Cold outreach & strategically expanding your business model into services w/ Jon Perl & Scott Wilson @ QA Wolf #176

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

This is a special episode from our show “Engineering Founders” - Jon Perl & Scott Wilson share the origin story of QA Wolf & deconstruct their best practices (and what to avoid) for early-stage cold outreach, how to add value to your cold email communications, and why experimenting with your cold outreach is important to early sales! We also dive in to the story behind QA Wolf’s strategic move to incorporate services into their business strategy & tangible ways to add accountability measures that will help drive growth in the early days of your company. Check out Engineering Founders - https://hubs.la/Q02tq5ym0

ABOUT JON PERL

Jon Perl is the co-founder and CEO of QA Wolf, a startup building the QA solution every engineering leader wishes for. Prior to QA Wolf, Perl led engineering teams in the healthcare and home services space, where he learned firsthand how difficult automated regression testing can be — and how critical it is for teams to have. His interest in software engineering comes from an overarching desire to eliminate boring, repetitive tasks and give people their time back. He has a dog named Finn and enjoys hiking.

"Your goal is simply to book a meeting. You're not trying to close a deal through one email. It's like, 'How can I just get on the phone with somebody?' That's the goal.”

- Jon Perl

ABOUT SCOTT WILSON

As co-founder and head of growth at QA Wolf, Scott Wilson is trying to upend 20+ years of stagnation in the QA industry. Before this he launched the marketing efforts at Wyze and helped acquire 6 million paying customers. If he’s not working, you might find him backpacking with Frank the dog, or learning a new illusion.

"It's not referencing the weather in Seattle or that you got promoted. Personalization is being contextually relevant to the person. This is how your mind should be thinking. It's like, 'I saw you're a hundred person company with nine engineers on your team and no QA engineers. You're probably going through this and here's a solution for it.'”

- Scott Wilson

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• An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao
• Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel
• Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering
• Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish

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SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of QA Wolf & the desire to build an automated QA system (2:08)
• What got Scott excited about joining the QA Wolf founding team (7:14)
• Scott’s experience as the non-technical cofounder on the team (9:13)
• Learn enough to be dangerous & be willing to persist as a founder (10:38)
• The approach of paying people you can learn from & its impact on QA Wolf (14:11)
• Lessons learned about cold emailing & effective strategies to implement (17:12)
• Cold emailing strategies that don’t work (21:00)
• How to add value to email communication & incorporate experimentation (22:24)
• Why they shifted the focus from coding to sales / outreach / identifying solutions (26:23)
• Make accountability mechanisms a key component of early-stage teams (29:09)
• The false signal of free users & expanding product into services (30:45)
• Identifying a gap in the business & being open-minded to new ideas (33:20)
• What the initial testing for QA Wolf’s services approach looked like (35:22)
• Jon & Scott’s perspective on dealing w/ investors in the automated services space (38:31)
• Rapid fire questions (44:01)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No
• How to Hire a Product-Led Sales Leader – at Every Stage

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/