E148: Warm Intros, AI Noise, and Building with Focus — Markku Vuorinen, Co-founder & CEO of Homie

How did you identify the problem and how did you build what you have right now with Homi?

I'm the least technical guy from us three co-founders. So my background is in commercial. I've been doing sales, but most of my time went to being like growth marketer or salesman. Now, like with the trendy new term, I would be probably like a GTM person. But I've been always kind of been responsible for inbound in like B2B business. During my time in this, my contract book, which is Danish scale up, I work quite closely with our sales reps doing outbound. And especially with the scale up, like the goals are quite ambitious there. And we never hit those levels. We had quality reps. So my kind of hypothesis was that we are not the only ones, you know, who are trying to contact in a quote way to potential customers. Those potential customers are quite flooded with messages on LinkedIn, emails, getting phone calls. And now with this AIBDR era, the volume is definitely not decreasing there. So I was kind of like thinking like, oh shit, like what to do to hit those goals. So I went quite deep into our CRM to look like what is actually working for us. And there I found out that every time there was a personal connection, for example, a happy customer were recommending us, we hired like a new employee who had other customers on their personal network. So the sales rate increased a lot on those cases. I got super excited about that and started to think how that can be scaled in a systematic way because it used to be like super random that this happened. So that's kind of the origin problem of Homey and kind of the concept that we got interested and started to build for.

How has it been going so far? We have done zero like cold

outbound so far. So we are eating a lot of our own dog food. Of course, when we were validating the idea, we did intros to get meet people. So yeah, like we've been continuing doing that and that has worked quite well. Of course, now it's, you know, having the pre-seed, we are looking and experimenting a lot of other channels, but still main of the revenue comes from actually, you know, getting intros.

It was quite a recent investment. You went live only in January. Do you have any kind of biggest milestone already that you could say, oh, we're very proud of that?

Last few months, I think we have the first signals of PMF. So we've been growing quite fast.

How do you navigate the pressure from the current AI boom and expectations from

Good question. I think what people are telling about how they are only working and AI that's and that's, There's a lot of talks, you know, focus on your own thing. Well, I have a like one and a half year old child at home. Instead of working seven days a week, I try to think what are the things that I should prioritize? How I make myself like as efficient as possible instead of, you know, just mingling on the, on the networking events, et cetera. I think that's also considered like doing the work there in San Francisco. So it's kind of all about the focus itself while you don't maybe have those seven days a week while some of the other competitors might have.

So working

smart. Yeah, I guess like summa summa, focusing