---
title: "Don't Just Build Software, Solve the Problem"
episode: 23
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Dan Friedman"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO, Moxie"
date_published: 2025-04-30
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:29:14
word_count: 4751
topics: ["gtm-strategy", "brand-positioning", "sales-leadership"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/dan-friedman-moxie-solve-the-problem/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Don't Just Build Software, Solve the Problem

_Dan Friedman on building Moxie as an all-in-one, running a sub-10% go-to-market team, and winning an embarrassingly small TAM_

**Episode 23 · The LeanScale Podcast**  
Dan Friedman, Founder & CEO, Moxie · Hosted by Anthony Enrico  
Published April 30, 2025 · Updated July 22, 2026 · 00:29:14  
Canonical: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/dan-friedman-moxie-solve-the-problem/

**Topics:** GTM Strategy · Brand & Positioning · Sales Leadership


## Executive summary

Dan Friedman is the founder and CEO of Moxie, an all-in-one platform that helps medical professionals — largely nurses, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants — launch, grow, run, and stay compliant with their own med spas. It began with a family friend, a skilled injector at a high-end med spa, who wanted to open his own shop and discovered that everything about starting the business was slower, more expensive, and more complex than starting a business should be in the modern era. That observation sent Dan and his team to interview 50 to 60 med spa owners over two months and shadow a handful of them, and out of that came the three durable themes Moxie is built on: make it easier to launch, more repeatable to grow, and less painful to run.

The contrarian core of the conversation is that Dan refuses to define Moxie as a software company. He defines it by the customer problem — I want to start, grow, run, and stay compliant as a med spa — and then solves that problem with whatever it takes: software when software works, but just as readily a delivered service, a content library, or an AI solution. Rather than hand a med spa owner a tool to send text messages, Moxie's team writes the copy, runs the A/B test, and places buy-now-pay-later at the right touchpoints. That whole-problem approach has a striking second-order effect: because Moxie isn't competing on the same playing field as narrow point solutions, its go-to-market gets radically cheaper. The entire sales and marketing team is roughly eight or nine people out of a ~144-person global team — under 10% of headcount, where a normal benchmark would say 30 to 40.

The back half turns into a founder's clinic. Dan's biggest lesson is the power of a narrow persona — pick an 'embarrassingly small' TAM, one probably too small on its own to build a big business, and win a high double-digit share of it before broadening; a broader start would have left Moxie best-in-the-world at nothing. On team-building he advocates 'hiring adults': going more senior early, paying ~50% more than his last company, and betting the business grows into it. Woven through is a mission through-line from his first company, Thinkful (the online, mentor-led education business he built as a first-class Thiel Fellow and sold to Chegg in 2019), to Moxie: giving people the chance to own a business and do work they love. Who should listen: founders designing a lean, differentiated GTM, and any operator obsessed with doing more with a smaller team.


## Key takeaways

1. **Define the company by the customer's problem, not the software category** — Moxie deliberately doesn't call itself a software company. Dan defines the business by the jobs its customers need done — start, grow, run, and stay compliant as a med spa — and is willing to solve them with software, a delivered service, a content library, or AI, whatever fits. He accepts that some of those solutions won't look like a classic 80%-gross-margin SaaS product.
   _Why it matters:_ Anchor product strategy to the whole customer problem, not to what's convenient to build or easy to benchmark against SaaS ratios. Pouring energy into solving the entire problem made everything downstream — retention, expansion, and go-to-market — easier and more efficient.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives

2. **Do the work for the customer — don't just hand them a tool** — Where competitors offer a tool to send texts or emails, Moxie runs the ads to find new customers, writes the message, runs the A/B test, and places buy-now-pay-later at the right appointment types — always with the owner's awareness and approval. For a small-business owner, the hundreds of little touchpoints are an unbearable burden, so Moxie does them rather than making them slightly more efficient.
   _Why it matters:_ The done-for-you model is a moat: it removes the operational burden a point tool leaves behind and deepens the relationship. It costs more to deliver, but it's why customers consolidate onto you.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Customer Success

3. **Solving the whole problem is what makes go-to-market cheap** — Because Moxie solves the entire customer problem, it isn't competing head-to-head with narrow point vendors, so its go-to-market is far easier. The entire sales-and-marketing team is about eight or nine people out of ~144 — under 10% of headcount — where a reasonable benchmark would put it at 30 to 40. The lean team can punch above its weight because the product does the persuading.
   _Why it matters:_ GTM efficiency is often a product-strategy outcome, not just a sales-execution one. Differentiate enough that you're not in a feature bake-off and you can run a dramatically leaner revenue org.
   _For:_ Founders, RevOps Leaders, Sales Leaders

4. **Strategy is a byproduct of doing the most important work each quarter** — Dan says what looks like a deliberate strategy in hindsight was really just doing the work that felt most important each quarter, which added up over time. When forced to choose between solving an existing customer's problem and going to find more customers, Moxie always solves the customer problem — and that compounds into more efficient, more effective go-to-market.
   _Why it matters:_ Founders shouldn't over-index on a grand upfront master plan. Relentlessly serving current customers compounds; the coherent strategy emerges from the pattern of those choices.
   _For:_ Founders

5. **Start with an 'embarrassingly small' TAM and win it completely** — Moxie focused narrowly on one persona — medical professionals opening new med spas — a category arguably too small on its own to build a big business. Dan argues that's exactly where opportunity lives: pick an embarrassingly small TAM, win a real high double-digit share of everyone making that decision, and only then move to the next category. A broader start would have pulled the team in many directions and made them best-in-the-world at nothing.
   _Why it matters:_ This runs against generic 'go big' startup advice, but a dominated micro-niche builds the skills and credibility that unlock the next one. Most founders are overwhelmed by too many opportunities, not too few.
   _For:_ Founders

6. **Winning a micro-niche unlocks the next persona** — Having mastered new-med-spa launches, Moxie is now serving adjacent personas — existing independent med spas with one to three locations that are consolidating five, six, or seven separate vendors onto one integrated platform. The vision: customers pay rent to a landlord and Meta ads to Meta, and get essentially everything else from or through Moxie.
   _Why it matters:_ Sequence expansion off a position of strength. Dominating a narrow beachhead creates the product depth and trust that make the next, larger persona winnable — and vendor consolidation is the natural endgame for an all-in-one.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives

7. **Hire 'adults' — go senior early and pay up** — Moxie decided early to hire more senior — internally, 'we're hiring adults': people two steps further in their careers, still hungry and rising, and paid roughly 50% more than at Dan's first company. The bet is that the business grows into that seniority. The hard part is finding people who can both do the detailed work at a team of two and scale up as the team hits 17 to 20.
   _Why it matters:_ Senior hires are a lever for staying lean: you may need a third or a quarter of the people because they know what to do and waste less time. The trade-off only works if the company grows fast enough to justify the seniority.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders

8. **Stay lean through disciplined 'no' plus contractors** — Moxie keeps its core team small with two inputs: smart use of contractors for work beyond the eight or nine full-timers, and disciplined decision-making about what not to do. Plenty of good go-to-market ideas haven't been said yes to yet; the team constrains itself to what it can execute at high quality and sequences the rest.
   _Why it matters:_ Leanness is a series of deliberate 'no's, not just a headcount cap. In the short run, under-executing on good ideas is acceptable if you're growing fast and retaining customers; flex capacity with contractors before adding FTEs.
   _For:_ Founders, RevOps Leaders, Sales Leaders

9. **Test channels before you hire full-time** — Moxie's open roles skew heavily toward product, engineering, and service delivery, with only a trickle on sales and marketing. When it does expand into new markets, the approach is to run early channel experiments before going all in — and certainly before hiring full-time — so the team learns where to double down before committing headcount.
   _Why it matters:_ De-risk go-to-market expansion with cheap experiments first. Hiring is the last step after a channel proves out, not the way you discover whether it works.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, Founders, RevOps Leaders

10. **Carry a mission through-line across ventures** — Dan frames Thinkful (mentor-led online education that helped adults change careers, sold to Chegg in 2019) and Moxie (unlocking entrepreneurship for medical professionals) as a single mission in two categories: giving people the chance to do work they love, own a business, and support their families. Underneath it all, he says, he simply loves the craft of building — product, customer solutions, teams, and companies.
   _Why it matters:_ A durable personal mission gives founders conviction to make weird, against-the-grain calls and to stick with a narrow persona long enough to win it. Authentic passion for the problem, not a spreadsheet-optimized business, is what tends to drive the success.
   _For:_ Founders


## Frameworks

### Solve the Problem, Not the Software (02:51)

**Definition:** Define the company by the customer's problem — for Moxie, 'I want to start, grow, run, and stay compliant as a med spa' — and solve it with whatever works: software, a delivered service, a content library, or AI, without insisting every solution be a classic high-margin SaaS product.

By pouring all its energy into the whole customer problem rather than a software category, Moxie stopped competing on the same playing field as narrow point solutions and found that retention, expansion, and go-to-market all got easier. It's a reframe of 'software-as-a-service' into 'software and a service.'

### Do the Work For You, Not Just the Tool (08:27)

**Definition:** Instead of shipping a tool so the customer can do a job, actually do the job for them — run the ads, write the message, run the A/B test, place buy-now-pay-later at the right touchpoints — with the customer's awareness and approval.

For a small-business owner the hundreds of little touchpoints are an overwhelming burden. Doing the work (not just enabling it) removes that burden, drives outcomes, and is a core reason customers consolidate multiple vendors onto Moxie, even though it costs more to deliver than a pure tool.

### The Embarrassingly Small TAM (18:00)

**Definition:** Deliberately pick a micro-niche — a TAM probably too small on its own to build a big business — and win an outright high double-digit share of everyone making that decision before broadening to the next category.

Moxie won new-med-spa launches this way. Starting broader would have pulled the team in many directions and left it best-in-the-world at nothing. Dominating a narrow beachhead builds the skills, product depth, and trust that almost inevitably unlock the next adjacent segment.

### Hiring Adults (19:49)

**Definition:** Hire more senior than the stage seems to require — people two steps further in their careers, still hungry and high-capability — pay roughly 50% more, and bet the business grows into that seniority.

The payoff is a leadership team that's stuck together from small-team days, brings high ownership, and lets the company stay lean because senior people waste less time. The catch: they must be able to do detailed hands-on work at a team of two and scale to 17–20, and the company has to grow fast enough to justify the seniority.

### Lean Go-To-Market as a Byproduct (04:20)

**Definition:** Treat go-to-market efficiency as an outcome of product strategy: solve the whole customer problem so you aren't in feature bake-offs, then run sales and marketing at a fraction of normal headcount — Moxie at ~8–9 people out of ~144, under 10%.

Because the product does the differentiating, a tiny GTM team punches above its weight, versus a benchmark that would staff 30–40. Leanness is protected with contractors and disciplined 'no,' and it also reduces friction between the company and its customers.


## Quotes

_Speakers inferred from an undiarized transcript — verify before attributing._

> "We don't necessarily define ourselves as a software company. We define ourselves as solving the customer problem."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (02:51)

> "It's great if we can solve them with software, but if we need to solve them by building a service, a content library, some new AI solution — we're willing to do whatever needs to be done to solve the customer problem."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (03:35)

> "It's not 'here's the tool so you can do the thing,' it's 'we're gonna do the thing for you.'"
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (09:09)

> "Something Joe and I talk about all the time here at LeanScale is finding ways to be incredibly efficient with your go-to-market team."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (05:01)

> "Describing it now, it sounds like a strategy, when the experience of building it is more: we're doing the work that feels most important in every given quarter, and then it kind of adds up to a strategy over time."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (06:23)

> "We thought the roadmap would last a certain length, and it's already five times deeper than that, and it's gonna be twenty-five times deeper than that."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (06:58)

> "If we have to choose whether we solve a customer problem or go find more of them, we always solve a customer problem."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (07:46)

> "Our ultimate vision is our customers will pay their rent to their landlord, they'll pay for Meta ads to Meta, and just about everything else they need they're getting either from Moxie or through Moxie."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (12:57)

> "The future of startups, especially on the go-to-market side, is really keeping FTEs as small as possible."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (15:50)

> "If we started with a broader solution, we would have been pulled in a bunch of different directions and not actually have been the best in the world for anyone."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (17:18)

> "Pick a smaller TAM, like an embarrassingly small TAM, and go truly win at that — to the point where a real high double-digit percentage of people going through that decision are choosing you — and then go and do the next one."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (18:00)

> "One of the things we decided early on was we were just going to hire more senior. And we actually used the phrase: we're hiring adults."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (19:49)

> "The mission of giving people opportunities to do what they love, own their own business, and find work that supports their family well is a direct through line for me across the two companies."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (26:41)

> "I just love the craft of building things — and 'things' might be the product, might be solving the customer problem, might be the team and the company."
>
> — Dan Friedman, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 23 (27:22)


## Practical advice by role

### Founders

- Define your company by the customer's problem, not by whether the solution is software. Solve it with services, content, or AI when that's what the problem needs — and accept that not every piece will look like classic high-margin SaaS.
- Pick an 'embarrassingly small' TAM and win a high double-digit share of everyone making that decision before you broaden. A broad start makes you best-in-the-world at nothing.
- Let strategy emerge: do the most important work each quarter and it adds up. When forced to choose, solve an existing customer's problem before chasing new logos.
- Hire 'adults' — go a step or two more senior than the stage seems to require, pay up (~50% more), and bet the business grows into it, as long as they can still do hands-on work at a team of two.
- Carry your mission across ventures for conviction. Authentic passion for the problem, not a profit-optimized business plan, is what tends to drive the success.

### RevOps Leaders

- Benchmark your GTM headcount ratio honestly: Moxie runs sales and marketing at under 10% of a ~144-person team because the product solves the whole problem — a normal benchmark would be 30–40.
- Protect leanness with a disciplined 'no.' Constrain to the ideas you can execute at high quality and sequence the rest; use contractors to flex capacity before adding full-time headcount.
- Remember that GTM efficiency is often a product-and-positioning outcome, not just a sales-execution one — differentiate out of the feature bake-off.

### Sales Leaders

- A smaller, more senior team is more flexible and faster to align — less time enabling and getting everyone rowing the same way. You may need a fraction of the people if each can genuinely execute.
- Test channels before you hire full-time. Run cheap channel experiments to find where to double down, then add the FTE.
- Don't confuse 'senior' with 'strategist who won't execute' — in a startup even the founder/CEO can't be the ideas-only person; hire executors.

### Marketing Leaders

- The highest-value model isn't handing customers a tool to send texts or run ads — it's doing the work for them: writing the copy, running the A/B test, and placing offers at the right touchpoints, always with their approval.
- Design the service so it removes the operational burden a point tool leaves behind — that's what earns vendor consolidation.


## Operations takeaways

### Revenue operations

- **Lean by design.** GTM under 10% of headcount because the product solves the whole customer problem, not a narrow slice — efficiency is a product-strategy outcome.
- **Discipline over volume.** Say no to good ideas to execute a few at high quality; under-executing on GTM ideas is acceptable short-term while growing fast and retaining customers.
- **Contractors before FTEs.** Flex capacity beyond the small core team with contractors, and test channels with cheap experiments before committing full-time headcount.
- **Proximity beats process.** Fewer FTEs means less friction between the company and its customers and faster internal alignment.


## Metrics mentioned

| Value | Metric | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| ~8–9 of ~144 | Go-to-market team size | Moxie's entire full-time sales + marketing headcount out of a ~144-person global team — under 10%, where a normal benchmark would be 30–40. |
| 50–60 owners in 2 months | Customer discovery | Med spa owners Dan's team interviewed (and a few shadowed for days) to define Moxie's initial pain points and value props. |
| ~2.5x med spas/month YoY | New-customer growth | By the end of last year Moxie was onboarding about 2.5x more med spas per month than at the start, up another mid-double-digit percent year-to-date (as of mid-April). |
| 5–7 vendors replaced | Vendor consolidation | An existing med spa switching to Moxie may terminate five, six, or seven distinct vendor relationships in favor of one integrated platform. |
| ~50% more | Senior-hire pay premium | Moxie pays roughly 50% more than Dan's first company to 'hire adults' — people two steps further in their careers. |
| 2 → 17–20 | Team scale span | Senior hires had to both do detailed work when the team was two and scale up as departments grew to 17–20 people. |
| Sold to Chegg, 2019 | Thinkful exit | Dan's first company, built ~7–8 years independently into the largest online bootcamp before the acquisition. |


## Entities mentioned

- **Moxie** (company) — Dan Friedman's company; the all-in-one platform to launch, grow, run, and stay compliant as a med spa. Runs a ~8–9-person GTM team out of a ~144-person global team and was named one of LinkedIn's fastest-growing companies. Defines itself by the customer problem, not as a software company. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/moxie/
- **Thinkful** (company) — Dan's first company: mentor-led online education helping adults learn tech skills and change careers. Built independently for ~7–8 years, became the largest online coding bootcamp, and was sold to Chegg in 2019. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/thinkful/
- **Chegg** (company) — Public education company that acquired Thinkful in 2019 (transcribed as 'Chag'); Dan notes it has had some post-AI struggles. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/chegg/
- **Thiel Fellowship** (company) — Peter Thiel's program paying young people to leave college and start companies; Dan was in the first class and left after his sophomore year to build Thinkful. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/thiel-fellowship/
- **Meta** (company) — Used in Moxie's all-in-one vision — customers pay rent to a landlord and Meta ads to Meta, and get almost everything else from or through Moxie. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/meta/
- **Dan Friedman** (person, guest) — Founder & CEO of Moxie, the all-in-one med spa platform; ex-co-founder of Thinkful (sold to Chegg, 2019) and a first-class Thiel Fellow. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/dan-friedman/
- **Anthony Enrico** (person, host) — Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/anthony-enrico/


## FAQ

**Q: Who is Dan Friedman and what is Moxie?**

A: Dan Friedman is the founder and CEO of Moxie, an all-in-one platform that helps medical professionals — largely nurses, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants — launch, grow, run, and stay compliant with their own med spas. Before Moxie he co-founded Thinkful, a mentor-led online education company sold to Chegg in 2019, and he was a member of the first class of the Thiel Fellowship.

**Q: What does 'don't just build software, solve the problem' mean?**

A: Dan refuses to define Moxie as a software company. He defines it by the customer's problem — starting, growing, running, and staying compliant as a med spa — and solves that with whatever works: software when software fits, but also delivered services, a content library, or AI. Rather than give an owner a tool to send texts, Moxie writes the copy, runs the A/B test, and does the work for them.

**Q: How does Moxie keep its go-to-market team so lean?**

A: Moxie runs its entire sales and marketing function with about eight or nine people out of a ~144-person global team — under 10% of headcount, versus a benchmark of 30–40. It stays lean because the product solves the whole customer problem (so it isn't in feature bake-offs), because it hires senior 'adults' who waste less time, and because it uses contractors and disciplined decisions about what not to do.

**Q: What is an 'embarrassingly small TAM' and why does it work?**

A: It's Dan's advice to pick a micro-niche so narrow it probably can't support a big business on its own — for Moxie, medical professionals opening new med spas — and win a high double-digit share of everyone making that decision before broadening. Dominating a narrow beachhead builds the product depth, skills, and trust that almost inevitably unlock the next adjacent segment; a broad start leaves you best-in-the-world at nothing.

**Q: What does 'hiring adults' mean?**

A: It's Moxie's decision to hire more senior than the stage seems to require — people two steps further in their careers, still hungry and high-capability — and pay roughly 50% more than Dan's first company, betting the business grows into that seniority. The trade-off only works if those hires can do detailed hands-on work on a team of two and scale as departments grow to 17–20, and if the company grows fast enough to justify it.

**Q: How does Moxie compete with point solutions like EHRs and practice-management tools?**

A: Moxie doesn't position itself against any single point tool. Because it solves the whole customer problem as an all-in-one, it isn't on the same playing field as narrow vendors. Its endgame is vendor consolidation: an existing med spa switching to Moxie can terminate five, six, or seven separate vendor relationships in favor of one integrated platform, with the owner paying almost everything they need from or through Moxie.

**Q: What was Dan Friedman's path before Moxie?**

A: Dan left college after his sophomore year as part of the first class of the Thiel Fellowship, which paid young people to build companies. He co-founded Thinkful, a mentor-led online education business that helped adults learn tech skills and change careers; it became the largest online coding bootcamp and was sold to Chegg in 2019. He frames Thinkful and Moxie as a single mission — giving people the chance to own a business and do work they love — in two different categories.

**Q: What's next for Moxie?**

A: Two things Dan flagged: expanding into the remaining U.S. states (including several of the largest, which is months of regulatory work), and serving new personas beyond first-time med spa founders — starting with existing independent med spas with one to three locations that want to consolidate vendors. The long-term vision is for customers to get nearly everything they need from or through Moxie.


## Timeline

- **00:00** — Intro: the Moxie founding story
- **00:39** — Origin: a family friend opening a med spa
- **02:09** — Not a software company: solving the customer problem
- **04:20** — A sub-10% go-to-market team
- **05:42** — Conviction: strategy that adds up over time
- **07:46** — Do the work for you, not just the tool
- **11:19** — What's next: new states and vendor consolidation
- **13:43** — Keeping the team lean: contractors and disciplined no
- **16:37** — Advice for founders: the embarrassingly small TAM
- **19:49** — Hiring 'adults': going senior early
- **23:40** — Dan's path: the Thiel Fellowship and Thinkful
- **25:55** — The Chegg exit and the mission through-line
- **27:22** — The craft of building things


## Related episodes

- **Ep. 90: Why Your Niche Isn't Niche Enough** (Gary Frazier) — The academic case for Dan's 'embarrassingly small TAM' — most companies target segments that are orders of magnitude too broad. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/gary-frazier-niche-brand-positioning/
- **Ep. 11: Value Stacking and Why Everyone Gets it Wrong** (Thomas Miller) — Moxie's all-in-one bundling vs. point solutions is a value-stacking play — companion to how you assemble differentiated value. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-value-stacking/
- **Ep. 10: How to Identify Your Company's Inner Core Value** (Thomas Miller) — Dan's 'solve the customer problem, not build software' is exactly the inner-core-value reframe. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-inner-core-value/
- **Ep. 95: Why AI Means More RevOps Hires, Not Fewer** (Jimmy O'Halloran) — Both episodes are about doing more with a lean team and reinvesting leverage — Moxie's tiny GTM org is the case study. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/jimmy-ohalloran-new-relic-revops-consumption-revenue/
- **Ep. 85: Why AI + GTM Engineers Can't Replace RevOps** (Tessa Whittaker) — Shares the lean, high-leverage operating-team thesis that underpins Moxie's sub-10% go-to-market. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/tessa-whittaker-ai-gtm-engineers-revops/
- **Ep. 91: Why Outcome-Based Pricing Is a Trap for Most AI Companies** (Roee Hartuv) — Packaging counterpart — Moxie's bundle-everything, done-for-you model versus how AI companies should price and package. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/roee-hartuv-outcome-based-pricing-trap/


## Full transcript

_Machine-transcribed and not diarized; speaker attribution is inferred._  
_Transcript only, as a separate file: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/dan-friedman-moxie-solve-the-problem/transcript.md_

### 00:00 — Intro: the Moxie founding story

**[0:00]** (logo whooshing) - Dan, really excited to have you here today and really excited about what you're building with Moxie. I think you have taken a really unique approach to building your company, and it shows a lot of the experience and expertise that you have in the industry and just building companies in general. So I was thinking it would be really insightful for our audience, our listeners, to really hear that founding story of Moxie, the problem you were solving, and the unique approach that I think you've taken to build your company. - Awesome. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I love sharing the story of Moxie.

### 00:39 — Origin: a family friend opening a med spa

**[0:39]** It's my favorite topic to discuss, so always a pleasure to have a chance to share it. If we go back to the beginning and the sort of origin story of Moxie, it started in the way that everything has kind of some random coincidence behind it. I was exploring ideas for what my next company would be and had a family friend who was an injector at a high end med spa, and he was looking to start his own med spa, and I looked at him and it was really obvious that once he opened, he was going to be successful. He had a huge following. He'd had a bunch of years in the industry, but then actually starting the business was proving to be incredibly complex,

**[1:27]** incredibly expensive, and far more time-consuming than we thought reasonable, or it sort of defined everything we knew about starting businesses in the modern era, which is it should be fast, it should be easy. And so that caused us to pay attention and start to dig in. We started interviewing med spa owners and met with over the course of two months, probably 50 or 60 med spa owners who actually shadowed a few and followed the owners round for a couple days each, and that led to the definition of the initial pain points and value props that Monty focused on. We made it far easier, faster, and cheaper to launch a med spa.

### 02:09 — Not a software company: solving the customer problem

**[2:09]** We made the process of growing your med spa more disciplined and repeatable and scientific, and we fueled back some of the complexity of managing your med spa. And that was those three themes just kept coming up again and again and again. And so that was effectively where the business started, going back three years and change. - That's awesome. And you guys have experienced a ton of success so far, even LinkedIn's fastest growing company, one of them, which is huge. What do you think some of these factors to get this type of growth were that led to all the success? - So one of the things that I think we did a little differently,

**[2:51]** we're often asked about like, who's the competition? There's, is this EHR a competitor or is this practice management tool a competitor? And on the margins, of course, yes. Sometimes that they are competitive bake-offs between them, but we don't necessarily define ourselves as a software company. We define ourselves as stolving the customer problem where the customer problem is, I want to start a med spa. I want to grow my med spa. I want to run my med spa. I want my med spa to be compliant and for that to not be a difficult thing to pull off. And so we said, these are the problems we have to solve.

**[3:35]** And of course it's great if we can solve them with software, but if we need to solve them by building a service, if we need to solve them by building out a content library, if we need to solve them by building some new AI solution, we're willing to do whatever needs to be done to solve the customer problem. Even if that thing isn't a classic, this is an 80% gross margin tool with where we can just measure against all the classic SaaS ratios. And we've found that by pouring all of our energy and resources into solving the whole customer problem, everything else has actually been easier and more efficient. And the all in one nature of Moxie has meant

### 04:20 — A sub-10% go-to-market team

**[4:20]** that we're actually just not competing with all of the, or at least not competing on the same playing field as all of the narrower point solution vendors or even, you know, couple points solution vendor. And so that has meant that our go-to market has been far easier. And as a kind of specific data point to support that our entire go-to market team, including both sales and marketing right now is a full-time headcount out of a global team working on Moxie that's like 144. And so I think like any reasonable benchmark would say that team should probably be 30 to 40 out of 144, but in our case, you know,

**[5:01]** the vast majority of the team is either building product and across a much larger surface area or helping to deliver some service for our customers. And that has meant that the eight or nine have been able to punch way above their weight class. - That's an unbelievably lean team. And something Joe and I talk about it all the time here at LeanScale is finding ways to be incredibly efficient with your go-to market team. And I want to go into that in a little bit, but before we move off of your initial approach, I think it's very, I hope it's fair to use this word brave to build your company that way because it goes completely against the grain

### 05:42 — Conviction: strategy that adds up over time

**[5:42]** of what you would typically hear from VC recommendations and when you're playing in the startup game, what people are trying to do, but I think you're doing the right thing. I'm curious, what gave you the conviction to go down that road? I don't know if it came down to a moment or if it just organically kept building up to that point, but what kept you going down that path to really, really just pour everything you have into that very specific customer? - Yeah, it's funny. Describing it now, it sounds like a strategy when the experience of building it is more, we're doing the work that feels most important in every given quarter,

**[6:23]** and then it kind of adds up to a strategy over time. And some of the times when we do things a little differently or a little weird, I'm not even sure we're doing the right thing. Like a rational board member might come in and be like, "Hey, if we hired 10 more people there, would we produce twice as much?" And the answer is probably we would, and probably we should go do that, and maybe next quarter we will. But we've sort of followed the lead of, let's build something great for our customers, let's continue to double down on that. And the more that we dig in there, the more that we uncover, the more there is to build. It's one of these classic,

**[6:58]** like we thought the roadmap would last X long, and it just now is already five times deeper than that, and it's gonna be 25 times deeper than that. And so we just find that if we're building to keep and grow our current customers, that that is continuing to compound into yet more efficient, yet more effective go-to market. And go-to market, last year, by the end of the year, we were bringing on about two and a half times more medspas than we were at the beginning of the year. We're already up another like mid double digit percentage year to date, sitting here on April 15th. And so that the second half of the answer is it's worked.

### 07:46 — Do the work for you, not just the tool

**[7:46]** And so while we're always asking our thing, can we make things that work even better? Part of it is there's limited bandwidth. And so if we have to choose whether we solve a customer problem or go find more of them, we always solve a customer problem. - And Dan, really quick on that. Do you have an example where something might classically have been solved with building more features in your product versus rolling out a service to solve that? - Yeah, I think the way that we think about helping our customers grow is a classic example. A lot of practice management solutions will talk about their growth support or their marketing enablement.

**[8:27]** And really what they mean is we have a tool through which you can send your customers text messages or you can send them emails. And that's great, that is really useful. There's an important tool. But our approach to that same problem is A, we have a team that will run ads for you to find new customers. And then B, for the text message narrow pain points, we will not just give you the tool, but we'll actually write the text message for you. We'll run the AB test to figure out which text message works. We'll integrate the buy now pay later into the right touch points for the right types of appointments and not for the wrong types of appointments

**[9:09]** for lower cost treatments, for example. And so it's not here's the tool so you can do the thing, it's we're gonna do the thing for you. And of course tell you and get your approval and never be contacting your customers without you being aware of it. But there's just those hundreds and hundreds of little touch points that you wanna get right. And for a small business owner, that's like an unbelievable burden. And so our approach is we do the work for you, not we give you the tool so you can do the work a little more efficiently. - I love it, I love it. And I love the approach. I was watching a old Zuckerberg clip

**[9:51]** and he was explaining great companies are built by people who are passionate about solving a problem, not necessarily trying to design a business and make it as profitable as possible. So I think when you have an authentic passion for solving a real pain, the success follows. And if you stay focused on that, just like you have. And I like that it was organic. Looking back, yeah, it looks like maybe you have to map this whole thing out, but I think it tends to be as you're going along and you find new problems to solve, authentically solving those just keeps adding to the success. - And I've heard for SaaS, it's software and a service

**[10:36]** instead of as, and I think that's been used as a way to show early on when the product's not working, you're doing some stuff behind the scenes to make it work, but you actually doubled down on that, kept providing services and that's led to you guys having such big success. So I think that's an interesting thing to see 'cause it's definitely not something we come across often with the tech teams that we talk to. - Dan, what do you think is gonna keep powering the growth of Moxie forward and what's next on the docket for your business, your team, what's on the horizon? - Yeah, so there's a couple of things that I respect to deliver this year.

### 11:19 — What's next: new states and vendor consolidation

**[11:19]** One is we're actually just not even in all 50 states yet, including we're not taking customers in a handful of the largest states. So, sometimes it's good to just do the obvious things and so unlocking those states, which is just months and months of regulatory work is one of the more kind of predictable drivers. And then two is we've spent most of the first three years narrowly focused on a very clear to my persona, which is medical professionals opening new medspas. And that has served as well, it's been an incredible, it's such a clearly findable group of people. It's a group of people who have the same set of pain points

**[12:09]** and problems and so we've been able to really build against those problems and master that craft. And we're now in a position, and it frankly took us a lot longer than we expected, but we're now in a position where we're starting to serve additional personas, including we're seeing existing medspas that have been open for years starting to do what I think is called vendor consolidation. So, we do so much that medspas switching to Moxie might be terminating five, six, seven distinct vendor relationships as they come onto Moxie in favor of one integrated solution. And that's our ultimate vision is our customers will pay their rent to their landlord,

**[12:57]** they'll pay for meta ads to meta, and just about everything else that they need, they're getting either from Moxie or through Moxie. And so we're able to solve truly all of their problems either directly or with a partner. And so we're beginning to serve that next tier of persona of existing independent medspas with one to three locations. Maybe or maybe not, we ultimately get to larger chains beyond that as well, but the already operating independent medspas is our next tranche. - And you mentioned it's a lean go-to-market team. Just to reframe that, it's less than 10% of your team is on go-to-market. You're one of the fastest growing companies.

### 13:43 — Keeping the team lean: contractors and disciplined no

**[13:43]** How do you expand into those new markets? Is it, you said it's a lot of regulatory work, but are you gonna be building out the team significantly? Can the current team handle that? What's the approach look like? - We will, we're definitely, right now our open roles are actually mostly across product engineering and our service delivery teams, our practice success group, our onboarding team, but we do have one open role on our sales team and I'm expecting that we will open a handful more across sales and marketing over the next three to six months. Our approach is typically to do some early channel testing

**[14:26]** before we go all in, certainly before we hire full-time. And so we're working through some of those experiments now before we decide where to really double down. - That makes sense. How are you keeping the team so lean? Is it a mix of tech? Is it really well oiled processes? How do you keep the growth sustained while keeping that team so small? - There's, I think a couple inputs to that. One is we are, we do use contractors, no doubt. It's a, you know, there's additional effort beyond the work of those eight or nine people. Two is just discipline decision making about what we do and don't do. So there's a lot of good ideas that we haven't yet

**[15:09]** said yes to that will all have their time, but that we just, we constrain ourselves to the number of ideas that we can execute at a high quality to make sure that we're doing the things we do very well. And so we've actually just done less of the good ideas and go to market than we have in other parts of the operation. And in the long run, that's a problem. In the short term, that's okay. Because we're growing fast, we're serving our customers well or our customers are sticking with us and themselves are growing. And so, you know, fundamentally, I think it's, I think it's both, you know, smart use of additional resources outside of the core full-time team.

**[15:50]** And then two is just to make the hard choices about what we actually do and don't do and sequence things carefully. - No, it makes a ton of sense. And I think the future of startups, especially on the go-to-market side, is really keeping FTEs as small as possible. That way you can be more flexible. When you're going through the decision-making process, you can be more efficient with that process too. It doesn't take as much time to enable and get everybody going the same way. I think the leaner you can keep your team, the more effective you can really be. - It's also less of friction between you and the customers,

**[16:27]** which seems like it's been a big thing for you, is just staying close to the customer, knowing what they need. So that's another big part of it.

### 16:37 — Advice for founders: the embarrassingly small TAM

**[16:37]** - So I think something interesting, especially for the segment, is people who are starting out and they're getting their companies going, a lot of first-time founders as well. So what advice would you give somebody who's just starting out their journey right now? Are there any high-level big things they should be looking at that would help them skip a few potholes along the way? - I think one of the things that Moxie ultimately did well, it took a little while to get right, was the narrowness of the persona that I talked about. And it, to some degree, conflicts with some generic startup advice. Because if you just think about the market

**[17:18]** of new medspas being created, and you define the Moxie TAN for the first hand, with years as that, it's no question too small to build a big business. There's only so many new medspas being created. Medspas is a very healthy category, but most business is not going to net new medspas. Most business is going to medspas that already exist, to sort of state the obvious. And so I think there was a narrowness of the persona where we could really be best in the world. And if we started with a broader solution, we would have been pulled in a bunch of different direction. And not actually have been the best in the world for anyone.

**[18:00]** And so I kind of believe in this micro niche with a category that on its own is probably too small to support a big business, is most of the places where there are still opportunities to go solve a problem far better than anyone solving it today. And doing that, and doing that really well, and actually winning in that segment, almost always inevitably unlocks a next move and a next category of the segment where you can go be the best in the world as well. And so I shy go even smaller, pick a smaller TAM, like an embarrassingly small TAM, and go like truly win at that, to the point where real high double digit percentage

**[18:49]** of people going through that decision-making process or choosing you, and then go and do the next one. And I think that was like a formative lesson in proxy. We had a false start moment six months in where we thought we could actually start to serve an additional persona. And we very quickly realized, actually there's just no way that we're gonna be excellent at both of these. - I think that's great. And also another contrarian view. And I love that term, an embarrassingly small TAM. I think if people start with that, where it's, hey, it's a no-brainer, I have the right to win for this. I can't lose right here. And like you said, during that process,

**[19:29]** you're gonna build the skills, you're gonna build the capabilities that allow you to move into other markets and personas anyway, but an excellent place to start. I do think a lot of companies, when they start out, get overwhelmed by the amount of opportunities, more so than lack of opportunity.

### 19:49 — Hiring 'adults': going senior early

**[19:49]** And Dan, I think you also, you had an interesting approach on hiring too, early on. I know you've done, you've started businesses before. How did, how is it getting people on this same mission and what were you looking for? - One of the things we decided early on was we were just going to hire more senior. And we actually used the phrase, we're hiring adults. And I think that that is a little bit of an offensive phrase to young adults who may also define themselves as an adult, but that's kind of by design. Versus in my first company, we've just shied towards people who have done a similar job at a similar type of company and are also high capability.

**[20:35]** And so, still smart, still rising in their career, still hungry, but probably two steps further. And so, the consequence of that is to attract pets on, of course, we have to build a great company, build a great culture. We also probably pay, I don't know, 50% more than I did in my first company. And we just have a willingness to sort of pay at least appropriate to the stage of the business, if not even one stage ahead, and know and believe that we're gonna grow into that being appropriate. Now, of course, these are still people who can do the work in detail. And so, that's the hard part of getting this right, is can we hire someone who's great

**[21:21]** when they're a team of two? And so, they have to do a lot of the work themselves and be directly talking to customers. And then, can they scale up to the team being 17 to 20? And so far, I would say we've gotten really lucky and have a really fantastic leadership team that has stuck together quite well from when we were a pretty small business. And I think the fruits of that we're seeing now in terms of how closely that team works together,

**[21:50]** how the level of ownership they bring to their work, how mature they are in the way that they're approaching building their team and their department. And so, I think that has played out incredibly favorably. And you can also imagine trajectories where that trade-off would not have been worth it. Had the company grown really slowly, the size and seniority of that team might have been inappropriate to the stage. So, it had to have worked, not only for where we were when we made that choice, but also for the trajectory that we've been on since. But in our case, for our specific situation, shying more senior has just worked out incredibly.

**[22:30]** - I think it makes sense. And I also think it helps support keeping the team really lean as well. I think, yes, maybe you're paying 50% more, but maybe you need a third or a fourth of the people. Just because you're not wasting your time on doing the right thing, they know what to do. And as long as, I think that's for anything, though. If you get somebody who can execute, that's gonna be important. You can't just have, if you're in a startup, you can't just have the idea strategist person, even the founder/CEO can't be that. That is so far along the company-building journey. I think you have to have executors. And being senior and being an adult

**[23:15]** shouldn't be an excuse to not be an executor, too. - Totally agree. - Well, on that, in terms of background. So, Dan, I know you've had a great background in tech, previous founder. What kind of led you to this point? How did the inspiration to start these businesses start initially?

### 23:40 — Dan's path: the Thiel Fellowship and Thinkful

**[23:40]** - Yeah, I started with kind of a lucky break, which was, I was doing my undergrad, and a good friend shows up one day and is like, "Do you wanna apply for this fellowship "where we'll get paid for two years, we leave college, "and we'll go start companies?" And we were working on an idea, as undergrads do, but not with a level of seriousness, that warranted dropping out of college for sure. And this ended up being the first class of the Teal Fellowship, where Peter Teal was paying 20 people a year to initially leave college. Now, I think more recent classes, a lot of them have already left college and are pursuing startups, and go start companies instead.

**[24:21]** And I think the thesis at the time was, A, to start a public conversation around, is college a good value, is it a necessary path? And then, two, to show that, at least on some small scale individual level, it's not the only way to pursue interesting things. And so I ended up leaving after my sophomore year, and over the course of about a year, ended up starting a company called Thinkful, which was an online education business, helping adults learn technology skills and change careers. And we specifically built everything around one-on-one mentorship, so use the power of the internet to bring, to bring effectively high quality,

**[25:10]** very one-on-one mentor-led learning to a much larger number of people. Versus, I think, a common approach at the time was to use the internet to just bring large lecture-led learning to everyone, which is also great, also valuable, but we were just taking a little bit of a different approach. And we ultimately built that business independently for about seven or eight years. It became, the coding bootcamp market emerged over the course of our second or third years, and what we built became the largest online bootcamp. And then we sold it to Chag, which was a larger public education company, still public, although it has had some post-AI struggles.

### 25:55 — The Chegg exit and the mission through-line

**[25:55]** And that was in 2019. And so we kept building it there for a handful of years, and then ultimately moved on. And yeah, we talked about the genesis of the Moxie story, but for me, one of the connections between the two is the Thinkful Mission was all about economic empowerment and helping adults pursue a career and support their families in a way that was meaningful to them. And Moxie, similarly, is unlocking entrepreneurship for medical professionals, largely for registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants. And that is, for me, in a lot of ways, a continuation of the mission. Of course, in a totally different category,

**[26:41]** using a totally different toolset, but the mission of giving people opportunities to do what they love, own their own business, find work that they love that supports their family well is a direct through line for me across the two companies. - I love that, and I love that the mission is carried through, I think that's really unique. Two seemingly totally different companies, but at the heart, a lot of the same. Was there something earlier on that gave you the bug of entrepreneurship and gave you the interest in that type of mission in general? - I think my answer to that, I'm not sure that there was a life experience,

### 27:22 — The craft of building things

**[27:22]** but I just love the craft of building things. And things might be the product, might be solving the customer problem, might be the team and the company. The breadth of problems that I have the chance to solve is just like day to day enjoyable for me. And I think I got that taste through working on projects and then ultimately got the chance to kind of try it directly with the Teal Fellowship. And have not once in a serious way ever looked back or had a question about whether I'm doing the right thing. - That's amazing, that's amazing. Well, Dan, I think we are huge fans of Moxie, everything you've built there, everything the team is doing.

**[28:16]** I think we're probably even bigger fans of Dan. And just your story and your approach, I think it's really authentic, it's really unique. And I think that's a lot of what's driving the success. And I appreciate you sharing everything you've shared with us. I feel like I've learned a lot. I know our listeners and audience learn a lot too. If anybody's interested in getting connected with you or getting connected with Moxie, what's the best way to reach out or connect with your brand? - Yeah, thanks for asking. You can check us out at joinmoxie.com, M-O-X-I-E. And I'm just Dan at ourdomain.com, so feel free to shoot me a note.

**[29:00]** - Thanks again, Dan, that was great. - Yeah, thank you, Dan, I appreciate everything. And best of luck with everything at Moxie and after as well. - I appreciate it, it was a pleasure.


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