My approach to innovation has always been to focus on the “need” before everything else. In the case of Noble, the “need” couldn’t have been more clear. In fact, as a technologist for my entire working career, I experienced it on a daily basis.
Specifically, having spent my entire career as a technology leader building new technology, I am constantly trying to answer the “build vs buy” question. And, there’s no better way to answer that question than to speak to my peers in tech. I almost always reach out to my friends with experience in the subject matter to see what they use in their tech stack or recommend so they can point me in the right direction. In fact, I am part of at least 5+ Slack groups and group texts where I - or one of my peers - will frequently post the question “Do you have any experience with x? If so, what tools do you recommend?”
I have also experienced this issue from the seller’s perspective. Having co-founded a digital health start-up and helped it scale from 0-200+ enterprise customers, I had a very close connection with the majority of our clients. Without fail, the most common question our sales team would get from prospects during the sales process was “can we speak to your other happy customers that are similar to us?” In these cases, I’d have to do a ton of coordination to figure out which client to connect the prospect with, followed by the typical work that goes into connecting two individuals digitally. I typically ended up re-using the same “happy customer” over and over again, which led to the client getting fatigued and a sub-optimal experience for the prospect. If I had an “easy button” for this process, I’d have used it in a split second.
When my friend Rahul Jain reached out to me and told me he wanted to solve this exact problem - create this “easy button” - I was all in.
Technologists trust their colleagues more than anyone else when it comes to getting recommendations for their company’s tech stack. Employees at growing companies want to focus on their day jobs rather than spend tons of time connecting clients to prospects. This is a two-sided problem that we felt could be solved by cutting edge software.
I’m excited to introduce Noble.
Noble automates customer referrals and backchannel references by showing buyers which users they know. Noble aggregates the buyer’s contacts (e.g., LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, email, and phone contacts) and cross-references them with a customer list provided by the seller. Noble’s software benefits sellers by (1) generating leads by targeting prospects early in the buyer journey when they are trying to find people they know who are familiar with the problem they are looking to solve; (2) identifying high-intent buyers as they reach out to people they know; (3) driving demos by moving prospects through the buyer journey; and (4) increasing/accelerating conversion rates by having happy customers talk to prospects they know.
We’re fortunate to be supported by some of the best venture capital firms in the world, including Founder Collective, Max Ventures, and GTMfund. Finally, the reason we named the company “Noble” is because the most honest and transparent action a seller can do is to let their prospects talk to customers they know because the truth will come out. Word of mouth is effective in driving sales because it is authentic, and can’t be manipulated by sales/marketing teams like they do today with ratings/reviews, case studies, and reference calls. We don’t expect all sellers to offer this level of transparency, but the ones who do should be called Noble.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can reach me at josh@thatsnoble.com
