The Exchanges

Q Yeah. Awesome. Let's wrap up with the famous five. These are just easy one word answers. Number one, what's your favorite, what's your favorite business book?

A Ah, shit. Um, And I knew you were going to ask this, and I've been trying to think about it. The one that I've, I really liked reading recently, um, is called Play Bigger. It's by three fellas who are out of the Bay Area who've been through the machine and got chewed up and spat out a bunch of times. Um, I heard it first reviewed as being, if you like, the, the, the appropriate sequel in a, in a sense of, you know, Startup, um, wisdom to Eric Ries' Lean Startup, which itself was a sequel to The Four Steps of the Epiphany, um, both of which I thought were tremendous and, and, you know, definitely on my favorites list. And I think Play Bigger has been able to sort of take that, that same, um, torch and carry it forward really effectively. Um, so anyone who's, who's watching this, who's entrepreneurial, get into it.

AI assessment note: “The one that I've, I really liked reading recently, um, is called Play Bigger.”

Q So you have two levers you just kind of shared with me in terms of driving expansion revenue. One is growing team. The amount of teams using you. So seat number seats. The other is you have actual product layers you can put on top. Are there any other utility based metrics you drive expansion revenue around?

A Not at this time. Um, there's certainly a lot of things that we could pull levers on in the future, but they're not really, you know, they're, they're more of a thought bubble at the moment, which has had some preliminary work. Um, what we've realized is that, you know, there's just such a massive opportunity. The sector we sell to professional services. Um, so again, those architect, accountant, engineer, designer, consultant type folks in the U S alone, it's more than twenty million people working in that industry. It's the largest employer in the private sector in the U S by far. Bigger than healthcare, bigger than education. Um, it's one in six people. And these poor folks like the average company size is less than 10. Um, only, you know, less than one percent of the businesses have more than 500 employees. And so what it means is that the big guys like SAP and Oracle who kind of came to came to power by automating and streamlining and trying to give systems to run operations for the big end of town. They've just ignored this massive, massive, massive market. Um, and what we're doing is we're bringing, you know, basically cloud, both from an infrastructure and an economics point of view to bear. So that anyone can afford to and benefit from stuff.

AI assessment note: “Not at this time. Um, there's certainly a lot of things that we could pull levers”

Q Give me a specific, give me a specific example though. So like at an agency that have an issue with this, because if they're billing per like human hour, it's hard to necessarily do the tracking. Are those the kinds of problems you're solving?

A Yeah. It's actually probably a metal level above that. So what's in the pipeline, then what projects does that convert into? And how do you make sure the promises that got made up front in your sales process actually reflect what the heck you're promising. You're going to do in a, in a team perspective, how busy are people? You know, you look into an agency and look over in the corner and go, Oh, there's Tom. What did Tom do today? Like you got no idea. And while there's timesheets out there that are kind of pretty painful, no one likes them. It's hard work to keep up to date. Um, most of the, the fundamentals of the technology have been relying, have been assuming that you can take smart, creative, uh, emotional, inconsistent, um, special human beings, which you all are and turn them into robots and machines and therefore magic would happen. Um, and so whether it be timesheets or project delivery or billing or utilization, all of this stuff was just so fuzzy and variable and it really is. We're not changing the fact that it's variable and nothing goes according to plan. What we actually do is we've got smart technology that uses a lot of automation and adapts to the reality so that you can run that business with confidence.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. It's actually probably a metal level above that. So what's in the pipeline”

Q Same 15% number on the bottom. What do you mean by ramping up? What do you mean by ramping up the bottom of the funnel?

A Yeah, the intents to, the actual intent is to make the funnel look more like a tube. Um, you know, we've got a product that solves a really, really, really clear problem for people. Um, and so it's really about, you know, um, getting out of our own way and helping them both through, you know, making the product easy to use. It's a, it's a big promise. It's a big product, so it's not easy to do. So there's a lot of improvements we need to make there. So we want to drive the top of the funnel, but we also want to make the bottom of the funnel, um, drive at the same rate. Um, by improving a whole bunch of the, you know, making it less of a funnel and more of a pipe.

AI assessment note: “the actual intent is to make the funnel look more like a tube”

Q And then give me the logo churn annually or the logo retention annually. What's it above?

A I don't have that number off the top of my head. Um, but it's, it's, it's not huge. We do, we break our customers and that's an interesting insight in terms of leaders. We break our customers into two categories. There's the self-service category, and then there's the qualified or sold to category. Um, and I think that's actually really good advice for other SaaS founders to do as well. Particularly if you've got a model that does have the online trial self-service model. Um, is, is really break your segments up. We've only got the two segments, but in the future, we'll have a bunch more, um, really break your segments up and think about issues like CAC, um, churn rates, all that sort of stuff based on different, different personas. Um, I highly, highly recommend that.

AI assessment note: “I don't have that number off the top of my head.”

Q Give me something that's not inbound. Um, Paid spend, uh, free acquisition, or word of mouth?

A Yeah, I mean, integrations is a pretty common one, um, and we've done a lot of that work. Um, my poor engineering team, like, one of the downsides of having a co-founder, an engineer, is his CEO, and even though I'm supposed to be focusing on marketing, sales, and success, I still, um, too much to their chagrin, you know, commit code. Um, but yeah, I mean, basically, One afternoon, um, we were doing an integration or we had a bunch of inbound leads that were clearly an opportunity and it was a strategic thing, um, as opposed to being something that would tactically move the needle that quarter. And so I just built the integration as a POC on a Friday afternoon. One of the funny things about building a startup on the west coast of the US is Friday afternoons are really quiet. East coast has gone to the pub. Uh, England's recovered already. They're already drunk. Uh, and the Australians are recovering from a hangover. And so you basically got this, this, uh, you know, you're at the tail end of the week and for the entire world. And it's kind of peaceful. Um, so yeah, someone Friday afternoon.

AI assessment note: “integrations is a pretty common one, um, and we've done a lot of that work.”