Don’t Chase The Wrong Revenue with Christian Owens @ Paddle.com
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Summary
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
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Whereas we might see a 80-20 split of maybe not even, maybe not even that low or that high
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in the US in terms of credit card usage, in Germany it will be probably reversed.
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Boom, Christian. Thanks for coming on the show, man. Appreciate it.
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All right, dude, the accent, let's start there.
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and then we'd have been like, what's his accent?
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Maybe I'm just trying to appeal to a broader audience.
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Founder of Paddle, you've been doing that since 2013?
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But before that, Teal Fellow, Peter Teal, which was,
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So that caused a big kerfuffle in the whole world.
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And I knew a few other guys, actually a young kid.
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I forget his name, but he was from the UK as well.
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I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to talk about this, so we'll see.
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I was in the, so I dropped out of school when I was 16 anyway
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So I think I got a call when I was about 18, 18, 19.
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And I'd just been in the Forbes, like 30 under 30.
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this is, I think, Allison from the Teal Foundation.
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Like I was a big like PayPal, like kind of whole story,
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like to meet you and then it was like it was like a Wednesday and it was like we booked you a flight
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on Friday like you're coming kind of thing I was just like okay yeah sure um and you're in London
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or yeah you're in the UK wow so I hang up the call they email me some stuff they email me um
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like tickets and sort of like an agenda thing and it turns out that it was like this
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kind of like pitch day demo day so there's other other kids yeah yeah other founders there yeah
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so i think i usually you apply so usually you apply and there's this like whole process and
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they have this big thing about um they get sort of like four or five thousand applications a year
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and 20 people get in um so and i think sort of they had gone through sort of the period of
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So the foundation had been around for the fellowship had been around for, I would say, three or four years at this point.
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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.
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And it was sort of less of the still the like big idea on change the world and kind of all that stuff.
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But that mixed in with a little bit of traction, like you're on your way a little bit.
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So I think they had to supplement these applications with kind of people that
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this person's actually doing something like this, invite them in.
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So I went there for this demo day type of thing.
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It was like, you're going to have to get up for two minutes and pitch.
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You're going to have to get up for two minutes and pitch one slide.
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Do your two minutes in front of the 50 or 60 other people.
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Cool. And for those watching, Paddle is a subscription management system?
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Yeah. So we build a SaaS commerce platform, which is everything from subscription management,
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payments, taxes, sort of all of the boring back office shit that nobody actually wants to deal
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with when they're building a SaaS business. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So in that space, Chargeify,
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Recurly, Chargebee. I mean, some of these came way past you, but that kind of.
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Yeah. So it's similar to those, just with all of the finance commerce stuff also baked in.
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And what would be examples of finance commerce type stuff?
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So all of the payment stack, banking, how you have-
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And instead of plugging something like Avalara or TaxJar or something in to help you calculate
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taxes, we'll collect the taxes, file them, and remit them on your behalf so you never
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have to touch a dime of tax revenue ever again.
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uh so we had a bit of traction we were doing i think like 30 or 40k mrr at the time um
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maybe a little bit north of that and kind of there was very little feedback like in the room i
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basically did that went to dinner with like all these folks and then went home um and then two
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weeks later i get a call and it's like you've been accepted um you have to sign some stuff uh you get
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100 grand over two years, no equity, paid out, I think,
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You have to sign a contract that basically says.
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You're not allowed to tell anybody what happened.
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So I'm going to get a bill for 100 grand immediately
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that says for at least the duration of the two years
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that you're a TEAL fellow, that you won't go to university,
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And if you're currently enrolled, you have to drop out,
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or at least take a leave of absence or whatever.
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So their point of view, and this is your perspective,
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So they're essentially saying, here's a sample set,
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Here's a sample set of people that we gave 200 grand,
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So it was better for them not to go to university,
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but I guess technically that wasn't really the case.
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So I think the rough thesis, and this is my words,
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it's not theirs, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer,
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disclaimer, all that stuff, is that why would you go to college,
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Yeah, and you need the capital and the resources to do that,
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And sort of the extent to which you're going to learn stuff,
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You're going to learn how to be good in meetings.
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You're going to learn how to maybe give a good presentation.
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You might learn some of these fundamental bits,
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like 90% of what they learn is by failing at it,
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what if instead of people entering this environment,
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of going to start a business with like $200,000.
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Like negative $200,000, they start positive $100,000.
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That's primarily what the $50,000 a year for two years is.
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You don't have to worry about rent and food and eating.
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If you want to go out and raise money, go out and raise money.
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given the two of those years that they would usually
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spend in college, given those to just go and build some stuff.
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So they kind of accept people in batches throughout the year
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rather than being like this big 20 people a year
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OK, they might take five people a quarter or something.
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And there have been some huge stories out of it.
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startup raised like $3 billion, largest independent hotel
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So he's got some really good me, obviously, for sure.
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Flixel, Phil, who started the company, is from my hometown.
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What are, like, tell us where the company's at today,
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So going seven years, we've raised about $35 million,
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dollars, 150-ish people, about 14 million ARR, and about 2,000 SaaS businesses run on
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So we have everybody from the people trying to start out doing a couple of grand a year
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alongside their jobs trying to make this work to businesses doing 50, 60, 100 million ARR.
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and sort of primarily SaaS, have a bunch of companies,
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it was like I think the thing that a lot of founders do which is like this thing looks a lot
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like these other things let's group them all together and like not focus so yeah to me like
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the reason I started paddle is I started a software business when I was 14 grew it to like
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4 million in revenue um realized I was spending way more of my time this was like 17 way more of
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my time actually dealing with all of this other shit that wasn't building a product and speaking
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to customers and growing um I was spending a load of time on stuff that was taxes growing
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internationally had two hundred thousand gateways yeah crazy um so started doing that and then kind
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of was like got obsessed with that as a problem set um founded paddle started trying to solve
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that problem did you have paddle.com from the beginning yeah that's a fun story okay um we can
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maybe get into that all right um so we so we started doing that but kind of software to me
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looked like content looked like downloadable stuff looked like games yeah and then you try
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and ultimately, how do you add a ton of value in that,
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were building around taxes and payments and things like that
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was repeatable, but the tools that a SaaS business needs
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So we started in August 2012, really launched early 2013.
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It's sort of primarily like the B2B, B2C mix on that
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And then by the end of that year, it was like, OK,
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But sort of in terms of focus, it's probably going to be
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We think roughly about 75,000 to 100,000 companies.
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I talked to Patrick Campbell, Nathan Lacka about this.
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We think there's about 25,000 that we would actually want
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that might fall into the category of the indie hackers
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And in regards to how does your pricing work, then,
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if you can work with a 2,000 MRR-type SaaS and $100 million?
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We don't take a monthly fee or anything like that.
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And the reason that we did that was two things.
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One, we want to be directly aligned with these businesses.
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Two, it means our business gets modeled like a SaaS business
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anyway, because the fee is all on recurring revenue.
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see our value as solving all these operational pains.
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It's sort of how can we help these businesses grow faster.
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Every single one that doesn't handle payments, yeah.
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So that's your freemium pretty much, all the infrastructure stuff.
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It's like we do all this for free and you just pay us for a fee.
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I mean, it takes people a while to get their head around it.
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But the thing that it means is when we give advice.
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So when we say you should change your pricing or you should do this thing.
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Like, look, we're only going to win if we can get your MRF.
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Like, there is none of this stuff of like, oh, it's going to increase the number of invoices
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or the number of tracked customers or whatever.
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So you're going to move to the higher plan or whatever.
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So in SaaS, there's this thing called expansion revenue.
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And ideally, we get to a point where we get negative churn
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How does your product consult to help them figure out maybe
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How do you help SaaS companies with pricing and revenue
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we have a saying, a weird, horrible marketing slogan.
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which is, like, your billing stack is holding you back.
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The way, like, the SaaS is more competitive than it's ever been.
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Like, it's cheaper than ever to start a SaaS business or a SaaS product.
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And infrastructure costs are basically non-existent.
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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?
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So, like, the expectations of these, the customers of these businesses are way higher than they've ever been.
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They expect these consumer-grade experiences in B2B.
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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.
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So around how does the customer buy it originally?
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And actually, when you look at how these businesses today,
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and then hoping that it's all going to work out.
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So we're talking like billing tool, analytics tool,
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So we think, one, you have to get all of that stuff in order
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Like you have to, in order to be able to experiment with pricing,
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you have to be able to experiment with pricing.
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And I remember talking to a client the other day,
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And he's freaking because he's got to pay for development
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Your tool is easy to, you can create new plans and packages
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Yeah, or you can optimize pricing in different regions,
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Like if you want to support like PayPal alongside credit cards
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because you have that kind of, you're launching in Germany.
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like non-credit card, like that should be a tick box
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A percentage is much lower than it is in the US.
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there are more credit cards than there are people.
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So maybe you have debit cards, for sure, credit, less so.
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local payment wallets, direct from bank, things like that.
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So whereas we might see a 80-20 split of maybe not even that
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low or that high in the US in terms of credit card usage,
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And so you guys support the ability for POs and stuff,
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Yeah, like deal rooms and contracts and redlining.
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So we think a bunch of people do the e-signing stuff really well.
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A bunch of people do the proposal CRM aspect of it really well.
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and they're doing their mid-market enterprise sales.
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building inside sales team for the first time most of that stuff is invoiced most of that stuff is
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wire transfer and what they're doing is they're making this stuff in like pages or word creating
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a pdf someone in the finance team has this job sending it to the sales team the sales team then
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goes and sends it out maybe when that gets a pain they buy a tool for it then it's someone's job to
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manually go through the bank statement and check if anybody's paid and mark it off and it's like
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this two-week cycle um and then when you want to do it internationally you have to go and set up
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companies and bank accounts and all this stuff.
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So we were just like, we have all this infrastructure.
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We built an invoicing product, links directly into Salesforce.
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So and then basically what you do is in Salesforce,
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generates tax compliant invoice, generates a bank account
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localizes it for currency language, like the legal stuff.
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We pay the taxes on it automatically, reconcile it,
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send you the money, update the CRM, do all that stuff.
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You remove, at scale, you remove half a dozen people
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And they were saying one of their biggest challenges
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is around just dealing with currencies in every country.
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if they're in Europe, or do you think that it's better
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And I'm quite a fan of doing that in whatever way you can.
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kind of you're working towards the same value metric,
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these days that have such significant localization
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Like if you're building a CRM or a collaboration tool
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or any of these things, marketing automation tool
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or whatever, the product that the people want to use in the US
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is roughly the same as the product people want to use in Europe.
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And then maybe just find a country that's big enough to like.
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Germany's a good one where it's like it makes sense to focus on as a market
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because there are so many local dynamics of how people buy,
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be it language, sort of more of a focus on compliance and regulation
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You have to have all those boxes ticked if you want any kind of deal of note
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Recently, I had Jason Reichel from GoNIMBY talk about RevOps.
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I know that's an area you guys support people on.
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What does that mean to you, and how do you guys
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So I think it's broader than the stuff that we do.
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things like sales ops and things like that in RevOps as well.
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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.
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Everybody speaks about like all of these things, how those things need to work together, engineering, kind of growth, all of those things.
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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.
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but kind of just as when you look at a funnel like when you look at a sales funnel you have
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kind of the very top of funnel maybe you're building kind of like awareness inbound whatever
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it is and you have like the actual sales portion of the funnel these people interested they're
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doing a demo are we getting close to contract and then you have the kind of inverse funnel the other
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side of customers using the product how do we expand on board yeah how do we expand them over
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And we talk about this idea that you want to optimize
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But the thing that we don't talk about so much is if you
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increase each stage of this funnel, that's funneled by,
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But a lot of the components of doubling that funnel kind of
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happen in the middle, which is, OK, how do I go from the
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The stuff in the middle is kind of all the nuts and bolts
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And ultimately, I always say the best time to buy-
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I always say the best time to pitch somebody on buying
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Paddle is the first time that they lose a customer
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because they just can't accept money from them.
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because you don't have like an ACH bank account
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and the invoice isn't compliant and it spooks them
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fees that you didn't even know about like all of these
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to this other thing and sort of like it really adds
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do we get more people from this stage of the funnel this stage
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of the funnel absolutely you should do that but there
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optimization things that you should be doing at the
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transaction around transactional stuff, revenue operations, expansion, like all of the kind of
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administrative bits that nobody wants to focus on. I get it. Like, it's not cool. It's not sexy.
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It's sort of, it just is. Um, they're all stuff that all of these businesses have to do. Um,
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and if they're not optimizing for them, they are losing money. It's those real costs involved.
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Yeah. And what have you learned? You know, now you've been building this. So the first company
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you built the 4 million, was that a software company as well? Yeah, it was invoicing software
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and having so many software companies as customers?
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if you were sitting down with a friend or a new customer
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and they asked you that question, what would you
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like cliche, normal stuff that people talk about,
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like kind of building culture, hiring, kind of all that stuff.
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But I think there are some pieces in that that are kind of more
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So assuming that you get the business to like, I don't know,
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Like I actually think that that's sort of the most treacherous
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And then he's like, wow, my employees are pissed off
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And then they churn out the back because they have no idea.
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Like, where am I going to be in six months time?
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the most treacherous point because you have to deliberately
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trying to make everybody else happy, the people who actually
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do the work happy, and focused in the right direction
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so everybody isn't pointing in six different ways.
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would be that I don't know where it is, 20 people, 30 people,
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It doesn't really matter, but focusing on that,
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hire in the right layer of people who manage the people.
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And then they thus kind of become responsible for the new people
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I think everybody talks about the unicorn superstar hire
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who's going to be great, or the key member of the exec team
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who's going to come in and he's done it before.
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Yeah, but actually I feel like the most important hires
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are the first couple of people that you hire in those,
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Whatever it is, it's sort of, I think those are the most important people.
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So like actually focusing on that, everybody says that hiring is really important, but
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I feel like if you actually drill into that, if they spend 60% of their time on hiring,
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I could probably guess that the majority of that time is spent with the kind of individual
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It's the bit in the middle that kind of gets forgotten about, but I feel like they're the
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And how do you recommend, or how did you do it for yourself,
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kind of like rank order, prioritize those hires?
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And that, to me, I think 12, it depends on the business.
00:28:47.520
Because if not, people are making decisions on your behalf.
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But what do you think founders, where should they start to hire?
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How should they think about hiring that executive leadership
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People give advice for the things that we usually did wrong.
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that you're earmarking to spend on that, double it.
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Because these roles aren't supposed to be easy to hire.
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And if they feel easy to hire, then maybe you're hiring.
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And sort of whatever you feel like about exec recruiters
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If they're going to bring candidates, you need candidates.
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And especially if you, like, I feel like that is,
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you can do all that work yourself, but that is a time
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expensive, but also the recruiters are an accelerant.
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And yeah, you're paying them and you might loathe paying them
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because it's the same thing of managers of like, what do they do?
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and it's time that you probably should be spending on it.
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So I think kind of, yeah, just invest in it as a process.
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Define those, even if you don't write them down,
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define yourself like what values and more behaviors and things like that.
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What would they do if one of the people in their team
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or at least behaviors you'd want them to show in that process
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And your team, is most of your customers in the States or in Europe?
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About 20% are in the States, about 30% in Europe.
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So Australia is big, Japan's big, Brazil, India, kind of everywhere.
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And then what have you learned about being a British company in SaaS?
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Because you see a lot of the Zendesk and others that I know
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What are your thoughts on that, and how have you been able to?
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I think a lot of it is like sort of rhetoric that's
00:31:24.660
I'm Canadian, so I'm like, you've got to move there.
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If you have a big concentration of customers in one area,
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so we have a reasonable concentration of customers
00:31:50.660
So next month we're opening an office in New York.
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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
00:32:04.900
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.
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And then being like, oh, I'm going to do it in the most expensive place on earth
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.
00:32:49.860
I've seen people in North America want to open up in Europe,
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,
00:33:29.240
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
00:33:59.140
And I think I saw once you say, when it's working,
00:34:07.500
who the core customer was, how did you guys go deep, I guess?
00:34:13.160
Because you don't have all the resources in the world.
00:34:21.200
It's easy to say like focus, but it's like obsessive.
00:34:41.580
is a good driver of like knowing what to focus on.
00:34:45.700
So there is the wrong revenue, which is chasing.
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
00:35:07.840
Sort of they're not buying the product on the basis
00:35:11.860
They're buying on the basis of what the product could be.
00:35:34.740
is enough stuff that they can get some value out of it today,
00:35:39.980
that sort of actually the value of them buying that product
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
00:36:02.460
they know that the product is going to be rougher
00:36:08.300
thing to focus on really identifying those types
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
00:37:40.160
But people were allocating time in their roadmaps
00:37:43.700
to do this switch, because they knew their business
00:38:00.200
that we should have done that but didn't act on it
00:38:12.300
their desk when they lost and we were like
0.99
00:38:22.640
at which we should have been like, okay, what's next?
00:38:29.180
that they just feel like for this type of customer,
00:38:32.740
So if you're there, start going what's number two and three.
00:38:39.060
you might learn a bit and shortcut some of the,
00:38:43.180
how do we get to a thing that we then want to go
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
00:38:59.020
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.
00:39:34.000
Do you do kind of SMB mid-market enterprise sales?
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
00:40:19.220
So we have lost eight customers in seven years.
00:40:30.820
100 and sort of 130% kind of revenue retention.
00:40:41.920
So really, it's just how do you scale that top of funnel?
00:40:45.200
So we have SMB team, the rest of the sales team
00:40:49.160
So mid-market we define as between that like 50K MRR
00:41:02.840
And then we have enterprise, which is kind of just
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
00:41:13.580
Zora, quite a lot of in-house, just cobbled together.
00:41:22.200
mid-markets on another, enterprises on another.
00:41:26.480
So will they migrate one kind of segment at a time?
00:41:35.760
Like what's the experience from a go-to-market,
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.
00:41:58.780
got half a dozen people on it, which is basically
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.
00:42:14.080
we do some interesting stuff where we speech to text them all
00:42:20.460
to extract information about the businesses and things like that.
00:42:31.580
Sometimes to help other clients to kind of inform
00:42:36.300
How often do SaaS businesses change their pricing?
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.
00:42:56.960
So account-based marketing to 2,000 or 3,000 companies
00:43:02.100
And do you guys do anything creative on the ABM side?
00:43:11.140
So a bunch of paid marketing stuff, sort of lots of content,
00:43:16.280
We've started to experiment with really specific vertical
00:43:19.940
So here is resources for all of the design software
00:43:23.660
companies, like really specific vertical stuff,
00:43:29.060
And sort of experimenting with the physical stuff as well.
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
00:43:55.660
Somebody said the last mile isn't crowded, right?
00:43:58.640
To go to the last, to do, still remember FreshBooks,
00:44:03.120
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
00:44:17.960
Yeah, customers always want faster, more inventory.
00:44:24.000
And there are those same bets that you can make
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
00:44:43.940
or kind of failed payments or whatever that is.
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
00:45:22.180
What's your, like, do you have a department assigned to this?
00:45:26.820
How do you protect yourself or protect your customers?
00:45:32.640
Because I know, like, a Stripe would have this, right?
00:45:35.980
So we have a risk and compliance team that's like a dozen people.
00:45:44.440
Like we have a finance team as any company would have a finance team.
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.
00:46:08.800
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
00:46:24.040
And then we're a big fan, or have been a big fan,
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
00:47:03.080
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.
00:47:13.720
We have support ops, which is the same thing for customer
00:47:26.840
These are people that are like the back of the stage.
00:47:31.780
They make your front line people more effective,
00:47:34.780
better communication flows, 360 view of a customer,
00:47:38.260
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?
00:47:50.860
Because that's always going to be a point of contention
00:47:54.700
It's like, how do we do a Salesforce implementation?
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.
00:48:17.040
they're engineering resources to make those people more productive
00:48:19.640
because their constraint is information flow or tooling.
00:48:26.060
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.
00:48:53.980
SaaS products in businesses being bought bottom-up
00:48:58.480
That's how sort of all of these other tools are bought.
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
00:49:14.680
Like, you have a dozen people who sit in spreadsheets.
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.
00:49:37.120
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
00:49:53.180
to enable those people and equip them with the data
00:50:04.620
like there's something happening in the markets right now,
00:50:08.180
There's whatever the markets are doing what they're doing.
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
00:50:25.260
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.
00:50:45.340
I also think the thing that we, we're obviously in SaaS,
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
00:51:08.880
maybe it's about the right price that it should be.
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.
00:51:33.140
is helpful from a diversification perspective of
00:51:40.200
But it's also like, OK, if it's real estate that hits
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
00:52:09.240
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.
00:52:21.200
It's like, you know, it's a payback period, how fast you want to grow.
00:52:27.400
And I think the things, I think it actually might even be beneficial.
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
00:53:17.140
So it's just going to get picky about where it goes.
00:53:19.840
So you're going to look for companies that are more
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?
00:53:39.900
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?
00:53:49.220
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
00:54:10.360
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
00:54:26.480
like double down on the things that you're good at
00:54:32.860
I think I swerved a little bit too far away from that
00:54:39.560
from being close to the customer or focus on the product
00:55:05.400
that you don't want to do or you're not very good at?
00:55:13.620
to be doing the shitty things that no one else wants to do.
0.94
00:55:18.340
make more money than anyone else in the building.
00:55:23.860
There's going to be painful stuff or shit floats.
0.98
00:55:28.540
It's disproportionate, and there's a reason why.
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.
00:55:42.760
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,
00:55:52.600
if you're going to add more value not going to a conference
00:56:37.300
Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.
00:56:40.520
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