Accel-backed Searchlight.ai’s Kerry Wang: Being Contrarian Can Lead To Traction And Growth

Learn how Wang's startup perfected customer interviewing to build impressive traction.

Mar 30, 2020

Introductions: Kerry Wang is open to connecting! Email her at kerry@searchlight.ai.

Document Drop: Check out this document highlighting Kerry’s process for interviewing potential customers of your startup: Searchlight CEO Kerry Wang’s Template for Initial Customer Interviews

Company Background:

Company Name: Searchlight.ai
Funding Stage: Seed
- Raised $2.6 million from Accel, Founders Fund, Soma Capital, Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front, Sequoia-backed), and others.
Founding Date: 2018
Problem: Companies struggle to hire talent due to broken interviewing processes.
Solution: Searchlight is a modern reference platform to empower people leaders with the data they need to build better teams at scale.
Vertical: B2B Hiring Software, customers are large and small tech companies’ HR teams
Team Size: 12
Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Executive Summary:

A Contrarian Approach To Gaining Traction: By looking at a common problem from a contrarian perspective, you’ll develop a solution that is naturally different from existing ones. If you’ve diligently guided your solution development based on customer research, you’re inherently aligned with your early adopters, setting the path for your startup to gain traction.
Turning The Art Of Customer Interviews Into A Science: Kerry and Anna’s success so far is due to their rigorous approach to interviewing their customer. Before they started building, they spent six weeks interviewing hundreds of target customers. Their interview process was standardized (allowing for comparison across interviews), with questions starting off broad then narrowing in scope, and included prototyping. These efforts allowed the sisters to get honest, authentic feedback on their eventual solution.

Condensed Q&A:

Q: What are the advantages of having a contrarian take to a common problem?
- A: A contrarian point of view helps align yourself with your power users and naturally differentiate yourself from your competition.
Q: What are the best practices for designing a customer interview process?
- A: Start broad in your questioning, then gradually make follow-up questions more specific. You want to capture the pain points your customer has in the forefront of their mind, then drill down on those. Having a standardized process also allows you to compare answers across interviews.

Standout Quotes:

“We were unafraid to be contrarian.”
“While most technical interviews answer the question of, "Can this person do the job?", there's a lack of solutions to answer the question, "Can this person succeed at this job on my team?"”
“If everyone agrees on what you're building, beware! If an idea truly has 100% buy-in, it should already have been built.”

Kerry is the CEO and co-founder of Searchlight. Growing up as a twin with her co-founder Anna taught her firsthand how easily people get judged by appearances. At Searchlight, she helps companies build the best teams by hiring the people beyond their resumes. Kerry graduated from Stanford with a B.S. with distinction in Human Biology - Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Human Behavior and an M.S. in Computer Science - Human Computer Interaction. Prior to Searchlight, she worked as a Product Sales Lead at Google, a management consultant at McKinsey, and a JavaScript instructor at Code for Cape Town in South Africa.

Searchlight.ai cofounder Kerry (left) and Anna (right) Wang.

A Contrarian Approach To Gaining Traction

Frederick Daso: How did you manage to develop traction with Searchlight given the early-stage of your company? What were the strategies you formulated, and the tactics needed to execute on them?

Kerry Wang: During the early days of Searchlight, Anna and I did three main things to gain traction (and still do them today):

We were unafraid to be contrarian. At Searchlight, the references we collect for our employer partners are different from what 99% of the world believes is a reference check. Most employers view reference checks as a risk mitigation exercise, but Searchlight is a strategic data-gathering technique. For candidates, a reference check is a final hurdle to cross, but Searchlight is an opportunity to showcase their unique strengths fully. By clearly articulating what we are and are not, we differentiated ourselves and our product and found valuable early adopters.
We solved our own problem. Anna and I built what we had wanted ourselves as candidates going through the job search and what we wanted to learn as hiring managers building our early Searchlight team. This empathy empowers us to create something people want.
We were willing to give away value. The very first Searchlight customers were on pilots at 1/10 the price of what our license is now. That's okay because the value of the feedback and evangelism from our early adopters was priceless.

Daso: First, how did you identify the pain points related to the hiring process for companies? What was your underlying rationale in selecting a particular point to build the necessary solution?

Wang: In developing Searchlight, Anna and I spoke with over 300 talent, sales, and engineering leaders about their hiring processes and pain points. After synthesizing our notes, we realized the most prominent pain point was an inability to understand a candidate's behavior fit on an existing team. LinkedIn's 2019 Global Report stated that 89% of mishires are due to soft skills mismatch. While most technical interviews answer the question of, "Can this person do the job?", there's a lack of solutions to answer the question, "Can this person succeed at this job on my team?"

Most hiring managers evaluate soft skills with "gut instinct". But a few hiring managers had processes to systematically understand a candidate's ideal environment, strengths, and weaknesses. These processes led to better teams, better culture, and, ultimately, better products.

It turns out, the best interviewers did references differently than 99% of the world views as a reference check. We codified these best practices into what Searchlight is today. We're making these contrarian processes more mainstream by making it simpler and more efficient to get a scientific, objective reference.

Daso: From your understanding of the market, how did you decide which part of the industry to address their particular problem? How did you manage to differentiate yourselves given the business intelligence you gained from studying this particular segment of the market?

Wang: Searchlight started by solving a pain point felt by our own community of tech startups. The advantage of starting with this segment of the market is that we understood it intimately and were plugged into great distributions channels like the YC community. We were selling a solution we ourselves needed to a segment that also happens to have many early adopters who are willing to try new, contrarian things.

Daso: You've mentioned in our discussions that most people in the space think of the main problem is that companies are limited in how wide they can search. How did you conclude that that problem wasn't the main pain point?

Wang: Anna and I interviewed countless companies that struggle to differentiate between the candidates in their recruiting pipelines. This means that after the final onsite interview, 80% of hiring decisions still come down to gut instinct. While most companies are quick to discuss the top-of-funnel problem (i.e. to expand the number of candidates in their hiring pipeline), they're neglecting the equally crucial interviewing problem.

We think the interviewing problem is the main pain point because the greatest investment of resources during the recruiting process is the onsite interview. Unsuccessful interviewing means low onsite-to-offer conversion rates, interview fatigue, and countless wasted hours diverted from business-critical projects.

We realize that this is a contrarian point of view, but the benefit of having this focus is that it aligns us with our power users. We've found that once we started talking about the interviewing problem, the users who were historically dealing with this pain point on their own started reaching out to us for guidance. It's a great spark.

Searchlight.ai team WFH Zoom Chat.

Turning The Art Of Customer Interviews Into A Science

Daso: What was your plan for methodically interviewing key parties (sales, engineering, and HR teams/functions) to understand their problem? How did you structure and design the questions to get honest, authentic responses?

Wang: Before writing a single line of code for Searchlight, Anna and I did six weeks of hypothesis-testing. To get honest, authentic responses with our three user groups (candidates, references, and employers), we:

Told them this was an idea we hadn't built yet. This meant the users could be honest without worrying about insulting our mission or work.
Always started the interviews with broad questions and followed a structured question guide. Starting broad with a question like, "How's hiring like at your company?", rather than, "Why is hiring a pain at your company?" meant that the pain points the question elicited were actually top-of-mind. Following an interview guide meant we could then analyze themes across different users.
Built prototypes for each user that they experienced during our interviews. It's one thing to ask someone for their opinion on an abstract idea, another to have them critique something right in front of them. To do this successfully, you have to be very thoughtful in the prototype you design.

Daso: What was the method of codifying qualitative interview feedback (i.e., respondents detailing 'best practices for interviewing') into your product?

Wang: Anna created a "Product Principles" manifesto that includes the best practices we learned in our initial user interviews, as well as our new learnings, which we add in every month. Whenever we design and build a new feature or product line, we make sure it aligns with our "Product Principles".

Daso: How did you two decide to identify what were the key obstacles that your customers face (i.e. reference data capture being an unscalable process), and therefore the problems you should spend time fixing?

Wang: Time-boxing user interviews is critical. At a certain point, Anna and I went back to our notes and had to decide: "Did we have the conviction that this was a problem we wanted to solve?" The truth is, no amount of user interviews will ever be 100% affirmative on what you should build. If everyone agrees on what you're building, beware! If an idea truly has 100% buy-in, it should already have been built. That's why it's necessary to be contrarian.

Daso: What's your largest advantage in having your twin as a cofounder?

Wang: Unconditional trust and unapologetic candor. Building a company requires constant learning and application of those learning. Trusting each other to learn, apply, and share the hard truths accelerates our iteration cycles.

As twins, we share similar values, but we're very different in skills and working styles. Anna is a tremendous technical talent on the product and engineering side, while I run sales and operations. I enjoy attending events and conferences, while Anna would rather have a quiet evening at home. It's a partnership.

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