What It Takes To 20X Your SaaS in 1 Year with Ben @ Privy.com - Escape Velocity Show #24
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Summary
In this episode of the Startup Spotlight podcast, I sit down with Ben and Dan, founders of Privy, a marketing automation tool that has been a huge hit in the e-commerce space. In this episode, we talk about how they built a company from the ground up, how they went from $1,000 in the bank to $1.5M in revenue, and how they were able to get into the Inc 500.
Transcript
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I'm not an MBA or finance guy, right? So like CAC to LTV is like never going to be a metric that like
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has me like excited, even though it's awesome. Yeah, right. Yeah. What really is going to get
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me excited is when I take a step back and I'm like, holy shit, like there's businesses that
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would cry if our software stopped working, you know, and like we've helped them quit their jobs
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So one thing I want to get out of the gate with Privy,
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Yeah, like explain the business and then we'll dive in.
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marketing automation for e-commerce businesses so think about what HubSpot
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and Marketo did for marketers on top of Salesforce we do for marketers on top of
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Shopify and you guys just got in Inc 500 yes yeah we we've had a journey but the
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last couple of years 100% plus growth year over yeah I think I read like 2,000
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260 some percent growth you know 2017 to 2018 yeah yeah but what's crazy is and
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you wrote about this on, I think it was Twitter,
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How does that, but you've been at it for eight years.
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So what happened in 2015 that, how did you turn it around?
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we were going after brick-and-mortar retailers.
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Yeah, it was like a way for them to publish their offline offers
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and just put those online so they could control it
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and then measure the impact of their Facebook ads
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in terms of how many people walked in the store.
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So it was like an offers platform for retailers.
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and uh no free version we're trying to sell 12 month contracts total outbound play what would
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an annual contract look like at that point um it might have been like six grand yeah six grand
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we had some that were kind of like 30 yeah um we got to maybe 100,000 in annual revenue and just
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kind of were you guys bootstrapped or funded uh we did a two million dollar seed round okay
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in what year uh 2013 okay yeah so uh just kind of quickly saw uh the bank account diminishing
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we felt like we had an interesting product and at the time everyone was talking about like
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online to in-store attribution yeah it was like it's a big it was a real thing yeah and um it was
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just a total yeah um and we were fortunate enough to be doing something interesting we got some
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attention from some bigger businesses and i was just kind of like i don't see a path forward here
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for us so let's just take one of these deals and sell the company which was exciting my wife had a
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picture of me with like a signed term sheet and like at the time there was only like six or seven
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of us in the company but we all knew what our jobs were going to be and all that um and a bunch of
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things happened but ultimately the deal fell apart didn't sell it no you're telling me okay
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I was like, can you imagine you go public and then it just falls apart?
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So yeah, it was like at the time I got a call that the deal was falling apart.
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Had to go in and let everyone know that we basically only had six weeks of runway left.
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Is there anything you could have done to save the deal?
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or that you would do different going through it
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Like, was there other buyers that you could have said
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I let the entire company get distracted with it.
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But it was the type of deal that still required
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required pretty much everyone in the company to engage with the buyer. And once that happened,
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everyone just lost sight of what we're trying to do. And we didn't have much traction anyways. So
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a lot of that falls on me. It sucked. But ultimately, I look back on that as like the
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best thing that's ever happened. Six weeks of runway in the bank. Yep. Took it down to a thousand
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bucks in the bank account. I have a screenshot somewhere of that. I'm like, you know, someday,
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i hope i can laugh at this and now i can for sure yeah it was wild and what what did you have to do
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so the so the pivot happened at that point or did it happen yeah i was kind of like in the back of
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my mind i i always knew a byproduct of the product that we had built yeah like one of the core value
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was uh for the one or two customers we had that sold online yeah they were like hey this offers
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thing is great attributions cool i guess but like i've never grown my email list this quickly
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and um i was just a little bit gun shy on that as the core value prop and did you feel it was
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too simple yeah yeah i was like isn't that funny sometimes the thing that but that's not a big
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that's not the thing yeah and like also crayola some of us on the team were like a little bit
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But in the back of my mind, I knew that, like, there was something there.
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Spent time with our retailers that ended up selling online.
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and they were like this is the greatest thing ever and so i asked a handful of them if they'd
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pay for the year up front essentially to fund the three of us that wanted to stick around and
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kind of try this again but like change everything that wasn't working really yeah that's cool and
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and with i mean obviously e-commerce has exploded shopify you know and just like everything's
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moving the retailers are definitely on it's a you know bad trend for them um was it just was
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a right time in the market as well like did you feel like you caught yeah there was momentum a
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few things i think we we did well one of them was timing right so when we pivoted the company uh it
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was just all about that wedge and we felt like you know with shopify's growth big commerce magento
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etc there were like incumbent esps that were solid for e-commerce but none of them offered great
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growth tools and so um you know at the time i actually thought we were late to the shopify
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ecosystem turns out we were still pretty early yeah and so there were a lot of benefits there
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but then you know as we evolved the company we started focusing on things that no other vendors
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in this space really do like support and live chat for free users trainings for free users
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In a world where all SaaS vendors try to move upstream, in the SMB world especially, we felt like we could really do something different at the lower end of the market.
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And that's worked well for us inside of the Shopify users.
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One thing I would love to get your perspective on is the free tools, like the list growth tools.
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Because people always talk about, call it the splintering strategy or the app marketing strategy.
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but building i call them expensive lead magnets but like did you guys it was that the strategy
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like hey let's give away these things to create top of funnel and then monetize inside yeah so
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at the time when we were rebuilding it was myself and uh five developers grew a little bit by that
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point but um for i'd say three years all we did was sit in a room and the developers were building
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out new integrations so that we could get listings inside of app stores so shopify all the e-commerce
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players wix weebly etc and then all the esps and what we found and meanwhile all i was doing was
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live chat support so same core product solution but just more integration so you can introduce
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yourself to different markets and every integration we built we'd get a listing
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and some of those would be complete flops if there wasn't an engaged ecosystem yeah but it
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would still help from a retention perspective if we got someone using you know a tier two esp
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it was still valuable to have that integration for the user so we found you know a handful of
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these integrations understood where we sat and that we could drive a lot of revenue for them
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based on contact pricing yeah and we'd add a lot of value for shared users so they'd promote the
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hell out of us and it was just like a really symbiotic relationship for for everyone involved
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and we even today as we've grown you know to 60 people plus um approaching 8 million ARR
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our CAC is like incredibly low so because of those free tools yeah because of the free tools
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because of the integrations the marketplaces all of that yeah so you did the stuff that was going
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but you're building a moat that's really tough to get into.
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willing to do the stuff that no one else will do, right?
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Other companies, you can't even talk to a human
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And we're spending our time live chat with free users,
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What have you learned about, does everybody do support?
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Yeah, just great docs, great how-tos, great video guides.
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A fantastic, easy-to-use product is what I would say is pretty critical,
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that in a matter of minutes or less, a couple clicks,
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that merchant of ours, our users, can see the right value,
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And what helped that is our integrations, right?
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What helps that for us is also like our default campaigns that are live
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So there's live campaigns ready to go as soon as you connect everything.
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I mean, they can tweak to make it look like their brand and stuff,
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but even that's something that we could knock off the to-do for them.
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Because if we have your store, we know your brand colors,
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or cart abandonment email and turn that into something
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Yeah, and just for the team, because obviously it's
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Yeah, I mean, I think it helps that there was a period where all I did was the live chat support and saw that benefit firsthand.
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Because I think a lot of, like, founders and CEOs just immediately outsource support.
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And they're like, I don't want to deal with this or it's hard to talk to customers.
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But, you know, we've hired our success and support team.
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A lot of them actually come from constant contact where we found there's just incredible training programs.
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um that people are used to live chat or ticketing for users that aren't that tech savvy yeah so
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patience is like key and um you know that paired with the fact that that i used to do it and we
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have a culture around like our success is tied to our customer success and uh and the training stuff
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about the cultural impact of employees from the company.
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And it's like, we don't have their bank account.
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has really built a great culture of, and the VSB.
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was important for the customer segment you guys serve?
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Yeah, I mean, I don't know the exact numbers anymore,
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It's also where the majority of our leadership team
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and what have you had to like figure out along the way obviously getting to 60 um you know in
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regards to the way you structured the team or um the way you've invested in growth like how do you
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how did you kind of come back from like because there's this mindset of like and i've been there
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you raise a couple million bucks you're like cool we're building innovation then you get humbled a
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little bit and then you got to come up but you sometimes have a little scar tissue right so it's
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like how did you have to like what were those inflection points or those those those moments
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along that journey uh for you to kind of like be okay grow like scaling faster yeah it's funny we
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um when we hunkered down after the deal fell apart and all that stuff
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we raised a little bit of money as we saw success with this new idea from uh a good friend
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now mike volpe also board member cmo pubspot great dude um and even though we raised money
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on the second iteration we treated the company like we had a thousand dollars in the bank account
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and i think for a two-year period that was incredibly healthy because it meant we were
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focused on the right things and growing the company you know in a cash flow positive manner
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and then as i saw like that our wedge into the market was working it really became clear that
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there was a much bigger opportunity here you know we had users all over the world like clamoring for
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the product upgrading without talking to us and i was like wow we actually we could be something
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much bigger and that was where i realized okay i've never seen this next phase of growth like i
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need people around me a leadership team that have seen you know 2 million to 50 million right and
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that's where the local ecosystem having people like volpe on the board having accomplice um our
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our main investor involved was critical because it helps me balance my like hunker down in a room
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mentality with, hey, you actually need to invest in the business to see the kind of growth and
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product development that I wanted to see. And so finding that balance and finding a board that
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understands that we want to kind of be cash efficient, yet grow the business has been
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critical. And that's like the transition from being kind of like defensive versus
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Like leaning into it heels to toe on the growth side.
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I mean, you mentioned Mike and a few other smart people.
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Like when you've had these moments, what's your go-to or how do you get through them?
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I think so much of this as a founder is confidence, honestly.
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We're fortunate enough to have incredible economics,
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there's a lot of times where I'm looking at our numbers regularly.
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given the amount of content out there around SaaS and benchmarks.
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So I find, for me, the time I spend with an advisor or a board member
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or my wife right who's really a co-founder but not actually um not talking about the numbers
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and thinking about the impact that we're having for our customers our employees and their
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livelihoods um and just like taking that step back i find is when i'm able to reboot confidence
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and understand that like i'm actually a pretty good ceo you know when you just as a founder
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you always have your doubts yeah that that um it's people yeah so you you reframe it instead
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of looking at like the business metrics you look at like the impact of the customer the impact of
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the team and that's where you're like now we're doing some cool stuff here yeah like i'm not an
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So, like, CAC to LTV is, like, never going to be a metric
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is when I take a step back and I'm like, holy shit.
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Or the 60 people that work at Privy and their families,
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That's the type of stuff that really motivates me
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and gives me the confidence to continue acting on our vision.
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And what books do you, like, are you an avid reader?
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Recently just read Behind the Cloud by B. Neon.
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Actually, just kicking off a couple chapters into Reboot.
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If you ever meet him, watch out, he'll make you cry.
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And so your process is more just talking to people
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and kind of like getting it out, looking at it objectively
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every time it's changing now that we've grown but i feel like i had done every role for a period of
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time cool even hiring yeah right paperwork payroll all that stuff like and so or sales or marketing
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or cs right so by having done that role at least for a couple months i get a really good feel for
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what it is and like how i'm doing a mediocre job and what a profile of someone would look like who
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can do a better job and there's a lot of unique things about our business it's high velocity
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small business freemium right so i think like where i can find the intersection of those things
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with the job that i was just doing i feel like that's a good fit but um you know again just like
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prospecting people that fit the bill as opposed to just like waiting for the application so you'll
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actually say okay in our growth plan i need to fill these roles let me just start putting some
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feelers out like beforehand just to i'll build a list on linkedin of people that are in boston or
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even remote i'll reach out to them i'll get on the phone or take a coffee and you know see if it's a
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good fit that to me is what a good ceo does right they build the team the team builds a business
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that is like over the last three years that's kind of all i've been doing you know like i
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in a for a good reason i can't execute marketing anymore i can't like be in support and you know
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there's new tools that i'm not familiar with and stuff so all i'm doing is really reaching out to
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people to try to get them to join our company yeah and so you'll take them out for coffee
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do you what's your what's the essence of the conversation like how do you do you have a
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it's to the tune of like you go to them with a big problem like are you are you saying like hey
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we're hiring we'd love to meet or do you say like hey man i heard you're really smart no it's it's
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kind of like hey we're growing rapidly um the impact we're having on you know small business
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globally is massive and for the last x months i've been executing this role and like it's time
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for me to bring in a leader who can completely own this and build out the team down the road
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and uh every every one of the leaders on the team is player coach right so if i'm bringing in a head
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of people then he or she needs to be able to do all the work themselves but also lay the strategy
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compared to where some of these people are coming from.
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What do you think is going to be your next level?
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Like, what does Ben need to overcome to kind of continue?
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I see it often with the venture-backed companies
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always like asking yourself like what's the next level for me um what do you think that is for you
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like what are the skills that you're looking to develop you know obviously you read these books
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what's the the big change for me as we grow and now like we're 60 i can see us getting to you know
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150 200 right so just anticipating what my job looks like in that path is very different from
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where we were before and really means that i need to become a manager and a leader as opposed to a
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founder so how do you differentiate those two founder is just like you got to be scrappy as
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and bringing in just incredible people to run each division and team and all that.
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So I think it's a big transition for me because it was hard for me to see past our original acquisition offer.
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It was hard for me to say, oh, this could be a billion-dollar company someday.
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And now that we're kind of on that trajectory, there's just very real transitions that I need to go through.
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doing that yeah what do you like how do you guys lead like in regards to cadence meeting cadences
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tools for communication what does that look like inside pervy yeah it's evolving quickly yeah so
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slack we used to do like this all company once a month meeting where i'd have every department
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head share their numbers yeah like in all hands yeah like in all hands and it just felt like
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overkill because people already knew the numbers um i think like a lot of people were just a little
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bored honestly um which was interesting because like people are hungry for transparency and we
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run a transparent company but so we're switching that so every friday now um we kind of cycle
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through a department and then do like a show and tell like here's what our marketing's working on
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this week here's some of the numbers that we're focused on challenges etc um and then i do a
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weekly email now uh this week at privy to the entire company where it's almost like a blog
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post about like what's happening some shout outs um some of the numbers um how long have you been
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doing that a month okay like i'm talking all this is new i just started a monthly internal only
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podcast where i go back to that format of like company performance less about cross team and
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more about like arr growth runway burn sas metrics and is it just you sharing your thoughts on these
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things it's me actually walking through the deck that like i'd share at the board level yeah and
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post that in our wiki okay and i do a voiceover to kind of bring it down so that everyone in the
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company can understand yeah uh and then i send that out to the entire company and that history
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is there so that's relatively new been getting a lot of positive feedback on that and then we
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move to a once a quarter all hands where we bring in food and drinks and it's like me presenting
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um q a all that stuff and then what about like meeting strategy what is you guys do quarterly
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off sites or anything like that or what's your some of the teams are starting to do that
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individually you know i haven't done that yet i haven't um and then one-on-ones do you do yeah i
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meet so we've got a management meeting every monday morning yeah look at the numbers how
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we're doing towards goal and that's your executive leadership team essentially yep yeah and what are
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the departments that you guys have you mentioned marketing sales customer success which owns
00:28:56.380
And before Jen, when we had a new hire starting,
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I was like, all right, I'll just come in early that morning.
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I'll print out some papers, and we'll figure it out.
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Whether you're going to get a screening call or not,
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So even if you apply and don't get moved forward,
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Yeah, because I just want to, like, I have that same problem.
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But, and then, like, even from the moment they walk in, we have, like, you know, for the final round, we have, like, the agenda of who they're meeting with and their role and, like, just try to create an incredible experience.
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and then proper onboarding right so there's some like training yeah hr stuff but not much it's
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pretty casual around that vision meet with me meet with each department head i go through the core
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values the mission uh a little bit of an introduction to e-commerce if they're not
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familiar with it um we've got a buddies program that's so key so like somebody told me if you
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don't make a buddy in the first like two weeks you're going to be bouncing in six months oh that's
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interesting yeah because essentially you just you think to yourself i took the wrong job interesting
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yeah like if and and you get like you can deliberately assign somebody a buddy which
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is what we do yeah so that way it's like they'll take you out for lunch they'll integrate you with
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team because if you don't build that and you just come in and just start cranking it's easy to get
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lost and then you start looking i believe it yeah it's a big one believe that yeah so that's been
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cool so jen came in and just built out this five-star candidate experience yeah it's amazing
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so jealous but that's where it's at it's huge yeah if you're scaling and it's a people thing
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you need somebody dedicated to talent um and so you guys do that every monday to kick off the week
00:31:02.160
kind of review the previous um and then they do they then go off and do their own team meetings
00:31:08.000
Yeah, everyone has, like, a team, you know, either stand-up or kind of metrics review.
00:31:14.780
So at this scale, how many scheduled meetings on a weekly basis would you have, like, recurring?
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I just really have the management and then my one-on-ones with direct reports.
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Do you have a high-level kind of flow for your one-on-ones?
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um just i bring personal notes to the table on like what i'm seeing from that person seeing yeah
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um any like ideas that i have that i want to get to them and uh they bring their own agenda to the
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table so if there's no agenda then we might just cancel it that week but try not to go you know
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and have you what have you learned about like having to work through those leaders to get
00:32:01.620
Because when you say something to the wrong person,
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So what have you, like, has that been hard for you?
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you're like, hey, I'm not going to try to tell you how to,
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I try to keep them to myself until I'm, like, sitting down with the leader of the team.
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And there's definitely times where I'm like, oh, hey, Ted, who runs sales, like, let's sit down with Alex, one of the sales managers.
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I have these ideas, but I'll let the two of them chat before.
00:32:48.600
Okay, so you'll let Ted know, the sales manager, hey, I have these ideas for Alex.
00:33:22.940
some of the bigger picture stuff recruiting and leadership you know i still have a lot of influence
00:33:30.260
and visibility and i like to do things yeah as a founder especially the guy that did everything
00:33:37.160
right yeah so you know if i'm excited about something i want to make sure that the right
00:33:42.580
people are there and we chat about it and the way the business model works you get 10 000 signups
00:33:47.840
and then do you guys kind of like qualify them in some way
00:33:55.460
and then account exec and pretty traditional sales process?
00:34:06.100
We'll immediately on the first day look at them automatically.
00:34:11.280
We'll look at their traffic, their revenue, their tech stack.
00:34:14.520
You get a lot because you're integrated into their platforms.
00:34:20.000
And we'll assign a portion of those to the sales team
00:34:28.840
And we look at our businesses, the freemium, the self-service,
00:34:41.360
So some products, it might make sense to create a free tool
00:34:48.880
without asking people to fill out a whole form.
00:34:51.820
Because you're even getting their customer contact info.
00:35:42.280
our metrics and free to paid, uh, on a per segment basis being self-serve direct sales,
00:35:50.020
blended, et cetera. Yeah. And then do you have, do you don't, what are your channels? Do you do
00:35:54.080
outbound at all or for some of the mid tier? No, everything's inbound. Feed the salespeople.
00:35:59.460
Is there an SDR AE or just straight to the account exec? Um, we are experimenting with
00:36:05.380
what we're calling like an inbound bdr it's kind of the worst title ever but um for our smaller
00:36:13.140
business segment that looks more like very small business yeah um who come into chat and are asking
00:36:19.260
questions about premium features we'll get on the phone and they'll close a single call you know 20
00:36:25.780
30 40 bucks something like that so it's a closing rule yeah um but it's a high starts with the chat
00:36:31.620
yeah high velocity yeah like they may close 100 deals in a month yeah but it's like queued up
00:36:37.780
they're there anyways sometimes people just want to talk to somebody totally and they're uh we see
00:36:42.580
it a lot in reviews they're like oh we talked to you know gg or will to the folks we have in these
00:36:48.760
roles and they're like it was the best support experience i've ever had you know and it's like
00:36:53.520
that's part of it is it's a brand play it's like we know that you want to serve to a human
00:36:59.640
you're going to have better retention here and so let's just talk to everyone that we can that
00:37:05.760
wants to talk to us is that something you saw in the data when you looked at retention and oh yeah
00:37:10.300
yeah so we look at when a human's involved we have uh net retention of mrr over 100 wow which
00:37:18.420
for smb is huge huge um and where we don't um it's a little bit it's not that it's not important but
00:37:27.160
it's it's less important to us because it really just fuels the sales team but um it's still high
00:37:32.980
it's like 98 yeah but you know i'll take over 100 all day dude that's amazing they're just more
00:37:40.080
qualified yeah they understand the full breadth of the platform and uh they're gonna buy or not
00:37:46.400
after that conversation yeah um ben as you look back uh over the you know years eight years now
00:37:53.820
you've been at it something like that yeah who did you need to become to be the ceo sitting here
00:38:00.300
today running a 80 you know going to be 80 person company this year and i think i needed to go out
00:38:07.640
of business you know like i'm a big believer in fate and i don't think i could be who i am today
00:38:19.700
without having gone through that near-death experience.
00:38:27.240
Because as a first-time founder, I was super naive.
00:38:36.800
is you do what you need to do to raise a round of funding.
00:38:53.420
I could have saved three years off of this journey.
00:39:03.440
If I had just gone and got some entry-level job at Google
00:39:06.580
or something like that, I could never have built this company.
00:39:12.320
So in every adversity, there's always a seat of opportunity.
00:39:22.280
Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.
00:39:25.460
Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment with your biggest insight from our conversation.