Taking SaaS Next Level

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight. We are very excited to host you here at our offices here in Glendale, taking in the beautiful view in Hillside. Sorry, you guys, you picked the wrong side. You can still move if you want to, but we have a great panel of speakers to speak to you tonight on a variety of different topics. But first, I'm going to hand it off to our co founder and president, Bahe.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Service Titan. Today we're going to talk about some stuff about how we got started and what we do. So we're happy to have you guys here and happy to support Glendale Techy.

So with that, I'll kick it off the bunch.

We go with the flow here. So we are very excited to talk to you about a few different things. But first want to make sure you guys know who these people are who are up here speaking to you. So we'll start with myself. I'm Christina Casey. I'm the director of employee experience here at ServiceTitan. So I lead the HR team and our functions and previously I worked at Westfield, the shopping mall company. But prior to that I worked at a startup in ad tech called Market Chair that was based on the west side as an HR business partner. And a fun fact about me is I am super competitive. I know not always what you would expect, but with two older brothers and like 30 first cousins and being the youngest of all of them, you really learn how to hold your own and you never like losing. So in terms of what we're going to be talking about, in terms of how to take SAS just to the next level, even beyond what SAS means itself. Vach will walk you through our customer impact, Darren will walk you through product, and Rafi will walk you through our talent strategy to give you insight into how it all comes together. But first, we're going to give you a little bit of insight about Service Titan. In case you don't know who we are, what we're about and how we started.

To understand Service Titan, you have to understand Vahe and I and where we came from.

So when I was six years old, my dad decided that we had a better chance at a good life. We moved to the US and picked up the whole crew and just came over here. No job, no money, didn't speak the language at all.

So I came here when I was one year old and my father is a residential contractor.

He worked a lot of odd jobs.

When we first got here. Ended up working as a plumber.

Growing up, we would watch them head out at the crack of dawn and go out there in a biting cold and scorching heat every day, break their backs and put food on the table at some. When Vi and I grew up and graduated from USC and Stanford, our fathers asked us to find them some kind of software to help better manage their growing companies.

I started looking around and when I saw that there really wasn't something worth recommending to my dad, I decided to build it myself. For the first five, six years, it was just me and Ara in a room, programming away.

They started from my garage. Actually.

ServiceTime is meant to be a one stop shop for our customers. And it's a platform that is meant to run from start to finish the entire operations of a home service business.

When a customer calls a company, the CSRs that are answering the phone call are able to pick up the phone and see all the customer's information right there on the screen in front of them. They're able to review all the previous times that that company has been out.

There to service the customer. All the notes dispatchers get to see where everybody is on a map. So they get the closest guy to the closest job on time.

And that technician is able to provide a much more compelling service experience.

The technicians get to have iPads where they can take pictures, they can show product catalogs, they can go through auctions with the customer, do paperless invoicing. We've shown that there is a huge opportunity to improve business performance. I can see how my marketing is.

Doing, how my CSRs, the people that.

Answer my phone are doing.

You can get a report on your technicians, how they're pacing, their conversion rates, and that's really, really important.

And the best thing about it, that.

It'S like two, three clicks away.

So the dashboard, I like to call it my investment portfolio. I invest so much time in my company, I invest so much money in marketing.

So when I look at that, I.

Say, okay, my time and my investment.

Is paying off today. It has dramatically increased our revenue.

So on the service site dispatch board, you have a ton of information and it's really easy to digest. The reports are awesome. You just put in the date range and it's there. If I see like a tech that did really well yesterday, I can go high five him in the warehouse before his day starts. It's all automated, it's easy, it's amazing. It works perfect for me.

He was the original customer that it was designed for. So it's very satisfying to see my dad actually using software, which I didn't think was possible.

When our Customers are successful, we're successful.

So with that, and now I actually will hand it off to Vaj who will talk through our customer support and success team.

Thank you and hello everybody. Thank you. My name is Vaj Hopesepian. I head up customer success here at Service site and I've been here a little over three years. My journey is I was at consulting PwC Consulting, doing a bunch of boring stuff for banks and financial institutions and then prior to that I was at JP Morgan. Actually this is my first startup. So personally went through a very interesting journey and can very confidently and comfortably say it's been the highlight of my career, hands down thus far. So happy to talk to anybody who is thinking about transitioning into a startup and has reservations because I did myself plenty. But again, from day one it's been, it's been an amazing journey and haven't looked back since. So in terms of the time that I want to spend with you all Today, the next 10, 15 minutes, I want to talk to you a little bit about how our team is structured, specifically our customer success organization, how it's structured and how we think about our relationship with our customers and how we position customer success as a differentiating factor for us as it relates to operating in a SaaS environment. So I'll start with the team and how we're organized. So if you think about Service Titan and it's so interesting, that video was shot I think about two years ago. Since then we have added at least six very complex modules. And at this point Service Titan is a full for suit of, you can think of it as an ERP end to end operating software. So in terms of what it takes to actually get value out of Service Titan, it's actually quite a bit of work both on the customer's end and our end. So we have organized our team around the customer journey and to make sure that every step of the way we have the right people involved with the right level of skill set that can set the customer up for success. So if you look at kind of the customer journey, what happens is when they sign up with us, the first thing they need to do is implement the software. So we have a team of what we call client onboarding. So in that team we have project managers, essentially folks who understand the software, understand the business and also have a traditional software management experience to where they can work with the customer, make sure that they're staying on track, that they're completing their tasks and also internally making sure that any sort of technical stuff that's that Needs to be done for that project to be successful is also done on time. So that's our client onboarding team. And we segment the team based on the complexity of the implementation. And so we bucket our customers into various different cohorts. And then next we have our professional services team. So this is much more technical. So that team essentially supports the client onboarding team in that implementation process. In that team we have data engineers, we have telecom experts, we have accounting integration specialists, and we have technical training experts as well. So if you're thinking about roles and where you may potentially fit, those two are essentially the beginning end of the journey of the customer journey that those teams support. And then moving from there. We have technical support, essentially end user support. So if our customers don't know how to do something or if they come across something they think is a bug or the system is not functioning as intended, they can reach out to our customer support team. We have obviously tier one, tier two, and we also have specialists in that team. Our customers can reach us via a chat. It's about to say slack, not yet, but they can reach out to us via chat from our software. They can call us and they can email us the three channels via which they can reach us. Interesting thing about that team is we are kind of positioning that team as our internal incubator for talent. So that's kind of the entry level role in our organization, the customer success organization. We typically look for two to three years out of college with some software experience. But most importantly, we're looking for people who are passionate, who have high level of grit and determination and then we develop them into various different roles that then feeds into some of the departments within customer success. Next team is our success management team. These are folks that partner with customers post implementation to make sure that our customers are getting the most value out of our software. So these are the trusted advisors that work with our customers. Similar to our client onboarding team, that team is structured by cohort. A lot of fun. That team has a lot of fun. The leader of that team is here, John. He's standing right over there if you want to talk to him. He can certainly give you some more context there. Yeah, hands down. And then last but not least, we have our small operations team that essentially is charged with building the operational platform for our success, for our CS organization to be successful. In that team we have reporting responsibilities, process systems and overall performance management. So this is, at one glance, this is kind of how our team is organized. So going forward. Oh yeah, I got to talk A little bit about our team culture. So we're certainly a work hard, play hard team. We interact with our customers. So the relationship aspect is very important. So what we look for in our people is tremendous passion about what we do, which I think is very core to our culture. And I always tell our new employees, if you're not passionate about what we do here, if you can't find that passion in you, it's going to be very difficult for you to be successful here because we set a very high bar for our employees. But then the flip side of it is you get tremendous opportunity for growth given our hyper growth environment. And also you get to have a lot of fun. Because we've grown so fast, part of our culture has become kind of this notion of leaning on each other and the team, particularly in the CS side and across the company, that's kind of become part of who we are. So when we have a new team member, the team kind of crawls together, make sure that that person gets to the point that they need to get as quickly as possible because they all need that person to catch up so we can as a team accomplish our goals. So this year actually we did our first, we called it customer success outing. We did one here and one in Atlanta, which is our largest presence outside of Glendales, in Atlanta on the csi. So rented a boat, had a lot of fun and then Atlanta went to a golf event, which I can't play golf, but it was a lot of fun. There was some drinking. So anyway, work hard, play hard is kind of how we like to think about ourselves in terms of the customer journey. Obviously there are a lot of steps that are required for us to get to success with our customers. But at a very high level. Somebody purchases our software, they go through the onboarding process. As I explained from a client onboarding perspective, this is typically where most of the heavy lifting is done and where kind of the faith of that relationship is really rooted. Because if we do a really good job of transitioning our customers to our software, then the likelihood of them, one, seeing a lot of value from our software and two, becoming an evangelist for us, where they're referring their friends, they're doing testimonials, et cetera, is much, much higher. We have a lot of data that shows if our customers go through implementation successfully, then their long term success with us exponentially increases and then the handoff to our success team. Success team is really focused on adoption customer and then focus on client outcomes. The adoption piece is actually really interesting. I want to spend A few more minutes after the slide to tell you guys a little bit about what we've done with partnering with product to make sure that we keep the focus on adoption, because we view that as a very important part of our relationship with our clients. And then finally, our goal is to get every customer to an evangelist, to where they're constantly talking about us, to their friends, to the associations that they're members of, et cetera. So if you look at our sales overall, our sales pipeline, and specifically in our industry, it's pretty much no one buys software without talking to someone that they know and they trust. So that piece is very, very, very important to us in terms of Titan Score. So this is adoption wise. So this is about a year and a half ago where I partnered up with a couple folks on our product side and I said, okay, what can we do to make sure that our customers know how much of our software they're using? Which, if you think about it, is counterintuitive to our kind of balance sheet, because the more of the software they use, the more expensive it is for us to service them. But that's not how we think about it, right? We think about it as the more of the software our customers use, the more successful they are, the more likely they are to become an evangelist. And I think this is something that differentiates us from both our competition and generally the SaaS market. So we came up with this concept that we're calling Titan Score. Essentially what it does is it gives the owner and anyone in the office really, a full visibility to how much of our software they're using. And then you can break that up into seeing your usage in various different modules. So it doesn't just give you an overall score, but it also gives you a breakdown of how much of the software using in each module. So you can essentially pick which business process you want to dig into, and then you can see what percentage of the capabilities that the software offers you are actually adopting. And it's not just adoption in terms of, oh, it's turned on, it's adoption in terms of how consistently are you using that feature. Because in our industry, there are certain things that we can help our business owners or our clients monitor in terms of making sure that there's compliance. And so we've built all of that into the Titan Score. So this actually we presented Titan Score at a Pulse conference called Pulse, which is put together by Gainsight for customer success. And we won first place in terms of being the most innovative solution as it relates to partnering with product team to drive results for our customers. So we feel very, very proud of this. And it also gives you trends. So for example, if you're working on your Titan score and you see a dip somewhere, that gives you an opportunity to dig in and see what's going on. Because oftentimes it could be that the consistency is not being there. And so that gives you an opportunity to go and dig in and do behavior changes as needed. So with that, I want to also just briefly talk about kind of what does this all mean? Right. So we think, like I said, we think about customer success as not just a cost center, which is how a lot of companies approach it, but also as an engine that can fuel our customer acquisition team. So our marketing, our business development, our sales teams, and thus far we've seen really great results in that. So overall, these are some of the most common matrix that SaaS companies measure as it relates to customer success. So in terms of our overall customer satisfaction score, we're at roughly about 94. This is around technical support happiness in terms of NPS. So we actually measure NPS throughout the customer journey. So I talked a little bit about the importance of the onboarding process. So at the end of the onboarding process, we ask our customers how we're doing, not in just overall mps, but also in every single area that we touch, such as phone porting, accounting or, or data import, for example. And so our overall score there is roughly kind of hovers around mid-60s. Our customers, this big bubble here, this is the most, I think, interesting one because our customers on average see roughly about 22% increase year over year when they use our product and what we do, the way we come up with this number is we take similar companies in the industry and we compare performance of companies who are using Service Titan versus companies who are not. So this is actually well informed data point. The other thing that's really important and interesting is we see a direct correlation between their adoption score and the increase in revenue that they're seeing. So roughly every 10 points in your Adoption Titan score correlates with 5% increase, which really gives us a lot to stand on when we're talking about our customers in terms of the value that we're delivering in that the more of our software they use, the more success they see. Which is in my opinion, really, really important because pretty much with a data point we can prove the value that we're delivering to our customers. And then our overall NPS score is around 40s, mid-40s. This is an area where We've gone up and down. We're certainly our targets are much higher, but we've also taken on, you know, a lot of new customers this year. So it's kind of waved a little bit, but this is. This is an area we're laser focused on. And then finally, this. This number here, churn, just a very common matrix in SaaS. So first off, our net revenue or net retention is actually positive. So year over year, our entire customer base actually grows, which is fascinating because, again, it goes back to the success that they're seeing with our product. And our overall annual churn is less than 3%. Just to give you guys a sense, kind of the industry average. SaaS. Industry average hovers around 10%. 10, 15%. That's actually considered pretty good. So when it comes to churn, we're definitely best in class. And part of it is because we spend so much time and energy during the implementation, like I said, because every data point that we look at shows us there's a direct correlation there. So I think. Yeah. And then in terms of our business model, I talked a little bit about this already, but we really believe in the partnership with our clients. And when it comes to customer success, we view that as an investment in our customer success and our own success, as opposed to viewing it as a cost center. So if you look at our headcount overall, we have consistently been roughly about 30 to 35% of overall headcount, which is a lot in the CS world. But again, the reason we're able to do that is, one, our founders get it, and so we're very fortunate to have that support. But two, we're able to actually show the value that customer success can bring to the business as a whole. Not just customer success, but to the business as a whole. So I think that's a wrap for me. I am going to be around after, and I think we're going to have a Q and A. So feel free to shoot any questions. And afterwards, I'm more than happy to talk about my own personal journey, as well as any questions you may have about any of the roles. So thank you so much.

All right, moving along. Thanks to you. That sat in the front, all of you in the back. I can barely see you. You're so far away. There's like this invisible barrier. I'm Darren. I'm the VP of Engineering at Service Titan. I've been here about five months, so I'm kind of the new kid on the block, but I'm coming up to speed with all the processes and things that are happening here. And before that I worked in video games for about 14 years. And you know, you know, Service Titan is a special place that got me to put the controller down and come work on software for plumbers and electricians and, you know, H vac guys. It really is a great company and I wouldn't have left for just anything. And this is a very special place. So fun fact about me, at one point in time I had about 12 pets. I use I loosely. It was not me. I have a family with three kids and a wife who is a huge animal lover. And every time I show up, I come home from work, there's another pet and I'm like, what's going on? There's more pets here. I'm like, I don't know, there's more pets than humans in this place anyway, kind of hilarious. So tonight I'm going to walk you through a little bit about what we are doing from a product perspective and from an engineering perspective. I'm going to start a little bit with what I call the SaaS success model. And ultimately we as a company leverage a lot of great technology that exists in the cloud, right? Amazon, Microsoft provide great services. We leverage those to provide success to our customers. And really the key TO a successful SaaS company is being able to understand cutting edge technology and not only like just for technology's sake, but how it applies to customer value, right. And really focus on how we get to important outcomes for our customers. We're very focused on enabling success for the people that use our software. And as you can tell from the founder's story, super important. It's very resonant for RM Bahe. Their parents are in the trades, right? We want to make products that make their lives easier and make them more successful. So we build upon a foundation of other great technologies that we leverage to really improve the work we provide for them and to make this a seamless experience. So some of the technologies enable us through cloud services to have rapid deployment, scalability, elasticity. We can really grow the business. Our customers don't care though, right? They just care that they get a great product. So we abstract that away and provide an opportunity for them to have more of a user experience that is seamless and sort of takes away a lot of the pain. We don't have to show them the fact that we're running servers in the cloud and all the details. We provide them a great service because what they really care about is getting to the fit for their business and getting to Results, Right. Results matter. And so for us, it's really about having a vision on the land, long term game and understanding what it is that they need to do for their customers.

Right.

And so we'll walk through a little bit of that tonight. So ultimately, when you're looking at how ServiceTitan exceeds customer expectations, we provide a ton of features. The product has become very rich in the feature layer and it serves a lot of needs across the board. But features don't tell the whole story, right? Features are just a way to enable value. It's a vehicle to deliver value for your customers. What really matters is outcomes, right? So we're looking at outcomes over output. Features are output. Outcomes are value that we add to businesses. The level that we can take them to so that they realize new profits, new customers, they have better marketing campaigns. We can provide a lot of those services. And so when we're thinking about leveraging technology, we're looking at AI and machine learning and data, big data, and basically looking at how we can capitalize on those technologies to provide really great, exceptional experiences for our customers, but also allow them to be more successful in their business because that's what really matters. And as Vaj mentioned with the Titan Score, so super important for them to leverage all the things we have in our products so they can really increase their success as a business. So we're going to walk through a little bit today, some particular customer Personas because Personas are a really good way to align your product and engineering group on the best way to get the outcomes versus just outputs. So you want to understand, understand who you're building the product for. So we've picked a couple tonight to go through. We're going to talk about business owners, we're going to talk about dispatcher and a field technician, the guy that or girl that comes to your house to solve your problem. I just experienced this recently, I'll get into that in a minute. So we're going to jump right in and we're going to talk about mobile first. So we have field techs, right? And they have a product, they've grown on an iPad or mobile device. They can see lots of content and features that you would normally have access to in your home, office or sitting at your computer. We basically make all that available to them so they can actually have a very rich experience. So this field tech may not know much about you, but they can get your history. They can get information on what you're trying to, what your problem is. They can show you what you can purchase and give you pricing and then all of that stuff basically allows them to set you up for purchasing and delivering value. They do all of that with technology that also runs in offline mode. So we know field techs have a hard time. If it's like bad cell service or whatever and they're connected to the cloud, we actually enable them to be able to run in offline mode as well. So some pretty complicated technology happening on the device just to make sure that we provide that seamless service for all of the field techs that are out there because their job is hard, they're sweating out in the heat, dealing with like broken air conditioners, which mine broke down this summer. And the guy did not have service item software. And I was like, you should get it. Because he was dealing with pen and paper and he was on the phone with this guy trying to work out a deal and I was like, he's like sweating standing under a tree in the shade. I'm like, man, you gotta move to the next generation.

It's like really sad.

But anyway, so we provide these services because we want our field techs and our customers, field techs to look good, right? We want them to have a great experience and be able to be successful.

In what they do.

So I think there's a little video that talks a little bit about the mobile.

Give service titan a couple days and I guarantee you're going to love it. I open up service titan, it pops up my job. It gives me a brief description. It also gives me a map location of their house.

Take a little time to look at the history.

Have we been there before? Were any estimates given? The inspection floor is fantastic. It helps us go through all the proper steps. Just kind of clicking it off as you go through it on service site. And I build my house. Go to the category you're looking for.

Touch the screen again and pick what you want. Everything just flows much easier with the customer.

I can take pictures and add it to service item, which is very handy.

After I've completed my work, then I.

Go to the payment part. The customer is winning because I'm not.

Wasting time in their house.

I'm winning because I'm being more efficient. It's all because of service item.

So you can see from that video we really have, we have the best interest of our customers at heart.

Right?

We want to provide software that gets out of their way and allows them to look good, right? And just makes them the professional and really puts the polish on their business. So we unlock that and enable that for Our customers. The next Persona we want to talk about is a dispatch person. So this person has the somewhat difficult task of trying to schedule lots of field text and moving calendars and stuff that goes wrong during the day. And this is like a really kind of a tedious task. I mean, I have a hard time scheduling my calendar and I don't really have to deal with multiple people. It's just me. They deal with like a large amount of like moving parts and trying to get text to jobs and things run long. So we've been looking at how do we make this experience better. We're looking at how do we leverage AI for that.

Right.

And so we're basically like looking at like machine learning to train our system on trends and look at how we can actually use location data and really provide information on what tech has the best skills and map that to the best jobs and get them there on time. And we've been able to create some cool software that's in alpha right now that we're actually running that actually does the dispatch job for the dispatchers. Right. And they can propose and allow them to accept or actually just dispatch people on behalf of them. So it actually makes cuts down a.

Lot of the pain.

So super cool tech. We'll show a little quick dispatch video for you. Oops, sorry, I skipped that one.

There we go. Using Service Titans actually made people think that we were psychic. When a customer calls in, that gray bubble pops up.

I already know their name, I know where they live, I know their past history.

Whole calendar is there. I can just click whatever date they want the time. I can assign a technician.

As a dispatcher, you need to be.

Working the most efficient way possible.

So you just click on a call, as simple as moving your mouse up.

And you can drop it onto the.

Technician'S photo or the timeline on the board, place a call on them.

We get a lot of redundant phone.

Calls or emails for something that's a quick exchange.

And through Service Titan, I can text that technician that's on his way and say, hey, this person's going to be late.

So the software is automatically.

You're missing the loop.

Why would anybody ever go back to old software when they have service types? It's a no brainer.

Cool. So last part is business owners, right? So they have to, to make sure that their business is profitable, that their techs are doing a great job and we have tremendous amounts of data we can provide to them. So we're starting to look into like how do we capitalize on this and really give insights to our business owners so they can optimize for better success. So we provide the dashboard, which is actually a cool look at kind of snapshot of where their business is going to. And we're looking at how do we actually leverage the data we have on where techs are located to provide potentially marketing campaigns and really cool, cutting edge stuff. So we're actually abstracting away a lot of the technology stuff, but to the customers, they're just like, wow, this stuff just happens and it's very cool and allows us to be successful. So moral of the story is we want to focus on primarily on customer value, right? And we want to make sure that our software gets out of the way for them to be successful.

Right.

It just allows them to look good, to run a great business. And so we hide the tech behind our scenes. You know, we do that for them, we do the hard work for them so that they can be really polished and brilliant. Also our culture here is really about innovation, improving what we do. We have a model of continuous improvement in our engineering organization and we really focus on trying to like always learn, grow, develop more. We're like compulsive, like about this like feedback loop of how do we continue to make things better, not only in our product, but in ourselves. And it's really resonant, you know, it's made the product sticky. Our customers really love it, as you can tell from these videos. So it's been really, really fun working here. I didn't have a cool slide like Vach. I don't know where he went about all the fun stuff we do. But I guarantee you our engineering team still has lots of fun and they do lots of cool stuff. They're just camera shy, so we don't have any pictures of them. Unfortunately, there's like one picture of Chris in the back playing ping pong that I put on the blog. So now he's Internet famous. So yeah, but we have the same cultural values, right? We really enjoy camaraderie, teamwork, collaboration. We want to solve hard problems together. We really enjoy working together and Glendale is a cool place to do it. So anyway, with that, I'm going to hand it off to Rafi to talk a little bit about talent and we'll wrap up.

Thank you, Darren. Hi, everybody. Welcome and thank you for joining us today here at our beautiful offices. My name is Rafi Kirchen and I initially joined Service Time back in early 2015. Prior to service Time, I was working at Symantec, who's the security company out in Culver City. And before that, I was across the freeway here at Yellow Pages leading their talent acquisition teams. Fun fact about me, one of the nicknames that they ended up giving me here was Godfather. Just because if you guys are. If you guys are privy to a movie, the Godfather always makes an offer that you can't refuse. Typically, I'll step in when we have some challenges in being able to recruit the bright talent. So just a quick overview of some of the timeline and some of the growth the service time has experienced over the past few years. When I joined the organization back in March 2015, we were about 30 employees and we ended up that year close to about 65. We've grown across the entire organization. Many different departments, sales, botches, organization, marketing, finance, hr. Everybody across the board has really experienced tremendous growth. And year over year, all the way up to today, we have pretty much doubled headcount. So 2016, we ended that year about 140 employees. And then 2017, we ended around 310. This year, we started the year obviously at 310. We are currently at 510 employees. We are forecasted to end the year approximately around 600 employees. And right now, as you guys are aware, I'm sure a lot of you guys have gone through our career site. We have about 70 active openings that we're looking to hire for. And after this presentation, you guys are more than welcome to discuss a lot of the roles with. My entire recruiting team is here in the back. And please feel free to come and talk to me about any opportunities that you would like to be considered. We would love to have an engaging conversation with all of you guys. Some of the challenges that we faced currently and over the many the past few years is, you know, we find ourselves now in a very competitive market. Unemployment rate has been the lowest it's ever been. There's many companies that are experiencing a lot of success and growth and we are competing against the Amazon, Amazons, ebay's, Facebook, Googles of the world for engineering talent, for finance, talent, marketing, everything. So there's a big war right now going on for talent. And we want to make sure that Servicetown is positioned to be one of the leaders and one of the best places to work, especially in Southern California. So the market is, you know, has proven to be a little challenging, but we have so many great things to offer people that typically we able to really retain and attract the best talent out there. We also like to focus on really hiring people that have industry background. You know, we are focusing on Home services. So a lot of times people who have worked in that home industry space have really in depth knowledge about how that business is run. And that kind of experience has proven to be very valuable for us to be able to kind of bring in house and be able to develop additional processes, procedures and just different business operations that really help our customers achieve success. So being able to attract industry hires has also been a little challenging, but certainly something that I will continue to focus on and quality of talent. Right. Every company wants to hire the best out there. We want to make sure that we continue to focus on hiring the best, making sure that our talent are not only a fit within the into some of the different requirements, but also being able to work well with the team or match the culture that we have to find here at service time. And with that obviously goes the technical expertise that each role kind of represents. In addition to being ambitious and smart and really having the right attitude towards opportunity, we also want to make sure that you are a match for some of the requirements that we have and that something that we take very seriously. Obviously we want to make sure that the people that we are hiring are a mutually beneficial fit for both of us, both parties, and are able to be set up for success. So some of the things that over the many years that we've done to continue to help us, you know, retain talent, hire people, retain them, engage them, develop them. When I first started, you know, service time was only 30 people and, and you know, the only benefit really had was our health healthcare package for the employee only. So ever since then, over the many years we have developed a really robust employment benefit package which includes, you know, benefits such as healthcare, dental, vision, life insurance, 401k, flexible PTO. We don't have a cap on how many days you could take off. You know, we just kind of trust the employees to take the time that they need to kind of unwind and then come back to work kind of charged up. We have many company events, a lot of fun events. We have an annual picnic, as Vaj and Darren mentioned. We have many different happy hours and fun events that we want to continue to promote and kind of build that camaraderie between the different team members. Equity. Right. Every employee that comes to Brooker service time is a share owner, is the only owner of the company. So that's really, really important to us and there's tremendous value behind that. Every employee feels like they're entitled to be here and be part of the success that the organization is delivering and whatever success we Achieve as a team, as a company, they're going to be able to reap some of the benefits. It's really important for us to continue to grant equity to every single individual that's joined the company. That way we are all engaged together for the same common goal. LinkedIn Learning. We recently signed up with LinkedIn to help provide our employees with great learning opportunities. We take learning and development very seriously. From the day that I joined RI and Valhe made it very clear to me that they wanted to continue to not only hire the best, but also make sure that we're engaging them, we're developing them, we're retaining them. And today we find ourselves within our HR team. We have a learning and development group that consists of four individuals. For a company of about 500, that's quite a bit. And these guys job is really continuously making sure that we are developing our employees, having different programs, different trainings to help them, making sure that they're set up for success. And not only here, but whenever they decide to leave Service Time that we help them kind of make sure that they are going to be successful in areas in other companies that they decide to join. We have free lunch. Everybody loves that. It's catered. We go to, we have this company called E Club. Very fun kind of environment where you go online, you can order whatever lunch you want and every day it's delivered in the back you go and pick up your lunch, eat it and you know, to be honest with you, at the end of the day it really adds up financially and saves people quite a bit bit of money and it's a big perk that a lot of people really enjoy. We also have obviously a lot of snacks and foods and people and sometimes alcohol wellness program. We have a partnership with Equinox. We have a weekly yoga class. We have a bunch of different massage specialists. We have a bunch of different other types of vendors that come, come in here and help us kind of help kind of take that edge off our employees. And that's been very well received as well. And then impact, right? This is something since there's, this is a benefit that's not necessarily kind of on paper, but it's something that really resonates with a lot of our employees where everybody that we hire here at Service Time is going to make an impact on the business. It really doesn't matter what your role is, doesn't matter what department you work in. Every single person that gets hired to Service Time, just as that was true four years ago, is still true today. It Makes a tremendous impact in the success of our customer, in the success of the other employees, and also the overall success of the company. So we take a lot of pride in that. And that's one of the areas that really try to focus on when we are doing our interview process, our hiring process, to make sure that people really are going to be able to come in here and contribute to the organization, organization's growth. So some of our core values, these are things that we really take to heart. And these are actually the same core values that we had when I first joined four years ago, and we were very small. And we continue to really live and breathe through these core values. One of them, most important one, I think, is changing lives. And what does that really mean, changing lives? So for us, the way we look at that is I look at it in three different ways, right? One of them is being able to change the lives of our customers by being able to help our customers be more efficient, run their business better. That gives them opportunity to spend more time with their family, be able to kind of enjoy life more and not worry so much about how to run their business, but focus on the core thing that they know how to do, which is being able to go to somebody's house and be able to service and provide that kind of service that they're being paid for, whether that be electrical, H vac, plumbing, whatever that may be. So we want to make sure our software is helping our customers lives and improving that. Second, I would say that also means making sure that our employees are being set up for success, changing their lives for better, making sure that they decide to join service time to the day that they leave. They are better individuals, they're better prepared to face the different challenges of the world, but also being able to help them be successful wherever they decide to go. So that's really important key for us to being able to retain and develop our employees. And lastly, as far as changing lives is concerned, is we really want to make sure that we are very much involved in philanthropy and charity events. We are very close partners with the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. We take part in many different marches, Alzheimer's March, many other nonprofit organizations. And you know, this is directly from Ara and Valhe. As we continue to grow, we're going to continue to focus on doing better things and help improve the world around us as much as we can contribute to that. Achieving the extraordinary. Obviously, this is another one of our big core values. We have T shirts that were made that achieved extraordinary. Many team members here are Wearing those T shirts with pride. We do take a lot of pride in this core value and what that means is really going above and beyond, right? Having making sure that you have really aggressive but achievable goals. Not selling for mediocrity, but really going for the win. Making sure that you are set up for success as well. And really doing things that are really outside the normal things that are expected from an employee. And going above and beyond. What we call that is really shooting for the stars. We want people to come in here and be super ambitious, as Vaj said, passionate and really help contribute to the overall success that we all want to see. So achieve and being a great team, that's pretty self explanatory, right? Being able to work with other team members, collaborate, being humble, really making sure that not only are you set up for success, but you're helping your other teammates through challenges, objectives, and just being there as an amazing team player. Quick video here regarding some of our employees.

Why service titan?

There are hundreds of thousands of contractors out there who are completely underserved by technology.

I wanted to make myself useful to my dad, who was a plumber.

How many founders can say, I take a phone call from my father with a question about the software.

Vahe was like, I need to do.

Something to help my dad.

And he did.

When I understood exactly what they wanted to do and how they wanted to.

Do it, I wanted to be a.

Part of the team 10 and play.

Number 10, 59, 16, 31, 17.

I'm number 81.

150, either 1 or 3, depending on whether you count Ara and Bahi 0.

The team that we have here, they're.

Young, they're bright, they're intelligent.

My mom kept telling me, like, you're.

Not gonna get a job with teal hair. So thanks Ara, for still hiring me even though I had teal hair.

If the horsepower is there and they're a little bit humble, we have a win.

Ara promised me a Bentley. I promised him 100% market share. He asked me, what do you want.

To make sure that we at service heighten, like never forget. And I was like, well, you never want to forget, like the roots of.

Where you came from.

He said something that really stuck with me. He said, as long as our customers are doing okay, I'm doing okay. Customer success is everything.

Literally our customer success is everything. And if we help our customers succeed, we help ourselves succeed.

It makes it super easy to sell.

When you really believe in a product and when I really feel like it.

Can change their Life.

We make pretty bold promises that we're going to increase efficiency, we're going to help your technicians earn more money, we're going to make your lives easier. I can change somebody's life.

This product, I don't need to hide anything about it.

Having an impact on people's lives is something I didn't even know that I was looking for at a job.

And to me, that's amazing. There's nobody that I work with that sits back and says, I'm done. It's good enough.

On a monthly basis, we're launching 50, 60 new features.

We aren't really resting on our laurels. It's just something about this culture, something.

About his people, something about his place.

We have a team that cares about each other on a personal level.

Service Titan is a family.

I've built so many great, lasting personal and professional relationships.

I mean, we hang out outside of work all the time.

You know, I've never felt as connected.

To my co workers. Why service?

Why Service Titan?

Because everything that we say it is.

Is true because we do it better than anybody else.

I'll tell you really why Service Titan.

We live and breathe and eat this stuff.

They appreciate the time and effort that we're putting in to really do something extraordinary.

How many customers are there in the country?

That's how big we can get. There are 100 million homes out there. I mean, the bounds are limitless.

I think we're already outgrowing our office right now. We're going to need this whole building.

Hopefully we'll take over the whole world. This is really just the beginning. When we change hundreds of thousands of contractors lives, that's how big we begin. I want Service Titan to be a platform for people to achieve their full potential. Whether it's our customers or our team members, we use it as a platform for changing people's lives, achieving the most extraordinary outcomes. I want this to be the best experience for everybody that touches Service Titan.

Okay, so a couple of quick things that really kind of stem from our core values that help us develop this culture that we take a lot of pride in. I would say the most important thing. There's many different buckets under here. But I think the most important thing that I've really felt myself coming from ARA is humility.

Right.

We are a very humble team. We don't like to show off. We take a lot of pride in our work, but we continue to grind it out and be humble. You know, we have a culture of inclusivity, transparency. We have all hands, meetings On a consistent basis. All of our reporting is shared with the entire workforce. Everybody is aware of how the company is doing, the health of the business, and we continue to have that transparency. Very important to us to share everything that's happening with our workforce. Ownership. As I mentioned earlier, every single employee here is an owner of the organization and takes a lot of pride in that empowerment. You know, every individual in the organization, if they have an idea, that idea is heard, it could go all the way up to r mbahe. And many times there's been employees that had ideas that we felt like they were very strong and we executed on them and they ended up being tremendous successes. Passion, respect, tenaciousness, and obviously, like I said, inclusivity. We want to make sure that everybody here that joins service time feels like a family, feels like they're welcome, and they feel like they're going to be set up for success and have service time be extraordinary. That's all I have for now. Appreciate all you guys joining us. Like I said, my recruiting team is in the back. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Rafi. So we are going to bring all of our panelists back up for Q and A. So the lovely Sam will probably. I just volunteered her to run around with the microphone so you wouldn't have to come all the way up here. But start thinking about your questions while I herd the cats. I know. Exactly. So, Rafi. Yep, that's him. Darren, take a seat. Where'd Vahe go? I feel like that's the question I always ask. Where did Vaje go? He'll be back, but we can start with questions here. Anything you covered.

Hi, my name is Vernaz. Before I proceed, I just want to say what you guys built is pretty impressive. As someone who's visiting Glendale and went to Clark, I saw the Mr. Blattner pictures.

We.

I came with my friends today. We have mixed backgrounds from working at Snapchat to Meredith. And our hobbies essentially just grew into business businesses. And I noticed in 2015, this is directed for more vaccina. In 2015, you guys had 65 employees. You guys started working from the garage. At what point did you stop developing on the product and focus more on sales and marketing?

What was it that really catapult.

Pardon me?

Catapulted your product.

So I guess I'll take that one. So the answer is never. Like you never stop from one to the other. If you have to, something is wrong. You should always be selling and you should always be building. Even if the thing isn't done yet. You should be selling. So, like, it's. That's the assumption I would have going into it in terms of the turning point. Product market fit is not just the theory. Like, when you hit it, you will feel it and it will be a switch from push, push, push, push, push, to okay, something is pulling me now. And so getting to that point is the hard part. And a lot of times it's not like a binary answer. You kind of see a little bit of a signal, and then the key is having a good nose for where it's really coming from. And usually it's an exercise of saying no more so than saying yes to things. So I'm not sure if that answers your question.

No.

Thank you. Thank you.

You can have more questions. Any other questions, I'll come to you.

This one's for Vlach. So when. So I have a startup and we're trying to sell our product, but when would be a good time to establish a customer success team? Like early on or maybe later when we have a more developed sales cycle and product. When is it important to start? Yeah, that's a great question. I've heard it a few times. I think when do we hire a plant? Like, probably after how many customers?

Like three customers.

Three customers, yeah. So I think one of the things we got really right at ServiceTitan was invest in CS early on. That's because we don't, like I said earlier in my presentation, we don't. We don't think of CS as just the customer service. Right. We think of CS as the organization that's going to fuel the growth. And so if you look at it from that lens, then when do you invest in a salesperson? Right. I think that's when you invest in a CS person as well. And yeah, in terms of exactly when, I think it depends on what market you're serving. But I'll say as soon as you get enough traction where you're like, okay, this thing, that there's a product market fit opportunity here, I think you've got to think about it because that will then, if you do it right, it will then circle. It'll do a full circle. And so it'll help with your growth. And VI can certainly add more context here, but if you look at the history of Service Titan, I think one of the main contributors to success of the company was from the beginning that focus on customer success. And it's not surprising because Bayanara started building this company for, you know, building the software for their. For their parents. Right. So obviously they cared about what that experience is going to look like. So I think kind of naturally it happened for us, but I would make a very deliberate decision to make an early investment in cs.

A lot of these questions are going to come down to a resource allocation question. At what point do you invest, what amount into what? And the reality is you as a founder will be doing most of the functions from the beginning. And then it's now an exercise and thinking about, okay, what am I saying? Spending my time on that I can get somebody else to do for me to then do higher value things. The first question is, do you care about customer success? Just forget the department is that important to the business? If it is, then the question is when can you do it and what's the opportunity cost for not doing it? So for us, like Ara and I were doing the sales and the product and everything else and our first hire was basically our customer success team. But that's because we figured out that our time would add more value to the business, focusing on building the product even more or getting more customers. But we waited until we had a few customers to actually like have enough of a demand to then bring that in. But a lot of this comes down to how much capital you have. If you are well funded, then you don't have to make a lot of these trade offs.

Right.

That's why you raise money. So a lot of it is very contextual to where you are on that journey. But ultimately just figure out what that end result is and then just map into it with whatever state you're in. And most of the time it's going to be you and the other founders until you can economically just the investment.

Questions.

So my question is for Darren. You've been here a few months and moving into a new environment. You're coming from the Bryant Games, I think, right?

That's correct.

So it's a big change of the.

Environment, but also at the level you're.

Coming in, it's exciting but also very challenging.

So as you came in and you.

Started to take a look at the.

Platform and the whole environment, how did you go about trying to identify the challenges and opportunities?

Yeah, so the first thing you do.

That was very easy. That was not the hard part.

Finding challenges was fairly straightforward.

Thank you for saying that. I value my job. Yeah. So there's a point in time when every small company becomes a big company and we're in that point. Right. It's this inflection point of everything's like you hit that day where you're like, we're selling, we're selling, we're getting customers, everything's cool, we're building features. And then you're like, oh my God, this thing is starting to take off without us. And, and how do we hang on to this rocket ride?

Right?

And this is a great, great time to be in a company. It's also super fun for people that love organizing crazy process and figuring out complex problems, which I love to solve. It was just right for what I enjoy. And when I went to Rite of Games, it was the same kind of phase, right? We were doing that rapid growth. And so problem are everywhere. Every company has them. It's the problems of scale that are compelling and energizing that I love solving. And like, we have plenty of those, right? So what I did first was just observe, right? Kind of the playbook for anyone that's starting a new job is like, first do no harm, right? Go in, see what's going on. Don't make changes that you don't know what you're talking about, right. First, see how the business runs. Where are the bright spots? Where are the things that are really, you know, valuable that the companies like the core DNA, right? The things that we really have to have to be successful and don't change that. Look for the things that you can slowly kind of transition into better ways of working.

Right?

Because you also don't want. I had a manager one time call it organ donor rejection, right? Whereas, like, you go in and you change too much stuff and the whole system kicks you out, right? So you have to figure out how to actually get the system ready for change, which is very difficult. People get accustomed to doing things a certain way and their success criteria and their reward mechanisms are all geared to this one system. And then you change the system and they're like, I don't know how to succeed.

Right.

I don't know what to do next. So what I did was observe. Then I started looking at, okay, what are the things that, that will unite us in this effort to get to the next level? And then what are the missing pieces, right? So for us, really focusing on the customer and outcomes and Vahe talked about this recently. We just had a product all hands last week, week before. There's also a time dilation effect with startups that you forget how long it's been. Everything seems like crazy sped up and also slowed down. So you're confused all the time. But anyway, really focusing the product team and the engineers on what matters and then prioritizing and selecting the things that are going to get you to the next level and then identifying the gaps in the organization that you have and really focusing on recruiting the right people to get you to the next level. The people that got you here sometimes aren't the people that are going to get you to the next level. You have to be smart about how you hire. You need to hire people that have had experience scaling businesses and really capitalize on their experiences because you find that you learn a lot when you go through those growing pains of an organization of what to do and what not to do. Every organization is unique though. So everybody that's here has an opportunity to learn and grow and figure out how to add value in the new inflection point. Right. So it's a long winded answer, but basically like observe, pick your battles, start to make incremental change, get everybody aligned and on the mindset of like, where you want to go and set the North Star for them so they have a vision and things to latch onto and then build a great team to accomplish success. So kind of in a nutshell.

Hi, my name is Arace and we have a startup as well. So thank you for sharing all of this information. What I want to know too is you're bringing an innovative, you brought an innovative product to technicians who do everything manually and specialize in certain areas and maybe are not business owners. So how did you, did you go.

To their homes and sit down and do a presentation?

Did you do a training? How length was the training before they automated and became your clients?

Yeah, so I would say so we did a couple of things right and I'll say the first thing that we did was we drew a box around who we identified as our ideal customer. And we look lived within that box.

And.

The qualities of the box is like a Goldilocks zone. You don't want it to be too big because then the needs of the users are too different from one another. And if you make it too small, then it doesn't really matter. So you got to get it just right. And if you do that, ideally what you end up with is with a meaningfully sized number of customers that have very similar needs. And what that allows you to do is have a scalable product where you can, you know, for every line of code you write, you have a higher rate of relevancy. Right. It's a ROI at the end of the day. So when you do that correctly, then it just becomes an exercise in like, you know, understanding how that particular market works. So like for us, we targeted key influencers that we knew the rest of the people in the box looked up to and we made kind of champions out of them. So our goal was to find a small number of people that if we can deliver success to them, then that just by itself would then refer a bunch of people. It's like, it's fairly old fashioned way of going about it, the word of mouth strategy and then you parlay the success into bigger and bigger opportunities. So you go from a few people to then organizations and depending on the market, you may advertise directly and so on. And so I would say that actually the hardest part is drawing the box around who that ideal customer is. And then once you do that, well, the rest of it is fairly straightforward because you can just look at the market and you can see, okay, so how do the people within this space make their buying decisions? Right? At what point will someone be making a decision on whether or not to buy whatever it is that you guys are selling? And the heart, sometimes it's an existing demand that you can just tap into, sometimes you have to generate the demand because they don't even know that they need what you're giving them. And so it's balancing all of these things. So it's a very vague answer. I don't know from answering the question, but it really comes down to having that right constraints. And if you do that well, everything else just kind of starts to line up.

Thank you.

Should have stayed over here.

Statistically, most of the startups fail due to inability to scale. So what are the. Clearly you're nailing it. What are the key factors or learnings.

You can share with us for the success?

I would actually question the premise. I would say most startups fail because they can't get the product market fit. If you get the product market fit, the scaling part is a luxury, like to have a scaling problem. It's a great problem to have. And if you can go to people that invest in this space and say, hey, I found product market fit, I'm having a scaling problem, they'll just throw money at you. That's basically how it works. So the key is to get to that point and then once you get there, you can just throw money at.

The problem.

In terms of how you scale, you know, it's just a fairly straightforward, okay, where is the bottleneck in the machine?

And then you go solve that one.

And then immediately something else pops up and it's just an exercise in prioritization and attacking the right problem with the right scope. So I would say solving the scaling Problem is actually the easy part. It's finding the product market fit that's the hard part. And if I think about all the startups that fail, it's because they never get to that point. And you know, whether that's because they lock themselves in an office and live in their own world and never reach out to how people actually operate or whatever the other sources of drivers are, that to me was to be the much bigger risk than the scale piece. You could throw money at scale, you can't throw money at product market fit.

Hi, my name is Nadine.

I have two questions. I hope the first one is quick. I'm just curious what your sales model is. So for your customers, are they paying an upfront fee, are they paying a monthly recurring fee, is it based on.

Number of users, etc.

Sure, I can answer that real quick. So it's a monthly recurring per license. So we've actually changed our model. We have now customers who are kind of what we call legacy pricing strategy, which just where we had a different price for an office login and a different price for a technician login, so it got a little bit confusing. So right now we have one license fee for technicians. So the office licenses we don't charge for. But we're still thinking through and potentially making some changes in terms of do we charge up front and how much we charge. We want to optimize for the recurring revenue. So oftentimes typically we do charge, but it's only to get commitment from the customer to understand that, hey, I'm making an investment here as opposed to trying to use that to cover our costs, let's say, because we're optimizing for arpu, which is essentially average, how much we're getting from our customers on a recurring revenue basis. But without charging up front, oftentimes people will just not treat it as seriously. Right. So we've tested various different models. Right now we're actually introducing contracts for the first time and we are kind of playing around the idea of not charging anything up front, but collecting two months of fees just so we can get again some, some sort of skin in the game. Awesome. Thank you. And then one more question. I'm curious to know if you guys are thinking at all about expanding outside of the service industries that you're focused on now.

So, H vac, plumbing, et cetera.

It sounds like this is a platform.

That can be used in of a.

Lot, lot of industries. So I'm just wondering if you guys.

Are thinking of going outside of that.

So what's interesting is if you think about that box that we just talked about, right? That's the box, right. For us, that box is we only sell to people that provide services in the home, which comes down to like a million businesses. And then from there we say okay, only plumbing, H vac, electrical and garage doors. And then gets a little smaller. And then with their only service, not new construction, gets a little smaller, but only residentially focused customers, not commercial. And gets a little smaller. And then we say, okay, you have to have four trucks in the field or more and it gets like super, super small. And that's where we live today. Everything you see here is focused on that little tiny box which to give you a sense of numbers, it goes from a million to like 30,000. So that, that's the pool that we're swimming in till today. So we still don't feel like we're ready to venture out because why should we, right? There's enough Runway within this little tiny box for us to still continue to scale. But that's a very, let's say, top of mind topic for us. And we've got a lot of various initiatives in play. But for people that are just starting out, I think that's one of the things that we probably did differently than what a lot of startups do is they focus on some big giant target that they're going to go after and they think, oh, if I just get 1% of this one giant big thing, then we're there. That usually doesn't work. So that's, I believe, I believe one of the keys to our success actually is we've been very conservative with that. We're probably too conservative right now. We should probably open it up. But yeah, we're still figuring that out.

Christina.

So there's a question for Rafi, but.

Anybody that can help answer it, please go ahead. So doubling in headcount every year has its own sorts of good problem strains. How much of a focus is there.

On employee onboarding and success as much.

As there is on customer onboarding and success?

It's a good question. So one of the first things that we did after I joined was we were able to develop a really comprehensive and robust new hire onboarding experience. And it used to be when I first joined it was a 12 hour session. And now we find ourselves with an almost five day new hire onboarding experience which covers everything from where to get coffee from and what are some of the strategies of the company that we're pursuing to the software to our customers and literally being Able to kind of make sure that the employee has, after that first week of orientation, is really ready to hit the road running and be able to really focus on their core job and having a really good understanding on everything that involves service time. So that's step one. Also, we make sure that during our interview process, really screen people for making sure that they're the right fit, they have the right hunger, the right passion, and the right values that are really kind of aligned with what service time is looking for. And also another thing that really have taken a lot of interest and something that we really are passionate about is their candidate experience. When people come into service time and interview with us, we want to treat them with the highest level of respect. We want to make sure that they really feel valued. They want to make sure that we treat them the way that we want to be treated when we go on interviews. So we have a specific scorecard and a service that we do every time somebody comes here to interview to make sure that we're really able to measure how we're doing and if there's areas for us to be able to improve. And that way, if we end up hiring that individual, really get a really good understanding of what they're looking for and how they're going to be able to fit in within the team.

See, Rafi was spoiled when he came in. We had a program.

Probably.

What number were you?

35.

35. Okay. So if you had been like, 27, you know what the onboarding experience would have been like, no laptop, please use your Ikea box, build your desk, and then good luck. That was literally it up until, like, the 30s. And then I think you were one of the first people who were like, we should do an onboarding experience.

It sucks.

Who wants to talk to that? So there's. There's problems you want to solve at various stages, and we probably waited too long to solve that particular problem. But when you're, like, just getting started, there's more existential problems to get ahead of. Right? And so there's a lot of things that comes down to timing, where you see spend kind of your focus. And so not to say that this is not important. And again, it's super important now because it actually frames the whole relationship with the employee from the moment they get on. But, like, this is not what it was when we were starting out. It was very, very ghetto. Like, super ghetto.

We have time for a couple more questions, if there are any. Everyone up front.

My name is Alena.

I have a quick question in addition.

To the question about sales as I've done some research on your company so.

I understand that you acquire in more enterprise customers. So in terms of recurring revenue, do you have a different strategy for do.

Customization or do you treat smaller business the same as an enterprise in terms of the product?

And the second question is are you.

Planning to go international with the little.

Focus that you guys have and if you have any thoughts which first three countries would be. I'll talk about the first question. I'll talk to you in a second. In terms of if I understood your question correctly was do we have different products that we sell in different segments? So the short answer is no. We sell the same product in terms of obviously the configuration, the setup of it varies depending on the complexity of the implementation. And then for some enterprise customers we do some customization. Fortunately we've been investing a lot into the corporate core product in the last let's say 12 to 18 months. So we are at a point where we don't really have any kind of glaring gaps when it comes to servicing our enterprise customers. So it really comes down to the goal is to just sell out of box and not make it customized. But realistically especially when you go after very large customers, there are some customizations that we do in terms of international so we're currently in Canada with a couple customers in the UK I think and while we haven't actively we're not actively pursuing an international strategy. It certainly is in the vicinity of things that we're thinking about in terms of opportunities for advancement. There's actually one customer from Australia that is just super persistent for like two years in a row keep coming back and they're just like, you know, we'll fly our entire team, you guys can train them there, just want the product. But we've been kind of holding back to Vaaz earlier point that box that also involves kind of geographic but in terms of in the future I think Australia is definitely in the mix because if you look at product market fit and the way the country the housing overall is structured in Astro ally there's a lot of similarities but I would imagine that's more of a kind of down the road opportunity for us because there's so much more that we can focus on in the current area that we play in that international probably more of a lagging strategy for us. At least that's what we think right now. Any.

So where you want to be in terms of this question is you want to do to vaj's point zero customization and just Sell out of the box. When you're early on, you know, a lot of times, like the customer will ask you, like, this is so dumb, why does it do that? And you look, you're totally right, like it shouldn't. So we're going to change that for you. And if it's like, if it's, if it stacks high enough on the priority scale, then you should absolutely customize it. But it's not really customization. You're just like filling in gaps. So you want to use that customer feedback cycle to actually inform where you need to kind of fill in the gaps. And depending on the strategy and generally speaking the approaches, you land wherever you can land and you go up market. That's generally within enterprise software playbook. In our case, we live in an industry where most of the companies are down market, where they're all the smaller ones, but we still went upmarket for us. Just because when you're dealing with one customer that gives you a big check, what did you find? When you're dealing with one customer who's giving you a bigger dollar amount, there's just more ROI in solving their problem. So you end up bending more for them than otherwise. But generally speaking, like the goal should be a product company, right? That you have a product that you sell. You don't want to, if you're in tech, you don't want to be a service company. You don't want to be a company that like does stuff and changes stuff, because what ends up happening is you make a little tweak here and you're like, oh, just a little thing. Six years later, that little thing has caused a fractioning of the space. And Darren's dealing with this now. He has to pay for the previous sins that we did. We said yes, way too much, but it's a problem. And you need to factor that cost in because every customization is going to be much bigger than what you anticipate it being. And it's mostly cost and complexity. So at the end of the day, you want to say no to everything. And the ideal is to have one kind of product that fits everyone. But in reality, you always end up having to bend as you go further and further up. So it's a game of balance.

Last question.

Sorry.

Hi, I'm Patrick. Darren. I really like your analogy of the rocket ship taking off and trying to hang off for dear life. And I think this is referring to.

Your SaaS service model.

At the bottom you had Azure and AWS.

And outside of cost, which is a pretty big Deal.

How do you kind of pick which provider you go with when you're trying to expand and scale? And how do you pick those services? Because they're both really competitive and they're both very competitive.

Yeah, I'll take a stab at this answer because I wasn't here when the original decisions were made. Bahin can jump in. He may have more context, but ultimately it's about reliability of service. Right. And so early on, Azure wasn't super reliable. There were some problems, but then AWS has had its outages as well. So you're really kind of hedging your bets. We actually use both. We have redundancy in AWS because we want to make sure that our uptime is there. Right. We need to have our service available for our customers when they want it, not dependent on what infrastructure choices we make. So right now we're kind of hedging our bets there. I don't know about the early decisions in terms of what was more compelling. We are a C Net shop, so there's a lot of Microsoft influence in the house. Our CTO is steeped in that. That environment. So Azure is definitely something that he has a strong affinity for. But Amazon's like the 800 pound gorilla. You can't really get away from them anywhere you go.

Right.

And they provide a lot of great features and services, so we're capitalizing on.

Some of those as well.

There's a lot of cool stuff that they do in the cloud that we can leverage. And so we just look at what's out there and kind of evaluate what technologies are complementary to what we want to provide. And then, you know, we just have to make sure the service is reliable and resilient and has a lot of uptime.

So I don't know if you want.

To speak to any of that.

I would say so. There's a couple of key things. One is these guys give away credits like it's running out of stock. So figure out how to get as much credits as you possibly, possibly can because it's straight up dollars and they usually give them through like incubators and accelerators. And so you get like a few hundred grand of credit. The catch is you got to use it in one year. And when you're just starting out, like, just not, it's not possible. But you could probably like get a few and whatever. So I'll definitely look into that because, like, we did that and it was great. The main question is, do you want to use their PASS components and get locked in or do you want to keep it agnostic to the platform and be able to jump around. That's really the key question because depending on the answer to that, you either focus on kind of maintaining the ability to just jump ship and then play them against each other and yada yada, that has a cost because a lot of their past components are awesome and you save a bunch of time. So it's that trade off. So I think the key is just to figure out which one is more important. The being agnostic to the vendor and being able to jump around or picking one and then going super deep in leveraging all of the benefits that they get depending on which one it is, then it's just a fairly straightforward comparison between what each one offers and. And which one maps into your stack better.

Thank you.

All right, thank you guys so much for being here. Thanks to our team, my team, whatever. Thanks for being here. So that wraps up our sort of structured part of the evening, but we have still a ton of food, so please continue eating and you can hang out and chat, network, talk to anyone, anyone who's still around. We have many team members in the back, all with name tags, so definitely feel free to get to know us a little bit better. But thanks for spending your evening with us so far. Thanks, guys.