EPISODE SUMMARY
In the most recent episode of Scale Your SaaS, Steven Webster, co-founder of Asensei, shared insights into the journey of building a cutting-edge technology company that’s redefining the fitness industry with host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach.
From launching their SDK to pioneering movement recognition akin to speech recognition, Asensei has made significant strides in digital health and fitness. Here’s a deep dive into their story, their innovative technology, and the lessons learned along the way.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach
Episode: Episode No. 328, “He Became #1 in His Industry, Then Exited – with Steven Webster”
Guest: Steven Webster, CEO & Founder of Asensei
Host: Matt Wolach, a top B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Sponsored by: Leadfeeder
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Innovation in Action
Steven Webster, co-founder of Asensei, expressed his excitement about the innovative products their customers are bringing to market. From smart mirrors tracking workouts to dumbbells that recognize weights and count reps, the applications are vast and varied. They even work with Navy SEALs for fitness validation and in VR and mixed reality settings, making the training experience more immersive.
Inspiration and Realization
In the early 2010s, while working at Microsoft with advanced teams like Microsoft Kinect, Steven was inspired by the convergence of wearable technology, flexible electronics, and machine cognition. This inspiration led to the realization that sport, fitness, and healthcare could be enhanced through unsupervised yet intelligent training systems. Thus, Asensei was born with the mission to give athletic intelligence to artificial intelligence.
The Entrepreneurial Leap
Transitioning from a secure corporate job at Microsoft to the uncertain path of entrepreneurship was a significant shift. Steven had prior entrepreneurial experience, having navigated the .com boom and bust of the late ’90s and early 2000s. His previous company, which became an industry leader in rich internet applications, was acquired by Adobe. This experience, combined with his time at Microsoft, provided a solid foundation for his next venture.
Building a Direct-to-Consumer Product
Starting Asensei was driven by a profound conviction that movement recognition technology had to exist, akin to how speech recognition had become ubiquitous. Steven’s decision to leave Microsoft was both daunting and exhilarating. He was driven by a vision of a future where machines could understand and coach human movements, a vision that seemed as futuristic as it was essential.
One of the critical strategies for Asensei’s early success was to build a direct-to-consumer product in a niche sport, indoor rowing. This approach allowed them to demonstrate the future potential of their technology in a controlled environment. The lessons learned from this experience were invaluable, enabling them to refine their technology and better understand their market.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Early Challenges and Successes
The early days were focused on securing those crucial initial customers. It was about getting the first wins, replicating those successes, and ensuring that each new client was not a completely unique challenge but part of a repeatable process.
Insights on Entrepreneurship
Steven emphasized that being a software leader is not a career path but a state of mind. It’s about the willingness to take on disproportionate risks. He advises aspiring entrepreneurs to gain experience in various aspects of business, not just their core area of expertise. His journey at companies like Adobe and Microsoft taught him crucial skills in sales, marketing, hiring, and more, which were instrumental in building Asensei.
For those looking to make a similar transition, Steven’s story underscores the importance of understanding your market deeply, whether through personal experience or thorough research. Building a successful software company involves not just technological innovation but also a profound understanding of your customers’ needs and problems.
TOP QUOTES
Steven Webster
[01:55] “In the beginning, it’s about getting those first wins, replicating those, and then making sure that as you onboard customers, you’re not facing a completely unique challenge every time, but can follow a repeatable process.”
[08:15] “Entrepreneurship is not a career path, it’s a state of mind.”
[08:45] “Get experience in as many aspects of business as possible, not just your core area of expertise.”
Matt Wolach
[13:31] “The lesson we can take from that is, be your personal brand, get people to recognize who you are your expertise, get people to look up to you in the industry, and they’ll want to follow and do what you’re doing and buy your stuff. “
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Asensei, visit: www.asensei.ai
You can also find Steven Webster on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenwebster/
For more about how Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com.
Head over to leadfeeder.com and sign up for a 14-day (no strings attached) free trial: https://www.leadfeeder.com/
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Check out the whole episode transcript here:
Matt Wolach 00:02
Hello, Welcome to Scale Your SaaS we are here to make sure that you can do exactly that. So you can generate a whole bunch of great leads, you can close those leads and you can accelerate your company with a team that helps you do it. If you want any of those things, definitely subscribe to the show right now. That way, you’re gonna get all the best tips and ideas and ways of generating amazing amounts of business. What we do is we talk with experts around the world who have done that who have created a scalable SaaS who have grown that company who have done great things in the SaaS world. And one of those experts is here with us today. I’ve got Steven Webster with me, Steven, how you doing?
Steven Webster 00:28
Matt Good to see you. Thank you for having me today.
Matt Wolach 00:31
Absolutely. Good to see you as well. Let me make sure everybody knows who you are. Steven, cuz you got an awesome background here. So Steven, he’s the CEO and founder of Asensei. Asensei It’s a fast growing software platform that is the easiest way for sport, fitness and health companies to add movement recognition and coaching intelligence to their digital touchpoints. Steven specializes in creating high performing cross functional teams, leveraging design thinking to achieve unprecedented results across various markets. He has successfully built and sold startups to Macromedia, Adobe, and led multimillion dollar projects at Adobe and Microsoft, this guy is an expert, I cannot wait to learn from his experience. Steven, thank you so much for being here.
Steven Webster 01:14
Likewise, Matt, likewise.
Matt Wolach 01:16
So tell me what’s been going on with you lately?
Steven Webster 01:18
You know, SaaS is an interesting point, we, we launched our SDK in 2021-2022. So basically, we’re an ingredient brand, you know, people that build digital health, fitness sport products, who are technology inside there’s to give that movement recognition and movement understanding, we’re like speech recognition for movement. And so we’ve kind of gone through a period of winning customers to your point, it’s like, how do you go out and get those first wins and the repeat wins and the wins that look like the last win, so everything’s not like a, you know, an art installation is different every time. But we’re at a really interesting point, now that, you know, we have like double digit, you know, a decent number of double digit customers all about to put products into market, with our technology. So I’m excited about what our customers are doing for their customers. I mean, we’ve got smart mirrors hanging on the wall in my gym. With cameras tracking your workout, we’ve got dumbbells that recognize what weight you’ve lifted, and automatically track your reps. We’re working with Navy SEALs who are training people for the basic military fitness test to become a, you know, a service member and using Asensei as a validation. So you can submit your fitness test results, and they’re kind of authenticated and validated. We’ve been working in VR headsets and doing kind of, you know, a trainer just appears in your room and mixed reality. So yeah, our customers are just doing really cool stuff. And they’re the ones that are kind of telling us this is what we need the product to do next, this is how it needs to work. And it’s, you know, it’s just, it’s an exciting time. It’s really exciting time.
Matt Wolach 03:02
That’s super exciting. That’s one of the things I love about the software world and I’ve worked with a lot of different companies and, and coach a lot of different companies and there’s just so many different ways of creating technology that helps people and that is such a unique idea and it’s it just sounds so amazing. Sounds like people absolutely need that. But what gave you the idea to start the company? Where did that come from?
Steven Webster 03:23
You know, it’s a whole bunch of different things. I mean, just going all the way back. I’ll start when I was four years old Matt. I’ve always played sports, sports and fitness of just I didn’t even say fitness because I got my fitness by accident just by playing sport like i and that was team sports like soccer and hockey. It was individual sports like swimming. But the sports are the activities I enjoyed best and I was best at were martial arts first jujitsu and then karate. So I went out when I went to study at university 91 to 95. That’s when I was I first learned karate I competed captained the team, I ended up coaching the team for over a decade. So that was a you know, so I’ll kind of, you know, just summarize there, a love of coaching human performance and a love of coaching score and a love of learning as well as coaching. You know, it’s a little cliched, but the best way to learn is to teach. So that’s happening at the same time. I’m studying computer science and electronics and I’ve always been, you know, just technology has always been fun for me not work but fun, right? As many of us I’m sure. And even as a kid like I wanted a red light on my hockey goals that would go off when the ball hit the back of the net. I wanted a light on my punch bag that would tell me you know, my reaction time was as I was hitting it. But let’s fast forward to maybe kind of 2011 2012 I’m at Microsoft. I’m working with teams like Microsoft Kinect, working with Intelligent agents in the early stages of like AI as we call it from from GUI to NUI from graphical to natural user interfaces speech and gesture. So you just throw all of that into a cauldron like this kind of sports coach guy that’s you know, wearables happening and flexible electronics are happening and you know, machine cognition and perception is coming online. And I just had a moment at Microsoft of I gotta start this company like I see a see a future where sport and fitness and health care will be something we’ll do unsupervised without an expert in the room. And so somebody has to give perception and understanding to the machine. You know, again, my cliche is we need to give athletic intelligence to artificial intelligence. And as anyone who started a company knows the second you have the idea and you have conviction on it you as quickly followed by terror that surely 10 Other people have this idea as well. And so, as you and I spoke before the show, I quit my job at the top of Snowmass mountain ski started the Asensei
Matt Wolach 06:08
Snowmass in Colorado my home state as many of you out there in the audience know that but that’s very cool. I do have to ask, you said hockey. Now as everyone can hear you are a true Scott. There’s not a lot of ice hockey in Scotland. Are you talking field hockey?
Steven Webster 06:30
So fact, Scotland is where NHL players go to kinda like pasture. So I grew up in the ice rink. Both my uncle’s two of my uncle’s played for Team Great Britain. One was the net minder. One capatains I went to my local hockey game every Saturday evening, my dad still does. And the rules on imports. Were you were allowed three, you know, non British players in your team. And so I kind of grew up knowing the celebrities in town because my uncle was coached them and played with them. But all these kind of former NHL players that, you know, we thought they were like, amazing, these stars from the NHL, and they were probably like, you know, 10th round picks. But yeah, I grew up skating and playing hockey, so ice hockey and street hockey. Now feels lucky.
Matt Wolach 07:23
That’s fantastic. I also was a hockey player all the way through college. So soft spot in my heart for other hockey players, but I’ve never met someone from Scotland who played hockey. So that’s pretty amazing. Yeah, very, very cool. Okay, so back to the good stuff. I want to understand a little bit more about you made this transition Microsoft, then you come become an entrepreneur. Wow, what a shift like you’re working for this big corporation. And now all of a sudden, you’re on your own. What was that shift Like? What told you it was okay to make that shift, because we have a lot of people who are already doing it. But we also have a lot of listeners who they’re thinking about becoming a software founder. They’re thinking about starting what told you now is the time and I can do this.
Steven Webster 08:07
I’ve done it before. You know, as you mentioned, up front, I was an accidental entrepreneur. I entered the technology industry, I graduated in 1995. Worked as a chip designer for three or four years. But then can the 1999- 2000 like .com happens. And when you were in the UK, you’re living in the UK is happening and kind of bigger in America. But we had some big, you know, you know .com successes in Europe as well. And I wanted to be a part of that. So I first made the transition into kind of .com and software. But then any of us that had jobs around 2001 also didn’t have jobs around 2001. There was a lot as I got laid off, like three or four times as companies went under and just you know, it was it was it was messy. And so I accidentally was like I might as well just, you know, be a software contractor. And then I had a buddy join me because the project was too big. And then we accidentally built a company and we accidentally became industry leaders and Adobe, Macromedia technologies for desktop UI is delivered over the Internet. And so before you know it, we’re partnering with Micromedia. They’re getting acquired by Adobe. We’re getting acquired by Adobe. So I’ve done it before. Adobe was fantastic. It’s still like one of my funnest places to work, the people, the technology, the culture of the company. Microsoft, I was getting itchy, you know, I was like I’m in a big company. I want to do something I was getting very excited by wearable and you know, everything that was happening. I was kind of, you know, poached or headhunted into Microsoft to start something new as like, you know, I don’t know I’m kind of thinking I want to start another company. But then I decided the best bootstrap financing would be go and just you know I’ll make some money at Microsoft for three or four years and figure out what I wanted to do. But yeah, I mean, listen, that’s hard. You know, you can you know, you do very well, a company like Microsoft, financially. You think you’re working hard, but you have no idea what hard work is until you can I try and start a company. But I’ve never started a venture backed company before as well. And here I am, like, entrepreneur that’s done it before. But now I’m in the Bay Area. And apparently you just walk into a coffee shop and you can raise $10 million, right? So I can I just, you know, it’s the athlete and compare and me, I was like, Yo, I want to take the shot at the title, you know, can I do this? And so, and most importantly, I was just deeply attached to the problem I wanted to solve like, I got that moment, no joke at the top of Snowmass mountain, I was like, I got to do this, like this, this thing has to exist in the world, just like speech recognition, movement recognition has to exist in the world.
Matt Wolach 10:57
I love it. You’re definitely an innovator, that’s for sure. You did say earlier that you accidentally became industry leader. I think that’s being a bit modest. I’m sure you did some really good thing. So help us out? What were some of those things, Steven, that you did in that first, you know, entrepreneurial position, and that first company that really helped you guys become that industry leader?
Steven Webster 11:18
I think it was a couple of things. I my, my first .com experience was online banking. So I helped put some of the first online banks in Europe online. And those of us that remember that I mean, horrific user experiences, everything was a form, click a button, wait 30 seconds for the page to render, click another button. Next Next page next page. So I used to describe it in sales as it was like reading a book through a straw. That’s what the online experience was like, right? Haven’t said that, in 20 years. I used to say 20 times a day. But then when I when I worked in online banking, we, we kind of we were really trying to solve this idea of like, how can we have desktop like software like Windows, we’re in the world of probably like Windows NT at this point, you know, we’re used to drag and drop and windows and mouse and point are, and that was the problem. I was searching for a solution for well as how can we get that level of interactivity but in a browser. And at the time, this insane idea that I had was what about Macromedia Flash that was getting used for cartoons and games? Could we build UIs with Macromedia Flash, but connect them to enterprise backends like IBM WebSphere or J2EE or dotnet. And so I decided I would tell Pearson publishing that I’ve solved it, full disclosure, I had not. And I wrote a book, which was basically in hindsight, documenting my learning as I went with a publishing deadline. But that meant that by the time I had figured out how to do it, I was also the author of the only book. That really, in hindsight, positioned our team as these are the guys these guys wrote the book on rich internet applications that then became known as internet applications. And now today, we call them applications, right? It’s just software on the web. It’s really cool. We’re there first.
Matt Wolach 13:31
That’s so awesome. And I think so the lesson we can take from that is, be your personal brand, like get people to recognize who you are your expertise, get people to look up to you in the industry, and they’ll want to follow and do what you’re doing and buy your stuff. And I’ve seen that all over the place. That’s the first time I’ve heard it, where you actually wrote the book for the industry on that thing, which is pretty amazing. But it just goes to speak that get yourself out there, start sharing your experiences, start sharing value. Now most people are doing blogs and videos and all that kind of thing, podcasts like we’re doing now. And people will look up to you and people will follow you. And it’s a very natural thing that I’ve seen many times it’s happened with me it’s happened with my clients. And sounds like you really encapsulated that that is one of the main things that helped you become the industry leader, right?
Steven Webster 14:18
And that’s something we’ve transferred to Asensei. I mean, my my co founders, I knew them. I’ve known both my co founders for like over 30 years at this point. But we’ve all played sport or spent a bunch of time on the mat beating each other up and karate or jujitsu. So that coaching DNA is in the leadership team. And not in every hire in the company. It’s not like you can’t work at the company unless you have an athletic background, but my VP of Sales deep credibility as a not just in the wearable technology and the motion capture world. But he’s been a strength and conditioning trainer. He’s got a master’s in kinesiology so it’s interesting very often our customers will say we came to you for the technology but we stayed for You’re no hire around coaching and human performance. So the domain expertise is as if not more important than the technology expertise. The technology makes it happen. But you think you really need to understand your customers problem. And that’s not a technology problem. It’s, it’s a domain problem. Yeah,
Matt Wolach 15:18
Yeah well said that’s, that’s step one, understand your customer and their problems. And you can build the tech to it, you can build your marketing messaging around it, you can build your sales process around it, and everything just works from that foundation. So I’m glad you guys found that that’s awesome. So okay, so we got this launched, Asensei it’s doing its thing you launched. Now you’re in the early days, how do you get it off the ground? You’ve got an MVP, or you’ve got a product. How do you get people to actually start using it? What did you guys do to get that early traction?
Steven Webster 15:48
You know, so there’s advice I didn’t take which I’ll share. The advice given to me, actually, by Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, the category design book, I had the good fortune of working with Geoff twice, first at Adobe, then at Microsoft, it was his team that took me to Microsoft actually. And Geoff’s advice to me, when I started the company was find a customer and treat it as a project, like don’t build a product, build a project, and then go and find another project is the same, and then start to extract some IP out of your projects that become the kernel of the product. Fantastic advice, which of course, I didn’t follow. So do what Geoff said. But what we did is what we did, I don’t think we did the wrong thing that I’m being a little flippant, is we were trying to imagine the future that didn’t exist yet. And people didn’t understand what it looked like, what would it look like when a machine can watch you, you know, pitch a baseball or swing a baseball bat, or do Pilates or do yoga and the machine understands what you’re doing and gives you feedback in real time. And coaches you it was hard for people to imagine. You know, we all know the movie Her with Scarlett Johansson, it’s kind of popular again, because the chatGPT I remember investors knocking us back, one of the founders of Wired Magazine knocked us back because this just seems like “Her”, it just seems impossible. You know, it was like we’re inventing that. So we actually went B2B, even though we want it to be B2B. But we picked one sport, and we actually built an app around that sport, so that we were direct to consumer. And we could kind of show the world what the future would look like. We chose indoor rowing, because like it was niche, and nobody cared. And if we messed it up, it wouldn’t be a disaster. But also because we felt our technology could have real impact, because and rowing your technique in your farm. So you know the technique and form important. So that was a slightly different approach. Maybe unorthodox, maybe not for everybody, but we use something I learned that Adobe was like, you really have to walk in the shoes of the end user, that’s the design thinking is like, really have empathy with the end user. So we did that first and then work back towards our technology stack.
Matt Wolach 18:06
And I think it’s critical just for everybody out there, you if you’re creating a company, and you weren’t an expert in that industry, like Steven was, you can still learn that and understand, like you said, what they’re walking through and what their experiences are, you just have to have the conversations, you have to talk to your market, you have to learn from them directly. And there’s no replacing that and everybody I talked to who’s had any sort of success, they understood their market on a deep level in some way or another. Either they were that person, or they start talking to them, they started having those conversations. It’s really a must. So tell me as we wrap and this has been really, really fantastic. What advice would you share for other software leaders who are getting started and they’re thinking, okay, how am I going to become that industry leader like Steven did?
Steven Webster 18:55
I mean, it’s funny, there’s a kind of an oxymoron there. Getting started as an as a leader, you don’t get started as a leader. Right. So I mean, I think advice I would share would be like entrepreneurs, not a career path. It’s not a job title. You know, it describes a state of mind. It’s a willingness to take on disproportionate risk. But it’s not a job title. So, you know, if you imagine that one day, you’d love the idea of running a company or building a company. I learned a hell of a lot working for Adobe, I learned a hell of a lot working for Cadence Design systems. I learned a lot at Microsoft. And it wasn’t just the core skill. I talked about this in Sport Coaching, and I talk about this in businesses, you want to become what’s known as a T shaped person. The T is like, what’s your strong core? You know, I’m an engineer. So I’ve got a very strong core as an engineer, I can go toe to toe. It’s been a while but I can still go toe to toe with engineers that can explain you know, technology In a deep level to the right audience, but what’s that bar across the top of the T, I learned sales I learned solution sales, I learned product sales, I learned pricing, I learned marketing, I hired people, I fired people, I performance manage people. And these are all super important skills that I believe are not best learned the first time you ran a venture backed startup and it’s your own money and your own salary, like learn them on Microsoft’s dime, learn them on Adobe’s dime or Stripes dime or Tesla’s dime. And then I think you’ll be well positioned for the role of being a leader, which is not about how good are you at your central pillar. But how much have you cross trained and understand like, I have to run a marketing team, I have to run a sales team, I have to run a customer care team, I have to speak with HR professionals in different countries, and all of that is me applying skill learned outside of Asensei not inside of Asensei.
Matt Wolach 20:56
He’s genius. I love that model. I’ve heard that before. And I completely agree with it and you just explained it really, really well. So I hope everybody out there was taking notes, getting all that down, because that was fantastic. Steven, this has been awesome. I want to make sure our audience can learn more about you and Asensei, how can they best do that?
Steven Webster 21:13
LinkedIn like, I think that’s the platform that we love to share the most on. So follow me on LinkedIn, or follow the company on LinkedIn, we tend to post more from our individual accounts because you know people follow people. People don’t follow brands. So find me on LinkedIn. Steven Webster is my I’m an early user. I got the I got the name. So the first one nice, follow me. And yeah, we just love to share what we’re doing. We’ll show off the tech that we’re working on. We’ll talk about our customers and the problems that are solving. And we’ll get a little bit philosophical from time to time. So yeah, love to love to connect and engage with people there.
Matt Wolach 21:54
Perfect. We’ll put all that into the show notes. So if you’re listening, go grab that. Go follow Steven there, get all his good stuff. Steven, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this with us.
Steven Webster 22:03
Of course and thanks for inviting me it was a pleasure.
Matt Wolach 22:06
You’re welcome pleasures mine as well. Everybody out there. Thanks for being here. Really appreciate it. Again, make sure you’re subscribed to the show so you don’t miss out on any other amazing stories and experience of how to grow a software company like you just heard from Steven. So subscribe, and then we will see you next time. Take care. Bye bye
