Talk to 5 Customers Daily or Quit, Says Sendbird's Billion-Dollar CEO

"Are you kidding me? You need to be talking to 3 or 5 customers a day." The bluntness hits hard, but John Kim, CEO of Sendbird, isn't mincing words about why 90% of startup founders are failing.

Kim has built Sendbird into the world's leading conversations platform, powering a quarter billion users monthly for giants like DoorDash, PayPal, and Reddit. With over $220 million raised and a billion-dollar valuation, he's earned the right to be direct about what separates successful founders from the 90% who don't make it.

In this raw interview, Kim reveals the brutal truths about startup execution that most founders ignore: why customer obsession trumps networking, how to build culture that actually works, and why your greatest strength might be sabotaging your company.

John Kim: Hi, my name is John, founder and CEO of Sendbird. We are the world's leading conversations platform for mobile applications. We power a quarter billion users on a monthly basis, sending 7+ billion messages, powering major applications like DoorDash, PayPal, Reddit, Yahoo Fantasy Sports, KakaoTalk in Korea.

Today we have over 340 employees globally in 7 different countries, and we have collectively raised over $220 million in funding which valued our company over a billion dollars.

John Kim: Something that a lot of first-time founders don't really think about is they look for market trends or opportunities they think that are interesting and timely, but a lot of founders pick ideas that are not really aligned to their own strengths.

So what ends up happening is after 2 to 3 years, they realize that pretty much whatever you do is harder than you think. It will take longer, it will be harder, so a lot of smart people end up giving up too quickly. It wasn't really something that they want to commit for the next 10 years.

Whatever the next thing you pick, try to see if you can really commit to the idea. Imagine yourself doing that for the next 10 years, which is very, very hard. But if you can really see yourself in the next 10 years doing things, hopefully at greater scale, that would be the more important question I would ask myself when starting my next company: Can I commit to this for the next 10 years?

John Kim: I'm still surprised by a lot of founders when I ask them how many customers did you talk to last week. They're like, "Oh, I talked to 3 customers last week or 5 customers last month." I'm like, are you kidding me? You need to be talking to 3 or 5 customers a day.

People who are good at one thing tend to overlook the others. So for instance, if you're an engineer, if you love building great products, you will be naturally biased towards spending more time on product. Instead of spending more time with customers, you think you have an idea about customers, so you try to go and build it before even talking to customers or validating with customers.

If you're outward facing, you'll be attending so many networking parties, going to every single conference, going to every single speaking event, but you don't go back to fundamentals of building a strong product.

Think about what your strengths are and try to make sure that you are balancing out talking to customers and building a fantastic product. Try to deprioritize everything else. None of that really matters until you find strong product market fit in the early days. None of it else matters.

John Kim: In the early days, when you're trying to find product market fit, it was obviously within 24 hours. You talk to a customer. In the evening you build something. Next day you follow up. 24 to 48 hours is when you follow up.

When I was doing the sales calls myself, towards the end of the first call, I would say "Within 24 hours you'll hear back from me on pricing, the next steps, within 48 hours you'll get a call from me." So I always tried to set that milestone in my very first call for when I would be following up.

If it's a feature development, they would surely know at least whether we're gonna deliver it or not within 24 hours. And if we do, we'll probably ship it within 1 week. We had about a 2-week sprint. So every 2 weeks we're releasing something new about our product. So we had that level of iteration.

Once B2B gets to a certain scale, you can't do daily releases. They'll freak out some customers because they built one way, next day the documentation changes, they're gonna freak out. So you want to manage the expectation of cadence a little bit. You build that 2 to 3 week cadence. But it's still a matter of days, if not a week.

John Kim: The way I think about culture is they call organizations superorganisms. It's a collection of people, but the collection is greater than the individuals combined. So 1 + 1 is not 2, ideally it's 3 and greater.

If you were to look at a single person, a person has a set of core values, they may have dreams and aspirations. If you map that to an organization, you can also think of culture as your core values. Personal core values turn into corporate core values, your organization's strengths and weaknesses - all those things collectively combined is something that we put a label on called culture.

Culture is like muscle memory. It is very hard to change a habit. It's very hard to just say, "Hey, today we're gonna define our culture as XYZ. We're just gonna change this way." It doesn't work like that. It's a collection of people's habits that's like a superorganism. So you have to really nudge and create an iterative feedback loop. It's a slowly evolving thing.

That's why it's so critical - your day-to-day decision making, day-to-day operations, everyday execution is really dictated by the culture of your organization, not by a couple of checklists. It's not what you write on the wall, it's what you do and live and breathe every day, and that is the culture.

John Kim: I came to realize the culture of a company is super important even way before I did my first startup because I used to work at other companies before finishing school. We had 100 employees. The CEO studied abroad, had a PhD. It was actually pretty cool - it was like the earlier version of Starlink.

Then I started to see the company not execute well, missing goals. I think what really drove down the company was the culture. The leadership was disconnected from what was happening in the field, and then I started to see a lot of good people leave first. People who were a little bit toxic and weren't doing a good job, but they were great at selling to their senior bosses, were getting more power and more roles.

I could tell these guys who were playing StarCraft all day long were not working. I thought, "If I were this person, if I were the CEO, what would I do differently?" And ultimately came to the conclusion that if they had a very strong culture of understanding, empowering good people, and knowing what was happening to the company, maybe they could have had a different outcome.

So when I started my first company and also second company, we started out with a mission statement, set of core values. We do workshops, we try to get the early employees and management like the founders to get together, spend maybe a day talking about core values and the culture of the company. Since then we've always thought culture was one of the most critical operating systems of a company.

John Kim: People have to realize if your company is growing quickly, you don't really have the time to organically learn the things you need to learn - the skill sets. So my general advice is continue to seek out companies or people that are maybe one stage or two stages ahead of you.

I think this is generalizable to not just startups, but anyone seeking fast growth in their own professional lives, in their careers too. What does greatness look like? Seek out people who've been there, done that before, and then try to not connect with one, but try to interview 3, 5, 10 people to see what is the general pattern of greatness that will get you to the next level of the company, next stage, maybe a year, 12 months from now, 24 months from now.

Seek out people who went down that path a few times, then you'll start to find patterns that start to emerge. What are the things that you need to have 12 months from now, 24 months from now that you currently don't have? Then try to build a path towards that - it's almost like Amazon's or Jeff Bezos' mantra of working backwards.

Think about what your end game or next stage looks like and then figure out your steps to getting there and who do you need to work with - upgrading or coaching your existing team or recruiting from somewhere else to really level your leadership. Ultimately, the job of a CEO is to do 3 things: One is get the strategy right for your company, making sure it's executed. Get the right teams onboarded, getting the resources, whether it be fundraising or allocating your resources. So strategy, people or team - figuring out how you need to navigate those things to get to the next level.

John Kim: Have bigger dreams, have longer time horizons, also have the patience to hopefully dare and risk greater things. I believe that probably gave me more confidence to be able to do something like this - coming to the US when everybody said no, you can't do it.

We couldn't really find a playbook of a Korean startup coming to the US and doing something in Silicon Valley, and literally everyone I spoke to, whether it be here in the US or in Korea, said no, it cannot be done. "That's stupid, that's too risky. You'll lose all the money and your time."

But still being able to take that bet was probably coming from that first-time experience, being able to achieve something, having the positive feedback loop, and increasing the time horizon of the next journey. So I think that's probably one of my greatest learnings.