Adam Steinberg on how PartnerStack evolved its Pricing & Packaging

Adam, thank you so much for being on our podcast. I've gotten to know you over the last, I don't know, year and a half. Founders in Atlanta, you've had such a cool career. You studied economics in college. Out of college, right away you founded a company. A couple years after that, you're acquired by Silverpop, which I think was eventually acquired by IBM. Like, early in your career, there's a lot of success. You spent a really good kind of tour of duty at IBM, like leading the emergent— the emerging apps team, if I understand correctly. And then you went and founded again and you founded Fetch and you ran it for most of the next decade. And then about a year and a half ago, you joined PartnerStack, which is this really interesting software company. Today you're the chief strategy officer. How did all this happen? How did we get to now?

Yeah, Fynn, yeah, I appreciate it. And thanks for having me on. Looking forward to the conversation. I've actually been founding companies since I was 6 years old. So classic kind of founder entrepreneur story, but You know, I came from a family that really wanted to instill responsibility, problem solving, being fiscally responsible. And that started as a kid. I remember very vividly, I wanted to buy Ninja Turtles. This is like 1990. I wanted some Ninja Turtles. My parents are like, well, great. Like, do you have the money? I was like, no. Like, okay, well, how are you going to get the money? And so this was also at a time when, you know, like environmentalism was first becoming really a thing. And so I had the idea of like, hey, I'll start a recycling business where I'll pick up the neighbor's recycling and take it to the recycling center. This is before curbside service. And so kind of fast forward, I, I did that for 5 years. I knocked on doors to do collections. I picked up recycling every other Saturday for 5 years, bought my first car with that, bought a bunch of Ninja Turtles with that. What that did for me though is instill a love of problem solving, of building something from scratch, of being able to make a dollar on my own. And so I've always loved the idea of how do I take inefficiencies in the world and solve them in different interesting ways, primarily through software in my career. But that's really, really how it started. You know, coming out of college, you know, also like there's context there that isn't shared on LinkedIn. So like outta college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was an economics major, loved economics, but didn't want to become an economist. And so I actually went to law school like most kind of maybe pathless economics majors. And so I went to law school and then quickly realized that just wasn't the path for me. Like realized that I love solving problems. Wanted to be creative, wanted to form my own solutions. And so I actually dropped out of law school, moved to New York, had a friend up there from college. We tried to start a company that didn't work, but then joined a startup and then got the bug pretty quickly and been on my way ever since.

You know, to me it seems exceptional that a 6-year-old would run a recycling business for 5 years. I mean, like, I can see like a few months for a summer, but 5 years is a long time to do that.

It is. It's also exceptional that my parents drove me every Saturday at 8 o'clock in the morning.

This is like your version of youth soccer, is like youth entrepreneurship.

Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. Um, but yeah, no, I mean, look, it was just a great lesson. I mean, imagine, look, also like you're 6, like, so you go knock on someone's door, it's like, hey, for $5 every month I'll pick up recycling. No one's gonna say no, right? Although I did get a few nos, so, um, but it was a great way just to learn fundamentals, responsibility as a kid. I loved it. Like sometimes I got McDonald's at the end of the morning, so that was great too. But I loved the experience and my parents were just so gracious to be able to support me in that as well. So it's something that I'm trying to do with my kids. I'm sure you are as well.

Yeah, I think about that constantly with my kids as well. When you look at— so your company that ended up being acquired by Silverpop was PlacePunch, right?

That's right.

When you look back on PlacePunch, you know, decade removed.

Yeah.

What do you take away from that experience? And I'm also curious, like, what do you sort of laugh at now when you sort of look in the mirror at the founder that you were then versus the founder-operator that you are now?

There's a lot of things I take away. The first is that those early days are just like the best days. They are so fun. Like, the grind is so fun. The constant problem solving is so fun. You know, I was call it 25, right? I'd spent enough time in a couple marketing technology companies leading product and marketing at the early stages where I had a little bit of confidence, but I didn't know what I didn't know, and I wasn't scared to do anything. And so, you know, the things we did well, we entered in emerging markets, location-based marketing then was really nothing. It was just starting. Mobile was just starting. Social was just getting going. So we entered at a really ideal time where there was this wave that we didn't know we were riding, but we were riding this wave. Also, this was 2010, 2011, so not many people were starting companies at that time. It's also, if you were scrappy, didn't require a lot of capital, there was a lot of room to run and not much competition. We also had great, amazing advisors, investors here in Atlanta. So I remember, call it 6 weeks in, an investor took us over to IHG here in Atlanta, walked us in. We had a location-based marketing product that was very, very early, but IHG was a willing kind of beta user, design partner is what we call them now. And they were interested because we were doing something really interesting and innovative that they hadn't seen before. And so that was another lesson learned is that when you do something interesting that's new, where you're riding a wave, you can really pick up early customers quite quickly with minimal product. Now, of course, we were doing nights and weekends pulling it all together and building the product that they needed, but it was a great initial design partner and we just weren't, weren't scared of it. It was probably the biggest thing.

How do you think now about identifying waves? Because I mean, you mentioned like we didn't know we were riding the waves. I assume like there's a little bit of first-time entrepreneur effect, like naivete. Like you had seen something, but you weren't thinking about it as like an investor and like thinking it through like the framework of this is a small category today that's going to be a huge category. I imagine that's true. Tell me if wrong, but how do you think about identifying waves today?

Yeah, I think it's a combination. I mean, it's, it can be risky because you're really trying to predict the future. And I love that quote, the best way to predict the future is to invent it or build it, right? But I worked for the first CEO I worked for, what he did, his model was he would sell a company, then he would go basically away for 18 months and just read, write code, talk to lots of people, and then figure out where is the world headed for the next 10 years. And that was kind of the wave. And so at that point it was social, mobile was the next wave. But you really have to, you have to have a vision for the future. You have to be creative, willing to take a risk. And understand where is the underlying technology going. And that's— that can be hard. And so we've had a lot of false starts, right? It's hard. Chat was a thing, right? Chatbots were a thing. Blockchain's still a thing. But are those the next thing? I'm not sure. Right now it's AI. That seems likely. But there's a lot of false waves, right, that kind of crest too early. So it can be tricky and you have to be pretty agile as well. But if you nail it, it can be really, really powerful.

You then spent 3 years operating in a larger— in a larger company environment. How do you think that that sort of influenced you in company number 2? Well, maybe company number 6, depending on how many businesses we count, but how did that larger company experience influence the founder that you became in company number 2?

Yeah, so I'd worked at— primarily my experience had been whether it was a founder or working for other companies, it's all very early stage, like Series A or before. And so when Silverpop acquired our business, Silverpop was a 500-person nearing $100 million marketing automation business here in Atlanta. And that was really the first time I'd worked for a growth company with real scale. And that still informs what I do today. Like, I look back on those lessons learned, they were so foundational to what I do today. You know, I got to see how a company operates at scale, how you collaborate across departments, how you build culture. So if you talk to people that were at Silverpop, the culture is the number one thing that stands out. And how do you build a culture that scales with the business is very unique. And so Bill Nussey, who is the CEO there, just an incredible leader, like just took a lot of lessons learned. It was the first time I'd seen a really incredible CEO that was also like in the weeds on the product, understood the technology at a very intimate level, operate. So really everything like I do today is informed by that experience. They also like, to their credit, they bought our company. We were very early still. They integrated our technology and they said, hey, We've got some interesting folks here that are really smart. They're young, they don't know what they don't know. Let's go let them build. And so they put us in a spot where we could go build, be innovative, make mistakes, but they supported us and we did some really compelling things to help build that business there. It ultimately led to that, that really exciting sale to IBM.

Any examples of maybe some of the stuff that Bill did that you now use and you, and that you now apply?

Honestly, the, the number one thing is that when you met with Bill, I was always kind of nervous to meet with Bill. He's the CEO, he's a very impressive person. I wanted to do right by him. They'd acquired our business, so I wanted to have a very positive impact there. Anytime you talked to Bill, you always came away feeling like a million dollars. And I saw the impact of that. When you have 500 people, you don't get to see everyone every day, but he would leave an impression where he really cared. And he did care about the people there. He deeply cared about the people. And he always left an inspiration, left you with confidence to go do what was required to build a business, what was next. And sometimes that wasn't easy. It could be a lot of tough conversations, but you always felt better coming out of it.

So, and just to press into that a little bit more, was he leaving you with confidence about the business's potential, about your own ability to impact the company?

It was a combination of both, I'd say. We had a very, I mean, one of the things he did well was we had a very audacious vision, which was to bring behavioral marketing to the world. And so that was a very inspiring vision that I very much aligned with. But it was also, you know, you're talented, you have the capability, right? We're going to push you in ways you maybe didn't imagine when you joined, but we know you can do it, right? So go do it because we believe in you and let us know how we can help, that type of thing. But it was, I'd say it was both.

So what led you to founding Fetch?

Yeah, so Fetch was born out of a couple iterations. So to give you the maybe 1 minute on the winding journey there. Every startup is a winding journey. Silverpop sold to IBM. We stayed along as part of that to help do the integration. And then we, you know, my co-founder and I from Placebunch, we said, hey, look, you know, we're founders, we're ready to start our next thing. And so we originally started a company in the marketing technology space again. We had a website personalization product for B2B marketers that we initially launched. And that didn't stick like we thought it would. So it was a different time. It was, uh, the market had different needs. And so we looked at the different options and we were frankly like running low on money. We were kind of trying to figure out if we're going to keep going. Um, I'd always been enamored by, by the idea of reducing friction and kind of frictionless experiences. And so my, my partner Chris, he had been renting trucks for some home improvement projects and kind of came in one day and was like, hey, look, I know this is out of left field, but the kind of lightweight truck rental market is so antiquated. Like there's no technology there. What if we rebuilt that business through software and hardware technology and removed all the friction and really rebuilt it in a mobile-first perspective? And I thought that was really exciting because, okay, wow, that's a huge business. I'm not familiar with it, but it sounds like a fun adventure. So let's go have that adventure.. And so that was really the light bulb moment was just that classic, like, business run on pen and paper. How do we automate it through technology? And so what that business became was a, a marketplace for contactless truck rentals. The idea is that both businesses and consumers are always renting trucks. Like if you're going to IKEA, going to Home Depot, you're renting trucks. If you're a business, you're constantly moving supplies and equipment around, you need trucks. And so we built a marketplace where everyone from individuals to large fleet operators, rental companies could come put their trucks in our marketplace, use our technology, which is a hardware device. They could plug it in their vehicle, connect it to our system so that any renter could walk up to that vehicle, unlock it with their phone, go on their way, do their job, pay by the hour, pay by the day. Um, that was a very interesting kind of mobility marketplace that we ran for close to 9 years, as you mentioned.

So, I mean, it sounds so obvious that like people are often trying to kind of exchange share trucks. How did you get convicted before you started really building the business that the market was there? Were you— is it a lot of primary research, or did you just kind of like trust the obvious?

One of the lessons I've learned as a founder is that you really have to trust your instincts. Like, it's your company, and so your instincts are usually correct, at least directionally. If you don't trust your instincts, like, you don't have that underlying enthusiasm, vigor for the business, like that can fall apart over time. So that's a dangerous spot to be in. So it's a combination of, I'd been in a spot, I was having my first child with my wife. We were going to buy some baby furniture, couldn't fit it in our car. Realized like, oh wow, like if I had this product, I would use it right now. And then we did the classic thing where we built a lean landing page for Fetch Truck. My founder was like, hey, Fetch Truck's available. Let's buy the domain. We bought it. Launched a landing page in 24 hours, set up some quasi-fake truck rental locations, drove some paid search to it, and immediately had people trying to transact. Immediately had people— actually, we put a phone number, people were calling us trying to find trucks. And so we knew that there was an opportunity where it's like, hey, folks are not exactly wedded to the existing incumbents in this space. There's an opportunity for us here. Let's keep going with it.

Super cool. What was hardest about this business, the supply side or the demand side?

The supply side was the hardest part to get right. Demand, we had, you know, the landing page is an example. We always had demand and we had like from click to conversion, we had like 12% conversion rates. We had great economics on the demand side, incredible economics on the demand side. Supply was harder because if you look at the, um, like the rental industry, it's, it's not quite monopolistic, but it's close. There's a couple key companies in that space that have really all the supply and all the mindshare. And so getting supply on was challenging. There was also challenges, you know, with the marketplace, especially with physical goods. There's a lot of logistics involved with that. And so it was just tough to get the supply right. And ultimately that was always our biggest challenge was getting the supply.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So take us into PartnerStack. You've joined this company about 18 months ago. You're now Chief Strategy Officer. Maybe let's start there. Like what is Chief Strategy Officer in your mind for like the mandate and the charter of the role?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So PartnerStack's an incredible business. You know, I've known the founding team since we met at Y Combinator close to 10 years ago now. So like anything, it starts with the people. So incredible people at the business. And really our mission is to change the way the world sells software by enabling every revenue team to leverage indirect revenue streams, partner channels, if you will. So everything from affiliate to co-sell, referral to resell. But at PartnerStack, you know, strategy, what does that mean? So I think it can mean a lot of different things at different companies. For Partner Stack, my mandate is what are the biggest opportunities, biggest leverage points for the business for us to grow as well as serve our customers in the industry? And then how do we define that and then go execute on it? So I'm really fortunate in that I have a broad purview of Partner Stack. I get to go work on the biggest problems of the business, work across the company, across different teams. I spend a lot of time with our product team thinking about product strategy as well as our go-to-market teams thinking about How do we position our product? How do we— I like the quote, how do we build a product so well that it fits the buyer's needs kind of automatically? So I love that, that thinking. So that's kind of my purview at Partnerstack. It's a combination of strategy and execution.

I have— so at a company that I joined between the two companies that I founded, I ended up running growth. And what was evident to me was the business needed a definition for growth and it needed a man growth as a function needed a mandate and a charter that the business could clearly understand, incorporate. And I had a similar definition. It was this idea of like, let's attack the biggest problems in the business. And I'm curious kind of how you approach identifying those problems and what you would say to people who find themselves in similar situations where they've got these really interesting cross-functional mandates, but they've got to select the right places to go focus. How do you identify the biggest problems?

Yeah, I mean, really it's about leverage, I think. And so it's, hey, if we unlock this bottleneck or solve this thing, does it unlock a large new opportunity for us? That doesn't necessarily mean it's a new market, but it means that we're reducing churn or we're driving expansion with our customers, helping them be more successful by solving this key thing. The natural challenge as a founder is that you always are thinking about like, what's the next thing? Like, what's the new, new thing? That's just the natural founder mentality. Um, but most businesses, you get to the point where it's, how do we relentlessly execute and focus on a core set of opportunities for 5, 10, 15 years, right? And so PartnerStack has a broad purview. Like we always say, there's, it's true, there's no shortage of opportunity, but it's how do we focus on the right opportunities that can move the business forward as well as help our customers move their businesses forward. So I know that's kind of broad, but it's, it's usually pretty straightforward. It's like, hey, look, our customers are telling us we need this. We're also looking at the market. We know it's moving in this direction. Let's bring all of our available resources and focus on executing in these couple areas really well over the next year. And so it's just picking what are those areas and then just being very focused and committed to them. So that's really the way I think about it. Oftentimes also I like to be kind of a consultant to the company. So it's, hey, Look, I've been in your shoes. Let me give you another perspective, right? So someone that's come in, let me give you a different perspective. This is the data. This is what it's saying. I know we think this, but this is the data. So how do we bring this together and find the truth here? Like there's some combination of founder vision that we need to always include, right? But also like, this is what the data is telling us. Let's be thoughtful about that and make sure we're not kind of missing an opportunity that's just sitting kind of right in front of us.

Like the data may suggest we have a churn problem or an expansion problem or a brand awareness problem or pipeline problem or whatever, and the data will tell us that. And then we can kind of line that up with where the business needs to go from the founder's perspective to prioritize.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that's a fair way to think about it.

Yeah, very interesting. Well, you know, it sounds— I think one of the things that, if I'm, if I'm interpreting correctly, like, you're in this interesting role where, like, you've been the founder thinking about what's next. Now you're really the operator who's trying to guide the business into, like, how do we operate with a ton of discipline over the course of a meaningful period of time to create enterprise value?

That's right. That's right. That's very fair. And so, you know, we can talk about this, but one of the first things we saw was an opportunity to really improve our pricing and packaging and reset that in a way that aligned to value, right, with our customers. So we could talk about that, but that's just one example of, hey, like, if we fix these couple of things, it'll really suit the market and fit the way our buyer needs to buy our product. Let's focus on that.

Well, let's go there. So, so tell us, maybe kind of help us understand the pricing as a journey. Tell us a little bit about where PartnerStack is on that journey, and maybe you could kind of make it as explicit as possible with like, what is the value that most customers perceive? And then how do they think about, you know, how do they kind of quantify that value from like a price, from a willingness to pay perspective? Help us understand.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So, so PartnerStack is a pretty interesting project in that it, it really delivers a couple kind of mediums of value. So the first is a pretty standard kind of software as a service type product. So what we call a partner relationship management system. So you come in, you bring your partners into this product, you invite them in, you set up your partner programs, you can manage training, you can manage commissioning, you can track all of your conversions from referrals and deal registration. So it's, it's pretty classic kind of SaaS product, but there's also a payouts component. So managing payouts for partners, especially when you're a global business, you've got partners in multiple countries, multiple currencies. That's a very challenging problem. And we solve that for our customers. And so we also have a really kind of a transactional pricing component to managing payouts for our customers. So we can talk about both on the SaaS side. You know, historically it was different versions, a little bit of kind of figure out pricing as you go. And so we wanted to bring some standardizations from real-world packaging to how we think about pricing and really wanted to align pricing to value. And so we looked at pricing a couple different ways, and one of the clearest ones for us is that in PartnerStack, it's really about how many programs are you running in the product. So we looked at, do we want to charge based on seats or other mechanisms? We ultimately found that programs is one way to think about it. And so a program could be an affiliate program, a reseller program, a referral program. But we, we aligned on that. So based on which package you bought, you, you kind of got most of the features. Some features are in the kind of enterprise packages. However many programs you wanna run is kind of which package you're tied to. And that was a very clear, kind of easy to understand way of thinking about it. And then within each package, you have different economics for managing your payout structure.. And so as you kind of move into more enterprise packages, you kind of buy down your, your payouts, commission structure as well. And so that was a very, again, I like to focus on easy to understand. So like, let's monetize appropriately. The more value we deliver, we should monetize that appropriately, but let's make it very easy to understand because ultimately if your customers are successful, they're gonna grow, they're gonna buy more product, use more products. We're all gonna win and do well, but let's make it easy to understand and predict and get started with.

Really helpful. I think one of the things that, I mean, on the easy to understand piece, I'll just highlight something that I feel like I've heard again and again on this podcast is like, if your customers are asking tons of questions about your pricing, you may have made the pricing a little bit too complex or kind of misunderstood how they think about your value. I mean, to your point on friction, like the more you can reduce friction and in other words, the number of questions asked about pricing, the better.

That's right.

The second thing you mentioned is that you realized that the real value metric was around programs as opposed to something like seats. So is programs today like how you would describe the price metric of the business?

So that is one of the key mechanisms that drives the packaging. There's also some advanced features that can't really change our economics, and so we have to think about how that impacts pricing and packaging as well. That's really the core feature, because what that means is that typically if you have multiple programs, you likely have multiple teams coming into the product. So that correlates with seats, but we didn't want to cap seats because we want to let you kind of bring your teams in and be successful with the product, realize value fairly quickly. So that was the best way we found to align really our packaging to the value the customer's receiving or driving.

When you joined the business 18 months ago, had the business realized that programs was the value metric, or did the business realize that over the last 18 months?

I'd say they that we likely knew that it was just a matter of actioning it. So it was a matter of all these other priorities we have in the business, when can we get to this? And so when someone new comes in, it's like I have a blank slate, right? So I can just help do things that you were probably thinking about, but I can get those started now that I've got a blank slate here and the energy to do it. I wouldn't say that we realized in 18 months, but we realized that the market and the customers were telling us how they wanted to kind of price the product and what felt appropriate. And we just kind of listened to the market a little bit more closely.

Interestingly, so they were effectively communicating that in the context of like a negotiation or a deal, a deal negotiation, right?

Right, exactly.

Yeah, very interesting.

Yeah, yeah. And to your point, you know, I'd say pricing, it's pricing something where it's rare that you win on pricing. You certainly don't want to lose on pricing. In terms of packaging, you know, price is different than packaging, but packaging, you typically want to be in line with the market, and you can be different to some degree, but you don't want to be completely different. And so we also just want to make sure that we were in line with the market expectations.

So the market had in some ways like anchored around this idea of programs from a competitive perspective is like what the market is sort of used to buying against.

I would say that that's one of the mechanisms. There's a few out there. Seats is certainly one that's still, still out there, but it was one that the market was, I would say, comfortable let.

Yeah, yeah. You said that pricing and packaging are different, and I think that that's very true. How are they different in your mind? How would you, how would you create the distinction for people?

Yeah, so, so packaging is, is what you get, um, and how the buyer thinks about feature set, um, and kind of value with the product. Pricing is something completely different in my mind. So pricing is, is certainly what the customer's paying, right? But how we think about pricing, how— and I'll say we, I say any business— how I think about pricing is pricing is a function of the value you deliver to the customer, but also a combination of our economics as a business, right? Ultimately, like, lower the price, the more you're going to get of something. That's just basic economics, right? And so certainly if you have a premium product, you can command a premium price. But there's also something to using pricing to be a little bit of a founder using pricing as a weapon, right? And so the way I think about pricing is how can we deliver more value to our customers? And we can do that by building a more efficient business. If you can build a more efficient business, you can build, build a more aggressive price pricing structure. Um, and so we saw that, that was a lesson I learned at Fetch was that our economics, cost of customer acquisition, for example, drove a lot of our, our pricing that we needed to charge our, our customers. And so I think about pricing as a way to deliver more value, but also everything you do as a business drives your pricing. So the more efficient you are, the better business you are, the better pricing you can deliver to the market. In combination with, as you build premium product, innovative product, you also want to have a balance there with how you think about monetizing that. But it's a classic kind of tension between two there and always finding the right balance.

Should people take away from that, that if they can build more efficiency into their business, for example, a lever like customer acquisition, that's an opportunity to lower prices for customers, which will be of value over the long term? Or is that not the takeaway you'd want people to walk away with?

I wouldn't take away with that. I would take away that it's an option. And so you have to think about as a founder, as an operator, how do you want to win in the market? There's a lot of ways you can win. Pricing can be a way you can win. It doesn't have to be the only one, but it's a, it can be a way you win. But to do that though, to have a sustainable advantage on pricing, you constantly have to be driving efficiency in your business. And that's a different type of business perhaps than maybe some founders want to run where they want to be innovative, deliver the most innovative products, you know, the Apple style where it's, hey, we have the premium product with premium pricing, premium customer service, all that. That's a great way to build a business as well. So there's no, again, like there's no right or wrong way to do it. There's different ways you can think about it though, different strategies you can employ. And you see businesses like do this well, each approach can work, right?

How, you know, as you kind of enter into this new kind of chapter at PartnerStack where you're looking at the biggest problems in the company and unlocking growth, how do you anticipate the company starts to operationalize pricing? Like how does pricing as a practice or a function in the company start to work? How do you expect that to evolve as well?

Yeah, I have a colleague who's very talented and very smart, and that colleague consistently says on our pricing calls, The best software companies are constantly testing and changing their pricing to align with the market and deliver more value, right? So for us, it's not a, we've solved it forever. It's a, how do we constantly iterate on our pricing to deliver more value to our customers? And so one of the ways we've done that is over the past 18 months, we developed really a testing framework to be able to test new pricing structures. Just like you do A/B testing on your website or in your product, we can do A/B testing now with our pricing. And the way we do that is we have a mechanism by partnering with our RevOps team where we can basically take new pricing that we think could be valuable to our customers and test certain percentages of new deals on that pricing structure so we can get feedback very quickly from the market and from our sales team without really putting the whole pipeline at risk in a given quarter, right? And so that's been incredibly helpful to get feedback very quickly to build trust with the sales team that, hey, look, we always want to be pushing things forward, being aggressive, but we're not going to put the whole pipeline at risk. And so we've been able to use that to operationalize really quick kind of pricing and testing over the past 18 months. And this year we're just going to keep doing more of that. So hey, we're hearing this from our customers. We're launching new features, new product. How do we test that and make sure it aligns with customer expectations and then look to operationalize that in the full kind of standard price book?

I think it's a phenomenal example. I think it's like obviously beneficial to invest in that. Curious what the hardest part about running that type of testing has been for you all. Is it like training sales reps, or is it coming up with the different hypotheses around how you might price and package, or is it something completely different than either of those two?

Yeah, probably the, you know, I like to say the devil's in the details. So, you know, you can see testing on paper, like the data is like, oh, this is a clear yes, you should roll this out 100%, or maybe no, you shouldn't. But there's always detail and context. And so it's not as easy as that. It's, it's, hey, like we're hearing this, we're seeing this in the data. Hey, sales team, give us your feedback. Leadership, give us your feedback. How does this affect our economics? Like it's very nuanced and layered conversation. So it's probably the hardest part is, is taking that data, but also using intuition and vision along with that and saying, "We feel good about this, let's operationalize it." Or, "Hey, interesting experiment. Let's not do it though. Not the right time." So I think that's the hardest part is that alignment piece. It really is saying like, "We're gonna take the bet now. We're gonna fully roll this out," even though the testing may be inconclusive in some places.

Yeah. The pricing person that you mentioned, do they roll to product or do they roll to finance or do they roll to you? Where do they sit in the org?

So our pricing, I'll talk about our pricing team. So our pricing team, there's no, I'd say no one person that owns pricing. Our pricing team consists of myself, RevOps, product marketing, business analytics, product sales leadership. So it's really like like super cross-functional. It's a great team. And so, you know, the way we do it is, you know, every person has kind of different responsibilities in terms of operationalizing the pricing that probably rolls into RevOps in terms of how do we formalize it, roll it out to our sales team. But certainly we have enablement, the product marketing as well. And the business analytics is ultimately taking that data and looking at it and making recommendations based on what we're seeing across the data. So it's an everyone kind of effort.—

it should be, right? Like if you, if you went and did all this without feedback from sales or product, where would you be?

Exactly, exactly right.

Really appreciate this conversation. One of the closing questions I always like to ask is when you look back at your career, is there a moment, like a, like a really isolated moment that you go, that was an inflection for me personally and where I am today?

There's several. You know, one that I, I haven't mentioned, I touched on a little bit is Certainly as a child, having supportive parents that really gave me the freedom and the rope to go figure out how to problem solve was a big one. When I, coming out of undergrad, when I made the decision to drop out of law school, like I left like, hey, that could be a very safe career. My parents were very excited to have me be a lawyer. I said, you know what, life is short. Let me go do something I know I'm super excited about. I'd always build software as a kid, build websites, like was really into gaming as a kid. And so I knew that was an area that I loved and knew that I also loved building businesses. And so I made that choice. I moved to New York literally with my pickup truck and like a couple hundred dollars and a truck full of like canned soup, right? And so like that was a bet on myself, like go have an adventure, you're going to figure it out. And that just gave me the resiliency and I think really fed into my experience as a founder where you always have that confidence that no matter what, I took a bet on myself. I've done that over and over again. I know how to solve problems. Like there's nothing I can't figure out, I can't solve. And so I'd say, I don't know if it was one inflection point, but just a series that built up that confidence that as a founder, you're just a problem solver. And the more you do that, the more confidence you have. So I'd say like being able to have that trust in myself.

I love that story. Thank you for doing this. Where can people learn more about PartnerStack or reach out to you if they want to talk about unlocking growth and attacking the biggest problems.

Yeah. So, you know, PartnerStack, you can find us online, partnerstack.com. Of course, we're on all the, all the social platforms. Myself, I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn. My email is adam.steinberg@partnerstack.com. Love to chat with anyone about partner programs, go-to-market, but as well, like, love the founder journey, love talking to founders. If I ever can help anyone think about go-to-market, pricing, being a founder, love to connect and help any way I can.

Adam, thank you so much as always.

Thanks, Fynn.

I appreciate it.