Nine Months, Zero Code, $75 Million: How Merge Broke the Startup Playbook

Nine months. Zero lines of code. $75 million raised.

While most founders rush to build first and ask questions later, Shensi Ding and her co-founder Gil spent nearly a year doing something radically different: research. The result? Merge, a company that helps businesses add integrations to their products, secured massive funding from top-tier investors including Excel, NEA, and Edition before they even had a finished product.

In this candid interview, Shensi reveals the counterintuitive strategies that led to their success: why they spent 6-9 months validating their idea before writing any code, how they turned brutal rejection into their greatest advantage, and the hard truths about turning friendship into a billion-dollar partnership.

Shensi: Oh my gosh, trying to get your first customers is so painful. We spent a long time building in stealth before we started fundraising, we were starting to build the product and then once we fundraise, we continued building the product and we actually didn't launch for a year or so. And once you come out of stealth, you just expect all the customers to come and they don't.

So we were basically outbounding, begging people to take a chance on us and to try our product out and those early customer sales processes taught me a lot about what questions people would ask. And I think one thing that Gil and I did really well was we really packed our calendars with as many sales calls as possible. So we're pretty much like from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., both of us just on calls.

It was a really tough period in our life. We were just in phone booths all day on calls and back to back to back, but it was a really great muscle for just hearing the same call over and over again, AB testing different pitches and seeing how people reacted, also just seeing a wide variety of questions that people might ask.

Shensi: So by the time we hired our first sales person, we were able to teach him the answers to the questions that we knew were always going to get asked. If we hadn't done that, I think it would have been really hard for us to ramp our first salesperson. We wouldn't know what questions would come, we wouldn't know how to answer them.

And so by the time he came, we were able to say, hey, this is the way that customers really like, this is what really resonates with them, this is what you shouldn't say. So I think it was really helpful for me and Gil to just get those first reps in because it made it so that the first salesperson that came in and head of sales, he was really prepped and he was set up for success.

Shensi: To be honest, we found product market fit pretty early on. I think the process of finding product market fit actually mostly happened before we even started the companies, user interviews, getting validation from people and how much they would spend money. All the research had really happened before we even started building.

I just didn't want us to start building the product and figuring it out later. I want us to do the research upfront and we probably spent 6 to 9 months of just doing user research before we quit our jobs.

Shensi: A lot of people think that if you come up with a really good idea, that's all you need, but you need to understand, is there competition? Who has done this before? Have they been successful? If not, why not? Why would you be more successful than other people? Also, the chances of you thinking of an idea that no one else has thought of before is extremely unlikely.

Probably someone else has tried this before and they probably have been unsuccessful if you haven't heard of them, or they're may be in the early parts of the journey. So you really need to deeply understand why you will be better than them and how you will be better than them.

So, we started every week and we would spend a day together just reading up on the industry, trying to better understand it, trying to better understand why companies out there that weren't solving this problem and if they were trying to, why it wasn't quite the right solution. So, I think the research is so, so, so important because if you're not opinionated about it and you don't understand why you're building, when you're building it, you can't be successful.

Shensi: I think a consistent characteristic of billion-dollar companies is successfully operating at scale with each team operating on its own. So what that means is that each manager is successful at operating their team and the manager above that as well. There's no individual that needs to contribute a ton in order to make the company successful. The teams are just operating on their own and that's really hard to achieve, especially from an earlier stage where each individual is the one that's contributing a lot to the company.

So, I think that transformation from individuals contributing a lot to the company to each team operating autonomously and operating on their own cross-functionally, that's the goal, but it's hard to do.

Shensi: It's not always natural for friends to turn into co-founders and you really have to have a foundation of trust. You also have to have complementary skill sets. My co-founder is a genius. He is the best software engineer I know, even to this day.

Gil and I knew each other from freshman year of college. We met in orientation and then we were in all the same computer science classes at Columbia, and so we knew each other pretty well socially, but we were also fortunate enough to be on engineering student council together in college and that actually became a pretty helpful proxy for what it would be like to work together. We were class president and vice president our senior year and after school we kept in contact and Gil and I naturally just living our parallel lives ended up getting skill sets that really worked well together.

I'm kind of like a master of none and I just, I know a lot of things. I can code, I can sell, do financial forecasting, but Gil is like the best software engineer ever. He's a great people leader and I felt like the combination of the two would actually be a really great pair.

Shensi: The advantages are it's just really fun. Everyone that we've hired is so great. We have such a good time at work and a part of that is because Gil and I are good friends. Like we just really wanted to make sure like the environment around us replicated how much fun we had together and it seems like so far we've been able to scale that, which is great.

Disadvantages are that your friendship does change forever. It's great because it's more textured and it's deeper, but you probably don't want to hang out on the weekends all the time together because you're always together on the weekdays. You just end up like having a friendship that's mostly just like, OK, it's much more like you want to just hang out, you want to have a good time. But then now it's almost like you have like a kid together and you always are caring about this kid and you want to talk about this kid together and that's the company and a disadvantage of that is just like your friendship completely changes.

Shensi: The one thing that has helped a lot with the really hard parts of being a founder is just making friends who are peers. I have a really great group of female founder friends in New York City that I made after I started Merge, and we just talk about everything, like everything bad, especially, and it's really hard to break that barrier with a lot of founders because people just don't want to share that kind of information.

It's very, very sensitive. Like you don't want to share your numbers, you don't want to share like things that are going badly, you don't share about people who hate you. You don't want to share about customers that hate you, but like having people that you can talk about that with really makes it easier because everyone's going through the same thing and everyone hates their lives.

And I think just once you realize that every founder journey is really painful and that no one has it easy, it just makes it a lot, it makes it a lot better.

Shensi: I think one thing that I've learned is as I'm living through life, I'm not really grateful for the time that I'm currently in, but then as time passes and I'm in the following year, I look back and I'm like, wow, that was such a great time period and that actually has consistently happened every year now.

And so now I've realized like I'm currently living in a time that I will like look very fondly on in the future and at some point like this journey with Merge will end and I'll be really, really sad about it. So I think right now I'm just really trying to like appreciate every single day as much as possible.