Peter Ord: Why First Impressions Matter When it Comes to Onboarding #206

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 why first impressions matter when it comes to your onboarding experience. Today we have our guest Peter Ord joining us. Peter is the founder and CEO of a company called GuideCX, which is a leading provider of client onboarding and implementation tools for SaaS companies with a focus on delivering value faster to clients. They offer advanced solutions to help project managers and client success teams invite, guide, and engage their customers. Peter's vision is to empower businesses to create a truly customer-centric onboarding experience that leaves a lasting impression, which is what we'll talk about today. So welcome, Peter. Super excited to have you on the show today.

Thank you for having me. Super, super big fan of the show as well.

Thank you. Thank you. So let's— before we get into the impressions of customer service and why that's important, tell us a little bit about your backstory. When and what inspired you to found your company GuideCX? And how big is your company today? If you can talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. They say the greatest products in the world are built off the founder's greatest frustrations. And this was one of my biggest frustrations, not being kept on the same page after I bought a product or service. both on the delivery side and on the customer side. So at my previous company that I was at, you know, we delivered a product to the automotive space. It was a CRM platform, something that we couldn't just turn on and have our customers use. We had an implementation process with, you know, 100 checklist items that we had to run through to get them live. And involved in that process were, you know, the manufacturer, the website providers, the inventory management tools, you know, a lot of parties involved in the, in the in the process to create a potential win-win between both of our organizations. And I'd get 3 questions throughout the whole process every time we sold our product from our customers. And the first question was, they'd always wonder when they were gonna get the good product or service they bought. You know, we live in a customer consumer world where Amazon tells us when our package is gonna be at our front door. And when it's late, we don't panic because we're told that it's gonna be late. And so unfortunately, in my last job, you know, when we were late, we didn't know we were running late. And so we would be, you know, 2 weeks past what we originally planned, and it wouldn't be our fault because, you know, the website provider didn't send us what we needed, or maybe the, you know, employee on the customer side didn't, you know, they missed a critical task that affected the, you know, critical path. But long story short, right, the modern-day customer expectations are to know when they're gonna get a good product or service. So that was the first question that I always couldn't answer thoughtfully. The second one was, who's responsible for what? So kind of clearly identifying how unrelated parties can work together, the first step is to define responsibilities and enable stakeholders on all sides of the equation to know, you know, what their teams need to do. And in our last job, all that information was in a spider web of emails going back and forth to stakeholders. And so, and then the last question was kind of weird. That was, what did I buy? And lots of times you have stakeholders making decisions to buy a product or service. Like in our case, we had a dealership owner, you know, seeing our product at a trade show. They got excited about it, they bought it. And then we'd get online with their customers, the customer side team, and 9 times out of 10, that stakeholder wasn't on our welcome call. And then also 9 times out of 10, the customer side team had never participated in the sales process, therefore they didn't know what we did. And so that kind of cornered our project management team, our implementation team, and having to resell that product and service all over again throughout that implementation process. And so I went to look for a product that can solve those 3 questions, answer those 3 questions for me, like, when am I going to get the good product or service? Who's responsible for what? And what did I buy? And I couldn't really find anything. Like, we tried using, you know, some generic project management tools. Collaboration kind of seemed to be an afterthought in those tools. It also, you know, when we use those tools, it put a different brand in front of our customers. They didn't know what Kanban boards were. The UI wasn't built for a first-time user. So ultimately that pain got significant enough where I decided to jump ship in 2017 and start this.

Awesome. So it sounds like the first one is really about communication. What I heard is communication, responsibility, and then what did I get from my purchase here? So I like how you— this seems intuitive that this is kind of obvious that this is how a company should operate. I mean, this is a service they provide and how they should live. But then you went and looked for a product. That would solve that. So people don't miss that in their experience, right? And it's kind of built into it, if that's what I'm understanding, right?

Yeah, I kind of compared what happened in the B2C world. Like, I order a pizza on Domino's. I know when to leave my house to get a warm pizza because they notify me when it comes out of the oven. Delta notifies me when my bags board a plane. So when I check in late to a flight, I don't have this anxiety throughout that whole flight experience on whether or not my bag really made it. I think the best companies in the world do things so customers don't have to call them for simple information. And, you know, then you move to the B2B space. If you have a product or service that requires an implementation where there's change management that occurs, lots of times you're at the mercy of a project manager to keep you on the same page. And we all know project managers are just slammed. And, you know, if communication falters, then trust starts to disappear, and then that affects the anxiety of your customers that ultimately, you know, increases. And then you find yourself kind of losing the renewal in the first 30 days of that customer experiment. So it's— yeah, you're exactly right. I think, you know, I think the modern-day expectations of a customer have changed substantially in the last 10 years, where it's no longer okay just to send them a status email once a week. People want to know exactly what's happening in a process, how that affects the delivery date, if their people are fulfilling their side of the responsibility so that they can help. Like, at the end of the day, people just want to help. And that's our mission, right? We help people work better together.

Yeah, that's a really good point. So you started in 2017, so now almost 5, 6 years into it, how big is your company today? And then have you guys raised any external capital? Are you guys fully bootstrapped?

Yeah, so we're kind of low 8 figures ARR, Mark. We have about 100 employees. We've raised about $40 million. Our last round of funding was Series B with Maritech Capital.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So kind of going to the next steps of understanding, when it comes to the first steps, let's go start very basics. What are kind of the first steps of, you know, customer experience? And if I'm a SaaS company, why is this so important to me to make sure, you know, we talked a little bit about this, but we want to improve our efficiency, we want to improve the experience. How do we kind of take those first steps?

Yeah, so I call ourselves a great technology company, but I really think we're a better consulting company. We aren't a pro-serve company. 100% of our revenue is SaaS, but we really do, like, of the 100 employees that we have in our company, I think it's safe to say that the majority of those employees have experienced the problem that we're solving, right? The anxiety that's created when you're sold a product or service, even outside of SaaS. Like if you buy a home and go through that process of getting funded on a loan, there are times where you don't know what's going on. You don't know that the appraiser needs to go to the house to appraise the home, and you might be blaming the broker that you're dealing with. And so just not having visibility in how the pieces of the puzzle fit together is a big frustration that a lot of our employees have had. And so we get on the phone with our new customers and we guide them through these best practices. We have over 500,000 projects that have run through our tool. Since inception, and there, there's some, you know, commonalities of how to productize your implementation experience. I'll give you one example of how you can create a ton of efficiency. Lots of times companies will, you know, roll onto our tool and we kind of force a conversation to help them understand what personas are required on the customer side to be successful. So like if you're delivering a product or service and you require like 4 skill sets on the customer side, lots of times companies, the providing companies will leave it up to the customer side to kind of define or figure out like who they need to involve on their side.

Mm-hmm.

Where with GuideCX, right, you can do this manually, but technology ultimately creates efficiency behind good manual processes. GuideCX kind of forces that conversation and helps the customer side of the fence understand, all right, these are the 4 personas we need, right? We need someone who can model data, someone who can, you know, who has access to maybe your DNS settings in your website, someone who can, you know, you go down the whole gamut, right? But ultimately you're defining these personas. And then you hold the stakeholder on the customer side accountable to inviting those specific individuals on the customer side to that project experience. And, you know, and then GuideCX has deliverables that are auto-assigned to that persona based on, you know, how our customers build that template process in GuideCX. So, and then there's some tons of cool things you can do after the fact. You can identify like, what is my engagement by persona? You know, how, what percentage of the time do I assign this task to my customer? Is it overdue across 400 projects? Like you can start to define bottlenecks and accelerators in your process, and that ultimately increases your time to value and increases efficiency. And we do that with making data actionable at the end of the day.

So that's an interesting one. I never heard that engagement by persona. What are you guys tracking there? We'll go deeper into kind of some setting KPIs and understanding the data a little bit more, but maybe just on that one there, can you talk a little bit more? What is engagement you're looking for? How fast are they You know, on top of it and responding? How active are they or how do you kind of look at that?

Yeah, so we have a white-labeled customer portal that unrelated parties can access to see kind of what's happening in an experience. One example would be you have a stakeholder, right? The decision maker, the person that's going to ultimately decide whether or not you get paid. In an environment without a client onboarding tool, that person oftentimes gets forgotten. It's happened to me. Like, we've bought probably 30 technology solutions here at GuideCX over the last 5 years. And we're going through one right now where I just got an invoice for a product that we purchased. I then had to call 2, maybe 3 different people on my team to figure out, hey, are we getting value out of this product? And like, should we pay this? And one person didn't really know the answer because they were kind of just kind of on the peripheral. Another person said, no, we're not live yet. I'm like, well, when will we be live? I don't know. These are the items that need to happen. And so then all of a sudden I start thinking, well, I was sold the Ritz-Carlton experience and now I'm being delivered a Motel 6 experience. And then I'm being asked to pay top dollar. We pay our bills. But at the end of the day, like to your question, the persona, like tracking the engagement from the stakeholder, things that you can do is how many times did they view the onboarding like that? I call it the pizza tracker, like a B2B pizza tracker. How many times do they go in and see, you know, what's happening in the experience? Do they open the emails? that are sent to them, and our customers can decide how often those emails are sent to stakeholders. But ultimately, like, those emails thoughtfully help them understand whether their team is or is not doing the things we need them to do. So if they have overdue tasks, right, the stakeholder is going to be notified, and that then creates a ton of intrinsic accountability because now, like, it just takes one call from the stakeholder to their employee to say, hey, like, we bought this product or service, I approved the budget, but you're not engaging with them. And now that they know the stakeholder sees that, there's lots of accountability. And that even extends to partners, right? Like third parties that are involved in implementation experience. At my last company, a big challenge was we'd often, like, us providing a service to a car dealer, that we would need the website provider to do X, Y, and Z. They didn't do it. That then extended out the launch date. The dealer would then blame us because the website provider blamed us. And so we would have no thoughtful way to tell the dealer that no, the website provider is the bad guy in this equation. And so like, we, I call it the scoreboard view, right? Like it just shows who did what, when they did it, and whether or not they did it on time. That's ultimately the data that if you can engage the stakeholder on that level and help them get access to that information easily without ever having to log into a solution, maybe they just want it in their email, right, through like an email digest of what happened in a given timeframe. That just, that accelerates the the project experience. So like it creates a ton of intensity around the experience because everyone knows that like, okay, wow, like everyone else sees what part I'm playing.

Right. It's just very objective at that point. It's just visibility. This is, you know, you agreed to this, I agreed to this. What's going on? Right. There's no like hard conversation. Like we listed this out together. Let's just get this done. Right. So then everybody's kind of focused on the same, on a single vision. So when it comes to setting up those KPIs, right, from a SaaS company, I'm building this out for my customer success team. What are some of the most important metrics, goals, KPIs that I want to look at while building and maintaining my company? What am I looking at as important ones?

Yeah, I think like there's 2 metrics that will always tell you whether or not you're doing well, right? I think if you onboard a customer quickly, efficiently and get them value to value fast, they're going to expand more, right? They're going to, you know, they're going to be more prepared to use your solution and be a rockstar user, and they're going to be engaging you to expand their use case sooner. They're also, if you don't do that well, they're going to churn faster, or you're going to see indications of churn. And so I think the 2 metrics that you'll see this impact the most Are like net revenue retention as it correlates to how fast you can expand your customers and gross retention, right? You're winning that renewal in the first 30 days of the customer experience. So having a, you know, first impressions matter. Having a great first impression is going to not only affect the long-term trajectory of the customer, but it's gonna affect how the renewal happens. I think, you know, today more than any other day, you're getting on the phone with these customers that are renewing. And if they didn't have a great experience, let's say they don't churn, but they're asking for discounts. If they don't think you're worth your value, they're saying, hey, listen, like, we had a tough first year. We didn't get the value fast enough. Like, can I get 30% off your fee? If I can't do that, I'm leaving. And so even if it doesn't show up in, like, churn, it's gonna show up in that revenue retention as it correlates to them not renewing for the full contract amount or even greater than that full contract amount.

Yeah, those are super important metrics. Even us at Horizon Capital or any investor, as you know, I mean, net revenue retention, churn, I mean, this is the thing that you have to be paying attention to. And I think people maybe always, from my understanding, the customer experience is probably underestimated. People underestimate the power of what it has on how much impact it can have to drive that number up. So I'm assuming you guys have that. If you guys are at 8 figures, have already raised a Series B, you guys probably have that locked down. I'm assuming you're using your— eating your own dog food, so to speak. So I'm assuming your customer experience is great and your numbers reflect that.

Yeah, we're perfect. We have no problems.

Yeah, perfect. You guys just keep perfecting it by the day.

Every company has challenges. My favorite metric to manage the business is net revenue retention because I think it's the biggest indicator of product market fit.

Right.

And, and so that's something we focus a lot on.

Yeah. So when it comes to some of the— maybe can you speak a little bit some of the latest customer experience trends that are happening or technologies to keep, to keep an eye on and, you know, going into, you know, this year, 2023, either on, you know, on the investment side or if somebody is looking to maybe who's listening in, looking to invest in a new startup or found a new startup in this space, is there things you see opportunities in? Because this is changing rapidly. I think like what people expected for customer experience, you know, 5 years ago in SaaS is totally different than it is today, right?

Yeah. Yeah. There's so many ways to make money. Yeah, for sure. I mean, ultimately it comes from my journey, right? You identify a problem, you make sure that a lot of people are experiencing that same problem and you build a product to solve it and then you just iterate on that experience. Moving back a step, I'm really I'm passionate, obviously, about the customer experience side of technology. I think in a world where there's so many products being built, technology and services are becoming more and more commoditized. And so the customer experience becomes your primary differentiator. And that's what sets you aside from the pack. One of the quotes we have up in our office that we've had up since the start is the quote from Frederick Wallace, who's the founder of FedEx. And he says the information about the package is more important than the package itself. And if you think about, like, I kind of paused there, but it said the information about the package is more important than the package itself. Like, FedEx was competing with the United States Postal Service, who arguably had, like, an unlimited bank account, right? And the only way FedEx could compete with USPS back in the day was, you know, being more transparent about the package, right? And helping them understand where the package was in the journey and when they were going to get that package. And that's why people spent more money with FedEx than they did with USPS. And I think that same analogy can play out in the technology space. Like, people I mean, it happened. So kind of quick story. My brother, this was like a euphoric moment for me. He lives in Texas, works for a company. He says, hey, I just hired this individual who's gonna be in charge of our digital marketing. He told me he wanted to buy this product and service that he implemented at his last company. And I asked him, well, tell me about the product service. He goes, well, I actually didn't use it that long. I know what they do, but they treated me incredible during the implementation experience. And my brother's like, ah, tell me more about that. Like, what happened? He goes, well, they used this product called GuideCX. And my brother's like, well, like, my brother started that company.

Wow.

And he goes, but ultimately that's why he wanted to buy that product at his new company that he just joined, which was, you know, my brother's company. And that's like, so the loyalty was won within like 2 months. He hadn't used this product for a long time and he brought that product into his next company. And so I think the customer experience world, any product or service that kind of comes into this space and optimizes communication, which ultimately optimizes engagement, which ultimately increases the trust of your customer and reduces the anxiety of your customers. I mean, those are the customers that are going to be evangelical about your product. So I think there's a lot of products that are doing that across a variety of different industries.

Yeah, there's tons. I mean, I see— I don't know if it's just me in my head that I see these opportunities everywhere I go, but I mean, if you look at, you know, like you mentioned FedEx and USPS, but I also look at, for example, Amazon, right? So, you know, the boxes in themselves, right? We always get like brown basic boxes that appear in our door. But I mean, hey, there's birthday gifts, there's all these other things where people want maybe You know, like, I think of my daughter. If I send her a gift, like, I want her a nice, you know, the, the box itself, you know, she gets more excited if the box is all colorful and something, right? So if there was a way to customize that, I mean, there's a big opportunity there. I mean, Amazon just needs to, like, have custom boxes, and I think there's billions.

They'll get there. I'm confident of it.

Yeah. If anybody listening in, I think that's a great idea. Um, so, so Brian Chesky, I think it was, I heard on a podcast, uh, the founder of Airbnb, you know, talks about, like, the 4-star experience, the 5-star experience, the 6-star, then he kind of tries to describe in your mind different levels of experiences. I'm kind of curious, can you share kind of some of your steps that you attributed to some of the early successes of how you came up with the GuideCX and how you implemented some of those higher-end customer experiences into your building of your product?

Yeah. So I think we We eat our own dog food or drink our own champagne. You said it earlier. And we're obviously trying to do the same thing our customers are doing with our own product. And that involves iterating on your onboarding experience. People like a custom onboarding experience creates a customer for life. And so while you want to productize your onboarding experience, you want to create moments within that experience to help customers feel like Well, this is for me. This, although it might be a repetitive experience that I know this company's guiding me through over and over, there needs to be moments where the customer feels like we're really catering to their needs, their goals, their aspirations. Like, customers buy product with a dream in mind, and the implementation should be all about making that dream come true. And that can't happen if you don't know what what version of the dream they have, they had envisioned. So through using our product, we're able to identify like, well, how do we go from a 90-day implementation experience to a 14-day? And that's what we've done, right? We've taken our 90-day process and now our average duration to launch customers is 14 days. And you can only do that through analyzing kind of, hey, what were your roadblocks throughout this experience? We're on probably our like 60th version of our, of our onboarding experience. You know, what integrations can we optimize to help the customer feel more at home with us? So for instance, one of the integrations we have in place, we use a product called Intercom to handle incoming chats, support chats on our, on our product. A big challenge we had early on was like customers would start using our product, they were still in the onboarding experience, But they chat in a question and then the onboarding manager would have no idea that they were working with support. Well, now through— we have an embedded iPaaS solution that we call a recipe builder. Now we create a connection that says anytime an Intercom chat comes in with a customer that's an active onboarding project, notify through the project, through the work notes that your customer just chatted in and this is— this was the This was the communication that happened. And that helps us have that kind of world-class experience of the onboarding manager saying, hey, I just noticed you chatted into our product a couple hours ago. Did you get all your questions answered? And when you do that, people know you care. They know that, like, like I know Delta cares about me because they notified me when my bag was on the plane. And I think about all the calls they probably got through their support center about customers that were worried about their bags not making it because they might have had a tight connection or they checked in late. And so Delta shows their customers they care by automating a transparent process to help their consumers know that, hey, there's no need to worry. We're going to let you know that your bag got on the plane.

So it sounds like you have to be a little bit more proactive in trying to understand what are potential areas where this person can start worrying or stress or have any block, right? I think when I buy something, I don't want to have to think or have to worry about it. It's like, I'm giving you money, so I don't have to worry. If I wanted to worry, I would do it myself, right? But now I'm paying you, so I don't have to think and I don't need to worry. I just want this to be a pleasant experience and I get to my end Result. But I think as on the other side, it's more of like, okay, what are things that could go wrong? And then being proactive in them so that, hey, as long as you communicate it, like you said, right? It's not about being late, it's just communicating it and letting the people know, okay, we're going to be late on this project. And people are usually pretty understanding as long as you let them know ahead of time, right?

Yeah. And then that becomes part of your brand. Like, you're going to show, like, the Amazon package tracker is part of Amazon's brand. Like a lot of our customers, they showcase, we white label our product to our customer's brand, but there's some discrete GuideCX branding, but they show the GuideCX work plan of like, hey, this is how we treat you after you buy our product. This is the post-sales experience. If there's a challenge, like this is how we handle it. And so, yeah, you're exactly right.

Yeah. Last question before we get into the personal rapid-fire questions, Peter. Any last kind of practical advice you'd give to entrepreneurs who are maybe looking to scale their SaaS startup? I mean, you're pretty far ahead in your journey. Any advice you'd give to some earlier stage founders?

Yeah, I guess just 2 words come to mind, and my father gave me this advice all throughout life. He's a good father. Perseverance and perspective. I think from a perspective standpoint, like it's never as bad as it seems. It's never, it's also never as good as it seems. You know, having gone through, in my experience, like we dealt with a trademark infringement, like in our first year, we then had the pandemic, then we had the recession, and then we had inflation, then we just had a bank run. Like there are—

It's going to keep coming, don't worry.

Yeah, it's, that's life. Like that's the market. Like you're never going to have a perfect market to deal with. And so it's important to have good perspective. From a perseverance standpoint, like, I love the quote from Woody Allen, which is, 80% of life is showing up. And so show up. Like, if you don't show up, like, you're gonna rob yourself of a learning experience. And so I think, you know, our version of showing up is like, we don't, I mean, we deliver products without bugs. To, you know, that's a core goal of ours, but we try not to let perfection paralyze us. Like, a product doesn't have to be fully baked in order to get it out in the wild. The sooner we get it out in the wild, the sooner we're gonna get feedback, and then that means we're gonna build a feature or function in our product that's more specific to the needs of our customer. And so we can't be arrogant enough to think that We know exactly what our customers want. And so our version of showing up is, hey, let's get things in their hands as soon as possible so we can iterate and help them get value that much faster.

Was that kind of your core kind of initial when you first launched the business? Was it, you know, let's just get this out there as quickly as possible? Or did you have any kind of, you know, growth strategies that maybe you can share quickly?

Yeah. So there's 3 books I read that kind of affected my thought process on how to start this. One is called The Mom Test. That's like, don't ask your mom for feedback. She'll always lie to you if she's anything like my mom. She'll say you're amazing no matter what you're acting like in the moment. Me too. Yeah. The other is The User Method. That's like the Henry Ford example. Like, that's the opposite of what you just said. Like, it's, hey, rely on your own intuition, build the automobile. Right? Don't build the, the chariot that can handle more horses. And then the last one is the most popular one, Lean Startup. That's, you know, like, hey, build what will fly. Don't, don't try to build a rocket ship. So triangulating the theories of all 3 of those, those books, that's, that's kind of how I based my methodology with leaning more towards getting things in the wild faster. I bootstrapped for the first 18 months. I think a lot of that was more due to ignorance than strategy. Just me being a little stubborn, thinking that like, hey, let me get to $1 million of ARR first before I take external funds. And if I were to do it over again, I would have taken money a lot sooner knowing how great our investors are and our partners are. But yeah, like that in the early stages, right? Since it was my own money, it forced me to be really picky about what we put in the product early on. And it also, like, I think ultimately ended up being good because money didn't cloud judgment. Like, sometimes when you get too much money, like, you end up making decisions just because you can. And when you have limited funds, you have to kind of be super scientific about what you— what your decisions are. Yeah, yeah.

Working within the constraints itself. Yeah. Awesome, Peter. Ready for the rapid-fire questions?

Yeah, let's do this.

All right. What's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into flow state?

I love hiking, specifically summiting mountains. I'm not one that will ever summit Everest. I think that's nuts. But, but here living in Utah, we have a lot of cool peaks that we've hiked. We have kind of a little group in our company that has a goal to summit a peak once a year. And so we did Kings Peak last year. That's a 14,000-foot peak. But yeah, getting out in nature, like that clears my lens.

Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, I figured you'd say that being in Salt Lake. I mean, you can't live there and not enjoy that.

Yeah, that's incredible.

What's one piece of advice? I know you shared advice kind of going back to your early stages of a SaaS company, but maybe before that, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known if you can go back to say your 20 or 25-year-old self?

Um, yeah, everything will be all right. Um, I, uh, I have 4 girls, um, and, uh, so I'm a girl dad, and, and that's one thing I try to, you know, help them understand. No matter what happens in their life, like, it all works out in the end. Um, and, uh, having that optimistic attitude— I, I think optimism unlocks human potential. It helps you be more open-minded and more receptive to ideas. And so, you know, early on when you're 20, you feel like the whole world's in front of you and it's a huge weight on your shoulder. And I think everything will be all right in the end.

Love it. Peter, what are some of the biggest challenges you guys are currently facing in order to continue to grow and scale GuideCX today? Meaning, What's keeping you up at night these days?

Yeah, impatience. We're creating a category which requires more patience than sometimes I have. And that means that, you know, our product, like if my product would've existed at my last company, I would've bought it. Unfortunately, there wasn't a client onboarding category that, you know, you had, you know, specific verticalized solutions for SDRs, for CSMs, for accounting departments. But then when you looked at the implementation manager's role, like they were relegated to generic project management. And so like getting megaphones outside of our office, letting the whole world know that products like ours exist, that's what keeps me up at night because we don't get on the phone with customers and share our value prop and we never hear, I 100% disagree with that. that communication and transparency will help customer experiences. Like, it's— everyone agrees with the premise and everyone seems to have, you know, a version of this problem that we're solving. And so, but the market has to catch up. Like, we, you know, more, more competitors have to come into our space, more funds have to be raised in this space that creates more awareness. And I think we're like, we're just bubbling up, right? Client onboarding space is It's happening, but it'll never happen fast enough for me. So that's—

That's what you're saying. Hurry up, market. So we're waiting. We're ready to go.

Yeah. And that requires like discipline on our side, right? It requires us to have it like sing in tune as a choir, like have a good message to the market and know what the market wants to hear. So we probably have a lot of work to do on that side as well.

Cool. Peter, who are— what are some of the best 3 resources? I know you mentioned 3 books already, but maybe people mentors or people you follow in the space who you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years?

Yeah, so I love podcasts. Guy Raz on NPR, like, he's super inspiring. More so the founders that come onto that show give me a ton of courage to not be afraid to fail. And then I'd also say our investors, those that back us, you know, Diego Mira, Rob Ruckert, Diogo with Album, Rob at Sorenson, Paul Madera at Meritech. And then, you know, we have, you know, other board members as well. Greg Reynolds and Jonathan Ward, my brother, founder of our previous company. It's just like when you have Kristen Hobach, former Trello exec, now on our tool, on our board, like when you have a board that's so supportive and, you know, interested in not only just the business but like your well-being. That matters and it enables you to be more aggressive and not be consumed around what other people think of you, knowing that there's, there's a high level of confidence that, that they have of you. So that— yeah. Yeah, yeah.

They become your support system and keep you, keep you going. That's awesome. Peter, what does success mean to you today, whether personally, business, financial, life? I guess there's no right answer.

Yeah, I think there comes a point in everyone's career where success stops becoming the primary motivator and being significant matters more. And that's very much the camp I come in. Like, I was fortunate enough to be a part of a previous company that was phenomenally successful, got acquired, got to do a lot of cool things in that company, and it set me up to, you know, take a huge risk starting another company like this. But, you know, my motivation is to be more significant, change the way people work together, help not only our customers be better at their jobs, but be a good steward of our employees and kind of how they learn. And, you know, I was part of an organization where I was the 20th employee, and then when I left, there was over 2,000 employees. I think of the growth that I had, like that's something I just want to duplicate because there's, you know, that shaped who I was in a lot of cases. And that to me has been significant.

Right.

Love it.

Well, thank you, Peter. This has been a, this has been a great show. I appreciate all the nuggets you've been sharing. I think, you know, our members and audience are going to get a lot of value from it. But, you know, for founders or, you know, anyone listening in, where is the best way to get in touch with you, learn more about you, or if they want to learn more about your company and try it out?

Yeah, I'm active on social media. I'm also always looking at my email, peter@guidecx.com. My LinkedIn profile is Peter Ord. Twitter is @builtordtough. So it's— yeah, feel free to reach out to me in any medium.

Okay, awesome. We'll add those links to the show notes, so make sure you guys check it out and make sure to say hi to Peter. All right, thank you so much, Peter. Appreciate it.

Thank you. This is awesome.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below. and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.

Bye.