Building AssetMule: Empowering Product Marketers and Bringing Sales Assets into the 21st Century
I had the pleasure of interviewing Justin Dorfman, the Co-Founder and CEO of AssetMule, a SaaS product that product marketing and sales teams use to create personalized interactive sales assets. Prior to AssetMule, Justin spent 15 years building sales and product marketing practices at early stage and hypergrowth companies across the Cloud Computing, Influencer Marketing, and Crypto/Blockchain industries.
What motivated you to launch your startup?
We launched AssetMule to solve a number of pain points I experienced myself as a former B2B SaaS salesperson turned product marketer, specifically as it relates to creating sales assets.
The first was the time and effort it took to create new assets. As a non-designer, I would often have to rely on outsourced designers to create new assets. This process could take 2–3 weeks to deliver and cost upwards of $1,000 per asset. So the first idea we had for AssetMule was to create a “Canva for Sales Assets” that would make it easy for product marketers or salespeople to build their own high-quality assets using a library of pre-designed templates (one-pagers, decks, case studies, etc.) and components (pricing tiers, competitive tables, etc.) for creating their own custom assets.
The second pain point was the need for sales to personalize assets. Sales always wants to personalize assets for each of their prospects, but product marketing wants to protect the branding and messaging. Product marketing is also often significantly outnumbered by the amount of sales reps they’re supporting, so there’s no way they can deliver on each request for a personalized asset. So what we decided to do with AssetMule was to enable the product marketer to build a library of pre-approved messaging and imagery (what we call “snippets”) that sales can pull from to personalize assets while staying on-brand and on-message.
The final pain point we set out to solve was the inadequate format of sales assets. For the last couple of decades, we’ve been using PDFs as the standard format for sales assets. This originally made sense as these assets would often be printed out, which PDF is a good format for. But, today, no one’s really printing out assets. Everyone’s viewing them from a browser. So we felt there was an opportunity to bring sales assets into the 21st century by making them web-based and more interactive. In doing so, we believe we can help our customers create assets that drive more engagement from their buyers. And because the assets are web-based, we can uncover buying signals based on how prospects are interacting with the assets.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
The first thing that excites me about what we’re building is that we’re solving pain points I experienced, myself, first-hand. I know the problems intimately and get significant satisfaction from solving them with our product.
Beyond that, I’m excited about who we’re building for, particularly the product marketer.
I’m a firm believer that product marketing is one of the most critical roles for any B2B SaaS company. They’re generally responsible for the positioning, messaging, and overall go-to-market strategy. There’s arguably nothing more important.
At the same time, product marketing is often misunderstood and underappreciated. As an example, there aren’t really any software tools built specifically for product marketing.
As such, I think there’s a real opportunity to empower and elevate product marketers. This gets me really excited. In fact, empowering the product marketer is one of our core values as a company.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
As a bootstrapped startup with just three people, prioritization is a constant challenge we face.
We’re very fortunate to have an active user base with a ton of incredible ideas on where we can take the product. There’s also a ton of interesting marketing strategies that we’d love to implement.
In the end, we have to be super critical with where we spend our time based on what we believe is going to give us the biggest return on our effort.
Overall, I think we’ve done a really good job at this. But it’s certainly a big challenge that we face on a daily basis and there’s always more we wish we could do.
What are your future plans for your startup?
In the immediate future, we’re super focused on building the best possible solution for B2B SaaS product marketing and sales teams at early stage companies to create high impact sales assets. This is where the pain is most critical and where we, personally, have the most experience and expertise.
From there, we see many pain points we can help solve for mid-market and enterprise B2B SaaS companies, as well as companies across other industries.
Ultimately, our goal is to be the go-to solution for sales assets.
If you had to share “words of wisdom” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
My advice would be to get started.
I’ve wanted to start a company for a number of years now but always saw it as something I’d do in the future instead of something to do now.
I’d often give myself the excuse that I needed more experience, a better idea, or that the timing wasn’t right for one reason or another.
Looking back, now that I’ve started my own company, it’s clear that these truly were just excuses.
Experience can help, but it can also hurt you by making you less open to new ideas and taking risks.
And ideas are cheap. In fact, I’m now a firm believer that you don’t even need an idea to get started. Get out there, talk to people about their problems, and look for trends. You’ll find that ideas are everywhere; you just have to go out and find them.
Finally, if you’re looking for the perfect time to start, you’ll never find it. We started AssetMule after my co-founder, Jorge, and I were part of the mass layoffs we’ve seen in the tech industry of late. Was it the perfect time to start something of our own? On the surface, it surely didn’t seem so. But in retrospect, it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can follow-up me personally on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/justindorfman87.
And you can AssetMule and our journey on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/assetmule.
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
