Delve

I used to be 315 pounds. 3 years and -85lbs later, I just finished my 3rd bootcamp with a Navy SEAL. Reminder that you can always do more than you think. — The first year that I went to this Navy SEAL bootcamp in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, I couldn't do a single pushup. I couldn't even run a mile. I barely survived. Year 2, I could finally do knee pushups. And I had just completed my first half marathon so running came easier. This year, I came back after having lost 85 lbs, completed multiple half marathons, and finally able to do pushups. Still a long way to go but here's your sign that if I can do it, you can too. — Thanks Cory Levy, Baylor Adams, and Dave for making this bootcamp happen. See you all next year.

Everyone’s obsessed with automating GTM. Delve raised $32M by doing the exact opposite. While the entire industry is chasing AI-powered outbound at scale, cold calling automation, conference booths, etc. Delve went old school with: → Personalized doormats for prospects → Handing out 10K donuts → Flying planes over SaaStr And they didn't just stop at that, they amplified by turning everything into content. Every prospect who received a gift also saw the buzz about Delve online. The social proof amplified the personal touch. And that’s the play most founders miss. No wonder they raised a massive Series A so quickly  🤷♂️

Product is the driver of everything else in your business. No sales, not customer success, not marketing.   — A lot of founders think they can hire their way out of problems.   Sales team struggling? Hire more AEs. Customers complaining? Add more CSMs. Low conversion rates? Bring in marketing experts.   But here's what I've learned building Delve: the best solution to every problem is building a better product. It's not complicated, but it's also not easy. —   When customers are unhappy, don't hire more support people to handle the same tickets over and over.   Fix the core product issue that's creating those tickets in the first place.   (We used to get constant questions about how to configure AWS to be compliant. Instead of hiring more CSMs, we built an AI chat for custom AWS instructions into the platform.)   Problem solved. Permanently.   —   When sales is struggling, don't just hire more AEs to push harder.   Build a product that's so obviously better that prospects can't say no.   (When our demo conversion rate was low, we didn't hire more salespeople. We rebuilt our platform from scratch over and over until customers would say "this is a no-brainer.")   —   When you're losing to competitors, don't hire another marketer to explain why you're different.   Build something so innovative that the difference is obvious.   (We built our UI around what we wished compliance would've felt like and even though it looked different from traditional compliance platforms, we embraced it. We leaned into our TurboTax UI, 5 simple tabs on the navbar, and AI automation.) —   Every other business problem becomes solvable when you solve it at the product level first. Sales becomes easier when prospects see clear value. Marketing becomes easier when you have real differentiation. Customer success becomes easier when the product actually works.    —   That's why we try to be product-obsessed at Delve. Of course there's always room to be even more product-obsessed, which is what we're constantly striving toward. But it's the whole reason we have a TV screen in our office dedicated to tracking product releases.   The product is the foundation. Everything else is just built on top of it.

We hosted an exclusive omakase dinner for 12 CEOs/CROs and brought custom chopsticks that said "Sushi without chopsticks is like compliance without Delve." Here's the full story. — Last week, we brought together a bunch of revenue leaders from some of the fastest-growing companies like Warmly, HockeyStack, and Origami. If you know us at Delve, you know that we never show up empty-handed to events. So this time, we decided to bring custom chopsticks for each attendee. Every set of chopsticks read: "Sushi without chopsticks is like compliance without Delve." And it was definitely an interesting conversation starter. — Thanks to our amazing co-sponsors Cluely and Salesbricks 🧱 for making this possible. Make sure you're not doing compliance without Delve:)

Flew out to the middle of nowhere Wisconsin for a Navy SEAL bootcamp with 24 other founders this weekend. It's my 2nd year doing this. And I'm just as sore + in just as much pain as in year 1. At the same time, there's nothing more rewarding than finding something that seems impossible and pushing through. Thanks Cory Levy, Baylor Adams, and Dave for making this happen. See you all next year!

Tonight we're hosting an exclusive omakase dinner with Cluely and Salesbricks 🧱 (PS: there'll be a growth hack happening) — We carefully curated 12 CEOs/CROs of hypergrowth companies for a 13-course sushi tasting menu in SF. And you know us - we never show up empty handed to an event. All attendees will get a taste of Delve's signature growth hacks. We have 2 spots left. DM me if you want to join.

Years ago, MIT students got a police car on top of the Great Dome. To this date, people still don't know how they pulled it off. I live by this now. Do something so creative and mind-bending that people are left wondering how you even pulled it off. — Imagine it's 8 a.m. and you're walking to your engineering class at MIT. You look up and see flashing lights on top of the Great Dome. There's a full police car sitting on the roof of a building. Complete with a dummy dressed as a police officer, fuzzy dice, a box of donuts….even a sign in the back window reading “I brake for donuts.” By 9am, helicopters are circling. Camera crews show up. The AP story goes global, from California to Korea. You even spot a slide at the movie theater: "MISSING: one white and blue patrol car,” with the campus police phone number attached. — This is just one example of the legendary pranks MIT students have pulled off. And it represents the biggest thing I learned during my time there: do things that make people wonder how on earth you pulled it off. That's inspired the way we approach marketing, compliance, customer success, product, and more at Delve. — We flew a plane over SaaStr with a banner that read "SOC 2 Made Plane & Simple." Hand-delivered 10,000 donuts across SF in a single day. Got free real estate at 100+ of the hottest startups by sending out custom doormats. And the results speak for themselves: it's generated millions in pipeline and months of organic word-of-mouth. The whole time our goal was simple :) Pull off something so creative that people are left wondering how we did it.

We just launched a new landing page at Delve as part of our Series A announcement. Here's how our landing page has evolved over the months. __ We started Delve after facing the challenge of HIPAA compliance ourselves. So our first landing page (top right) was all about fast-tracking HIPAA. But as customers started asking for more and more compliance frameworks, we knew it was time to re-do our landing page to show SOC 2 as well. We went for dark mode and really leaned into our AI-native approach (top left). — For our $3.3M Seed announcement (bottom left), we had a light-theme, sky-blue landing page. We built it in React about a week before our seed launch. And that managed to support us all the way to 500 customers. But as we were gearing up for our $32M Series A announcement, we knew we wanted something completely different. — Every SaaS landing page had the same bright blues. The same style of bento boxes. The same gradients and light animations. We wanted to do the opposite just for the sake of it. Teal and orange gradients that we didn't find other SaaS websites using. A drop shadow that moved across our hero image. Custom paneling that made our lives infinitely harder. __ At the same time, we wanted to keep 1 thing the same: our emphasis on AI and speed. If there's 1 thing that's stayed the same across all landing pages, it's our focus on cutting out hundreds of hours of compliance busywork with AI. And that (along with multiple all-nighters) is the story of how our current landing page came together:)

Here's how someone landed an instant interview at Delve after sending us a box of donuts. — A few months ago, we handed out 10,000 donuts across SF with our tagline, "The only hole in your security we approve of."   It went viral. Hit millions of views. Unlocked $1M in ARR.   Then, a few weeks ago, we got a notification that there was a special delivery at our office. We were pleasantly surprised to find donuts.   We've sent out so many donuts, but we rarely ever receive them. — A few minutes later I checked my email and saw the subject line "donuts for the Delve team." It was a candidate that had just applied for a growth role and had sent us these donuts. He managed to grab the attention of the whole team. And that landed him an instant interview. — We get hundreds of Ashby applicants, so it's amazing to see candidates take creative approaches. After all, it's the same thing we do all day long at Delve - get creative with marketing, product, customer success, and more. If you're looking for a role, we're hiring. Open roles are in the comments!

Excited to share that we just moved into our new office! Years ago, we started in a dorm room. Last week, after finally outgrowing our last SF office, we made the move to a new one. And within the 1st week of moving in, we hosted a hackathon! No better way to stress-test the office than having 85+ hackers from across the country build for 36 hours straight. It was our version of an office warming. — Even though we're in a much bigger space now, the energy feels exactly like those early dorm room days. Same hunger, same late nights, same relentless focus on shipping.