The Exchanges

Q So, so before I dive deep into like the actual product, cause I want to go deep here. Um, what, how do you think about pricing on this thing, right? What is your own go to market? What's the average customer pay per month to use this?

A Yeah. Yeah. So we, we charge on a per editor basis. So, you know, our whole structure is based around the people who are actually like leading the launch process. One of the big downsides to all of those other tools that you were talking about there is that they charge for every single user seat. So a lot of the teams that need the information involved in the launch process, like for example, sales and support, it doesn't make sense with their business model for you to actually have seats and for them to even be able to access the information that they need. Hence why you have a lot of meetings and stuff. So So yeah, we charge, um, you know, at our base tier, 29 dollars per editor per month. And then, you know, at our kind of primary tier that most teams use, it's a 99 dollars per editor per month. So, um, you know, small teams end up looking somewhere in the like three to 10 K range, um, you know, on an ACB basis. So.

AI assessment note: “we charge, um, you know, at our base tier, 29 dollars per editor per month.”

Q great. Okay. I want to come back to how you plan to expand, like your net dollar retention. Obviously it'd be dependent on how many people you can classify as an editor, like who's needed in the process, but let's go back to sort of like base case here for a second, these small editing teams, like you call them editors, but what are their job titles on LinkedIn today?

A Yep. So typically it's a product marketing manager or a product manager. Um, the, the role of product marketing ends up being done by people with a couple of different titles. So sometimes it's like a just generic marketing manager. If you're talking about like CPG companies, it ends up being a brand manager. Um, so it's, there's a variety of different like shapes and sizes of product marketing, but functionally it is the product marketing function. Um, and then, you know, sometimes the product manager ends up being the kind of primary collaborator Collaborator with them. Um, they do have, you know, there's smattering of like other marketing folks across the editor spectrum as well. So marketing ops teams are often involved. And then oftentimes you have like a comms person. Um, sometimes some design teams or our editor seats. So, um, it, it does vary a bit company to company, but primarily we go after, you know, the product marketing team is kind of our main entry point.

AI assessment note: “typically it's a product marketing manager or a product manager.”

Q team uses, like linear, right? A project management tool, because that's really what's going to drive if this thing gets released on time. And then I like sort of figure out a way to make the engineering Trello board or Kanban board work for all the marketing activities. What are you building inside of your platform that we're not going to see inside of project management tools for developers already?

A Yeah. So, I mean, one of the big downsides of doing that is just you are intermixing two totally, totally different lines of work that have completely different needs in terms of communication. So it's not just about project management when you're talking, when you're talking about launching stuff. And a lot of people think about their launches as the checklist. And so we do all the project management stuff and, you know, you can kind of replace linear or JIRA or whatever you're using on the dev side, um, with our product when you're talking about marketing. But There's a lot of strategic documentation involved as well. So you also need the ability to actually document this stuff in written format in a way that's not buried within tasks. So we're taking the kind of project management. We're marrying that to documentation. We're then marrying that to asset management. So you can actually store all of the marketing assets that are created in the launch process, manage approvals on those, and then push them into the tools that you need. But the real magic here is that we're actually taking all that stuff. And that's just the baseline. Like how do you document and like plan the launch? And we're marrying that to tools that help with research upstream and then downstream communication of those plans. So upstream, we have competitive intelligence tools and customer research tools whe…

AI assessment note: “We're marrying that to documentation. We're then marrying that to asset management.”

Q guy like you that understands product and user feedbacks So much. Do a lifetime deal. You know, those people, they're not going to expand. They're not going to give her to a monthly. So it doesn't even help your cashflow. It doesn't help your valuation really. Right. Cause they, cause he, cause the lifetime deal destroys all the unit economics with SAS. Why waste your time with a lifetime deal?

A So I, I actually think that it is one of the most valuable things that we've done in the lifetime of the company. Um, it was mostly for feedback. Like basically, you know, we did our beta launch. The product was pretty broken when we did our beta launch and, you know, we purposefully shipped something that we knew we weren't going to be like super happy with. Um, and then we did a lot of work on it over the course of like Q one, Q two. And we decided, Hey, we need to really stress test this before Before we go do, you know, any kind of like more concerted user acquisition and start scaling anything up. And so that was why we did the AppSumo deal and we got tons and tons of feedback and it was drastically more engaged feedback than I think we had been getting through the early part of the beta, just because people had paid up front and, you know, regardless of whether or not it was a lifetime deal or it was a recurring deal, we were getting much, much more valuable and like Very tactical pressure testing of the product.

AI assessment note: “I actually think that it is one of the most valuable things... mostly for feedback”

Q Yep. Okay. So let's say you've been diluted on average 15% now twice. Like, why do you need this money to get going? Why couldn't you scrape by and bootstrap and keep a hundred percent?

A Yeah. So we, we likely could have for a while. Um, I think, you know, part of it is my co-founder like, you know, needed to take a salary. Um, also the other, other component here is we are building a pretty large surface area platform. So in order to solve this problem, you really have to solve all of the like, 10,000 little paper cuts that are involved in it. And it's a pretty big bundled aggregate solution. It's very hard to build just like one individual part of this. Cause like, for example, if we built Just the project management component of it. We would get sucked into building purely a project management tool for most of the life cycle of the company, because that's just where customer demand would end up pulling us. And we probably would have never had the time to devote to building some of the tools that help with automating a lot of the other like work involved in the process. So I think mostly it's the surface area of the product. Um, you know, we just had to build a lot of stuff. In order to have it be meaningfully differentiated from what you're already kind of packing together in a documentation tool or project management tool.

AI assessment note: “part of it is my co-founder like, you know, needed to take a salary.”

Q I see. Okay, cool. So that's a good relationship for you guys. Makes sense for, let them in as a strategic investor. Um, anything else in terms of go to market that's worked really well for you? We're talking very meta here. Go to market platform for go to market thing.

A Yeah, totally. I mean, we've done a lot of cold outbound. So, you know, we, we have mostly been using cold outbound outreach as our primary, like acquisition vehicle. Um, a lot of our acquisitions come through word of mouth and just being, you know, act, I call it like being a professional community member, just going and being active in product marketing Alliance, responding to people's questions, Uh, going, being active in, you know, other, other forums and whatnot, where people are talking about go to market and like trying to get that insight into this stuff. Um, we've done a decent amount of podcasting as well. So, um, you know, we, we've since day one started to build out a pretty robust, like content program and podcasting program, both for SEO purposes. And then also for a lot of like thought leadership around this space, because it's an area where there's a lot of content, but not, not a lot of it is very good content and very actionable. So, Um, you know, we, we've done a decent amount of content as well, but we've been pretty light on, you know, our actual like marketing activity to date. We just kind of recently in the last month or two started kind of scaling up, um, you know, trying to aggressively acquire folks.

AI assessment note: “we have mostly been using cold outbound outreach as our primary, like acquisition vehicle”