Dan Martell - September 24, 2020


Don’t Chase The Wrong Revenue with Christian Owens @ Paddle.com

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Patrick Campbell Jason Richline Zora Kara Schwitzer Nathan Lacca Teal Fellow Jeff Bezos Elon Musk Oyo Rooms Chargebee Allison Recurly Dimitri Maslow Adobes Peldi Scott Phil B2C. Dude
How to Define Your Vision of Success and Achieve It Why Fear Is the Biggest Threat to Your Business Growth

Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

194.25

Word count

11,031

Sentence count

739

Harmful content

Toxicity

36

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Startup Spotlight podcast, we sit down with Christian Blumberg, CEO and Founder of Paddle, to talk about how he got into the Teal Foundation and how he built a startup from the ground up.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Whereas we might see a 80-20 split of maybe not even, maybe not even that low or that high
00:00:07.200 in the US in terms of credit card usage, in Germany it will be probably reversed.
00:00:13.220 Ignition sequence start. Three, two, one.
00:00:26.240 Boom, Christian. Thanks for coming on the show, man. Appreciate it.
00:00:30.000 All right, dude, the accent, let's start there.
00:00:33.400 Where are you from?
00:00:34.600 I'm from the UK.
00:00:36.320 We should have just got you to talk,
00:00:37.480 and then we'd have been like, what's his accent?
00:00:39.600 Yeah, we should have.
00:00:40.360 Yeah, I'm from the UK.
00:00:41.440 I grew up like 100 miles outside of London.
00:00:44.880 Because sometimes you sound Canadian even.
00:00:46.920 It's so crazy.
00:00:48.000 I don't know.
00:00:48.500 Maybe I'm just trying to appeal to a broader audience.
00:00:50.840 I don't know.
00:00:51.520 Good job, man.
00:00:52.300 It's like this blend.
00:00:53.080 It's branding.
00:00:53.760 But did you spend time in San Francisco?
00:00:56.180 Not a significant amount of time.
00:00:57.660 OK.
00:00:58.040 And certainly not until I was at least 18, 19.
00:01:02.620 So it wouldn't have rubbed off significantly.
00:01:05.320 Founder of Paddle, you've been doing that since 2013?
00:01:09.640 Yeah, seven years.
00:01:10.760 Seven years.
00:01:12.360 But before that, Teal Fellow, Peter Teal, which was,
00:01:15.860 is that the whole, don't go to university,
00:01:17.440 I'll give you money instead?
00:01:18.480 Yeah.
00:01:19.280 Let's start there, and we'll get to Paddle.
00:01:22.160 So that caused a big kerfuffle in the whole world.
00:01:25.880 I think it's interesting.
00:01:27.540 And I knew a few other guys, actually a young kid.
00:01:30.120 I forget his name, but he was from the UK as well.
00:01:32.500 What did he end up doing?
00:01:33.440 Anyways, he was like 15 or 16.
00:01:37.140 What was the offer?
00:01:38.600 How did it work?
00:01:39.340 How did you get that?
00:01:41.300 How did you become a Teal Fellow?
00:01:42.380 I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to talk about this, so we'll see.
00:01:45.800 Basically, I got a call one day.
00:01:48.420 I was in the, so I dropped out of school when I was 16 anyway
00:01:51.800 and started building my first business.
00:01:53.780 So I think I got a call when I was about 18, 18, 19.
00:01:58.200 And I'd just been in the Forbes, like 30 under 30.
00:02:03.360 And I get a call one day.
00:02:04.620 I'm in like an Uber.
00:02:06.160 I get a call one day, which is just like,
00:02:08.580 this is, I think, Allison from the Teal Foundation.
00:02:12.440 Peter Teal would like to meet you.
00:02:15.460 Did you know who he was?
00:02:16.660 I knew who he was.
00:02:17.380 Like I was a big like PayPal, like kind of whole story,
00:02:20.280 Elon Musk, like all that stuff.
00:02:21.540 So you knew.
00:02:22.300 Yeah.
00:02:23.560 like to meet you and then it was like it was like a Wednesday and it was like we booked you a flight
00:02:27.420 on Friday like you're coming kind of thing I was just like okay yeah sure um and you're in London
00:02:35.720 or yeah you're in the UK wow so I hang up the call they email me some stuff they email me um
00:02:43.120 like tickets and sort of like an agenda thing and it turns out that it was like this
00:02:47.380 kind of like pitch day demo day so there's other other kids yeah yeah other founders there yeah
00:02:54.480 so i think i usually you apply so usually you apply and there's this like whole process and
00:03:00.440 they have this big thing about um they get sort of like four or five thousand applications a year
00:03:05.580 and 20 people get in um so and i think sort of they had gone through sort of the period of
00:03:14.200 So the foundation had been around for the fellowship had been around for, I would say, three or four years at this point.
00:03:20.500 So they've gone through a few cycles. So I think they were really honing down like what they like in a in a person in this program.
00:03:27.520 And it was sort of less of the still the like big idea on change the world and kind of all that stuff.
00:03:34.320 But that mixed in with a little bit of traction, like you're on your way a little bit.
00:03:38.660 So I think they had to supplement these applications with kind of people that
00:03:43.660 they would kind of outreach to and say, okay,
00:03:45.660 this person's actually doing something like this, invite them in.
00:03:48.460 So I went there for this demo day type of thing.
00:03:52.100 It was like, you're going to have to get up for two minutes and pitch.
00:03:55.480 What was your company at the time?
00:03:56.920 It was paddle.
00:03:57.440 Oh, okay.
00:03:58.020 Yeah.
00:03:59.420 You're going to have to get up for two minutes and pitch one slide.
00:04:01.800 You're allowed one slide.
00:04:02.680 That's it.
00:04:03.420 Do your two minutes in front of the 50 or 60 other people.
00:04:06.920 Cool. And for those watching, Paddle is a subscription management system?
00:04:11.700 Yeah. So we build a SaaS commerce platform, which is everything from subscription management,
00:04:16.220 payments, taxes, sort of all of the boring back office shit that nobody actually wants to deal
00:04:20.480 with when they're building a SaaS business. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So in that space, Chargeify, 0.95
00:04:24.880 Recurly, Chargebee. I mean, some of these came way past you, but that kind of.
00:04:29.220 Yeah. So it's similar to those, just with all of the finance commerce stuff also baked in.
00:04:34.820 Cool.
00:04:35.380 And what would be examples of finance commerce type stuff?
00:04:37.740 So all of the payment stack, banking, how you have-
00:04:41.060 Oh, you actually take the transaction as well.
00:04:42.900 Yeah.
00:04:43.040 So Stripe.
00:04:43.600 Oh, wow.
00:04:44.240 Cool.
00:04:44.320 And instead of plugging something like Avalara or TaxJar or something in to help you calculate
00:04:49.440 taxes, we'll collect the taxes, file them, and remit them on your behalf so you never
00:04:53.260 have to touch a dime of tax revenue ever again.
00:04:56.200 Boom.
00:04:56.640 That's really cool.
00:04:57.520 Strong value prop.
00:04:58.340 So pretty advanced, I think, seven years ago.
00:05:01.540 So you get up, you pitch that.
00:05:02.820 Yeah.
00:05:03.080 What happens?
00:05:03.560 uh so we had a bit of traction we were doing i think like 30 or 40k mrr at the time um
00:05:11.620 maybe a little bit north of that and kind of there was very little feedback like in the room i
00:05:17.300 basically did that went to dinner with like all these folks and then went home um and then two
00:05:22.100 weeks later i get a call and it's like you've been accepted um you have to sign some stuff uh you get
00:05:27.660 100 grand over two years, no equity, paid out, I think,
00:05:31.840 quarterly.
00:05:33.240 Why did he do this?
00:05:35.220 Did he want equity?
00:05:36.480 No, don't want equity, don't want anything.
00:05:38.160 You have to sign a contract that basically says.
00:05:41.180 You're not allowed to tell anybody what happened.
00:05:42.940 Yeah, exactly.
00:05:43.800 So I'm going to get a bill for 100 grand immediately
00:05:46.980 after this.
00:05:47.380 If you do, yeah, well, yeah, so funny.
00:05:50.580 So basically, you have to sign a thing
00:05:52.080 that says for at least the duration of the two years
00:05:54.300 that you're a TEAL fellow, that you won't go to university,
00:05:59.220 college, sort of anything like that.
00:06:00.980 And if you're currently enrolled, you have to drop out,
00:06:03.560 or at least take a leave of absence or whatever.
00:06:06.400 So their point of view, and this is your perspective,
00:06:09.820 is that they wanted to prove that.
00:06:12.820 And I think it's interesting.
00:06:13.860 So they're essentially saying, here's a sample set,
00:06:17.120 but it was highly curated.
00:06:18.760 Here's a sample set of people that we gave 200 grand,
00:06:21.740 100 grand?
00:06:22.160 100 grand over two years.
00:06:23.240 Yeah, and here's where they're at now.
00:06:25.000 So it was better for them not to go to university,
00:06:27.560 but I guess technically that wasn't really the case.
00:06:30.080 So I think the rough thesis, and this is my words,
00:06:34.760 it's not theirs, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer,
00:06:36.800 disclaimer, all that stuff, is that why would you go to college,
00:06:43.740 spend $200,000, get $200,000 in debt,
00:06:47.140 enter the workforce, especially if you're
00:06:49.880 entrepreneurial minded.
00:06:50.780 You want to go start something anyway.
00:06:52.100 Yeah, and you need the capital and the resources to do that,
00:06:54.380 not start off with a 2K hole in the ground.
00:06:56.780 Yeah, exactly.
00:06:57.340 And sort of the extent to which you're going to learn stuff,
00:07:00.980 you're going to learn how to take good notes.
00:07:02.500 You're going to learn how to be good in meetings.
00:07:03.860 You're going to learn how to maybe give a good presentation.
00:07:06.340 You might learn some of these fundamental bits,
00:07:08.760 but actually when you talk to people,
00:07:12.040 like 90% of what they learn is by failing at it,
00:07:15.220 trying it, like iterating over it.
00:07:17.640 So the rough thesis is,
00:07:19.560 what if instead of people entering this environment,
00:07:22.100 of going to start a business with like $200,000.
00:07:25.100 Like negative $200,000, they start positive $100,000.
00:07:28.400 Don't have to worry about things like living
00:07:30.380 and living expenses and things like that.
00:07:32.060 That's primarily what the $50,000 a year for two years is.
00:07:35.060 You don't have to worry about rent and food and eating.
00:07:38.240 If you want to go out and raise money, go out and raise money.
00:07:40.140 But this is like an investment in you.
00:07:42.400 Yeah, basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
00:07:44.820 You get that covered.
00:07:45.320 Cover that stuff off.
00:07:46.660 Like what can these people do if they're
00:07:49.220 given the two of those years that they would usually
00:07:51.900 spend in college, given those to just go and build some stuff.
00:07:56.360 And what did most, like there's 20 people,
00:07:59.600 have they continued this?
00:08:01.280 Is it the Teal Fellowship still?
00:08:03.080 So they still take in, they've changed it
00:08:04.920 to be like more of a rolling kind of thing.
00:08:07.880 So they kind of accept people in batches throughout the year
00:08:11.240 rather than being like this big 20 people a year
00:08:13.980 in the summer go through it.
00:08:15.200 OK, they might take five people a quarter or something.
00:08:17.300 Something like that.
00:08:18.620 And there have been some huge stories out of it.
00:08:23.360 So Beam, the Twitch competitor that
00:08:26.720 was sold to Microsoft, was a Teal Fellow.
00:08:29.640 Ethereum, like.
00:08:31.280 Really?
00:08:32.140 Yeah, Vitalik was.
00:08:33.560 Yeah, Vitalik, I know his dad.
00:08:34.960 Yeah, Dimitri, that's crazy.
00:08:36.620 Was a Teal Fellow.
00:08:37.460 Good dude.
00:08:37.860 Yeah.
00:08:38.440 Yeah.
00:08:39.660 Oyo Rooms, so like an Indian hotel 0.91
00:08:42.780 startup raised like $3 billion, largest independent hotel
00:08:45.780 chain in the world.
00:08:46.280 Oh, wow.
00:08:46.820 So he's got some really good me, obviously, for sure.
00:08:50.260 Paddle, man.
00:08:50.900 Huge.
00:08:51.500 Huge.
00:08:52.160 Yeah.
00:08:52.700 Well, let's talk about Paddle.
00:08:55.240 You know, it's a fun fact.
00:08:56.860 Flixel, Phil, who started the company, is from my hometown.
00:09:00.980 And I saw they were a customer of yours.
00:09:03.640 What are, like, tell us where the company's at today,
00:09:06.420 kind of customers you work with, feature sets.
00:09:08.840 What does Paddle look like today?
00:09:10.200 Yeah.
00:09:10.400 So going seven years, we've raised about $35 million,
00:09:14.920 dollars, 150-ish people, about 14 million ARR, and about 2,000 SaaS businesses run on
00:09:25.840 us.
00:09:26.940 And it's a real spectrum.
00:09:29.860 So we have everybody from the people trying to start out doing a couple of grand a year
00:09:34.020 alongside their jobs trying to make this work to businesses doing 50, 60, 100 million ARR.
00:09:40.820 and sort of primarily SaaS, have a bunch of companies,
00:09:46.680 some of which are here, who run on us,
00:09:50.220 like skewed mostly B2B on the smaller side
00:09:53.340 and then B2C on the large customer side.
00:09:55.440 Gaming side, is that part of it?
00:09:56.720 No gaming, no gaming, no content.
00:09:58.480 I've seen you a long time ago pitch it,
00:09:59.820 and it was like apps and games.
00:10:01.220 Yeah, yeah.
00:10:01.980 Okay, so you did pivot around.
00:10:03.580 We narrowed, we narrowed.
00:10:04.860 So the idea initially was,
00:10:07.280 and I've given a talk on this before,
00:10:09.020 it was like I think the thing that a lot of founders do which is like this thing looks a lot
00:10:14.600 like these other things let's group them all together and like not focus so yeah to me like
00:10:19.400 the reason I started paddle is I started a software business when I was 14 grew it to like
00:10:23.740 4 million in revenue um realized I was spending way more of my time this was like 17 way more of
00:10:29.380 my time actually dealing with all of this other shit that wasn't building a product and speaking 0.72
00:10:33.280 to customers and growing um I was spending a load of time on stuff that was taxes growing 0.86
00:10:38.340 internationally had two hundred thousand gateways yeah crazy um so started doing that and then kind
00:10:46.240 of was like got obsessed with that as a problem set um founded paddle started trying to solve
00:10:51.480 that problem did you have paddle.com from the beginning yeah that's a fun story okay um we can
00:10:56.960 maybe get into that all right um so we so we started doing that but kind of software to me
00:11:03.460 looked like content looked like downloadable stuff looked like games yeah and then you try
00:11:07.940 going to be all things to all people,
00:11:09.600 and ultimately, how do you add a ton of value in that,
00:11:12.340 especially when you're building a product?
00:11:13.920 This core set of infrastructure we
00:11:15.180 were building around taxes and payments and things like that
00:11:17.180 was repeatable, but the tools that a SaaS business needs
00:11:21.380 alongside that are very, very different.
00:11:22.720 Different than gaming, yeah.
00:11:24.580 And how long did you guys go down that path
00:11:26.200 before you narrowed it down?
00:11:28.180 Was it a couple of years?
00:11:29.180 A couple of years.
00:11:29.940 So we started in August 2012, really launched early 2013.
00:11:35.500 By the beginning of 2014, we'd kind
00:11:37.820 have been like, OK, it's software, it's SaaS.
00:11:39.700 It's sort of primarily like the B2B, B2C mix on that
00:11:44.220 we weren't sure about.
00:11:45.140 And then by the end of that year, it was like, OK,
00:11:48.340 B2B is where we want to be.
00:11:49.600 We're going to still support B2C. 0.58
00:11:50.960 But sort of in terms of focus, it's probably going to be
00:11:53.300 What's the TAM for you?
00:11:54.820 How big do you think the B2B SaaS market is?
00:11:57.800 Like how many companies would you put?
00:12:01.220 We think roughly about 75,000 to 100,000 companies.
00:12:05.900 Global in the world.
00:12:07.120 Yeah.
00:12:08.420 It's interesting.
00:12:09.280 I talked to Patrick Campbell, Nathan Lacka about this.
00:12:11.580 We've got it pegged around 30, maybe.
00:12:14.780 Yeah, I was about to caveat.
00:12:16.480 We think there's about 25,000 that we would actually want
00:12:20.120 as customers, want to sell to.
00:12:22.380 Hopefully that.
00:12:23.940 I think there are a lot of those businesses
00:12:25.940 that might fall into the category of the indie hackers
00:12:29.020 style businesses.
00:12:30.700 And then there are a lot north of the Adobes
00:12:33.860 and people like that.
00:12:34.760 They're rocking the big guys or custom stuff.
00:12:38.940 And in regards to how does your pricing work, then,
00:12:42.100 if you can work with a 2,000 MRR-type SaaS and $100 million?
00:12:47.940 How does the structure work?
00:12:49.820 So we take a transaction fee.
00:12:52.000 We don't take a monthly fee or anything like that.
00:12:53.900 No minimums.
00:12:56.000 Sort of 30-day, no minimum contract. 0.99
00:12:59.660 Damn, $14 million ARR on just fees? 0.99
00:13:02.240 Yeah. 0.99
00:13:03.240 And the reason that we did that was two things.
00:13:05.120 One, we want to be directly aligned with these businesses.
00:13:09.220 Two, it means our business gets modeled like a SaaS business
00:13:11.900 anyway, because the fee is all on recurring revenue.
00:13:16.020 But ultimately, we don't actually
00:13:18.060 see our value as solving all these operational pains.
00:13:20.840 It's sort of how can we help these businesses grow faster.
00:13:23.400 Don't every other SaaS billing company
00:13:26.140 charge a monthly fee?
00:13:28.720 Every single one that doesn't handle payments, yeah.
00:13:31.320 Oh, because you handle payments.
00:13:33.540 Got it.
00:13:34.040 And all of the payment stuff that you'll ever.
00:13:36.200 So that's your freemium pretty much, all the infrastructure stuff.
00:13:39.100 Yeah.
00:13:39.580 It's like we do all this for free and you just pay us for a fee.
00:13:41.900 Yeah.
00:13:43.000 Dude, that's amazing.
00:13:44.360 Yeah.
00:13:44.660 I mean, it takes people a while to get their head around it.
00:13:47.420 Yeah.
00:13:47.780 But the thing that it means is when we give advice.
00:13:51.020 So when we say you should change your pricing or you should do this thing.
00:13:54.100 They got to listen to this.
00:13:55.060 Like, look, we're only going to win if we can get your MRF.
00:13:57.480 Exactly.
00:13:57.800 It gets that.
00:13:58.500 Like, there is none of this stuff of like, oh, it's going to increase the number of invoices
00:14:01.400 or the number of tracked customers or whatever.
00:14:03.480 So you're going to move to the higher plan or whatever.
00:14:07.160 Everything is 100% aligned.
00:14:10.040 Yeah, success fees.
00:14:11.540 And what have you learned?
00:14:12.920 So in SaaS, there's this thing called expansion revenue.
00:14:16.040 And ideally, we get to a point where we get negative churn
00:14:20.360 and revenue churn.
00:14:21.060 How do you help companies do that?
00:14:23.640 What do you see as best practices?
00:14:25.580 How does your product consult to help them figure out maybe
00:14:28.640 their value metric?
00:14:30.460 How do you help SaaS companies with pricing and revenue
00:14:33.460 optimization?
00:14:34.240 Yeah.
00:14:35.080 So I think this all starts with, like,
00:14:37.960 we have a saying, a weird, horrible marketing slogan.
00:14:41.020 It's actually not horrible, I quite like it,
00:14:42.400 which is, like, your billing stack is holding you back.
00:14:44.980 Your billing stack is holding you back.
00:14:46.720 Yeah.
00:14:47.220 You got to hire some, like, SoundCloud
00:14:48.940 rapper to do a song, man.
00:14:50.220 Yeah.
00:14:50.720 I'm going to get on that right off your list.
00:14:52.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah, Fiverr.
00:14:53.300 Yeah.
00:14:54.680 And basically, that's the premise of, like,
00:14:59.220 The way, like, the SaaS is more competitive than it's ever been.
00:15:02.380 Like, it's cheaper than ever to start a SaaS business or a SaaS product.
00:15:06.000 Yeah, Upwork, SPAC, build me something.
00:15:07.820 Absolutely.
00:15:09.060 And infrastructure costs are basically non-existent.
00:15:11.340 Like, what you would usually, what would you previously spend 10 years ago in a server room at 2 in the morning racking stuff up?
00:15:17.520 Full metal.
00:15:17.860 Yeah, you do with an Amex and AWS.
00:15:19.660 Yeah.
00:15:20.400 So, like, the expectations of these, the customers of these businesses are way higher than they've ever been.
00:15:26.700 They expect these consumer-grade experiences in B2B.
00:15:32.180 They expect these consumer-grade experiences across every touchpoint, be it customer support, customer success, through to, and I think we think one of the key pieces that gets neglected in this process is sort of that CRM stuff around billing.
00:15:47.060 So around how does the customer buy it originally?
00:15:52.040 How do they kind of renew it?
00:15:53.900 How does their ongoing billing relationship
00:15:56.440 with a kind of SaaS business change over time?
00:16:00.900 And actually, when you look at how these businesses today,
00:16:04.580 how these SaaS businesses are achieving that,
00:16:06.760 they're buying 12 different things
00:16:08.620 and duct taping it all together
00:16:10.320 and then hoping that it's all going to work out.
00:16:13.000 So we think fundamentally, you have to have...
00:16:15.480 So we're talking like billing tool, analytics tool,
00:16:18.880 like payment processing thing.
00:16:22.020 Yeah.
00:16:22.600 So we think, one, you have to get all of that stuff in order
00:16:25.180 first.
00:16:25.780 Like you have to, in order to be able to experiment with pricing,
00:16:27.960 you have to be able to experiment with pricing.
00:16:29.520 And you're saying when it's holding them back,
00:16:30.900 it's because they can't experiment.
00:16:34.240 And I remember talking to a client the other day,
00:16:36.080 and he was like, OK, so you now want
00:16:37.980 me to create these new packages.
00:16:39.860 And he's freaking because he's got to pay for development
00:16:41.860 cycles.
00:16:43.020 And that's what you're saying is like,
00:16:44.460 Don't do that.
00:16:44.740 Your tool is easy to, you can create new plans and packages
00:16:48.140 and you're good to go.
00:16:49.120 Yeah, or you can optimize pricing in different regions,
00:16:51.940 support different currencies, whatever it is.
00:16:53.500 Really, you guys change it per region.
00:16:55.200 Yeah, whatever you want to do, tick a box.
00:16:57.320 Like if you want to support like PayPal alongside credit cards
00:17:00.660 because you have that kind of, you're launching in Germany.
00:17:03.240 Like whatever it is, like even B2B in Germany,
00:17:06.240 like non-credit card, like that should be a tick box
00:17:10.000 that you check.
00:17:10.660 You shouldn't even have to.
00:17:11.240 Non-credit card.
00:17:12.160 Yeah, you shouldn't even have to.
00:17:13.400 Germany, they don't use credit cards?
00:17:14.460 A percentage is much lower than it is in the US.
00:17:17.520 Really?
00:17:18.020 Yeah.
00:17:18.400 Like, what is it, a third?
00:17:20.280 So we see.
00:17:23.220 What would we find interesting for us,
00:17:25.620 you know, especially North Americans,
00:17:27.360 that we just think everybody does this?
00:17:28.840 Yeah, in the US, sort of per capita,
00:17:31.280 there are more credit cards than there are people.
00:17:33.280 That, I believe, I got about six in my pocket.
00:17:36.940 In Germany, that's not the case.
00:17:38.760 So maybe you have debit cards, for sure, credit, less so.
00:17:43.240 local payment wallets, direct from bank, things like that.
00:17:46.900 PayPal, all of that.
00:17:49.140 So whereas we might see a 80-20 split of maybe not even that
00:17:55.720 low or that high in the US in terms of credit card usage,
00:18:00.040 in Germany, it will be probably reversed.
00:18:02.960 80 local cards or bank wires or whatever.
00:18:06.920 And so you guys support the ability for POs and stuff,
00:18:10.820 so people can wire it into bank?
00:18:12.620 We launched a product last year.
00:18:16.100 Actually, it was earlier this year,
00:18:17.440 which was an invoicing product for sales teams
00:18:19.280 because we think the same problem exists
00:18:20.600 for sales teams as well.
00:18:22.960 Yeah, like deal rooms and contracts and redlining.
00:18:25.740 So we think a bunch of people do the e-signing stuff really well.
00:18:29.740 Don't want to touch that.
00:18:30.540 A bunch of people do the proposal CRM aspect of it really well.
00:18:34.840 Yeah, like a Proposify kind of thing.
00:18:36.100 But invoices, you talk to these companies
00:18:37.840 and they're doing their mid-market enterprise sales.
00:18:40.860 They're trying to scale that up,
00:18:41.800 building inside sales team for the first time most of that stuff is invoiced most of that stuff is
00:18:45.840 wire transfer and what they're doing is they're making this stuff in like pages or word creating
00:18:51.880 a pdf someone in the finance team has this job sending it to the sales team the sales team then
00:18:56.160 goes and sends it out maybe when that gets a pain they buy a tool for it then it's someone's job to
00:19:00.440 manually go through the bank statement and check if anybody's paid and mark it off and it's like
00:19:04.320 this two-week cycle um and then when you want to do it internationally you have to go and set up
00:19:08.780 companies and bank accounts and all this stuff.
00:19:10.680 So we were just like, we have all this infrastructure.
00:19:12.960 We built an invoicing product, links directly into Salesforce.
00:19:16.040 Do you have bank accounts in every country?
00:19:17.840 Yeah, pretty much.
00:19:18.740 Wow.
00:19:19.700 So and then basically what you do is in Salesforce,
00:19:21.960 you do your proposal, DocuSign, whatever,
00:19:24.380 hit a button, pulls all the data from the CRM,
00:19:26.600 generates tax compliant invoice, generates a bank account
00:19:28.940 for that invoice in whatever country it's in,
00:19:31.600 localizes it for currency language, like the legal stuff.
00:19:35.900 Customer pays it.
00:19:36.760 We pay the taxes on it automatically, reconcile it,
00:19:39.140 send you the money, update the CRM, do all that stuff.
00:19:42.400 You remove, at scale, you remove half a dozen people
00:19:46.640 in headcount and tooling and everything.
00:19:48.580 Easily.
00:19:49.180 Yeah.
00:19:49.760 I was at an event in Prague, and I
00:19:51.600 was talking to local entrepreneurs there.
00:19:53.180 And they were saying one of their biggest challenges
00:19:56.920 is around just dealing with currencies in every country.
00:20:00.280 And so, I mean, what are your thoughts
00:20:02.940 around people wanting to sell into the States
00:20:06.080 if they're in Europe, or do you think that it's better
00:20:08.600 to focus on the local market?
00:20:10.300 You know, if somebody's in Europe,
00:20:12.760 what's your thoughts on scale there first,
00:20:16.020 or maybe go to the US first?
00:20:18.240 I think get product market fit first.
00:20:20.400 And I'm quite a fan of doing that in whatever way you can.
00:20:25.320 Like, if you have customers in the US
00:20:26.660 who are willing to pay you, sell to them.
00:20:28.440 If they're buying the same product,
00:20:30.100 kind of you're working towards the same value metric,
00:20:32.440 sort of building the same thing, maybe
00:20:34.340 There are reasonably few products, I think,
00:20:36.920 these days that have such significant localization
00:20:39.680 challenges.
00:20:40.400 Like if you're building a CRM or a collaboration tool
00:20:43.900 or any of these things, marketing automation tool
00:20:46.740 or whatever, the product that the people want to use in the US
00:20:49.800 is roughly the same as the product people want to use in Europe.
00:20:52.180 There are some edges to it.
00:20:55.380 So get to product market fit.
00:20:58.120 Double down on the markets that are working.
00:21:01.040 If it's sales driven, build local sales.
00:21:02.360 So it doesn't matter if it's local in Europe.
00:21:04.400 Just get the product market fit.
00:21:06.120 And then maybe just find a country that's big enough to like.
00:21:09.120 Yeah.
00:21:09.720 Germany's a good one. 1.00
00:21:11.400 Germany's a good one where it's like it makes sense to focus on as a market
00:21:14.200 because there are so many local dynamics of how people buy,
00:21:17.920 be it language, sort of more of a focus on compliance and regulation
00:21:22.260 and things like that.
00:21:23.060 You have to have all those boxes ticked if you want any kind of deal of note
00:21:26.560 in those countries.
00:21:27.240 I feel like big companies.
00:21:27.640 And there's a lot of B2B.
00:21:28.660 I just feel Germany's business.
00:21:30.120 Yeah.
00:21:30.620 My brain, the brand of Germany is head 0.92
00:21:33.540 office of a lot of businesses.
00:21:35.780 Recently, I had Jason Reichel from GoNIMBY talk about RevOps.
00:21:38.740 I know that's an area you guys support people on.
00:21:42.240 Why is it such an exciting topic right now?
00:21:44.320 People are talking RevOps.
00:21:45.680 What does that mean to you, and how do you guys
00:21:47.640 help clients with it?
00:21:48.640 Yeah.
00:21:49.260 So I think it's broader than the stuff that we do.
00:21:51.780 So I encapsulate things like, to some extent,
00:21:56.600 things like sales ops and things like that in RevOps as well.
00:21:59.360 But I think there is this big topic that nobody has spoken about for a long time, which is sort of everybody speaks about product.
00:22:09.200 Everybody speaks about sales and marketing.
00:22:11.320 Everybody speaks about like all of these things, how those things need to work together, engineering, kind of growth, all of those things.
00:22:16.620 Nobody really speaks about the glue that fits those two parts of an organization together, especially like the go to market to product, sort of the mesh in the middle, which people fill with tools and people and everything else.
00:22:28.400 but kind of just as when you look at a funnel like when you look at a sales funnel you have
00:22:34.100 kind of the very top of funnel maybe you're building kind of like awareness inbound whatever
00:22:38.980 it is and you have like the actual sales portion of the funnel these people interested they're
00:22:42.680 doing a demo are we getting close to contract and then you have the kind of inverse funnel the other
00:22:46.980 side of customers using the product how do we expand on board yeah how do we expand them over
00:22:50.900 time.
00:22:53.140 So we talk about that a lot.
00:22:55.080 And we talk about this idea that you want to optimize
00:22:59.340 first stage of the funnel, get more leads in.
00:23:01.620 It's going to do much better over time.
00:23:03.760 But the thing that we don't talk about so much is if you
00:23:05.740 increase each stage of this funnel, that's funneled by,
00:23:08.020 say, 10%, you end up doubling the business.
00:23:12.680 But a lot of the components of doubling that funnel kind of
00:23:16.280 happen in the middle, which is, OK, how do I go from the
00:23:20.480 customers' interest in the product.
00:23:21.600 We've done a great job of product marketing.
00:23:23.280 We've sold it really well.
00:23:24.920 The stuff in the middle is kind of all the nuts and bolts
00:23:27.620 of how is it priced?
00:23:28.760 How do they pay for it?
00:23:29.640 What are the contract terms?
00:23:30.700 How do we handle renewals?
00:23:31.980 All of that stuff.
00:23:33.400 And ultimately, I always say the best time to buy-
00:23:37.840 When you say in the middle, you mean
00:23:38.720 the middle of the bow tie.
00:23:39.740 Yeah, yeah.
00:23:41.800 I always say the best time to pitch somebody on buying
00:23:44.780 Paddle is the first time that they lose a customer
00:23:47.380 because they just can't accept money from them.
00:23:50.180 The first time that you are this close
00:23:52.380 to signing a $100,000 deal in Germany
00:23:55.460 or you're a European business
00:23:57.620 doing your first 50K deal in the US
00:23:59.480 and it stumbles at the last point
00:24:01.880 because you don't have like an ACH bank account
00:24:03.700 that they can pay into
00:24:04.640 or you invoice the customer in Germany
00:24:06.920 and the invoice isn't compliant and it spooks them
00:24:09.200 or like whatever the thing is
00:24:11.560 or you get a bill for taxes
00:24:14.820 or you realize that you've just paid
00:24:17.100 like 4% of a
00:24:19.100 of a 250k contract
00:24:20.860 in like foreign exchange
00:24:23.440 fees that you didn't even know about like all of these
00:24:25.240 things like those are the real pain points
00:24:27.400 that kind of if you're losing 4%
00:24:29.520 of this revenue to that thing and
00:24:31.300 then a few points of conversion
00:24:33.360 to this other thing and sort of like it really adds
00:24:35.460 up and everybody's talking about okay like how
00:24:37.320 do we get more people from this stage of the funnel this stage
00:24:39.360 of the funnel absolutely you should do that but there
00:24:41.280 are all of these other like low hanging fruit
00:24:43.060 optimization things that you should be doing at the
00:24:45.240 transaction around transactional stuff, revenue operations, expansion, like all of the kind of
00:24:50.660 administrative bits that nobody wants to focus on. I get it. Like, it's not cool. It's not sexy.
00:24:56.220 It's sort of, it just is. Um, they're all stuff that all of these businesses have to do. Um,
00:25:01.000 and if they're not optimizing for them, they are losing money. It's those real costs involved.
00:25:05.060 Yeah. And what have you learned? You know, now you've been building this. So the first company
00:25:09.560 you built the 4 million, was that a software company as well? Yeah, it was invoicing software
00:25:13.540 off of freelancers.
00:25:14.500 Got it.
00:25:14.920 So like FreshBooks and that space.
00:25:16.840 And then with Paddle, what have you
00:25:19.780 learned about building software companies
00:25:21.820 and having so many software companies as customers?
00:25:26.800 If somebody is looking for the areas
00:25:28.600 to focus on their business to scale up,
00:25:31.100 if you were sitting down with a friend or a new customer
00:25:33.220 and they asked you that question, what would you
00:25:34.860 advise them to go look at?
00:25:36.580 I think the, so I think there's a little bit
00:25:40.800 like cliche, normal stuff that people talk about,
00:25:43.240 like kind of building culture, hiring, kind of all that stuff.
00:25:46.660 But I think there are some pieces in that that are kind of more
00:25:48.980 nuanced than people realize.
00:25:52.020 So assuming that you get the business to like, I don't know,
00:25:56.280 15 to 50.
00:25:56.780 100 million plus.
00:25:57.700 Yeah.
00:25:58.200 No, sorry, a million plus.
00:25:59.080 A million plus.
00:25:59.700 You have 15, 20 people.
00:26:00.880 Yeah.
00:26:02.580 Like I actually think that that's sort of the most treacherous
00:26:05.820 sort of point when you're adding more people
00:26:08.240 to that organization.
00:26:09.640 It's sort of like, it's the awkward point
00:26:11.800 where everybody talks about, oh, we're
00:26:13.240 going to be a flat organization.
00:26:14.560 And we're not going to have hierarchy.
00:26:16.180 I just talked to Peldi from Balsamiq.
00:26:18.820 That was his mission.
00:26:20.080 And then he's like, wow, my employees are pissed off
00:26:22.120 because I don't do performance reviews.
00:26:23.520 And they don't know who they report to.
00:26:25.760 And then they churn out the back because they have no idea.
00:26:28.080 They're like, I'm a designer.
00:26:29.740 What does that actually mean?
00:26:31.120 How do I get a pay rise?
00:26:32.500 Like, where am I going to be in six months time?
00:26:34.640 And it's sort of, I feel like that's
00:26:37.060 the most treacherous point because you have to deliberately
00:26:39.340 make that step to be like, oh, we're
00:26:40.600 going to hire some managers, or we're
00:26:42.420 going to hire somebody in the exec team,
00:26:43.880 or we're going to do these things.
00:26:45.440 And for me, I'd never had a job before.
00:26:48.500 I didn't know what good looked like.
00:26:49.860 I didn't know what bad looked like.
00:26:50.700 You've never seen it, yeah.
00:26:51.700 And I was really reluctant to do this.
00:26:54.120 I was like, managers.
00:26:54.820 So they're basically people who do nothing.
00:26:57.280 Nothing productive.
00:26:58.120 They don't actually do any work.
00:26:59.580 They go and sit with people and talk to them
00:27:01.640 and have nice conversations. 1.00
00:27:03.160 And I'm like, that's bullshit. 0.99
00:27:04.940 Why are we paying them for doing this? 1.00
00:27:07.020 And then you realize that, oh, they're
00:27:10.200 trying to make everybody else happy, the people who actually
00:27:12.760 do the work happy, and focused in the right direction
00:27:15.260 so everybody isn't pointing in six different ways.
00:27:17.640 Yeah, pulling on the rope.
00:27:18.760 Yeah, and it's chaos.
00:27:20.640 So I think that my biggest sort of thing
00:27:24.480 would be that I don't know where it is, 20 people, 30 people,
00:27:27.660 whatever.
00:27:28.320 It doesn't really matter, but focusing on that,
00:27:30.700 how you build middle management, how you
00:27:34.580 hire in the right layer of people who manage the people.
00:27:37.800 And then they thus kind of become responsible for the new people 0.93
00:27:41.480 that you add.
00:27:42.620 I think everybody talks about the unicorn superstar hire
00:27:47.240 who's going to be great, or the key member of the exec team
00:27:50.160 who's going to come in and he's done it before.
00:27:53.820 Yeah, but actually I feel like the most important hires
00:27:56.780 are the first couple of people that you hire in those,
00:27:58.820 like the first engineering manager you hire,
00:28:00.740 or the first kind of, I don't know.
00:28:03.020 Product manager.
00:28:03.740 Whatever it is, it's sort of, I think those are the most important people.
00:28:07.760 So like actually focusing on that, everybody says that hiring is really important, but
00:28:11.900 I feel like if you actually drill into that, if they spend 60% of their time on hiring,
00:28:17.580 I could probably guess that the majority of that time is spent with the kind of individual
00:28:23.520 contributors or the exec team.
00:28:26.100 It's the bit in the middle that kind of gets forgotten about, but I feel like they're the
00:28:29.880 most important hires in the business.
00:28:31.520 And how do you recommend, or how did you do it for yourself,
00:28:34.740 kind of like rank order, prioritize those hires?
00:28:37.300 Like when you get to that 12, 20.
00:28:39.520 And that, to me, I think 12, it depends on the business.
00:28:41.580 But that's where it starts to get like, oh,
00:28:45.040 culture is important, values.
00:28:46.420 You need values, right?
00:28:47.520 Because if not, people are making decisions on your behalf.
00:28:49.760 And you're like, that was bad.
00:28:51.180 Why'd you do that?
00:28:52.020 Well, I didn't give you any instructions.
00:28:53.780 OK, I get it.
00:28:55.040 But what do you think founders, where should they start to hire?
00:28:58.700 How should they think about hiring that executive leadership
00:29:01.760 team?
00:29:02.300 Yeah.
00:29:04.760 I think it's really tough. 0.97
00:29:05.620 I fucked it up a couple of times. 0.97
00:29:06.740 Yeah, sounds like it. 0.57
00:29:07.880 And this is what I've discovered.
00:29:09.200 People give advice for the things that we usually did wrong.
00:29:14.200 I think sort of whatever amount of time
00:29:17.000 that you're earmarking to spend on that, double it.
00:29:21.460 Because these roles aren't supposed to be easy to hire.
00:29:25.120 And if they feel easy to hire, then maybe you're hiring.
00:29:27.260 You probably got the wrong person.
00:29:28.580 Like, maybe you get really lucky.
00:29:30.080 Yeah, but you're saying proactively source
00:29:32.300 those specific roles.
00:29:33.080 Oh, absolutely.
00:29:33.740 Yeah.
00:29:35.140 And sort of whatever you feel like about exec recruiters
00:29:39.100 or things like that, sort of get over it.
00:29:41.960 Yeah, use them.
00:29:43.520 If they're going to bring candidates, you need candidates.
00:29:45.860 And especially if you, like, I feel like that is,
00:29:48.360 you can do all that work yourself, but that is a time
00:29:53.340 expensive, but also the recruiters are an accelerant.
00:29:56.120 All they're doing is saving you time.
00:29:58.220 And yeah, you're paying them and you might loathe paying them
00:30:00.500 because it's the same thing of managers of like, what do they do?
00:30:03.640 But actually you're paying them for time
00:30:05.540 and it's time that you probably should be spending on it.
00:30:09.460 So I think kind of, yeah, just invest in it as a process.
00:30:12.880 Define those, even if you don't write them down,
00:30:14.840 define yourself like what values and more behaviors and things like that.
00:30:20.180 How would these people make decisions?
00:30:22.580 How would they deal in a crisis?
00:30:24.240 What would they do if one of the people in their team
00:30:28.080 did something that we don't like?
00:30:30.440 Kind of model that out and try and figure out
00:30:32.540 what kind of decisions you'd want them to make
00:30:34.580 or at least behaviors you'd want them to show in that process
00:30:38.500 and then figure out how you ask questions
00:30:40.620 that sort of eke that information out.
00:30:42.960 And your team, is most of your customers in the States or in Europe?
00:30:47.000 About 20% are in the States, about 30% in Europe.
00:30:51.720 And then we have quite a lot everywhere else.
00:30:55.480 So Australia is big, Japan's big, Brazil, India, kind of everywhere.
00:31:00.720 And then what have you learned about being a British company in SaaS?
00:31:05.640 Because you see a lot of the Zendesk and others that I know
00:31:08.880 moved to the valley.
00:31:10.420 What are your thoughts on that, and how have you been able to?
00:31:13.260 I think a lot of it is like sort of rhetoric that's
00:31:17.960 just like reasonably unhelpful. 0.99
00:31:19.900 It's just like, who gives a shit? 0.99
00:31:21.420 Just build a business. 1.00
00:31:24.140 I'm like that.
00:31:24.660 I'm Canadian, so I'm like, you've got to move there.
00:31:26.920 I'm like, no, you don't.
00:31:27.640 Build a good product.
00:31:28.720 Focus on customers.
00:31:29.900 Maybe you'll have some customer calls or demos
00:31:32.100 that are slightly later in the evening
00:31:34.340 or early in the morning.
00:31:35.740 It's like, who cares?
00:31:37.280 Build a business.
00:31:38.640 Figure out what works.
00:31:39.840 If you have a big concentration of customers in one area,
00:31:42.660 so we have a reasonable concentration of customers
00:31:44.880 of the 20% of our business that's in the US,
00:31:48.380 good concentration of its East Coast.
00:31:50.660 So next month we're opening an office in New York.
00:31:53.780 So do it when it makes sense, though.
00:31:55.840 I feel like so many people, and I hate the whole,
00:32:00.600 like we're going to be in Silicon Valley because it's Silicon Valley
00:32:03.080 and we're going to change the world.
00:32:04.900 And it's sort of like you realize that you're basically taking a thing
00:32:08.720 that's hard enough anyway, which is building a company.
00:32:10.900 So true.
00:32:11.640 And then being like, oh, I'm going to do it in the most expensive place on earth
00:32:15.580 with more competition than anybody else.
00:32:18.400 Or talent.
00:32:19.100 Yeah, where nobody has an attention span longer than eight minutes
00:32:22.840 and is going to fly to anything that's shiny and new.
00:32:26.080 And the first sign of any kind of hiccup, like they're out.
00:32:30.180 Like the exact point at which you need people to just like double down
00:32:33.320 and be like, we're going to get through this, they're gone.
00:32:36.200 And it's just like, why would you do that to yourself?
00:32:39.020 Like if you're there and you like understand the environment
00:32:41.620 and that's where you're starting the business, cool.
00:32:44.080 Yeah, fine.
00:32:44.620 But like why make things harder?
00:32:46.900 That's a good way to look at it.
00:32:48.980 And vice versa.
00:32:49.860 I've seen people in North America want to open up in Europe,
00:32:52.740 and they don't have the concentration.
00:32:54.340 They open up an office here.
00:32:55.400 And I'm like, what are those people doing?
00:32:57.440 Do you get on a plane?
00:32:59.140 My buddy Jason opened up an office.
00:33:00.860 The whole thing of hiring a local as well is,
00:33:05.000 I think it's just flawed.
00:33:07.120 Hire local people on the team.
00:33:08.900 Send a founder.
00:33:11.320 Nobody's going to grind in the same way that they are.
00:33:13.200 No one's going to have the meetings, build the culture,
00:33:16.220 kind of do all those things.
00:33:17.480 and like there is a certain
00:33:19.820 credit that I think that you get
00:33:21.660 through the authenticity of like just being
00:33:23.780 there and not quite knowing what you're doing
00:33:25.420 building a team around that's how you did it
00:33:27.640 in the early days
00:33:29.240 that's how you did it in the beginning and you did pretty well
00:33:31.700 you did alright like you found a team you found people
00:33:33.820 who were going to come with you on that journey
00:33:35.080 I think the idea that you're going to
00:33:37.840 hire like a head of EMEA
00:33:39.680 stick them in London or
00:33:41.780 in Berlin and then just be like oh cool
00:33:43.780 now we've just doubled the business
00:33:45.220 It's like, it's just naive.
00:33:49.420 And what have you learned building this team
00:33:54.220 and competing against the other competitors?
00:33:57.320 How do you take that advice?
00:33:59.140 And I think I saw once you say, when it's working,
00:34:03.460 iterate around what's working.
00:34:05.420 So how did you guys, once you figured out
00:34:07.500 who the core customer was, how did you guys go deep, I guess?
00:34:10.620 Or how did you think about prioritization?
00:34:13.160 Because you don't have all the resources in the world.
00:34:15.060 I think it's just about focus.
00:34:16.820 So we, what is focus?
00:34:19.140 Focus is such an easy, you know what I mean?
00:34:21.200 It's easy to say like focus, but it's like obsessive.
00:34:23.780 Yeah, so what's your criteria filter
00:34:27.160 for deciding what's in focus, out of focus?
00:34:29.980 I think talk to customers.
00:34:31.540 Also, like sort of, so step one, figure out
00:34:35.240 who the customer is.
00:34:36.060 Once you have that, work backwards from.
00:34:38.160 Yeah, and also sort of like the right revenue
00:34:41.580 is a good driver of like knowing what to focus on.
00:34:44.900 Unpack that.
00:34:45.700 So there is the wrong revenue, which is chasing.
00:34:50.600 That's a big idea, man.
00:34:52.140 Right revenue versus wrong revenue.
00:34:53.520 Yeah.
00:34:54.180 Like the chasing of a dollar because it's a dollar is wrong.
00:34:59.440 The chasing of a dollar because it's the right dollar
00:35:03.100 is the right thing to do.
00:35:04.560 They're the right type of customer.
00:35:05.860 They buy into this vision.
00:35:07.840 Sort of they're not buying the product on the basis
00:35:10.840 of what the product is today.
00:35:11.860 They're buying on the basis of what the product could be.
00:35:14.800 Like chasing those dollars, I think,
00:35:18.060 and then actually seeing some results.
00:35:20.020 Sort of product market fit is this thing
00:35:21.920 where everybody thinks that,
00:35:23.920 well, in my opinion, everybody thinks that
00:35:25.580 sort of you have to have every box ticked
00:35:28.320 for a certain type of or segment of customer.
00:35:31.880 And it's just not true.
00:35:32.980 Like the thing that you have to have ticked
00:35:34.740 is enough stuff that they can get some value out of it today,
00:35:37.060 but also enough boxes that are unticked
00:35:39.980 that sort of actually the value of them buying that product
00:35:42.380 is going to go up over time and not down.
00:35:44.160 like it's not going to diverge
00:35:46.380 from what they thought it was going to be
00:35:47.740 so I think chasing those dollars
00:35:50.180 chasing those people who are going to buy into the vision
00:35:52.400 and this is sort of like the starting with the founder
00:35:54.300 sell and things like that
00:35:55.740 sort of building kind of having those
00:35:58.240 charismatic conversations with people
00:36:00.160 where kind of at the end of the day
00:36:02.460 they know that the product is going to be rougher
00:36:04.080 than sort of you say that it is
00:36:05.960 I think that's just a really powerful
00:36:08.300 thing to focus on really identifying those types
00:36:10.340 of customers having those conversations
00:36:12.160 and telling them what it isn't going to be anytime
00:36:14.140 soon um and if they're still willing to buy it anyway chase that money um i think the other the
00:36:20.220 caveat to that is understand when sort of you've gone narrow and you need to start going broader
00:36:27.180 like that's one of the things that we didn't do um what does that mean like you mentioned like
00:36:32.420 flixel as a customer of ours flixel's a sass business but they build um this downloadable
00:36:37.800 software desktop software for the mac great product like like really awesome from apple
00:36:44.400 like so it's such a good product um so we sort of was working with those types of businesses so
00:36:50.680 it's desktop software downloadable but subscription-based maybe for teams for businesses
00:36:55.440 products so these are things like flexor this framer um you might have heard of um so businesses
00:37:03.560 like that. And we were like, okay, we're getting product market fit with these people. Let's go
00:37:08.780 and really focus on that. They were the people who were buying the product, not for what it is
00:37:12.100 today, but what it could be in the future. And we, in the period of, I want to say 24 months,
00:37:20.460 absolutely became the market leader, both by market share and by kind of just perception
00:37:25.420 and everything. We became the default in that segment. People who were starting businesses
00:37:30.140 would stop them on panel, people who were using some other thing
00:37:33.860 would switch to it, even though that's 0.99
00:37:36.360 a complete pain in the ass. 0.99
00:37:37.780 Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's huge. 1.00
00:37:39.580 It's horrible.
00:37:40.160 But people were allocating time in their roadmaps
00:37:43.700 to do this switch, because they knew their business
00:37:45.280 would be better.
00:37:47.700 And it was our full intention always
00:37:49.260 to move to broader segments of SaaS businesses
00:37:53.380 and things like that.
00:37:54.220 but sort of
00:37:56.160 and I think the
00:37:57.980 moment at which we knew
00:38:00.200 that we should have done that but didn't act on it
00:38:02.180 was when in the
00:38:04.240 office when someone would do a sales
00:38:06.260 call or a demo
00:38:07.180 and we didn't celebrate when
00:38:10.240 they won anymore but we all huddled around
00:38:12.300 their desk when they lost and we were like 0.99
00:38:14.300 how the fuck did we lose that 0.95
00:38:15.540 when it became 0.98
00:38:18.400 expected that we would win a deal
00:38:19.920 that was the moment
00:38:22.640 at which we should have been like, okay, what's next?
00:38:24.820 Broad.
00:38:25.080 Like, it's not like we're going to kill that
00:38:26.300 and not do anything with it anymore.
00:38:27.240 No, but you're so right.
00:38:27.780 I have clients that are like that,
00:38:29.180 that they just feel like for this type of customer,
00:38:31.520 we should win it.
00:38:32.420 Yeah.
00:38:32.740 So if you're there, start going what's number two and three.
00:38:36.100 Yeah.
00:38:36.560 Because it's going to, the cycle,
00:38:39.060 you might learn a bit and shortcut some of the,
00:38:41.540 like the learning stage of like,
00:38:43.180 how do we get to a thing that we then want to go
00:38:45.520 and try and pour fuel on and grow.
00:38:47.300 But it's still going to be a longer cycle than people think.
00:38:49.720 Like it's still going to take that 6, 12, 18 months
00:38:53.380 to really get to a point where you know exactly
00:38:56.740 how long it takes to onboard a new rep
00:38:59.020 and get them to quota and sort of them do their first deals
00:39:02.100 and you can do that consistently and you've built the funnel
00:39:04.480 and you've got all the marketing automation stuff figured out.
00:39:07.580 Yeah, reference accounts, all that stuff.
00:39:08.740 Yeah, all of that stuff.
00:39:09.320 It's still going to take 12 months, 18 months.
00:39:11.240 So as soon as it becomes easier to,
00:39:15.760 as soon as it becomes expected to win a deal
00:39:17.700 for a certain type of segment, customer,
00:39:21.200 competitor, geography, whatever it is,
00:39:23.200 stop thinking about the next one.
00:39:24.780 That's great advice.
00:39:25.840 The go-to-market you guys use today,
00:39:27.380 because you mentioned sales team and companies
00:39:30.340 starting at 2K MRR, do you segment?
00:39:33.040 What's the process?
00:39:34.000 Do you do kind of SMB mid-market enterprise sales?
00:39:36.760 Yeah.
00:39:37.440 What's your approach?
00:39:38.760 We segment in two ways.
00:39:40.780 So we segment on size.
00:39:43.000 So we have SMB sales team, which are kind
00:39:47.600 of focused on businesses doing up to, say, 25, 50k MRR. Are they quota carrying salespeople?
00:39:55.300 Okay. We're thinking about- Because I'm starting to see this trend. Are you thinking the same
00:39:59.520 thing? We're thinking about experimenting with making them cohort based. Okay. So like you get
00:40:04.400 100 accounts and you're responsible for the cohort accounts. It's like a CSM, like customer
00:40:08.340 success manager. But for new business as well as existing. I like that. It's better customer
00:40:14.360 experience, maybe.
00:40:15.020 Yeah, for sure.
00:40:16.280 And we have basically zero churn.
00:40:18.200 OK.
00:40:19.220 So we have lost eight customers in seven years.
00:40:22.580 We have about 50. 0.93
00:40:23.840 I had like a frigging bomb. 0.96
00:40:25.940 Bah, that's amazing. 0.99
00:40:26.960 He's like a merp.
00:40:27.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.87
00:40:29.060 Dropping bombs.
00:40:30.020 Yeah, it's crazy.
00:40:30.820 100 and sort of 130% kind of revenue retention.
00:40:35.860 Dude, that's the number.
00:40:37.160 Churn in the baseless points a year.
00:40:39.920 Yeah.
00:40:41.920 So really, it's just how do you scale that top of funnel?
00:40:44.120 Yeah.
00:40:45.200 So we have SMB team, the rest of the sales team
00:40:47.840 is mostly mid-market.
00:40:49.160 So mid-market we define as between that like 50K MRR
00:40:53.420 and I want to say like 500.
00:40:58.100 And then we have key accounts, which
00:41:00.200 is sort of 500 to 2 million MRR.
00:41:02.840 And then we have enterprise, which is kind of just
00:41:05.900 opportunistic.
00:41:07.800 When these deals come up that we're excited about,
00:41:09.920 we think we're- Now would they be switching off like a Zora
00:41:12.100 type thing?
00:41:12.680 Yeah.
00:41:13.580 Zora, quite a lot of in-house, just cobbled together.
00:41:18.260 Or they use three different things,
00:41:19.840 because they have their own SMBs on one thing,
00:41:22.200 mid-markets on another, enterprises on another.
00:41:25.320 So a lot of that stuff.
00:41:26.480 So will they migrate one kind of segment at a time?
00:41:29.840 One segment at a time, or one geo at a time,
00:41:31.880 if it's split up by geo.
00:41:33.100 And how does key accounts work?
00:41:34.360 How do you guys think of key accounts?
00:41:35.760 Like what's the experience from a go-to-market,
00:41:37.940 if I'm a customer in a key account?
00:41:38.840 So we love data, like a lot.
00:41:40.840 So basically, we collect tons of data on the market.
00:41:44.660 We have this thesis that we are in the best industry in the world
00:41:49.760 because SaaS businesses all want to talk about themselves.
00:41:52.720 And quite a lot of them are selling to other SaaS businesses.
00:41:56.520 So we have an internal project that's
00:41:58.780 got half a dozen people on it, which is basically
00:42:02.500 to map every SaaS business in the world.
00:42:05.920 So everyone that starts and all of the available metrics
00:42:09.440 that we can get about every SaaS business in the world.
00:42:11.820 Like from interviews on podcasts like these,
00:42:14.080 we do some interesting stuff where we speech to text them all
00:42:17.260 and then kind of NLP all of the text
00:42:20.460 to extract information about the businesses and things like that.
00:42:23.540 Is this going to be for public?
00:42:25.140 No, no, we use it entirely internally.
00:42:27.320 To help other clients?
00:42:29.060 To help us in our go-to-market process.
00:42:31.580 Sometimes to help other clients to kind of inform
00:42:34.560 some of the stuff that Patrick's doing.
00:42:36.300 How often do SaaS businesses change their pricing?
00:42:38.300 Sort of how do people go international?
00:42:40.340 What's the effect of opening a European office
00:42:43.180 at a certain point on growth or fundraising or whatever it is?
00:42:47.180 So we use all of that data to inform what we do.
00:42:51.580 In terms of our go-to-market sales process,
00:42:54.420 we're big on account-based marketing at scale.
00:42:56.960 So account-based marketing to 2,000 or 3,000 companies
00:43:00.280 at a time.
00:43:00.700 Yeah, named accounts.
00:43:01.600 Yeah.
00:43:02.100 And do you guys do anything creative on the ABM side?
00:43:05.080 Like any cool bobblehead drops or whatever?
00:43:07.700 I don't know.
00:43:08.540 So we do.
00:43:09.480 We experiment with a bunch of stuff.
00:43:11.140 So a bunch of paid marketing stuff, sort of lots of content,
00:43:15.320 lots of really specific.
00:43:16.280 We've started to experiment with really specific vertical
00:43:18.580 content.
00:43:19.940 So here is resources for all of the design software
00:43:23.660 companies, like really specific vertical stuff,
00:43:26.260 webinars and things like that around that.
00:43:29.060 And sort of experimenting with the physical stuff as well.
00:43:34.380 Usually, you just get people on a call.
00:43:36.980 socks, puzzles, that kind of stuff, which works pretty well.
00:43:43.100 I think that stuff is way more valuable for retention
00:43:45.620 than it is for acquisition.
00:43:47.160 Sending somebody a thing on their birthday
00:43:50.140 or their anniversary, do that stuff.
00:43:55.660 Somebody said the last mile isn't crowded, right?
00:43:58.640 To go to the last, to do, still remember FreshBooks,
00:44:01.540 the cake, right, on your birthday.
00:44:03.120 Like, just such a subtle thing that means so much.
00:44:06.680 Like, it is one of those things of, like, if you take the,
00:44:09.180 I think it was, like, Jeff Bezos and, like, Amazon,
00:44:11.860 of, like, this idea that you can't invest too much
00:44:14.740 in, like, delivery.
00:44:16.020 Like, if we can reduce delivery times.
00:44:17.960 Yeah, customers always want faster, more inventory.
00:44:20.360 Yeah, no one is ever going to complain
00:44:22.380 that they got that package too quickly.
00:44:24.000 And there are those same bets that you can make
00:44:26.100 in, like, SaaS businesses.
00:44:27.980 Customer success is another one of those.
00:44:29.820 Like, no one's ever going to complain
00:44:31.080 that they got too good support.
00:44:32.100 Too much service, yeah.
00:44:33.520 And sort of, like, one of those things for us
00:44:35.860 as support, but then it's also like billing infrastructure.
00:44:38.940 No one is ever going to complain that we improved conversion
00:44:41.920 or payment acceptance or reduced churn
00:44:43.940 or kind of failed payments or whatever that is.
00:44:47.260 That's the moat.
00:44:48.300 That's stuff that we don't really
00:44:49.600 need to justify internally, like our investments in it.
00:44:54.160 So I think that's also true for customer success as well.
00:44:57.920 When you think about the, because you mentioned
00:45:01.980 the billing infrastructure and taxes and compliance.
00:45:05.820 So there are some SaaS companies that I work with that
00:45:08.580 have legal frameworks that need to be true for their software.
00:45:12.840 Like, how do you, because it's not just a CRUD database
00:45:16.280 with a front end web app.
00:45:17.260 Like, you're dealing with stuff that's
00:45:19.520 got to be compliant in governments.
00:45:22.180 What's your, like, do you have a department assigned to this?
00:45:25.480 How do you staff it?
00:45:26.820 How do you protect yourself or protect your customers?
00:45:28.940 Like, what do you call it internally?
00:45:30.940 What's the compliance?
00:45:32.640 Because I know, like, a Stripe would have this, right?
00:45:34.560 Like risk or whatever.
00:45:35.980 So we have a risk and compliance team that's like a dozen people.
00:45:40.660 We have a finance team.
00:45:42.440 And a finance team is kind of split in two.
00:45:44.440 Like we have a finance team as any company would have a finance team.
00:45:46.800 Do payroll, do like all of that stuff.
00:45:48.900 And then we have a finance team, which is more like a product finance team.
00:45:52.480 Then in engineering, we have two teams who we call billing and finance operations,
00:45:57.960 which is 20-something people who are only focused on that.
00:46:02.800 And their customers are obviously, as a team,
00:46:06.780 their customers are obviously our sellers,
00:46:08.800 people selling on the platform, but they're also internal.
00:46:11.560 If we're going to release a new feature of tax collection
00:46:14.500 in a country, we also have to be able to pay the taxes
00:46:18.540 ourselves on behalf of all these companies.
00:46:20.940 So they focus internally.
00:46:24.040 And then we're a big fan, or have been a big fan,
00:46:29.000 of something we rolled out 12, 18 months ago,
00:46:31.760 which were functionally focused, um, operations teams. Um, so we have commercial ops, um, which
00:46:39.180 we call cops, um, which, uh, yeah. Oh, they have a theme song. That's great. Um, but sort of who
00:46:48.460 work on, um, tooling efficiency, um, and everything. So they're like sales. They're
00:46:53.200 like sales ops. Yeah. With engineer, with actual engineering resource. Okay, cool. Um, and that's
00:46:59.900 That's part of the software universe thing
00:47:03.080 that we're building and things like that, which
00:47:04.620 is kind of fueling a lot of our go-to-market stuff.
00:47:08.820 And then we have finance and risk ops, which
00:47:10.520 is the same thing for finance and risk.
00:47:13.720 We have support ops, which is the same thing for customer
00:47:15.960 success and support.
00:47:16.900 Wow.
00:47:17.920 So it's almost like back end layer of folks
00:47:21.580 dedicated to efficiencies.
00:47:23.280 And is it like the way I think about it
00:47:24.700 is like front stage, backstage?
00:47:26.840 These are people that are like the back of the stage.
00:47:29.320 These are the people who power the people.
00:47:30.820 Yeah.
00:47:31.780 They make your front line people more effective,
00:47:34.780 better communication flows, 360 view of a customer,
00:47:37.460 all that fun stuff.
00:47:38.260 How do you make the, so it makes your teams a little bit bigger.
00:47:43.060 But it's like, how do you make your teams a little bit bigger
00:47:45.340 in the short term to avoid them getting massive in the long term?
00:47:48.100 Yeah, by automation, data, synchronization.
00:47:50.860 Because that's always going to be a point of contention
00:47:52.980 with your engineering team.
00:47:54.700 It's like, how do we do a Salesforce implementation?
00:47:56.700 How do we implement outreach?
00:47:58.000 How do we do whatever?
00:47:59.780 Same thing as how do we implement NetSuite or whatever this tool is.
00:48:02.820 Back in the day, DevOps or DevTools, I think there's going to be a future
00:48:08.040 where every company has developers designed to just make their,
00:48:11.740 essentially what you said, functional, focused operations.
00:48:14.380 People say for this area of the business,
00:48:17.040 they're engineering resources to make those people more productive
00:48:19.640 because their constraint is information flow or tooling.
00:48:25.360 Or even experience.
00:48:26.060 Like, it's the same reason that it's the same, like, I hate the term because it's so terrible, but like consumerization of the enterprise, whatever you want to call it. 0.99
00:48:36.480 It's like the idea that a decade ago, people bought NetSuite because the person buying NetSuite wasn't the person who had to use NetSuite because it was sort of a piece of shit.
00:48:46.940 It's probably not, but like the experience for people using it was.
00:48:50.700 And that's the reason why these,
00:48:52.320 and I think this will continue to be a trend,
00:48:53.980 SaaS products in businesses being bought bottom-up
00:48:56.380 rather than top-down.
00:48:57.380 Like, that's how Slack is bought.
00:48:58.480 That's how sort of all of these other tools are bought.
00:49:00.480 Letting expand.
00:49:01.260 Yeah.
00:49:02.020 And sort of that's also the same for process.
00:49:05.540 Like, I think we're having that shift in process as well.
00:49:07.940 Like, gone are the days, like, or going are the days
00:49:11.640 where you have-
00:49:13.000 Throw people at it.
00:49:13.860 You throw people at it.
00:49:14.680 Like, you have a dozen people who sit in spreadsheets.
00:49:17.560 Man, that's just a brilliant way of saying,
00:49:19.060 look, it's going to be a bit people heavy today,
00:49:23.180 but the bet is over the next three to five years.
00:49:25.380 So what's the upfront versus incremental cost
00:49:27.340 of doing this?
00:49:28.760 The upfront cost is high.
00:49:30.400 Incremental cost becomes incredibly low.
00:49:34.540 It's kind of how I feel about, everybody
00:49:37.120 defines it slightly differently, but kind of how I feel about SDRs.
00:49:41.560 I think there is, why not focus those people's energy
00:49:45.000 on the things that actually matter,
00:49:46.120 rather than doing lead research?
00:49:48.200 Invest in tooling and engineering resource
00:49:50.640 and data science and things like that
00:49:53.180 to enable those people and equip them with the data
00:49:55.400 that they need to do their job.
00:49:56.700 Don't make them go and get the data.
00:49:59.740 Where do you think, I mean, I've seen stuff,
00:50:01.940 maybe you have more better data and you
00:50:03.320 think there's no issue, but it seems
00:50:04.620 like there's something happening in the markets right now,
00:50:06.780 a bit of a correction.
00:50:08.180 There's whatever the markets are doing what they're doing.
00:50:10.440 How do you think that's going to affect SaaS?
00:50:12.460 Like if there is another recession,
00:50:14.560 I don't know if I have any data specifically on B2B SaaS
00:50:17.080 companies, 2008, 2001, it wasn't really as big of a thing
00:50:21.220 as it is today.
00:50:22.300 What do you anticipate would happen
00:50:25.260 to either your customers or to that market as a whole?
00:50:28.840 Is it recession-proof, because a lot of these B2B tools
00:50:31.580 are back-end workflow tools, or do you think there's?
00:50:36.120 I think there are a bunch of tools, like MarTech for sure.
00:50:38.920 There's a bunch of tools that exist
00:50:41.620 to make businesses more efficient,
00:50:44.020 and I think they'll be fine.
00:50:45.340 I also think the thing that we, we're obviously in SaaS,
00:50:49.100 like we get it, we know all these people,
00:50:50.580 we come to conferences and we do all these things.
00:50:53.340 And we talk to these people and they're all tech people.
00:50:56.380 They're all raising money and doing all this stuff.
00:50:57.880 And yeah, maybe it will get harder to raise money
00:51:00.960 or maybe the markets will be a little bit less liquid
00:51:03.480 and there won't be as many acquisitions
00:51:04.700 and things like that.
00:51:05.540 Or the ones that we do see will be cheaper
00:51:07.580 and maybe it's not cheaper,
00:51:08.880 maybe it's about the right price that it should be.
00:51:12.240 But I think one of the things that we miss
00:51:14.240 is the end value chain of who is buying these products.
00:51:19.520 In a lot of cases, there are a handful of people
00:51:22.580 who are selling to other people who build these products.
00:51:24.680 So people like us, we're selling to SaaS companies.
00:51:27.860 But a lot of these tools aren't just
00:51:29.600 sold to SaaS as an industry.
00:51:31.160 They're sold to others, which I think
00:51:33.140 is helpful from a diversification perspective of
00:51:36.140 you don't have funding drives up in tech,
00:51:38.060 and then that's all the customers do as well.
00:51:40.200 But it's also like, OK, if it's real estate that hits
00:51:43.280 or financial services, whatever that hits.
00:51:46.300 There are probably a handful of companies
00:51:48.100 that are focused on those industries 0.99
00:51:49.400 that, quite frankly, might be fucked. 0.98
00:51:52.720 That's fair. 0.99
00:51:53.540 It happens.
00:51:54.180 The service providers and the suppliers of those things,
00:51:56.980 they're going to stop buying and things like that.
00:51:58.340 But I think majority of SaaS is pretty well diversified
00:52:01.000 in terms of flick.
00:52:01.280 It's a beautiful business model.
00:52:02.600 Yeah.
00:52:03.720 Recurring revenue, you focus on customers.
00:52:06.040 You align value that you're providing
00:52:07.600 with how they're paying.
00:52:09.240 I think we'll probably get squeezed on valuations.
00:52:11.380 I think, I don't actually think there'll be a funding crunch per se.
00:52:15.780 I think the funding will get more picky.
00:52:17.980 Yeah.
00:52:18.560 But I mean, it's the look at the economics.
00:52:21.200 It's like, you know, it's a payback period, how fast you want to grow.
00:52:24.760 Like, I mean, it's pretty.
00:52:26.040 That stuff's still going to exist.
00:52:27.400 And I think the things, I think it actually might even be beneficial.
00:52:30.860 Like a bunch of companies will die.
00:52:32.340 Yeah.
00:52:32.600 They'll be the unsustainable, unhealthy from a metrics perspective companies.
00:52:37.360 I've been loving, I don't know if you know, Kara Schwitzer and Scott.
00:52:39.700 oh my gosh they've been on pivot this podcast they've been just talking about
00:52:43.360 the we work stuff in the uber and they go you know because it's like pets.com
00:52:46.840 like I love buying a bag of you know for my my dog at eight bucks that was you
00:52:51.520 know cost them 20 like yeah great business yeah of course sustainable yeah
00:52:55.700 yeah so I think that handful these businesses has died but for the good
00:52:58.780 ones that will still be funding available all of these all of these the
00:53:03.280 funds that are investing they've already raised the money they still have to put
00:53:06.520 it somewhere.
00:53:07.020 Yeah.
00:53:07.320 Like the billions of dollars in VC money
00:53:11.880 that's been raised in the last three years
00:53:13.980 still has to go somewhere.
00:53:15.220 It's not all deployed.
00:53:17.140 So it's just going to get picky about where it goes.
00:53:18.940 Yeah.
00:53:19.840 So you're going to look for companies that are more
00:53:23.920 investable and maybe have stronger economics.
00:53:27.560 Christian, one question I love to ask as we wrap up
00:53:30.080 is over the last 2013 you've been building the company?
00:53:33.900 Yeah.
00:53:34.240 Yeah.
00:53:35.280 Like, as a CEO, 160 people, 140, a lot.
00:53:39.300 Somewhere around there.
00:53:39.900 Yeah, because you probably keep hiring every week.
00:53:41.740 Who have you had to become to be the CEO of this company today?
00:53:46.200 That's a good question.
00:53:49.220 And I actually think it's a good question because I feel like at some point in that I became sort of like what I thought I should be rather than what I needed to be.
00:53:59.000 I've like went from a place of being first time founder
00:54:04.560 or second time founder but first time founder
00:54:07.180 of building a company rather than a business
00:54:08.740 like hiring people and stuff
00:54:10.360 to like through that stage that we were talking about earlier
00:54:14.480 about okay it's difficult to hire managers and do this stuff
00:54:16.660 I think I became like a little bit less product focused
00:54:20.860 a little bit less customer focused
00:54:22.500 and kind of all these things
00:54:23.440 and I think sort of double down on strengths
00:54:26.480 like double down on the things that you're good at
00:54:28.500 and things that you want to do.
00:54:30.480 I think I did a little bit, sort of,
00:54:32.860 I think I swerved a little bit too far away from that
00:54:35.540 and kind of now are cost-correcting.
00:54:37.800 When you say swerved away, swerved away
00:54:39.560 from being close to the customer or focus on the product
00:54:42.360 and got too much CEO in?
00:54:44.460 Yeah, I think I focused too much on what
00:54:46.640 I thought a CEO should be.
00:54:48.880 Instead of what you felt.
00:54:50.660 Where I felt I could add the most value.
00:54:53.480 So I think continue doing the thing
00:54:55.680 where you can add the most value, and that's
00:54:57.000 That's sort of what I'm doing now.
00:54:59.320 And then backfill for those areas
00:55:01.280 that need to still get done.
00:55:02.920 Yeah.
00:55:03.220 Why would you spend time doing the thing
00:55:05.400 that you don't want to do or you're not very good at?
00:55:07.200 Especially if you're the founder.
00:55:08.580 Yeah.
00:55:09.080 Because you get to decide.
00:55:10.820 Yeah, I'm sure you're going to have
00:55:12.240 a good chunk of your time that's going 0.94
00:55:13.620 to be doing the shitty things that no one else wants to do. 0.94
00:55:15.240 But that's life.
00:55:16.800 That's why eventually, hopefully, you
00:55:18.340 make more money than anyone else in the building.
00:55:22.500 There are going to be those things. 0.98
00:55:23.860 There's going to be painful stuff or shit floats. 0.98
00:55:26.980 Yeah, you're accountable for everything. 0.98
00:55:28.540 It's disproportionate, and there's a reason why.
00:55:30.740 Yeah, exactly.
00:55:32.180 But that doesn't mean that you should just make it harder as you go.
00:55:35.580 If you don't like doing finance, don't do finance.
00:55:39.240 Hire somebody who can do finance.
00:55:40.920 If you don't like doing sales, don't do sales.
00:55:42.760 It doesn't mean you shouldn't talk to customers,
00:55:44.700 but it means that maybe if you don't think you're the best person at selling to them,
00:55:47.680 don't sell to them.
00:55:49.580 Pick the things that you're good at.
00:55:50.840 If you're going to add more value,
00:55:52.600 if you're going to add more value not going to a conference
00:55:55.580 and staying back and helping the team
00:55:57.100 work on a new thing, go do that
00:55:58.960 and figure out who's the best person
00:56:00.020 to go to the conference.
00:56:00.520 Send somebody to the event.
00:56:01.660 That's wise advice.
00:56:03.420 Christian, where do people find you online?
00:56:05.880 So I was banned from Twitter.
00:56:07.500 Yeah, you're not very active.
00:56:08.620 I'm recently back on Twitter.
00:56:10.720 So it's Christian B. Owens on Twitter.
00:56:12.400 How'd you get banned?
00:56:14.640 I really wish there was an exciting story.
00:56:17.160 I wish I said something like incendiary
00:56:18.400 and pissed someone off.
00:56:19.440 I was too young when I signed up.
00:56:21.360 And then I put my birthday in,
00:56:23.860 and they were just like, nope. 1.00
00:56:25.160 Oh, shit. 1.00
00:56:25.980 Yeah, so be careful of that. 0.99
00:56:27.920 Otherwise, it's paddle.com.
00:56:29.640 I'm Christian at paddle.com.
00:56:31.820 If people want to email me.
00:56:33.660 Oh, they will.
00:56:34.620 Dude, I could talk to you for days.
00:56:35.620 Awesome.
00:56:35.840 Appreciate you so much, man.
00:56:36.920 Thanks.
00:56:37.300 Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.
00:56:40.520 Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment with your biggest insight from our conversation.
00:56:46.000 Be sure to check out the next episode.