Harrison Rose: The GTM Story of Paddle ($1.4 Billion Valuation)

This is Unicorn Builders where we tell the untold stories of the founders who've defied the odds and built billion dollar companies. Here's your Host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines IO. Now let's jump straight into today's episode.

Hey founders and thanks for listening. Today our unicorn builder is Harrison Rose, co founder of Paddle, a payments infrastructure provider for SaaS companies that's raised 300 million dol in funding. Harrison, thanks for chatting with me today.

Thanks for having me.

Super excited. Let's go ahead and kick off with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.

Yeah, sure. So I'm Harrison. I founded my first business paddle 11 years or so ago when I was 18 with my co founder Christian. Yeah many years later as you intro where seems like a long time ago with 300 staff, 3,000 customers globally and raised some money. I ran all of kind of go to market revenue and strategy there for the decade or so I was in the business and then yes, step back from full time in January last year which was quite intense, having been running the business my entire adult life. And after a short break I've co founded a new business called Good Fit off the back of some of the kind of unique ways we were going to market and using data at Paddle, with some encouragement from some friends and investors. Very different reasons of starting the two companies, but yeah, that's kind of how I got here. By hook or by crook.

Take us back to inside your mind. When you were 18, who inspired you and what inspired you to go out and start a company that's quite young to start a business?

You're much kinder than most people. Most people are like at 18, why on earth were you trying to solve like payments for B2B software companies have been a little bit harsher than you. I think I was dragged into it a little bit if I'm completely honest. Christian, my co founder I think always wanted to run a business at the age of like 17 when I first met him, albeit remotely. We didn't meet each other for like a year or two and he knew everyone's like S1 filings back to front people's cap tables. Like he knew about this world and wanted to be a part of it from a very young age. I kind of got dragged into it having been introduced to Christian by a friend and was just very excited to kind of be running a business. If I'm honest, Christian was kind of solving a problem that he'd encountered building software himself. And for those of you listening that don't know paddle basically just payments, checkout, taxes, recurring billing, all of that fun stuff for software companies. And he'd experienced the pain of not having a solution for those things in trying to build some invoicing software, which was rubbish by the way, himself back in the day. And I kind of got dragged in to help him with all aspects of running a business and kind of ended up here. I don't regret any of it. But to say that I had a plan or knew what I was getting into would be a complete lie to Brett.

What were those early days like? Are there any untold stories or stories that haven't been shared widely that you can share with us?

I mean, there's a lot of very unsexy stories that we probably haven't shared. Like, and a lot of them probably meet some archetypes. Like we raise money and ye I didn't know what like a VC was. We raised an angel round from a guy called Mark Pearson who we met at Hackathon before we started. But I had no idea how we were going to spend this money. Like Christian and I put ourselves basically on like a minimum wage. I think our Runway was like 20 years. I used to drive my monitor, which is actually like an LCD television to and from the office every day in the car. It was like a 50 mile each way trip. Like we honestly had no idea what we were doing. Which I'm really grateful for, actually. Both those initial angel investors and even the early stage kind of institutional funds who backed us because I really felt like they funded our kind of growth and development both as like operators but to some degree as people. It is mad to look back on, albeit I'm encouraged to sometimes, but yeah, probably all the archetypes you could expect, man.

What do you think they saw in you and Christian?

That is a great question. I think I've heard people don't tell you directly. I've heard some funny stories about Christian. I think one of the quotes that stood out was Christian tells you he's going to change the world and you look him in the eye and you realize that he's not joking. Like he's a slight madman. But I think it was our kind of relentless desire to improve, to learn, to do something with impact. I don't think we definitely didn't know what culture was or values were in some of those early days, but I think we're hopefully depicting some of the behaviors of some folks who go on to do something pretty cool, like the actual nature of the Business changed quite a lot in what since we started. So I'm pretty sure they were just backing hopefully us as individuals in the early days and we eventually stumbled upon something that worked, I think.

When did it start to feel like things really were working? Was that one month in, was that one year in? Or did it never start to feel that way?

It's funny, like I'm obviously doing it a second time around with Gutter as well. I just keep chilling my code down, how much easier it is the first time. I don't think it ever really felt good, to be honest with you. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves, Christianity, to grow the business to the extent where we once had a board level conversation that we needed to be better at celebrating wins. Once I had like a bunch of sales team members leave the business because they thought we were rubbish and doomed because we weren't hitting Centauri Sunset. And actually that day after that exodus of like folks leaving the business, we were like crowned the fastest growing software company in the uk. So we weren't so good at recognizing how far we come. I think I really bought into not knowing the world and a lot of the hype I was seeing on LinkedIn and on blogs and expecting everyone was running these sexy startups coming out of SF or whatever and maybe not realizing actually we were doing an okay job. So it probably took us to at leave maybe the second round of institutional funding. The first was a real slog to recognize we were probably onto something good. We ran our first company retreat. I still remember that weekend really fondly now as a moment of just like, oh my God, like this is real and we've actually, we're actually doing okay. But that was a good, good few years in that it took a while.

Let's talk about those first paying customers you were able to land. That's obviously something that all startups struggle with. So how'd you do it? How'd you pull off those first big deals?

Yeah, I think it was. It's quite different. Both the new company and Paddocks and I'm kind of talking about both and some of the benefits or the pros and cons. So Palo, our proposition was quite different when we first started. So we had this real hypothesis which I think the angel investors kind of believed in, that selling software and at the time it was more digital goods as a whole than just software was too difficult basically. And people were spending as much time building that out, that infrastructure as they would actually work on their products. And our initial hypothesis was Like a marketplace. In theory, marketplaces take away a lot of that pain. They bring new customers, they handle your payments, they handle your refunds, they handle the delivery of the product. So our first paying customers were people on this marketplace. Actually, it was quite easy to get someone to sign up to an extra channel. I think the real game changer for us is when we realized that we could help a lot of these software developers very specifically, not only sell their products on like the actual list that started on the outside and direct and on our marketplace, we really iterated and stumbled our way to more significant customers, to be honest with you. And there was a real period that we knew we were going through of lots of experimentation around what was the right business model. We tried like flash deals, we tried like the sincere base marketplace. But it was when we started powering that big infrastructure for those companies to actually sell their products, like globally and outside of app stores using our software, that we saw real success. But it was an iteration like those companies we'd often done like a flash deal with, then on the marketplace named, convince them to use like our trials and licensing structures. It was all desktop software focus on actually initially rather than SaaS, which sounds pretty mad today to say outbound. But it was a really iterative process. And that's the complete opposite to what I found second time around with my new company called GoodFit. So GoodFit was born out of the way we were like going to market and selling at Paddle. Actually, like after a while, we established this really repeatable outbound machine at Paddle. Once we really zeroed in on that infrastructure piece being the most successful thing, we were like outbound driven. Five years. It was our exclusive channel, growing 500% year on year. The way we were doing that was with some really interesting kind of ways of using data. And I remember, like at each round of our funding, they were as interested in this data set we were using to go to market as they were PADDLE itself, which actually got quite frustrating at times. And it got to the point where the investors actually encouraged my head of Revops at the time to leave our business at Paddle and productize what it is that we were doing. And he had like a queue of customers waiting to pay tens of thousands of dollars before he even started. And all I could do is just like, not normally this easy man. Like you have, you have a wonderful opportunity ahead of you. So experience some quite different times there, I guess. One taking many years, the other kind of establishing product market bit before you'd even got started.

And how do you think you pulled that off? Was it just because you had a deep understanding of the problem? So it was much easier to get product market fit right away.

I mean, we thought we knew how companies should be going to market. Right. We tried and tested that panel while stress tested it, frankly, we were growing incredibly quickly. We talked to a lot of other businesses how we were going to market it and a lot of them were either trying to do that or thought that that was the future, having heard about it from us. So as you say, having done it ourselves and lived and breathed it, we basically got the product for ourselves, right? And then recognized there was a real desire for that, for that elsewhere. Again, you're kind of doing your user research and your feedback building and your validation. We were doing it by accident, to be honest. We were just being asked to talk about this stuff. But that's really helped us later down the line because we've established ourselves as very helpful and very open to talking about data and go to market within the space and real thought leaders. Again, all this was kind of by accident before we even got going and got started, which has made our lives a hell of a lot easier. On the inverse PADDLE started every year we did the understudied business model. We had zero interest, zero credibility. We weren't thought leaders obviously, just such. So having built some of that stuff out beforehand has certainly made our lives a hell of a lot easier and second time around.

Yeah, I can imagine. I've got a bunch of questions on good Fit that I want to ask, but I want to ask just a few more questions here on PADDLE before we move on to those. So let's talk a little bit about the marketing philosophy. What was the marketing philosophy for PADDLE in those early days and how did you see it evolve?

That's an awesome question. We actually didn't have marketing like traditional marketing, dedicated full time employees and marketing for five years. We genuinely were running outbound sales almost exclusively email with their phones for five years and growing 300%. We were doing marketing like I didn't know it. Again, this was the first business I ever ran. Like there was product marketing but there wasn't any like content strategy, SEO strategy. We didn't update the website at the time. So years of end we were really, really good. Identifying people who were demonstrating some of the pains that we thought that we could solve and getting from them, getting in front of them without them. Data was a core, a lot of that stuff. So we didn't have marketing for a long time. But I Think it was to our detriment. I think in the latter years at Paddock, we've invested a hell of a lot in brand and this has been really helpful and we see it impacting every stage in the funnel as well as just your organic amount of funnel. And this is something we've done a lot better in the latter years, I think on reflection, and have probably done that a lot sooner. It's just difficult to balance like investing and continuing to throw your livers the amount of dollars of the channel that's working whilst also investing in experimenting with new channels, I guess, or some of those, investing in some of those kind of ideas and things which are slightly less quantifiable or easy to attribute. But it really clicked for us when we started even just turning up some events, being like, oh my gosh, everybody here we can sell to, nobody knows who we are, this would make things a lot easier. We have people's money.

Right.

Like that's quite helpful. So we didn't think about it for too long and actually the trigger to hire marketing wasn't even on the commercial go to market side. Again, having not done this before and not knowing what we were doing, we grew at an alarming rate for a number of years with a very strong team. We were like 20 people, four in the same max. And then at the time we did the Series B, I think they were like, you can't keep growing like this, this isn't going to work. And rather than slowly linearly growing the organization, we went from like 20 to 120 people inside six or seven months. Which again actually these days maybe isn't that extreme, but it certainly felt like it to us. And we actually hired a marketing initially to establish some level of employer brand for us to make that possible. And then things evolve from there long term. Yeah, we've invested a talent brand we've got and we're doing some pretty extravagant and unique things I think in the market. And even like our account based kind of go to market approach, it's super, super sophisticated. But it really did take us a long time to get there.

In terms of those investments you made in brand, are there any that you thought were going to be a hit and they just ended up not working?

Yes and no. Like again, it's really hard to quantify some of this stuff. Right. I think you don't often get the immediate leading indicator that you're necessarily hoping for. When I think about how brands paid off for us more recently, it's like being out to end private Conversations with big companies in markets we haven't historically had any presence or success and suddenly, you know, cold outreach, the conversation rate is increasing pretty dramatically. And like, is that we're getting better at outreach, is it that we're getting better at targeting? Or is it that we're actually starting to establish brand and presence in these regions so people will pick up the phone or answer the email that we send them? And like, I think the thing with a lot of this stuff is that it isn't often your instant winning or that's going to draw you, but it's actually going to be a steady build. There are exceptions there, right? Like we run like an AI launchpad most recently that was a part of just partner being there full time and that generated a bunch of businesses on the platform that are already fast growing, which is great fun. So it's a real balance, I'd say.

When I think through my conversations I've had with other founders, a lot of them in the B2B world used to have this belief that either brand didn't really matter for B2B or it was just too expensive. That's something that big, big companies worried about. Were those the reasons that you didn't invest in brand early on or what was the reason that you didn't invest early on and then. And what made you decide to switch and double down on brand?

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I think we probably fell into that category. As I said, it was like we don't have a lot of money. We're trying to grow very fast. We have a channel that works. Why don't we throw more money at that channel? Was basically our thinking, to be completely honest with you. The contrary thing to this is I think Christian's been a bit more bought into it than me. I think he really thinks a lot more of some of this stuff as an art rather than a science. I'm very much a kind of data driven revenue and ops leader to some degree. He's like this mad creative guy, which is a nice balance to strike. So he was really more willing to invest in some of this stuff earlier. I think evidence of that sound of main Net the first check that we got from Angels, as I said, a couple markerson I think we raised, I can't even remember, 200 grand USD. And at the same time he also committed to buying us the paddle.com domain name for another $120,000. Fortunately, he didn't take out of the pool of money we raised. Otherwise we'd have been Much poorer I guess. And he only transferred ownership over to us series there when we could pay for the domain. We were willing to like fork out this big cash like a domain and thinking we were going to be this big consumer facing marketplace. And as you open to B, that felt like maybe not the best decision. We even got sued for payment shortly afterwards. It was quite an expensive decision, but maybe that also led to some of the uncertainty. We've gone from at first thinking we're going to be this big consumer facing B2B2C marketplace where we need heavy brand spent to slowly iterating our way towards recognizing we're actually a B2B, have this infrastructure play. And maybe that made us hesitate a bit, I guess. I think the biggest trigger to start investing in it though was as we've started to try and move at least concurrently, target some slightly larger customers and also break into new markets and new regions. Like when you're the most expensive thing that people buy other than maybe aws, and when you're asking to rip out infrastructure they've had in their business for many, many years and replace it with you to handle all of their revenue and all their transactions like trust and credibility is super, super important. So recognizing that I think was a real trigger for us to be honest with you, as well as an expertise brought into the business.

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Yeah, that's a great question. I think in the early years, media was particularly out there and we didn't really know how to do networking or how to be a founder. And I remember sometimes going back from like the one copy we have every six months with the founder. We should do this more. This is awesome. But we really didn't do any. We didn't attend any events. We were solely focused on running the business. Christian in the early days, more so on the product side, more so on the revenue operation side. So we didn't do a lot at the start. I think as we moved out of independent kind of software developers and stuff irrecovered in the first place, which is kind of the background that Christian came from, where I think some of that stuff is also was valued a little bit less. None of them particularly businesses themselves, they kind of like slightly more of a nature of things. We started sort of more and more into SaaS where we were competing with more companies, companies with bigger punch, bigger brands. We recognized the need to tell more of a story of our own. It was also the point in which we started messing employee over realizing the storytelling both from the perspective of the problems that we're trying to solve and the experiences we've had above that problem ourselves as well as our own founder stories, but were quite compelling. So we started to invest particularly in Christian's kind of narrative and story in those early days. And then over time you need to kind of pull that back again, which is I think quite a weird experience for Christian because we kind of recognize that early stage startup that needs a payment solution cares. You were an early stage company once with the founder, cool things and stuff. When you're sending into like the CRO or the cfo, a company processing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, they don't really give a shit. They just want you to sol solve the problems that they have really, really effectively. And again, that adjustment back to telling the customer stories and the pains we're solving rather than just the founder story were quite interesting. Even the nature of the employees that have changed a little bit and the stories needed to tell them from an employer brand perspective. So it's probably interesting how that's kind of evolved. Whereas again, a good thing is actually leaning on ourselves as industry leaders and our experience of this problem out of data and that credibility which is driving pretty much all of our business today. The business is growing 100% year on year exclusively via network and customer referral. It's leading it on that experience say I've really seen different marketing or investment into this stuff at different times.

In terms of paddle, at what stage did you really start to push that founder narrative out and then at what stage did you really pull it back and switch to that more customer focused?

I don't know if company stage is the right way to think about it like it would have been post series B, but it was all about actually the nature of the customers we were targeting, what it was they valued. Right as we moved away from selling into these map software developers and desktop software developers who care less about brand, I guess, and more into SaaS, whereby that was valued more or we were in a more competitive space. All that stuff was more important. It felt that was a true to investors, like what does the customer actually need in order to buy, in order to get comfortable or in order to find us in the first place. It was always grounded in what do we think we need to do in order to win in order to compete, I guess. And so that was the kind of real trigger.

What about the category for paddle? Was it payments infrastructure and the niche was serving SaaS companies or how did you think about market category?

As it said, like when we first started paddle, nobody knew who we're operating under this model called the merchant record model, which nobody'd really heard of outside of again some desktop software companies globally. And we were really struggling because people were already associating us with payment practices like your PayPal, your shrouds at the time, your braintrees at the time. And we did a hell of a lot more than just process payments. We recognized there was a lot more to actually selling a software product such as handling stats, it's currency which is delivering the profits, handling it's refunds, handling it's licensing at the time, free trials or whatever. So we were really stuck because you don't really want to be a category of one. So I think we just navigated that awkwardness for a really long time. It's been a really long time trying to educate people why and how they're different and why pricing was different. Before we really started to invest in category creation, probably after the series, I think it was before the series, between the B and C basically when we felt we had enough customers, enough people to tell the story, enough credibility in the bank to be able to actually have a chance at some category creation. And we spent a hell of a lot of money. I wish I remembered how much or maybe I'm glad that I don't remember trying to create this category called revenue delivery infrastructure. Actually I loved it. I was like, this describes exactly what we do perfectly. Tell an amazing story about this end to end in the sales process. We can have these revenue delivery advisors, external revenue delivery consultants and revenue delivery. So it's probably going to be owned by the CEO. I was like, it is awesome. Best plan ever. On paper, in execution. It was an absolute disaster. Like we couldn't get any of the team to understand this thing. We were really trying to build like Casper of one, which is incredibly Difficult wasn't working and eventually we just gave up. Unfortunately, I think the market helped us a lot. So some of those payment processor plays, Stripe being a great example. I think to recognize that the point problem they were solving was indeed a point problem. And actually selling software is actually products and Airplane is actually much broader. And as they started to broaden out their own product suffering, they started talking about themselves in a different way. And we kind of attached ourselves onto this payments infrastructure kind of category as they themselves started to think about it, which has been helpful. We still solve the problem in a very different way, albeit the catcher group feels right. So there were some of them that's really trying to push that our own category and eventually just the market kind of gag. It wasn't a tidy story and it's been quite expensive, that's for sure. I remember spending like hours in Warburies being undescribable. You do two substances and getting very frustrated. But yeah, hopefully have been as helpful.

Yeah, especially I think on the, you know, category execution not working out. I think a lot of founders have this idea of starting a category they read play bigger and it sounds so sexy to do it. It seems like it's an obvious thing that you have to go do and go out there and create a category. But I think a lot of founders experience exactly what you experienced, that it's very hard to get the market to really embrace it. One follow up question, based on your category experience, how long was it before you decided to, you know, kind of retreat on that category strategy? Was that like three months? Was that six months? Was it two years? Like when did you know it was time to backtrack?

I don't think it took as long, probably six months or so when literally there's no adoption even internally, let alone externally. That was kind of the sign, I think the thing I distinguished with, I guess on a category creation versus not kind of a pay from what makes sense. I think if you manage to maybe not create a category of your own or attach yourselves to a newly emerging category, but it says certainly attach yourselves to an opinion and a change in the way in which people work or a change in the way in which people do things, whether you're going to call that cash recreation or what comes out there or not, I think it's much easier to be more successful or to win in that mind share of the people who are trying to drive that change and even to hire people. Right. You can get these people. For us it was like we think software is being sold wrong Globally like we think so many amazing products never make it to market or they fail because people aren't trying to run their businesses in the right way and it's not equitable and they shouldn't be. How this works. If you attach yourselves to one of those changes in the way people are doing things, I think it's much easier to strike up attention and excitement and employees and like get very mission driven and even missionaries I guess in terms of some of your customers as opposed to like I don't know. The more you can position yourself in that way, the better and it can fit similar. Right. That we really think the way people are going to market isn't effective and all fit the purpose Quite frankly in 2023, going into 2024, really attaching ourselves to a change in the way which we would do. So it's a really effective way to sell and establish yourself within crowded markets. That probably comes before the ability to create the category, I'd say because that is going to require a lot of investment, brand, et cetera. But they're probably the iterations of thought I'd probably be going through if I was starting a business again.

Final paddle related question for you. If you reflect on the success that paddle had, what do you think you guys got right?

It's hard. Most of normally that's what we got wrong. So it's also harder to answer. I think the stuff that we got right, I mean hopefully a bunch right. Like I'm incredibly proud of the culture that we built. A weird, wonderful mad set of people we brought together to achieve what the business is achieving. I'm most proud of some of the people who've been in and we definitely made some right calls there as well as the wrong ones. But I think the thing maybe strategically that we got right was we exclusively focused on software since we began. As soon as we started doing what the revenue infrastructure as we call it now. Infrastructure as we call it now. Whereas a lot of people in our space went a little bit broader. And that verticalization of SaaS as a trend is the one that's very popular. People kind of do paddle 4x or in lots of different ways like even within our investors portfolio like New Systems is a great company that kind of does the paddle for hotels or mindbody kind of does it for gyms. And I think recognizing that that was the way software was going and deeply being able to solve for just one customer despite the temptation over the years to start expanding out or allowing them to start selling physical products or maybe looking into some of these adjacent markets too soon, I think, really helped us, to be honest with you. We really did try and chase the customer and instead got really, really good at narrowing in on the people of Adam B for the product that we had today and selling to them, as opposed to broadening our offering to the extent it was unsupportable or indistinguishable or whatever. I think that.

Was it obvious back then that SaaS was going to become as big as it became, or was that a risky bet at the time?

It was quite strategic actually, and the data ground a lot of it. Like we were very good sizing the market of desktop software, SaaS, offline software, quantifying thus the number of companies that are in there and there are opportunities available to us, even the size of which some of those markets are growing. We were doing that better than the investors. The investors were desperate to get our hands on our data, to be fair. So I think we were quite good at quantifying some of those strategic opportunities. But the real way in which we realized it was a need for us and we started to form opinions on how platforms weren't going to matter in the future, billing models weren't going to matter. We're still quite there, but I think that'll be the case soon and people will do all sorts of stuff like usage plus SaaS, plus onboarding plus whatever. And the thing that dragged us there was our existing customers. Some of them started with us as independent workers. We sold their product one time, 50 bucks. Then they moved to SaaS, then they moved to Percy, then they moved to like C platform and they added usage elements. We kind of got dragged there by the market and our products had to follow them because we were so close to a lot of those customers and established such strong relationships with them and we were so necessary to how they're running their business. It really helped layer in the qualitative with the quantity on where the company should go, which I think helped us make some of those right calls. Amazing.

Let's switch gears now. Let's dive a bit deeper into Good fit. So I know we've touched on it throughout this interview, but I just want to ask a little bit about the decision to start the company in the first place. So after what, 12 years of paddle, I'm sure you were a little burned out. Did any part of you just want to take it easy for a couple years, maybe relax a little bit and recharge? Or did you know immediately that you were going to dive right into another.

Company I definitely know honestly this period was one of the most complex but my short life to be fair stepping back from a business that you've been running since you were like 17 effectively Chris and I are actually working together pred want some Paddle esque ideas but like stepping back from that thing in and of itself was terrifying. Like telling you off feels like you're like I can't even explain the level of guilt you feel or like the I don't know the questions you ask yourself like you're portraying your company when you're making that call were pretty, pretty bad. But for me the reason to leave paddle, which maybe you should think as a good decision was like having just experience running that company my entire adult life. I just was ready to kind of try and experience life through a different lens like not as harrison@paddle.com and I became more intrigued and interested in that than like the series D which I was helping close to some degree at least in the kind of data room the commercial side of things as I was setting out the business. So with that being the driver I really didn't think I'd be working. I mean it's quite a long time. Good Fit had already began so as I said there was such interest in the data that we were using at Paddle and how to go to market that my my best mate and head of Roberts had kind of been asked by the investors to leave and start this up and he did so in my blessing. I was devastated because he was like my right hand in the business. I kind of quite as a cheaper stuff also very happy getting my items straight on VV and scrap duty available. I was advising him to see the gap and then as I stepped back I really wanted I spent a lot of time trying to think about where I was going to spend my time and what was going to bring me joy. Having not really felt like I had agency to decide before which is wrong but kind of how I was feeling if I'm honest. And I realized that the things that were going to bring me joy something like Good Fit could actually deliver upon spending more time with my friends, continuing to learn, support others. And a lot of people I think assume that entrepreneurs just can't help themselves and start companies. But it's generally my expectation that I won't do another one after Good Fit Remind me of that in a few years because I didn't start giving someone who's run a company again it's not a good fit because I thought it'd be really cool to help My mate, to be honest with you, my best friend Alex, who is running it, and also try and give opportunities to a lot of the people that I've met over the 12 years who I don't think really got their fair shot or the equitable kind of outcome then working together at PADDLE or whatever my head about being one of them. So I found that as this amazing vehicle to help a lot of people and give back to a lot of people who've given themselves I think to me and Madeleine over the years and also worked with some really cool people. I never had the chance to. It was all about learning and growing with others as opposed to like necessarily being a business again. You can do that in slightly less stressful ways I think if I'm completely honest. But that was kind of the trigger I guess to say yes. But again I deliberated that for quite a long time as well.

Obviously with PADDLE you achieved what a lot of founders aspire to achieve, which is building a company that has a valuation of greater than $1 billion. Is that the intention with Good Fit here? Are you hoping to build a big big company again or is the goal and the mindset to try to keep it somewhat nimble and a smaller team and really have more fun as you're building it or keep it smaller so you can have more fun?

Yeah, and I don't think small and fun are necessarily correlate like a lot of people. Again assume that a lot of founders enjoy the early stages or the late stages. I actually much prefer the latter stages. I try how to really operationalize everything and scan everything. I wasn't worried how I was going to get paid to be fair. I don't know if anyways link is probably just worth calling out. But yeah, we want to run in a very different way, at least for the time being. Again, one of my drivers is learning.

Right.

I've never run a small bootstrapped organization and I'd rather big VC backwards exclusively. So that was. That was one driver. We're also a remote previous company had headquarters so some of it's learning but a lot of this optionality to be completely honest with you, like I'm so grateful for the VCs to kind of have funded that learning the network that I've built to allow me to establish the credibility that we have at GitFit. But this time around, frankly just not sure if we want to run and grow a massive, massive organization. So I've kind of committed work backwards of my kind of thought of what it is we want to achieve in what time frame. I set us very clear goals. We're very open with the business about that. We're all aligned towards hitting which get some really great clarity as to what we need to achieve by when and at that point in time when we hit that number, I guess or set of numbers. We're going to have another hard conversation I'm sure actually to it around what it is we want to do. Do we want to go raise up a huge round and do we want to think about, you know, partnering up with someone maybe with some greater resources, do we want to hire in some you know, full time management team to run the business? But we're really aligned on how committed we are to it over what time frames and at least we have that optionality that once you get on the VC train you can't get off to be honest. So we're probably just reserving some of that optionality now. I do think I'd like to run it less resource intense because I think that I can and I've learned a lot of not necessarily learned a lot from the first time when it comes.

To market category for good fit. What is that category? Is it go to market or what is the category?

I'm in a great example of like attaway that's not particularly well defined and at least we're attaching ourselves to a change. That was kind of my prompt on that. We've kind of changed the way in which today like reps, normally junior reps given access to these big databases that accounts and contacts ask to filter down from prospects and get themselves to them. In reality a lot of these people anywhere in their older what it looks like and truly even if they did, they often have the data available to actually prioritize the accounts that are most likely to buy. So we're really changing the way which people do things and we're trying to start from the account level actually that map the market accounts you can sell to enrich them with a huge amount of insight and data unique to you to really allow you to look for those companies that have the highest buy who you want to spend your time on. I haven't named that category yet. I'm not sure anyone is doing exactly that. Albeit some competition is starting to slowly catch up and slowly emerge. So absolutely we'll let the category emerge and right now we're really focusing on the principles and our view on how people should go into market and selling into that as opposed to a main category. But watch space. I definitely don't have the budget for it yet. Grant, to be honest with you, what.

Do you think is going to be key to Good Fit being a success?

Like any good companies again, we actually so operate into some in some difficult macro conditions for a small earlier stage company especially very, very fast and have a good roster of clients already. It's always difficult. I think one thing that I said to my team is probably what I'd say to you guys, which is we have built an incredible team. Frankly, we have no right to have a team as good as we have. And again, that's the result of 12 years of networking and hopefully doing right by a lot of people. I remember hiring our CTO who is an ex co founder who's also scaled businesses to tens of millions of dollars in revenue. They're saying to my co founder, I was like, again, this isn't usually that easy. You normally pay tens of thousands to an executive search firm, hope the person's good and maybe not as opposed to just hiring mates. But I think ultimately we've cobbled together an incredible set of individuals, some amazing talents and I kind of am confident we can work out anything that we need to along the way. You're only as good as your team, to be honest with you. So yeah, I'm very happy with the team we've put together and we'll work on the rest.

Man, final question for you since we're almost up on time. Based on everything you've learned from Paddle, from Good Fit and just your other general life experiences, the number one piece of advice you'd give to a founder who's just starting out.

I think the biggest skill which is probably underutilized or unrecognized the most, is actually the level of self awareness that's needed in the founder in order to actually stick it out 10 years or so. It's quite rare that I think Richard and I again, actually both of us are stepped back from full time operational roles now after 12 years. But it's quite rare that you see folks go from naught to the living elevation again. It happens sometimes, but the only way in which we've been able to get there, I think is recognizing where we need to learn and grow. And people are really, really obsessive about getting better every single day, but also just really knowing what we weren't good at and hiring for those things or letting other people do them. Even if you enjoy it, like unless you're able to look in the mirror and know what the board are probably uncomfortable you continue to do or what you should be doing better or whatever. You're going to have some difficulty along the way. So try to be really vulnerable and honest with yourself and your team and your organization around how you're having to grow just like them. You have strengths and weaknesses just like them, and the more aware of those that you are, I think the more likely you're going to be able to succeed and build the best team you can around you and not get outgrown by your organization along the way.

Amazing. All right, Harrison, we'll have to wrap here. This has been such an awesome conversation. If there's any founders that are listening in and they want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?

You can catch me on LinkedIn. Just Harrison Murray's on LinkedIn. You should see me on there. I'm posting one regularly now that I got a drive in demand for good fit. So you'll see me on there. And anyone's welcome to email me on harrisonbanel.com or harrisondip IO Amazing.

Harrison. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Thanks for having me. Cheers. It's been great fun.

All right, cheers. Bye.

Sam.