The Exchanges

Q And what moved you from that into Relate IQ?

A So, uh, I actually thought about, um, taking a pass at, at my first kind of entrepreneurial journey right after that, decided to run operations at another company in Boston. Um, and we were actually doing really well, a close partnership with which companies. I was called Crimson Hexagon. Um, and they're still doing very well in Boston. Stephanie Newby, uh, was the CEO that I worked, I worked for and, um, She was world-class in my opinion. So I, I learned a ton from her, um, what it looked like to kind of take a company from where we were to the next level. And I implemented a lot of tools like Salesforce.com, um, in JIRA. And what I saw is that I, I felt like as the person who decides on a lot of those technologies, your evaluation criteria is much, much different than the people who actually use it. Um, and what excited me about RelateIQ is we were really thinking about how we could build a sales system of engagement, um, And I think the way to think about that is, you know, you got to have social features. Um, you got to work well with data and you really just have to kind of tie into how people are going to need to be doing their job day in and day out.

AI assessment note: “what excited me about RelateIQ is we were really thinking about how we could build”

Q Very cool. Okay, take us into your story here. So was, was Relate IQ kind of your first kind of Tech exposure, or did you have your own thing before that? Or what's the story there?

A Great question. Yeah, I had, um, I kind of stumbled into tech in all honesty, where I was a finance major and I was thinking about what I wanted to do. And if I wanted to kind of stay on the East coast and go do the New York, Boston, um, finance game, um, and really just optimized for the best team that I could find. So I ended up joining a very small software team that was based in central Massachusetts. Um, and we were building technology for the pharmaceutical industry. So think of it as like a CRM for clinical trials. Um, and that was the first time that I really got to see what it could be like building technology for large companies. Um, and it also kind of opened my eyes to a lot of the things that were very, very manual within these companies where externally they had built efficiencies internally. It was, it was a lot of paper. It was a lot of Excel. Um, it was a lot of emails kind of back and forth that, that didn't help with it. Didn't help people to get things done very efficiently.

AI assessment note: “I ended up joining a very small software team that was based in central Massachusetts”

Q And why'd you decide to go that route versus just kind of using your own capital, keeping all the equity for you and your team and bootstrapping?

A Yeah, I think, um, you know, you're going to win based on how great of a team you can recruit. And I think there are very few circumstances where, um, it's only one or two people call them co-founders where they can actually crack it. So, uh, we had a very, very specific profile around how we wanted to think about the seed round, where we wanted to bring a large institutional investor, a micro VC, someone who just does seed deals and is very good at helping them get to the next level. And then some high value angels. Um, and I think, you know, it played out the exact right way where ABC was, was excited to lead our series A.

AI assessment note: “you're going to win based on how great of a team you can recruit”

Q Progressly what's it doing? How do you make money?

A So you can think of us as the operational system of records. Um, and the way I kind of think about enterprise today is that, um, all of these large organizations, they're all using Microsoft products. They have a CRM tool, which is your customer system of record. They have an HCM tool, which is your employee system of record. And then they typically have some, some notion of ERP in the building. So an SAP and Oracle. Um, and we really see it as an opportunity to build the system of record for fortune, 1000 CLOs. Where we especially like the industry profile where it's an extended value chain. So I think energy and utilities, transportation, consumer packaged goods, even government. Um, there are a ton of people who work outside the building that need to be in the loop around what's getting done. And if you want to make optimizations around how people can actually work better and stay connected, um, there's really no way to do that today. So, so we, um, You know, pretty simply kind of have a mobile first strategy where we, we typically really help the people who are in the field, again, not in front of computers every day, and we connect the data, uh, That they need access to and the information that they need to submit all the way back up to what, what a COO could be making decisions around. Um, you know, we kind of have a standard SAS licensing model, um, around that.

AI assessment note: “we kind of have a standard SAS licensing model, um, around that.”

Q And then too, I mean, are you, how are you comfortable sharing kind of a sense of growth rate? I mean, what did you, between 2015, 20 16, like do you aim for 20% over your growth or more or less than, and why?

A Uh, yeah, I'd say much more, right? I think we'd want to grow at a clip that's kind of a hundred percent year over year, especially when you're, when you're, you know, you kind of have some negotiation leverage based on the size of these relationships. It's, I think it's actually easier for you to drive a high growth rate than it is for you to have, uh, You know, your, your referenceable customers that are willing to get out there and help you tell the story to help you acquire new customers. Right. Cause our, our ask, we're much more comfortable with the ask being, Hey, will you be a referenceable customer for us than saying, Hey, we really need, you know, another hundred seats on the product based on what we have to hit for our metric.

AI assessment note: “I think we'd want to grow at a clip that's kind of a hundred percent”

Q Got it. So take us back to, I mean, your experience with the related IQ really comes down to like customer onboarding, understand like how to make them sticky. I imagine you're thinking about things like churn and things like that. How do you think about those economics at, at progressing? I mean, what is your gross You know, seat or logo or revenue churn per month.

A Uh, so what we really try to look at is how do we, how do we have net churn that that's positive, right? So, you know, there's never really a scenario where we're not accelerating most of our accounts faster than say, we're kind of downsizing in certain accounts. Um, but if you, if you look at kind of the industries that we serve, um, If it goes from a site-wide deployment to a regional deployment to eventually an enterprise deployment, um, you know, you look for kind of that, that exponential growth curve. So it's definitely something that we, we keep an eye on, but for us, I think it's, it's more at the point where, um, it's scaling into different locations based on especially being accessible, uh, mobile tablet offline for, again, the people who are kind of in the field and doing the majority of the work today.

AI assessment note: “what we really try to look at is how do we have net churn”