Laith Dahiyat: The Right Pricing Model for B2B SaaS Companies

This episode is sponsored by Contentfy, a premium video editing and content repurposing service for busy content creators, influencers, brands, podcasters, YouTubers, and marketers. Contentfy provides unlimited end-to-end editing and repurposing services to help you get your video and audio content edited and repurposed quickly, easily, and reliably. Join other busy content creators, founders, brands, and marketers who now spend even more time creating while they take care of the rest. You no longer need to worry about spending hours editing anymore. Just create content, Build your audience and grow your business. If you're a content creator looking to save time and money, or looking to outsource your content marketing team, get your first free video edited now at contentfy.co. If you'd like to sponsor the SaaS District podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show, visit horizoncapital.com/saas-podcast today. Thanks again, folks. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how the right pricing models are evolving with B2B SaaS companies. Today we have our guest, Leif Dayad, joining us. Laith is the Chief Strategy Officer at Chargify, a billing and revenue management platform for fast-growing SaaS businesses. He's also now the General Manager of Keen.io, which is an event streaming API for developers to enable a data-rich user experience to every product on earth, where he actually led the acquisition process. Laith has over 20 years of enterprise software and e-commerce experience with a focus on product management and global software development. He began his technology career in the late '90s with engineering and product roles at AOL, CareerBuilder, and Network Solutions. So welcome, Leith. Super excited to have you on SaaS District show today.

Thanks for having me. Looking forward to chatting.

Cool. Uh, Leith, can you share, you know, a little bit more details about your personal background, you know, your past positions, management roles, and your journey up until being part of Chargify and Keen, which I believe the acquisition went into place in 2020?

Yeah, just think, I mean, you named some of these old companies people don't realize, you know, still exist, some of them probably don't, but, you know, I'm kind of a Web 1.0 guy, I'm old. I started, you know, working in really in SaaS before it was called SaaS, so at CareerBuilder.com, which is one of the first sort of online HR systems, recruiting platforms, resume platforms, and then, you know, we sort of helped revolutionize that industry. We were building SaaS products really early on when it was, we didn't have the tools available that you have now from a technology perspective, so it's interesting to think back. But I've been in product management most of my career. You know, I worked at AOL back, back when AOL was sending you CDs. If you're old, you're not, you're not probably even old enough to remember that.

Probably not.

But those of you that are, Akeel, when you used to get a CD in the mail to load AOL. So, so really I've been focusing on e-commerce and product management my whole career, kind of at larger companies, but also at startups. So I've kind of progressed up the chain within product management. You know, more recently I joined Scaleworks, which is a venture equity firm headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Founded by Ed Byrne and Lou Moorman. But Scaleworks is laser-focused on making what they call venture equity investments. It's a flavor of private equity in B2B SaaS companies, so laser-focused on B2B SaaS. So I came into Scaleworks a little over 4 years ago to work with Paul Lynch, who's the CEO of Chargify, at a company called Assembla, which is a source code management tool. We had a successful exit to Idera Corporation, And then after that, Paul became CEO of Chargify, and he gave me a ring and asked if I wanted to get involved in this crazy idea they had around Keen and Chargify. So I came on board, getting close to 2 years on the Chargify and Keen, and that's kind of how I got here.

It's interesting you mentioned Scaleworks. I actually just heard about them from somebody this week, and I'm actually chatting with somebody on the team next week, but we can chat about that later. Oh, great.

Yeah.

Cool. Can you tell us a little bit more about leading that strategic acquisition of Keen.io, your role as the general manager, and what was that decision-making framework from Chargeify for that acquisition? Because I feel that the different models are so different, and it's not something you typically think of when you're making a strategic acquisition.

It's really not. I'll walk you through the thought process. Keen is a company with a fairly long history. It was founded out of San Francisco and Silicon Valley area. I think getting close to 7, 8 years or so. But Keen was venture-backed. It got investments from the likes of Sequoia and other investment firms. It was a startup, obviously raised north of $30 million over its lifespan before we acquired it at Scaleworks.

Mm-hmm.

But Keen was on the cutting edge of event data streaming. So the technology is around Apache Kafka. I won't go too techie, don't worry, but it's essentially a platform purpose-built to ingest massive amounts of real-time data that streamed in real-time, but then has the ability to store it in a non-relational database so you can query it and access it really, really, really fast. So you think of $30 million plus building out this platform. Keen had quite a bit of success giving developers a way to turnkey implement data streaming and real-time querying to their apps, but it really pivoted towards Analytics and embedded analytics, right? So it left the developer arena and went into the analytics arena. The reason I mentioned that is it has a really, really strong built-in analytics platform. So query engine, visualization, dashboarding, you know, and it's all in real time. It can handle billions and billions of pieces, pieces of data streamed in in real time every day. So purpose-built for that. Now you can see where I'm going is, well, why would a billing and subscription management tool be interested in that? Well, where B2B SaaS has already gone is around event and really usage-based billing models. The fastest-growing tech company ever, I think, don't quote me on that, but I think it is, is AWS. AWS bills most of its tools, a lot of its tools on usage. It beat Rackspace. How did it beat Rackspace and these other hosting companies? Same servers, Same internet, right? It beat them because of their model. Their model is pay for what you use. We can track that in real time and charge you per CPU second, per core CPU. AWS now has hundreds of products, and you look at the billing models for these products, and so many of them are real-time usage-based. Twilio was told they couldn't go public because they did not have reliable, forecastable revenue because it was all usage-based. They're like, here, hold my beer, right? They went into the stratosphere. Where I'm getting at is, it is usage-based models. I think we'll talk and maybe go into detail in a little bit in the podcast. Usage-based models have become the norm. The problem with that is, for a brand-new startup or somebody who hasn't hit that $1 million ARR level or what have you, it's really complicated to do and to build.

Yeah.

Now I need an event streaming platform, and I need a separate database, and then I need integrate with Stripe, maybe if I don't use a purpose-built tool like Chartify. It's very, very complicated. So we looked at that and we said, well, what if we could take something that could ingest massive amounts of data with sometimes hundreds of attributes per event, an event being anything that happens in your application or with your customer, layer a query engine and a visualization tool alongside that, and then embed it inside of Chartify? If we could do that, we can then in turnkey say, hey, You want to charge every— your customer every time you send an SMS on their behalf? You want to charge per millisecond of compile time that your DevOps tool does for your customers? Great, we can do that. Just every time anything happens, use our open API, stream it in, and then in real time it'll show up in the billing tool. You can experiment with it, you can pick and choose your attributes, and you can bill off of it. So that, that was the vision of how we could sort of leapfrog ahead the competition and deliver something that took would take years potentially to build from scratch. So that's, that's the, that was the thought. So we launched the first round of the new billing capabilities last year, what we call events-based billing, and it's been, it's been a great success for us. So we're really excited.

So was that the thought process going into it, was that, you know, there's this model that's working like this and you think by making this tweak specifically just on pricing, switching to that usage page, you'll see a a kind of more, you know, a huge kind of, you know, growth after making that switch. And is that what happened? Did your hypothesis stick out?

Yeah, for sure. You know, customers were asking for this type of— it's just a flavor of usage-based billing. We call it events-based billing, but, you know, there's other flavors we implement as well. But customers have been asking for it without knowing how to call it. what they call it. So, hey, I'm an SMS as a service provider and it's really hard. I wanna charge per SMS, but I wanna change the pricing based on origin carrier, destination carrier, origin country, destination country, whether it's MMS or SMS, like the technology of the message. And I wanna have these 5 or 6 different attributes in a matrix all fit together. And I want the ability to analyze which Combination of the attributes of the SMS is gonna make me the most money. It's like before, that's really, really hard to do. But with event-based billing with Chargify, it's actually very easy to do because you just, every time an SMS is sent, you send us the list of attributes, they show up and you can do it. So once we started actually showing this to prospects and customers, they're like, oh no, that's exactly what I wanna do. I just didn't know what it was called and if I could do it. So, you know, we did a lot of research. We talked to a lot of customers, a lot of prospects, a lot of people in the industry, a lot of investors, and vetted this hypothesis. And I also looked at the market— Datadog, Twilio, AWS, the list goes on and on. I think, you know, 7 of the last 10— this is a couple of months old— but 7 of the last 10 major tech IPOs were all usage-based models.

Hmm.

So it's here, it's the norm. But we're democratizing it. So I'm at $800,000 ARR, I'm starting to get some traction, my database is starting to crash because I'm storing all the real-time event data in my transactional database, and I'm just sending stuff to Stripe and like, no, I need a specialized tool. So that's where we come in.

Makes sense. Just kind of adding to that acquisition piece and kind of your plans there, would you say there are future acquisition plans for Chargify in 2021? And if so, are there any strategic plays that you guys are really exploring?

Yeah, I mean, obviously we can't talk details, but I think we're always looking at being opportunistic. When you look at the billing and subscription and revenue management space, there are a lot of potential areas to go into to expand the platform. Analytics is what we're doing with Keen, along with data streaming and data access. There's interesting things around AI. Where if you're— if we're ingesting massive amounts of data, how can we potentially start automating the analysis of that data and using artificial intelligence to help customers learn more about their product usage and their billing and all that kind of stuff? Integration platforms, right? Data augmentation, where you're actually adding data enrichment to data streaming. And the world, like, We're now playing in the data spaces to a certain extent, as well as the billing and revenue management space, because being in the data space and the integration space makes our billing solution that much more powerful. Because listen, your companies you talk to, SaaS companies don't operate in little silos. They want all of their systems talking. They're using HubSpot and Salesforce and Chargify, and they have a data warehouse and a transactional database, and they're using ChurnZero, and they're using ProfitWell, and they're using Intercom. They're easy, right? That's a real thing. I'm not exaggerating. But so the systems all need to talk, and the same information that's in Salesforce should be in Chartify because those are my customers. So we're always working towards breaking down those silos and integrating that business data together.

Cool. Is there any minimum criteria if anybody is listening in, SaaS founder looking for maybe being a strategic partner acquisition on your side, anything minimum or something they're looking at?

No, no, give me a ring, right? Shoot me an email. We're always looking to talk to people and companies in the ecosystem, whether it's Chargify or not speaking directly for Scaleworks. Scaleworks is a great resource, even going to their website and checking out the SaaS newsletter they put out.

Cool. So speaking a little bit more about Keen.io, Can you talk about a little bit what are event data-driven metrics that you should be paying attention to in these events and why are they important for SaaS founders specifically?

I think the earlier you implement an event-driven architecture to collect data, the better. The reality is a large majority of what's going on in your app and with your customers is hidden. It's wasted. Maybe you're collecting it, but probably not. using a very fragmented stack, like I was just rattling off the Intercoms and the Salesforces of the world. So something like Akeen just makes it really, really relatively cheap and very, very fast and easy to just start collecting data around everything that happens within your application, everything that happens with your customers. So that sounds very broad and generic, but an event is just Like, it's just like a bunch of attributes. So let's say every time a customer uses a certain feature, like, collect that. You can, you can do lots of stuff with it. You can charge them based on that usage. You can analyze for potential churn risks based on usage patterns. You can gather usage data and send it over to your Salesforce, your HubSpot, so you have a clearer picture of your customer. There's just so many things you can do, but building it yourself and sending the same data to lots and lots of places all at once is incredibly inefficient and expensive and risky. So I think if I'm a SaaS founder, starting from scratch and using something like Keen that could be foundational to be event-driven as a company could be a real advantage. Being event-driven means not only showing real-time information in your app, but also being able to get granular on your pricing model. On alerting around churn risk, alerting around potential upgrade opportunities based on customer usage patterns. There's all kinds of really cool stuff you can do. If you wait and wait and wait and wait and wait, it gets harder. You lose a lot of data and you lose a lot of time. I think the earlier you are in the lifecycle of a company, the more able you need to be to be agile, meaning Okay, we thought we were in this category. That's not working. We need to change our message. And if we change the category and the message, we need to change the pricing model. Or what most companies do is they undercharge for their service. You become more mature, they're like, whoa, we need to raise our prices. How do we optimize our install base and start asking for more money? Having really detailed usage data going back for all your customers makes that be an easier sell, so to speak, when you say, hey, I know you were at $400 a month, we're taking you to $600 here. I think those are the things SaaS companies, as they start hitting inflection points, need to be thinking about.

And you mentioned kind of churn data. I think churn is one of the most important problems or metrics that every B2B SaaS founder needs to pay attention to, they struggle with. And as an expert, you mentioned they should also be thinking about pricing strategically to reduce churn. How and why should they be thinking about their focus on pricing to optimize churn? And I wonder how that was affected when you guys made that shift on your side. Did you guys see any change on churn specifically when you made that change in pricing model?

Yeah, I mean, potentially, yeah. Pricing is huge. And I think particularly with developer-driven tools, really sort of high-tech tools, the technology changes Really, really quickly. The competitive landscape can change really, really quickly. So products and services that once demanded a huge premium now are table stakes, are really, really cheap. And where I'm getting at is customers that were willing to pay, I'm making this up, $800 a month for a certain platform suddenly have more options. Maybe it's easier to build on your own. Maybe it's a competitor who's doing something similar for $200 a month. So I think, again, you need to look at your pricing and you need to be able to evolve and bob and weave, so to speak, really, really quickly because your competitors are going to come and eat your lunch, right? I mean, things change quick. Things that used to cost a lot of money are now free, just in general. So pricing is a big lever to battle churn. But what goes along with that is how you market the value of your product. Right. And in some cases, I think companies are too willing to slash their prices or give free months or do tier mitigation on price where you need to also spend time working with your prospects and your customers on showing the actual value of your product.

Right.

Again, it's more common to undercharge than overcharge for your product sometimes when you're younger as a company. So, but, but, you know, going back to the evolution, you need to, you need to evolve your pricing model too, right? So where it might've been a per seat, per seat model, or, you know, just a flat per month in the industry, again, it's now all evolving to usage-based models. A lot of, in a lot of markets, customers are now getting used to just paying for what they use. Why do I need to pay you $800 a month? I want to pay you a 10th of a cent per second. Right? So having a kind of a dinosaur pricing model can definitely hurt your growth and cause churn because again, I don't care if you're in marketing automation tools, DevOps tools, sales intelligence, it doesn't matter what SaaS subcategory you're in, pricing models In the pricing model, customers want changes really quickly. Like I said, I'm not just saying this because we do usage-based models really well. The entire industry is going to usage-based models. If you're not able to evolve and change your models and do it in a way to experiment, do it quickly, you'll get left behind.

I guess the point there is continuous change, continuously to test, continuously to optimize, and don't stick to your old model thinking that it's working just because it's working. the best kind of model to optimize your churn.

Absolutely. I mean, what worked a year ago may not work now. And again, you got to be really cognizant of looking outside your walls and see where are the similar markets or where are your competitors going. It's also talking to your customers and understanding how are they getting used to paying. If you talk to a developer CTO, they're used to paying per— well, when I used— I pay Datadog $8,000 a month. That's all usage-based. I pay AWS tens of thousands a month. That's all usage-based. Why are you guys charging me for seats? So, you know, you've got to be, you got to be in the position to move quickly on these things. And again, if you're building it in-house, your billing solution in-house, you're going to be in a world of hurt. Again, I'm not just saying that because I'm charged by it. Like, with a purpose-built tool, you can stand up new billing models nearly overnight. We're launching a new experimentation tool later in the year that lets you actually implement side-by-side in staging sort of way, a different pricing model side by side with your live one. And like, so you can experiment. Well, I think I should change the way I charge, but how do I know without doing it? And that's going to take me months and like that could crush your business. So being able to experiment, I think is critical as well.

Can you share any of those? Like, have you guys ran different kinds of pricing tests or experiments with whether Chargify, Keen, or other kinds of companies? that helped kind of reduce churn and any values on net increase of the business that what that led from that experiment?

Yeah, I mean, not necessarily like specific values I can share with you, but, you know, I think experimenting with different models based on the market is key. I'll give you an example with Keen. We totally changed our pricing model around last year because we realized that Particularly developers and startups, technology-focused startups, they want to pay for what they use, but they also want to ramp up their usage, right? So we're like, hmm, okay. So, and you'll see this a lot in different, different, different SaaS products. It's free up to a certain period. It's free up to a certain volume of usage. So for example, with Kinesis, it's free for, I'll make this up, 50,000 events streamed and 1,000 queries.

Right.

It'll always be free, but once you go over a certain level, you pay as you go. And you can do that forever if you want, but after a certain point, it's more expensive to pay as you go, and it's better to go into a higher tier that includes usage and has overages. So you need to do the data analysis to help try to draw your customers up into the higher and higher tiers. preach about usage-based models, but customers sometimes want predictable costs. So you can kind of blend the 2 models to say, listen, if you stayed on pure pay-as-you-go, here's the chart. Once you go over a million events, it's way more expensive for you to stay pure à la carte. Why don't you go into this plan that's X hundred or X thousand a month that includes some usage, but then lets you pay overages in real time? So again, To do that is really, you need a tool that gives you the flexibility to implement these blended sort of models. And that helps not only mitigate churn, but also helps onboard new customers. Yeah, it makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's things like that that we're doing to experiment. I think with our new experimentation tool that'll come out, it'll, again, it'll speed time to market and let you validate your assumptions. If you're, you know, if you're an SMS as a service CEO, And founder, you know, you're an expert in that. Your assumptions are probably pretty spot on, but you don't really know that. So if you want to start charging different rates based on carrier network or based on country, because you know it'll optimize your costs and potentially customers would be willing to pay more for this premium service you're offering around international texts, then wouldn't it be nice to go back and look at the last year of usage and extrapolate and actually see in the tool the changes, right? So it's those sorts of things that a very, very large SaaS company that has 50 to 100 data scientists working for it, you know, one in each little marketing team, can go and run these analyses for you, right? But if you're a, you know, 10, 20, 30, 50-person startup, that's a lot of work. You don't have necessarily dedicated resources to do like crazy regression analyses on pricing. You want your billing tool just to do it for you. And that's, that, that's our, that's our mindset around, uh, around Chargify.

Very cool. I mean, uh, yeah, I mentioned, I think we talked at the beginning of the show, I know, uh, Patrick from, from, uh, ProfitWell. Uh, we've had him as a guest as well. People haven't checked him out should check out that episode. And we also talk a lot about more, more about churn and a little bit about pricing as well. Um, what are some other pricing trends that people should be kind of keeping an eye on that, and that rely on strong data? So, you know, you mentioned usage pricing and event-based billing. Any others that we should look at?

Yeah, absolutely. So usage-based models, usage-based billing is like the umbrella. Think of usage-based billing as an umbrella. It's anything having to do with charging on usage. Now, the simplest one is every time you send an SMS, you pay a cent. Great. Well, there's a lot of flavors of that, right? And again, these are things because we're laser focused on B2B SaaS, we build them out of the box. So a model that's becoming very prominent is what we call prepaid usage-based. So in other words, you fund— your customer funds their account with $500, and then based on your rate engine you set up in Chargify. So let's use the SMS example cuz it's simple. It's 1 cent per SMS sent in real time. Instantly when an SMS is sent, we know about it because you're streaming the data in real time and it draws down your account in real time. As soon as you hit a threshold, it re-ups you. It's like if you're using like a toll, automated toll thing in your car, it automatically re-ups you to $500. Why that's compelling, A, customers want it. They want to link, they want to, they're okay with free. funding their account, but it also protects you as a business because if you don't, if they don't pay, you need to be able to know that and cut off their access to the platform immediately because you're on the hook for the SMSs. Like you're paying for that. So it's protection, it's risk mitigation for your business. So prepaid subscription, what we call prepaid usage, we launched that towards the end of last year, second half of last year, and that we've had a huge response for that because, again, it's just out of the box. Prepaid is huge. Event-based billing, again, the real-time event-based billing, I've talked to death about that, but we've had a lot of traction for that, particularly developer tools, cloud database tools, anything that requires large matrices of variables and a massive amount of usage data. So if you're a cloud provider that does— we have customers that do video rendering services in the cloud. They want to charge based on cores of CPUs, numbers of CPUs, where the data center is, what type of video card, blah, blah, blah, and they want to charge it down to the second. And they can— when they realize all they have to do is just stream the data and it happens, They love it. So those kinds of models are the biggies for us.

Very cool. So I love that you're using pricing as a growth lever, as part of your overall kind of growth strategy. Can you share any other growth experiments maybe you've been focusing on at Keen, has worked well, and maybe you plan to double down on going into 2021 since the acquisition?

Yeah, I mean, I think I hit on sort of like the ability to experiment with different signup methods. So I think laser focusing on the whole kind of trial and onboarding aspect of the customer lifecycle is something I consider like a growth lever. Try before you buy, right? Matching the market sentiment for how they want to buy. So selling— when Keen was, as an example, when Keen was customer-facing metrics, Meaning I'm a product manager. I want to embed real-time analytics in my, in my platform. Keen can do that. Well, we were selling to product managers. So product managers have a requirement. Oh, I want customer-facing metrics. They go to their CTO. The CTO is like, I don't have time to build this thing. Go find something and buy it. We're selling to a product manager, very different than selling to a senior architect or a developer co-founder, which is, I want to log in. I want to view the documentation. I want a free account that I can actually use in production. And if I need help, I'll let you know, but don't, Mr. SDR, Mrs. SDR, don't call me. I don't like talking to people. I'm oversimplifying, but the point is, so we had to, when we pivoted away from customer-facing metrics towards an event data management tool, competing with the likes of Confluent and some of the AWS tools, We need to have the signup and the onboarding and the sales process match the persona, which is sign up for free, limit my usage based on volume, give me full access to the platform, give me lots of self-service documentation, and go from there. So those are areas that I would highly, you know, you've got to consider, especially as you kind of pivot your Just in terms of—

so I guess you're more or less of the actual kind of top of the funnel, middle of the funnel. Seems like you're more focused on kind of that activation phase of getting people more engaged, right? If that's correct, right?

Yeah, if I understood your question. Yeah, activation is key, right? Signing up for a free trial is one thing, using it is quite another. So I definitely Recommend focusing on building out a model for what an activated trial— if you're, if you're in a trial thing for your business, what is the model you need to build for an activated trial? Meaning, what are the things a potential customer do within the trial that signal purchase intent?

Hmm.

For Keen, it is, I'm actually streaming data in. I can sign up and look at the documentation. If I don't actually send data into the Keen platform, I'm probably not going to buy it because if I'm not willing to go to the trouble of even testing it, why am I going to buy it? Definitely do the analysis and build out a model that you could say, okay, people that come into our platform and do this are low, medium, and high intent to buy, and automate that, whether you're sending it to Intercom or we did that at Assembla. Build out the model based on your observations. Don't build out the model and then hope people do it right. Actually look at who bought and what they did in the trials and build out a scoring model for your trials. Right? Because there's a lot of other aspects too. There's acquisition channel. Your Google PPC might perform way better than Facebook or Instagram ads. Like, we've seen dramatic changes in activation based on Channel. Like Stack Overflow is where developers go. If somebody's interested in Keen from Stack Overflow, they're probably a developer and they're probably gonna sign up and they're probably gonna activate and they're probably gonna buy. If we do like some retargeting and I'm showing you Keen on Instagram, like probably not where developers are shopping. I'm not saying they don't use Instagram, but they're not shopping there. So we're very spendy. A lot of focus, a lot of time on the activation stage, for sure.

Love it. Laith, kind of switching gears here, moving into the rapid-fire questions, a little bit more personal. Starting off, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known and would tell maybe, say, your 25-year-old self who's starting off your kind of entrepreneurial journey?

Oh gosh. Don't do so many stupid things when you're 25 years old. Honestly, I would say you have to spend the time and the effort asking questions, looking for mentors. I think folks underestimate the willingness of people more senior in their careers or people with different skill sets, particularly in the technology industry, willingness to help. And mentor. You've got to take the reins of your career and your life into yourself. Look for people you look up to that you think you can learn a lot from and proactively reach out to them. Hey, I'm really looking to bounce ideas off of you. I'm looking to talk around mentorship. Would you like to go get a cup of coffee? Can I take you out for a cup of coffee or get on a Zoom call during COVID Most of the time, folks are going to be flattered and be like, wow, this person's a go-getter, so ask for help. Find mentors, reach out. And when you network, like, make meaningful connections. Don't just spam people on LinkedIn or like go to the happy hours. Like, make meaningful network connections. I think not only to get business ideas and to grow your business if you're an entrepreneur, but also for your personal development and career development. I think that's key.

Makes sense. And speaking about mentors, you know, who or what would you say are the best 3 resources? It could be books, It could be mentors, it could be people you follow, who you'd say have been instrumental to your success over these last few years?

Yeah, I've definitely gotten more into business books over the last 4 years, particularly since joining Scaleworks. We and Paul Lynch, who's my boss and has also been a mentor, and the team at Scaleworks love certain books. We use book clubs as a means to break through business problems and think about business problems differently during certain inflection points of the business and what So some of the books we've used that I love, that I recommend to everybody, are the Jim Collins books, Good to Great and Built to Last. They're 2 books. They're kind of like sequels. One's a sequel to another, so to speak. Good to Great is incredible when you're struggling with focus for the business, struggling on your category, struggling on what you should really laser focus on. Built to Last, same way, when you're looking at your team and leadership and hiring, what makes a good company built to last is awesome. So I love those 2 books. The other one we preach is Play Bigger. I don't recall the author off the top of my head, but it's a very well-known book. Play Bigger is really focused around category design. I think that when you're talking about mature businesses that are looking to pivot and change, Good to Great is maybe a little bit more applicable. But if you're just starting out or you have a startup, Read Play Bigger. Play Bigger is always about, it's about inventing or creating a category and being a category king, right? You don't have to invent some new technology and like invent a new way to get to the moon and stuff. It's defining a cat— maybe it's an existing product or service, but defining the problem in a different way that makes you unique, right? Having that category. And I think if you're not really like, If you're listening or watching and you're not really familiar with that concept, you're going to start looking around at really, really successful SaaS companies, and a lot of them that have broken out of very competitive spaces reframed the strategy and really invented a category, and that's what caused them to break loose and break free. So Play Bigger is awesome.

Play Bigger. I've never read that book, but I'm going to get that today. We'll add that to the show notes as well for her.

Yeah, Playbigger is awesome. Definitely listen to it or read it.

Definitely will. Leith, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Keen? Meaning, what keeps you up at night these days?

I mean, it sounds cheesy, but the competition, right? And what I mean by that is we're in— when we talk about event data platforms and event data streaming, it's an area of application development and infrastructure that is becoming very mainstream. There's a lot of investment dollars flowing into it. Confluent is a multibillion-dollar valuation company in that space. A company called Aiven, A-I-V-E-N, just raised— I just got on my Crunchbase daily email— just raised a $100 million round, and they do a lot around event data streaming, Apache Kafka, pipelines, which is what Keen does. So, I mean, certainly the amount of focus and investment competitors are getting certainly keeps me up at night, right? And not to say it's an arms race and like more money doesn't mean better service, better product, better, better, better growth, but it gives you some advantages potentially. So certainly that keeps me up at night, just having to keep up with the speed of innovation. I think the other thing is just general business is hiring. finding the right people, getting into the Built to Last and Good to Great books, getting the right people on the bus, getting the right folks on your team that share your vision is actually more important than just having really talented people that know technology really well. So I've seen a massive upward pressure as far as salaries and competitiveness in hiring in the last year, particularly as more and more companies have gone 100% Remote.

Right.

You're now like, your good employees are now, they can now look for jobs in Seattle and Washington and San Francisco. It doesn't matter. Like the universe of companies for every role is now huge. So certainly finding and retaining great people, you know, that fit the culture, have great integrity and great skills, That keeps me up at night for sure.

Absolutely. Yeah, people is always like the number one answer for everybody I know.

Yeah, but really the last year, but the last year it's changed. In fact, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, just posted on LinkedIn today, and this is March 25th when we recorded this, a study that Microsoft did around the dramatic changes in the workplace and hiring that have really happened in the last 12 months. So definitely, definitely check out his LinkedIn.

Yeah, it's interesting where, you know, that remote, uh, kind of option used to be like the differentiator and get people interested to apply, but now it's like, you know, it's a lot harder to, you know, to attract those top guys.

Absolutely.

Yeah, cool. What does success mean to you today, whether that's personally, financially, business, life? There's no right answer, but how do you define success now?

I mean, my life changed dramatically 2 years ago when my wife and I had our first, our first child. So success now to me means Being fulfilled in the personal life as much, if not more, than the business life. Your priorities shift a little bit. You want to be fulfilled in your professional career, and certainly you want the financial stability to live the lifestyle that you want. But to me, it's certainly pivoted more towards having work-life balance and the flexibility to spend time with my family and do things with my friends in a more flexible manner. So that's really what success means to me, having the lifestyle I want to have versus purely money and purely ladder climbing, which I've been guilty of that in the past for sure.

For sure.

Priorities change as your life situation changes.

Yeah, I think that kind of follows suit. You mentioned Jim Collins, and I think he takes that measure in terms of how he measures success each and every day, which is, you know, how much time he spends with loved ones and people, you know, family, friends, and then, you know, being into flow or doing actual work that you enjoy, right? So I think you kind of categorized it.

It's crazy. Just to close that point, my brother, he's the CEO of a publicly traded company, and I talked to him yesterday on the phone, just catching up. He said, I have not been on an airplane In 13 months, and I love it. I don't miss it one bit. He would travel sometimes 2 or 3 times a week, if not every other week, multiple times all over the country and then all over the world. And you get so used to that. You have your clear pass where they scan your retina and you go through security.

Yeah.

I used to be a road warrior, and you get so used to that and you realize how terrible it is to be away from home. home, live your life in airports and Ubers. I think the last— if anything, the last year has taught me and some of my loved ones is, wow, it's great to not travel for work.

Sometimes it's okay. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Anyway.

Love it. Thank you, Lane. This has been great. I appreciate you jumping on the SaaS District show today, sharing all your knowledge. Where can our founders get in touch with you, learn more about you and Keen if they're interested in trying it out as well?

Yeah, I mean, obviously keen.io. You can send me an email, laith@keen.io, or stalk me on LinkedIn and shoot me a message and mention the podcast so I don't delete it and think you're a BDR spamming me on LinkedIn. And happy to connect, happy to chat. I'm always looking to make connections with entrepreneurs.

Cool. Thank you so much, Leith. I appreciate you.

All right. Thanks, Akhil. Have a wonderful day.

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