Cristina Flaschen - CEO + Founder at Pandium

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom pod. We have Christina Flaschen with us today. She's CEO and founder at Pandium. Yeah, Christina's interesting. I love my last call with her. She integrates all things for SaaS companies. She's a host of a podcast as well, Between Product and Partnerships. She's a guest lecturer at Care of Kittens, and I make coffee. I'm not sure what that one means, but you can explain in a second. She's not an ex-fang. Last time I was like, oh, Christina's an ex-fang, cool. But yeah, Christina, tell us a bit more about yourself.

Yeah, yeah, so as you mentioned, I am the CEO and founder of a company called Pandium. We do integration infrastructure for software companies, which I'm sure we'll get into. The kitten thing is I'm also a foster parent for neonate bottle baby kittens here in New York City. So that is a big part of my offline life. And yeah, being the CEO, I feel like my job is really to make sure that everything is running correctly and to enable my team to do all the things. So I feel like I make the coffee and that's essentially my goal is to make sure that everyone else on the team can do what they do. By way of background, I've been in tech for about 20 years. Started way, way back actually in college as an SDR for a software company that we would now call a startup at the time. Time. It was just a software company that had bagels and a keg. And then got into kind of project management, eventually ERP consulting, and kind of found my way to this integration stuff along the way and have been doing that for many years now. So really excited to be on the pod and get to talk to you and looking forward to diving in.

So how was your start in sales and how did that forge your mind?

Oh my God. So I was working at a company in Wilmington, North Carolina while I was in college. And I started as a sales assistant. So part-time just doing mailers. We did physical mail then. Email was barely a thing at that time. So I was sending out pamphlets and stuff for folks and then eventually got promoted to being what I now know as an SDR. We didn't have an autodialer or anything. So I was just making 80 calls a day by hand. With that, I was working there full-time and I also got involved in some internal software development projects. This was a web-based application. We sold actually background checks and employment screening services, which we won't get into it, but I have like mixed feelings about that ethically, but that's what I was doing. And they were also building a CRM in-house. This was before Salesforce. This was in like, what, 2003? And the tech team needed sort of like a subject matter expert from the sales org. And they were like, throw Christina at it. Like, she knows how to use stuff. So I got to work on developing that tool with them. And that was really the beginning of sort of my like software professional life. Even though I was making 80 calls a day, I had this like side hustle with them and Having that job actually in college and working full-time and like having been a quota-carrying employee is what led me to getting my first job in New York when I moved here in 2006. That ended up being a project management job for an ERP implementation. And then that consultancy hired me and that kind of got the whole ball rolling. So although I was selling at that very first job, it was It was software, but it was really more services that happened to have software. This sort of project that I started working on internally is what kind of got me thinking about tech. And, you know, I'm old, so was like an early adopter of the internet. Like, we had the internet when I have— we had the internet when I was like a young kid, like before Windows existed. We had the internet for DOS, and like, I just always loved systems and I think that has helped me get to where I am today.

Interesting. So one thing you reminded me of, I mean, I consider myself old as well because I also did like these 200 dials a day when I started my career. And I often have these tests now that I have a daughter, and like when she'll be 15, she'll be like, Daddy, what the fuck? You dialed 200 people a day? What is this? Like, why? And then I'm gonna be like, yeah, this forged my mind. This really created a shell in me and that allowed me to launch my own company. Didn't it have like a similar effect on you? Because it really was an ego death for me. I had way too much ego as a kid, right? I found this first mentor and yeah, that sort of destroyed that ego. 'Cause I'm from Quebec, English is not my first language. And I would dial these people in, English, uh, and then my best English possible, it was engineers and architects, right? Like very cerebral people, and I got a lot of fuck off. So what was the, um, effects that this had on your mind?

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So we were calling mostly at that time like brick and mortar mom and pop stores, so like, you know, just random any industry types of places, and I would say that I had a different experience where I went into that job with very little ego. I worked fast food and retail and stuff leading into that. This was great to me to have a job where I didn't come home smelling like oil. I was like, "Oh my God, it's a desk job." I was just like, "I need to keep this job." I went into it, I think, a little bit fearless, just kind of like, "I'm just going to call. What's the worst that can happen? They hang up on me." And they did. They hung up on me. They told me to fuck off. They told me to never contact them again. I think that those early experiences, both in the SDRing and also working fast food and managing restaurants and stuff when I was younger, really thickens the skin. And it did give me confidence. When I moved to the city, I was getting my first post-college job and ready to kind of take on the thing. I was like, I've talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of strangers at this point, most of whom never want to hear from me again. I feel like I'm pretty good on the phone. I can do a lot of things. And Um, I'm thankful for that, for that role. I do think that working restaurants and retail prepared me well for that role because like you just get the shit kicked out of you working fast food. Like it's just awful. So I actually love the job to be fair, but like, you know, people treat you terribly. So I think being hung up on was not nearly as bad.

Interesting, right? Because I also worked in restoration. I was a waiter, which was way better, but I found the phone experience to very much be fight or flight because on one end, if you don't perform, you get fired, right? Or you don't get paid, um, because I was mostly commission, I think. On the other end, there's people that don't want to have anything to do with you. So it's like no man's land in like both places, sort of. So it's really like sink or swim, and that caused like a massive rift in me. But I remember dialing and checking. I had a window right in front of me and I would check people on the other route, right? Like, uh, in full congestion, like almost every day. And I was like, do I really want a 9-to-5 job? I think that will really forge me into something else. And it really did, right? It broke the ego. And then I soon— I left that one and then I started a Facebook Ads agency and I would dial up realtors. And that's how I unlocked my first $5K, $10K, $15K contracts. And that got me started. So Would you recommend that path to founders? Should they all start in sales and just face that massive black hole of rejection?

I mean, I don't know if it has to be like SDRing, because I also feel like today being a BDR, like it wasn't even called that then, right? Like it's just a different thing. Like you're doing a lot of AI stuff, you're sending a billion emails, there's LinkedIn, like, you know, phone, I think depending on your industry is like not as common. I do think that. It's important, if you're gonna be successful running a business or starting a business, whether it's a tech company or an agency or a store or whatever, a restaurant, getting comfortable with projection.

Starting a restaurant may be harder.

If you want to do your debt. Oh my God, sorry. A restaurant or a bar, especially here in New York, it's like a, oh my God, I have so much respect. I have a lot of respect on it. It's a jungle.

It's a very predatory jungle. I mean, it's like 95% of restaurants fail in less than 3 years or something like that.

Yeah, no, it's crazy. So I think getting the cycles in of just getting rejected and getting kind of knocked down a couple pegs will just prepare you for what will come at some point. If it's not investors, it'll be customers. If it's not customers, it's vendors. If it's not vendors, it's employees. Just something will, it will just continue to happen. And as business, in my experience, as a business continues to become more successful and as an employee or as a founder, as you kind of grow up, your role, like my role is less and less of like the fun stuff and more and more of like the firefighting, the harder work, the doing the apologies or negotiating or like the things that are just like a lot less fun. Like I'm not on the phone anymore with our customers when they're telling us everything is great. Every once in a while I am, but the job as you get bigger continues to get more of that sort of less of those quick little dopamine wins like you get when you're an SDR and you close a deal. That stuff just isn't as important anymore. You have folks that do that for you. But I would say you don't have to have started in sales, especially not in tech. I love people that worked restaurants. I love people that worked retail as employees, like second career folks. I just think there's so much grit. And people have a chip on their shoulder like I did.

Michelin chefs are the best because you know that they're fucking crazy in their heads.

Yeah, well, it's people that are motivated. And like, uh, we had someone that worked for us for years who ran, um, started and operated a chain of barbecue restaurants. And like, just— she was just— had like the best demeanor. Like, went back to school, picked a different career, came to us. But like had so many great stories. And like, you just know, like, if you've been woken up—

she always smells like smoke.

You know what's so funny? She's vegan now. So, but like, there's nothing like, you know, getting a phone call at 3 in the morning that like the cleaning crew came into the restaurant and like the ceiling has collapsed because there was a leak upstairs. Like, that kind of stuff is like so visceral, you know? And like, you laugh at it now, but like If you worked restaurants, we've all been through this stuff. And I think that is a really important thing to me. Yeah.

Or your assistant cook Juan is at the hospital from a third-degree burn.

Or your dishy didn't show up again because dishies never show up. They have a 4-shift lifespan typically. Yeah. It's like there's always something. You're back there washing dishes. And I think that demeanor to me, I think is so valuable. I would take that over almost anything, all things being equal skills-wise.

Yeah, I mean, pain tolerance, right, and grit is most of the game. Of course, there's like, what, like 100 to 1,000 factors to be successful, which is why there are so few up there. But pain tolerance is still like a steady home, right? And Marcus Aurelius and stoicism, because shit will get hard like sooner or later. And will you cry and run away? From the fire? Well, you go through it and fight it, right? And for you, you started Greenwood in 2017, that became Pandium. What was the idea behind that one? And what I feel was a consultancy became more of a software throughout the years. So can you walk us through that pivot?

Yeah, yeah. So when I left my previous, the company that I was at right before Greenwood Tech, which is a company called Handshake, acquired by Shopify. My co-founder and I met there, my now co-founder. I was being recruited really heavily from these kind of great big companies to help them build out their integration stuff. 'Cause at that time, and even currently, there's not that many folks that have this many years of just doing this. So, good companies, brand names, like come build out our professional services org. And I didn't really wanna do that at that time. And so Sean, who's my co-founder, and I were like, we like this problem, let's do some consulting. In that space while we independently think about what we're going to do next. Because we both left the company around the same time, we'd worked together for 3 years. And so as we were doing some of that consulting work around integration ecosystem stuff, we were also looking for a tool that we'd want to be able to use with that work. And we couldn't find anything. Like, I'd used all these other platforms before and like get into all that stuff, but, um, We used some of that time to try to figure out, hey, is there something that would be better than what we've used in the past? And we couldn't find anything. So as we were going through those projects, it was like, oh man, what if we tried to build something? And we kept coming back to, oh, wouldn't it be cool if it did this and this and this? And that's when we decided to just give it a shot and try to build something in that same sphere. And that's when Pandium was born, actually in this room, obviously pre-COVID. But Sean had a desk behind me. We were back to back. So yeah, that's where the baby, the ugly baby was born. It's much nicer now, but you're muted.

Thanks for that. So Zapier for e-commerce businesses, is that what it is?

No, I mean, so we work with software vendors across industries, so we're not a specific vertical, typically mid-market software companies who want to launch integrations that their customers use. So we don't directly sell to like a merchant or an accountant or a small business owner. We sell to the tools that they use, and then that small business owner is a Pandium user, but they, they don't know that. We're kind of underneath the hood of those businesses helping them launch these integrations more quickly. So when you say e-com, e-com is a good place for us because like Shopify has a very robust ecosystem. There's a lot of point solutions there, so We do a lot of work in e-com, but we have customers in martech and sports tech and fintech and all over the place.

Isn't that what Zapier does or Make.com does? Like they go to these players and be like, hey, we're gonna create your integrations. Is that what they exactly do? No.

So what Make and Zapier do is they market, if we go with like e-com, they market to the merchant. So like you're a person that sells stuff online, you use Shopify, you use QuickBooks, you use ShipBob, you use whatever for your returns. You as the merchant are using Zapier. What we do is we sell to companies like ShipBob so that you don't have to use Zapier. Like ShipBob natively offers an integration to Walmart and Amazon and all this other stuff. And we underpin that.

I love that niche because it's limitless, right? Like they constantly need new integrations and all new integrations require potentially different API infrastructure. So it's like big contracts for you and recurring most of the time and then shit breaks. So you need to fix their integration, so they also pay for maintenance, right?

Yeah, maintenance of the platform. It's like really, it can be inside baseball, which I won't bore everyone with, but yes, it is annual contracts. We are quite sticky. And you know, we have had the pleasure of working with some really cool, really large companies even very early on as like a first-to-market product. So it's been really fun to grow with some of these huge companies that, you know, were Series A, we started working with them and now they're like ready to, getting ready to IPO. They've gone from, from 100 employees to 1,200 employees over the time we've worked with them. And to your point, as long as the companies we work with are either signing new customers or those customers are adopting more integrations, we continue to grow with them.

Okay. And 100K customers use Pandium like directly or indirectly in the past 8 years. That's crazy.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's a lot of, it's a lot of fun.

That's a lot of people. That's a couple of stadiums.

Yeah. I mean, it's even more people than that, 'cause like each one of those is a business, right? So there's people underneath all of that. I don't even, I couldn't even estimate how many transactions that is, but yeah, it's about, I would say probably 60% of those are e-commerce merchants. So company or folks anywhere from like a single person, direct-to-consumer person selling stuff on TikTok, all the way to great big brands that you see like at Walmart. Are users of the platform, but again, they don't know that.

Right. How much clients do you currently have and how do you get them through the pipeline?

We don't disclose the number of customers, but our sales motion is really twofold. We have a really great referral and sort of inbound mechanism just from being out in the world for as long as we are. And we work with partnership folks at these software companies, right? We are working with somebody that wants to get these integrations built. So they have a huge ecosystem of other SaaS company folks that they talk to. So that's a really good lever for us. And then content marketing has really been our number one kind of lead gen function since the very beginning, since 2019. We were a first-to-market product. And so we had to do a lot of market education. No one was searching for embedded iPaaS. That segment didn't exist at the time. So we weren't gonna be able to really do ads or SEO or anything like that. We had to like get out there and kind of build this market from scratch. And we've just done it with really good original content. And luckily the GPTs and all this, the bots love original content that has a lot of traffic. So that's paid back in a way that we would not have necessarily been able to predict.

I love it. Your ICP, is it CPOs, CTOs? Who do you sell to?

Yeah, so our check signer is typically someone either in leadership at, on the product side or the engineering side. Although we do have like champions that are partnership folks, which could be in sales org, marketing org, other type of org. And then sometimes like even, you know, like strategy or some of those like platform teams, but really like product, the engineers are the users of the product. So we need to get sign-off from them., at some point throughout the journey.

How big is their company right now? And, uh, you told me a little bit of your role, so I guess your, uh, co-founder is like technical. He does all the technical stuff and you like more on the client hunting side of things, like, uh, success relationship. So tell me about the size of the business and your top objectives as a CEO.

Oh my God, top objectives. It's like there's always something, right? Um, so we're a small team, about 10 people. And man, top objectives. That's actually a hard question for me to answer. You are correct about my co-founder being our CTO. He might—

Well, your day to day, if you think of your day today, right? It's like what do you do and you start your day and what happens? I mean, it's chaos, right? But what is most of it?

I mean, most of it is gonna be something having to do with new business. That could be doing things like this, Candidly, like we are always always trying to get out there and building content, strategic sales calls, conversations with partners. It's a lot of conversations with external parties. We really don't have very many standing internal meetings. The team is not huge. We try to keep stuff pretty light for the engineering team. But basically, if it is forward-facing and potentially a customer or a potential employee or a potential partner, I am going to be a part of that. And so that is what my day is filled with. I also will say, you know, if folks are watching this on LinkedIn, I try to be relatively active on LinkedIn. I think as much as it can be very annoying, it is actually where if you're in B2B, it's where your audience is. And I think engaging with folks on LinkedIn helps not only obviously get our name out, but it bolsters the brand. And I try to be very authentic in the way that I communicate, like I am right now, um, also socially on social media. And that actually helps a lot.

Um, how does it feel to have gone from struggle and like finally making it? And when was that moment? Was it like 3 years ago, uh, that you knew that, yeah, it's like Because I, I mean, you don't need to disclose anything, but I estimate your AR to be like around $10 million. It's quite successful. You have like, I don't know, 80 clients or more. Um, you hit that, but before that you struggled hardcore, right? So like, it's like, how, how does that feel?

I mean, is there ever a moment where you feel like you've made it? Is that a thing?

I don't— Yes, yes, yes. It comes slowly but surely, I would say. But, and if not, I mean, it's probably because, I don't know, you have like a trauma, like when you were young you never had— I mean, it's a good question. It's like both, right?

It's like, yeah, I mean, I think for me, and it's just a part of my personality, like I have been managing people since I was 14 years old. Like I have been running teams of people since since I was very, very young. And I always have thought of my role again as like enablement. So even if something great happens with the business, I think of that as a win for the business and for the team and for our customers and for our partners or whoever is involved. But for me, there's always the next thing, right? And so that's what keeps us motivated, keeps me motivated through crazy shit like launching the company 3 months before COVID basically. Is when we started going to market and that transition and all that kind of stuff. It'd be really easy to just tail between the legs, curl up and be like, this is a nightmare. We're never going to get out of this. But that's not a part of my personality. So I could tell you milestones, like when we hit our first 10,000 installed customers. There's all these moments where it's like, oh my God, that was so cool. But then it's like, oh, okay, cool. It's 10,000. Now we got to get to 20. Now we got to get to 30. And you hit the revenue. Now you got to get to the next. And you know that with the— I know you're not in the States, but I'm sure the news of the States dominates globally. With how erratic the markets have been over the past 10 years, really, you know, like it never really feels like a good time to rest on your laurels, uh, because who knows what is going to happen out there. Um, so I don't think your business is very resilient.

Like, I would think that— I, I think you're in a very good place. Uh, and I talked to a lot of business owners, you have like an exit plan eventually, or do you want to keep on scaling that one forever?

I mean, I'd be stupid, I think, to say I'm gonna scale it forever. Like at some point I will be older and still not, I'm old now, but be older. It's my job to make sure that I'm doing the best thing for the company, our customers and our employees. And so we'll know when the time is right. And as long as we continue to build, like as you said, a resilient, reliable product and we keep our hands clean and keep our brand clean and act like good humans out in the world, regardless of what happens in the macro environment or to Pandium, I think we'll all be able to feel like it's been a positive outcome. Yeah.

Keep saving them cats.

I got to keep saving the cats, man. I threw them out of here for this because they were running. They're pretty big now. We've had them for 3 months. Once they're like getting crazy and I did a podcast a couple weeks ago and they were like wigging out running in the background. I was like, maybe not.

Cats are always like that. As soon as there's a podcast, like, well, I mean not all, but I often see cats in the background and they climb desks, you know, dogs don't climb desks. Like they just chill at the floor level. Your podcast, how's it going? What's your objective with that?

Yeah, so Between Product and Partnerships brings together All kinds of folks involved with SaaS partnerships. So it's partnership, technology partnership folks, product folks, engineering folks. You had folks from security companies, all kinds of things. And it's great. Like, I love humans and getting to talk to such a wide breadth of, of like experience levels and sort of positions and companies is really fun. Like we get to learn a lot. We have a really great audience. And I also love selfishly that it's basically just like this, right? We edit it and stuff. It's not live, but it's really just casual conversations with really cool people. And every single time I get to learn something about something and our audience does too, which is great.

It's free market research. It's also the best go-to-market engine ever. Where can people find out more about you, Christina?

They can find me on LinkedIn, which may or may not be showing up on this because I can't do anything. And pandium.com. We also have the SaaS Ecosystem Alliance, which is getting ready to relaunch in its new version, which is a Slack community. And also we're doing roundtables and things like that. Again, for folks involved in technology partnerships in essentially any role, but LinkedIn and pandium.com are going to be the two spots. To find me and folks are welcome to add me. If you're interested in potentially being on the pod, hit me up. We're always looking for new folks to chat with, very low impact. But yeah, I appreciate you taking the time.

It's Christina and Charles Cormier for another Founder Without