10 Lessons Learned Along the Path to $100M ARR | UserZoom's CEO and CMO | SaaStr Software Community

Hey everyone, Sophie, CMO. I have been in marketing for about 20 years. About half of that has been in SaaS, a couple of big companies, Medallia, Google. And in addition to helping UserZoom scale to $100 million ARR, which we're nearly there, I've also advised and mentored some very early-stage startups, which was a huge ton of fun for an incubator. Alfonso. So my name is Alfonso de la De la Nuez.

In Spanish, it's Alfonso de la Nuez. Since we're in Spain, I have to say it in different ways. I'm the co-founder and proud co-CEO at UserZoom, and we're here to share, you know, some of the lessons learned in the last few years. I have to say, first of all, how amazing it is to be here because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I think I attended the first SaaStr event in San Francisco about 10 years ago, and I sitting there listening to people just like me today and just admiring what they were saying and dreaming about doing what they were doing and scaling the business and all that stuff when we first moved to Silicon Valley. And here I am today sharing this amazing story with you all in my home country. So ask me how I feel about that. Pretty emotional. It's a dream come true, and also I'm very happy to be here sharing this story with you because I really believe that, first of all, I know that I think about 80% of the companies here are sub-$10 million and trying to make it, obviously trying to scale. And I think that all entrepreneurs, we need to help each other out. You know, I got a lot of help in Silicon Valley when I moved there to try to get to $10 million and then past $10 million. Never thought I would get to $100 million, but I got a lot of help. And Saastr was actually phenomenal and super inspirational. So a couple minutes on UserZoom, I guess. You know, who are we? What do we do? And how do we get to 100 million? UserZoom offers user experience research and testing for companies to optimize all digital products, digital experiences, whether it's websites, mobile apps, internets, prototypes, mockups, whatever. And what we do is we enable customers to run efficient, cost-effective user research, usability testing, user experience. We help designers, we help researchers, we help product leaders optimize their digital products through insights with real users. This is a market that back then when we started, and I'll talk about this quite a bit today, it was not a really big market. It was a niche market. But it's become now sort of the way to do, the way to build new software, the way to be customer-centric in everything you do. And as we'll speak about today, there's plenty of real financial ROI behind what we do, and this has been key for us to get to $100 million. Anything you'd like to add about UserZoom?

The only thing I'd add is, you know, I've worked at some great companies, and just, it's amazing when you can see the impact of what insights can do, you know, for founders and people building products. So Why don't you tell your story?

Yeah, so we started in Spain, Barcelona. We have about 130 people, I think, in the office here and growing. I'm actually from Madrid, Spain, but we spent quite a bit of time between Barcelona and Madrid. And right away from the beginning, I moved to Silicon Valley to roll out the US market because we— this is— we're talking 2008 or so, and we had the big crisis back then. So we thought that the Valley and the US would be the market to go to. We bootstrapped He almost scrapped the business, by the way, as I'll mention in a minute. And then after a very tough 5 to 7 years, we finally started taking off. And the company finally raised some capital in 2015. Again, I'll tell you all about this later. But it was a— it's a beautiful story, I think, of a company that starts in Spain, starts humble, starts with very little resources, and then, you know, moves to the Valley and, you know, becomes a large company. You know, we raised a $34 million round in 2015, then we raised a $100 million round in 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. And then about a month ago, we closed a deal, a strategic investment, a strategic growth investment with Thoma Bravo, which is one of the top 3 software companies in, in the world, with a valuation of $800 million. So great, great That's the story. Thank you. So again, I'm just super excited to tell you guys the story and talk about these 10 lessons learned. Let's start with falling in love with the problem. So even last night, we had a nice dinner and we were talking about, oh, you guys created a category here, right? I said, no, not really. This, this is not a creation of a category. This is more of a disruption. And I think that all founders, we should look at what we're building at what we're doing and think about it. Is this something that we're disrupting or are we really literally creating a new category? If you're creating a new category, good luck. It's very, very tough and you're going to need a lot of capital probably and a lot of time and you're going to have to convince the market. If you're disrupting like we did, we basically went and cloudified the lab, right? We— all the studies and all the testing that we were doing before UserZoom was done manually in a lab with a one-way mirror. How many of you guys have participated How many of you participated in a usability test? Yeah, quite a few. Okay. My mission will be that all of you will do it sooner rather than later. But, you know, we were basically disrupting that market. Instead of doing it in a lab, in a physical and manual labor-intensive way, we cloudified it, and with the software that we created, we automated the way you do user research. So we were really disrupting. The other point is, you know, as entrepreneurs, As entrepreneurs, we have these ideas, right? We're so happy and we are so enthusiastic about going on your own and building your own business. Is it a genius idea that we have? I had plenty of ideas before UserZoom, by the way. Or is it really a problem? Are we really solving a problem for customers? So I would suggest that you do some serious research. I got to be honest, the way we learned about the market and the gap in the market was through our previous startup. So UserZoom is our second startup. The same co-founders started UserZoom but also started a consulting company. And it was through the consulting that was about 7 years, 7, 8 years long. That experience helped us understand that there was a real gap in the market. Companies really wanted to get insights and feedback from, from users and from customers. However, it was so time-consuming and so labor-intensive that only a handful of companies were able to do it. And by the way, do it, they actually wanted to do it more on a more ongoing continuous basis, but it was impossible. Just too much money, too much time, impossible to meet the agile development demands and requirements. So we thought about, hey, if we put together a software and using the internet, you can connect users remotely so you don't have to bring them to the lab. You know, maybe what we can do is we can get more scalability, cost-effectiveness, and then actually run studies on a more ongoing basis, which is what's happening today. Our customers are running, you know, 300, 400 studies, actually sometimes less than that, maybe 50 to 100 studies a year. That's still a lot of research, a lot of tests. And if you look back a few years ago, they were doing maybe 4, 5, maybe 10 per year. And so now they're making decisions, they're considering user feedback when they're designing, when they're developing, they're reducing the risk of developing the wrong thing, which again, we'll talk about later in the benefits of what we do. But again, fall in love with the problem means is really understand what the problem is rather than just follow your gut. As entrepreneurs, we all have to follow our guts and our instinct, but if you can conduct serious research— we did it through the previous startup. But if we hadn't had that startup, to be honest with you, I think we wouldn't have had as much understanding of what the problem was. This is one of my favorites. So I think the reason why UserZoom has been successful, I mean, it took us a while to get going, but honestly speaking, you have to pick the right partners. So I get asked quite a bit, how did you find your founding partners? How did you meet them? You know, and the fact is that we actually met at the same consultancy and we worked together in several projects. We got along really well, and I think it's the reason for success. At UserZoom, we had 3 co-founding partners and we kind of had our, our, our roles and our tasks clearly divided. I read this book that I'd like to share with you guys, the Rocket Fuel, VI, Visionary Integrator Combo. When I read this book, I was like, that's exactly what we were doing and what we, what we needed also to scale. Somebody, maybe one of the founders, is more of the visionary, the kind of crazy dude, kind of the Steve Jobs, more social, more sales-oriented, you know, can sell the story in an elevator, right, to anybody. But then there has to be the other aspect, which is, you know, you also have to be able to run it, run it efficiently, run it effectively, and also, you know, have some financial skills as well, for instance, right? So this VI model is what we had at UserZoom. We had a third partner who was also a product guy. And I think we set the expectations clear from the beginning, who was going to do what, and don't underestimate culture. So to me, culture is, well, as Peter Drucker said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So don't underestimate the importance of the three leaders in our case or the leaders of the company, the leaders of the startup setting the culture. You're going to be setting the culture for the whole company and it's really all about your responsibility. So if you find the right partners to start up, that's going to be much easier. You want to take this one?

Yeah. So you found the right partners. You've got your problem, a genius problem, thought up by Alfonso. So what do you do next? So you may have heard this before, but we think this is still really, really important to think about, and it's to define one persona until you scale. And as a CMO, I just love to hear a founder give this advice because it means that a marketer and the product developers can focus on a problem, can focus on those pain points, they can do that deep research, and maybe apply something, a model like, I like the Jobs to be Done model. I think that's a very smart model to use, and to really make sure that you're nailing those problems. Now, I have to tell you, there's a confessional here I'm going to make on behalf of Alfonso. He did none of those things until he met the man on this slide. So what Alfonso actually did, he took the physical business and launched a SaaS business based on what he thought he knew, with his co-founders, and then went to this course at MIT with Ken Morse and realized the power of focus. So we were also discussing at dinner last night, Alfonso had that kind of happy-sad problem where they were making money, they were taking money, they were paying the bills, but they could have been taking money from anybody because they didn't have that clear target persona. So then this happy moment, I think, would have been when Alfonso told me He had PayPal who wanted the team to build 80 features in order to renew.

80-0.

He also had a major bank that wanted him to build on-prem, and I'm sure you had a bunch of other customers asking you to do all of these different things. Now, without focusing on that one target persona, it would be very difficult to decide where the next piece of revenue is going to come from. Now, I'm going to give you the end of the story and Luckily, Alfonso decided to take the UX researcher persona, which was the PayPal option, and built, I believe, 79 of those features, and that enabled the team to go and sell the same proposition to people like Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay. So all works out well in the end, but that focus on the persona is what helped drive that decision.

Yeah, I'll be honest with you. This guy here is Ken Morse from MIT, and Actually, it was here in Barcelona. I don't even remember the year, but it must have been 2010 or near that year. We weren't really sure who our target persona was. I'm sure many of you are thinking the same thing. It's like, do I go to the enterprise market? Do I go to the SMB? Do I start with SMB and then start growing, going upmarket or the other way? Typical question. We had it as well. I'll be honest, we weren't sure. We weren't really focusing on one. And this is what we learned from this course, from Ken Morse, is focus on only one. Now, it's easier said than done, right? You're taking some chances here because you're going to have to be very disciplined and say no to potential options. And when we're starting up, we need money from anywhere, right? We're looking under the stones, you know, if there's any money out there, and we're going to say yes. And I remember that we would go and answer the phone or provide a service to any company out there that would pay us a few thousand euros to start with. But actually it was this course that I remember the three of us going back to the office and saying, you know what, let's just focus on those guys, the PayPals, right? Let's focus on those large enterprises. And we started doing more research, as I say there, to understand the pain points these guys had, you know, multiple website, multiple web properties, they had the budget, and most important for them to improve user experience and, you know, conversion ratios of 0.01% meant potentially $1 million, right, or even more. So therefore they were happy to pay us, you know, $50,000 or $30,000, I think is where we started, $40,000 a year, which we thought was quite a bit. But honestly, I think the lesson for me was that we were going everywhere and we didn't really pay much attention to, you know, focusing on one specific persona. And I think that once we learned that, we were able to focus. As I say in the last bullet point, give it a chance and then iterate. We worked with PayPal quite a bit, but, you know, we didn't just work for PayPal. We thought that whatever we were doing for them, was going to work for others as well. All right. So funding, and of course, SaaStr has been phenomenal when it comes to content around funding and VCs and uniting the community of entrepreneurs and VCs. And so I say be creative when it comes to funding. Personally, you know, maybe it's because the two startups that we created, you know, we did not use VC money. We bootstrapped them. Of course, of course, it was hell and back several times. It was really hard to do. But I really believe, and you know, when we went to the Valley, by the way, we didn't go to find capital. We went to Valley and we went to the US to find the market. That's where our customers were, like PayPal. And we did have conversations with VCs. But the fact is that, you know, you have to be ready. I always say get some traction, get some metrics, really understand the problem, as I said earlier, and try to get that seed capital. Wait as much as you can. In our case, we waited for 7 years, guys. And I can tell you, you know, honestly, we were past the $10 million mark and we had only raised, I think, $1 million, $1.5 million more or less between, again, friends, family, and fools, bank loans, government grants, customers that were paying for some services, which I'll talk about in a minute. We were very creative, very resourceful. This is much more, I guess, typical here in Spain and Europe where capital is not as abundant as it is in the Valley. But we got going. And you know what? Once we passed the $10 million mark, VCs were pitching to us. It was incredible. You guys are past $10 million in a growing market and you're EBITDA positive. They were pitching to us. I was— I'm not lying if I tell you that I was able to raise— we were able to raise $34 million and we actually didn't really pitch. We talked about our story. We showed them some numbers. and we got some offers, and we ended up partnering with the right partner. I'll talk about it in, in a few points here, but we did it without having to pitch, you know, the typical story of the entrepreneur going out and pitching 50 times. We didn't.

We—

our, our way was different. We, we focused on the business, we focused on growing, we got traction, and we waited for the right time. To me, VC is, is money that is, is more gasoline to an already burning fire. If you're not burning, if you don't have something going on, I think it's the wrong thing to do. So be creative. There's multiple ways to do it. One of them was, in our case, this is also something that a lot of people have asked me about. So we chose a model of being a SaaS business, right? A software as a service. But they call it SaaS++, when service actually was about 50% at some point, even higher, meaning professional services, not just selling licenses or subscriptions, but actually delivering a service. This actually worked out really well for us. The customers were getting true value and they were getting exposed to what they could do, And then I remember it was Google that came along and said, "Hey guys, you're really good consultants or researchers or, you know, you're providing us a great service, but we'd like to have the keys to the car." Meaning, can I have the, you know, login and password and run the studies ourselves? To which we said, "Well, let us go back and think about it." It took us a year or maybe 2, I don't remember exactly, but it took us a while to go from an on-premise delivering service to a fully cloud-based on-demand SaaS model. In the meantime, guess what? We were funding the business, right, with some services. And so it worked out really well for us. I mean, today, you know, like for instance, Qualtrics, which is a company that I admire, Qualtrics went public and also before they went public, they sold to SAP for $8 billion. And, you know, when you look at their S-1, they were about to go public before they got bought. They actually had a third of the revenue was services. And, you know, they got an $8 billion valuation. Sometimes services, depending on where you are, especially if you're in B2B like we were or like we are, sometimes services can can really add a lot of value as long as you have this 75% rule more or less. If you can demonstrate that you have recurring revenue and license and subscription to the software of 75% and 25% services, you're okay. The other thing is about making professional services recurring. So that's another thing we did over the years is we learned that there is value, But we also wanted to make sure or prove ourselves and prove to our customers that these services were not just like one-time, maybe onboarding services in the first month or two months. We actually were able to define recurring managed services throughout the whole year. And as of today, I think in UserZoom we have somewhere in the vicinity of 15 to 20% of our revenue is services. And our customers love our consultants. Now, you just have to, of course, pay close attention to gross margin. I've learned that, you know, sometimes you can actually give it away. You can give the services away as long as they support the business, the software business. Or in other cases, like in our case, we actually have a 40% gross margin. So if you deliver real value, customers are happy to pay. And as long as you can prove that there's gross margin and you're not losing money, you're, you're in great shape being a software as a service plus plus company. This is one of my favorites, of course, because that's what we do at UserZoom is we do user experience research and we empower UX designers. That's Brian Chesky, founder and CEO at Airbnb, one of my favorite companies. And of course, Brian Chesky is actually a design freak. He actually is not a business major or a finance major or, you know, he comes from design school. And I love what they've done with their business. It's not only a phenomenal company, but it's also a phenomenal design company. And they spend a ton of money on design and research and insights. And I think that what happens when you have great UX design, this is one of my favorite topics to talk about with entrepreneurs. Like, I would actually invest in product user experience design and delivering a great user experience even before I invest in sales, before I invest in marketing. I think if you can make the user experience be kind of the competitive advantage, it's going to be a great way and a very efficient way for you to grow. Look at user experience, look at product UX as not just something that's cool. A lot of people confuse user experience with UI. It's not about how it looks, it's about how it works, how the website or your product actually works and whether it's easy to use or whether it allows your users before their customers or even once they're customers, to do whatever they came to do in a very seamless and intuitive way. You'll see that companies that are actually investing in UX, and McKinsey is actually covering this, you know, they actually outperform their competitors. Even public companies are outperforming their competitors and growing twice as fast as those that are not investing in design. Andreessen Horowitz calls this the decade of design, the 2020s. Is the decade of design. Don't underestimate the power and how much it's going to help you grow to have a great user experience and be the product and kind of be product-led growth versus investing in sales and marketing. And I'm not suggesting do not invest in sales and marketing, we do as well. But if you can start off with a great experience, one of the key metrics that I look at is retention. One of the best ways to retain a customer is by making things easy and intuitive. Be user insights driven. Make decisions based on user feedback. Don't just rely on designers or developers. Listen, it's tough. It's really, really difficult to deliver a great killer digital experience. You have to make a ton of decisions. It takes a village. It's about design and development and product management and marketing, everyone getting together. And sometimes, to be honest, you have to make decisions and ultimately it should be all about the end user, not whatever the head of design or even one of you, the founders, suggests. Should be really focused on the end users. So do, Do user research, usability testing, and UX research. Product marketing.

Yeah, some thoughts on go-to-market. So you are in this brilliant position. You've got this great problem you're solving. You have built this fantastic user experience that people love. Now you need to get more people to hear about your product and want to test and try your product. So you need to invest in product marketing. That's, that's probably a little obvious, I hear you say. Of course I want a product marketing team at some point. But the reason that we bring it up is because we still see early-stage founders invest in growth marketing first. And the challenge with that is if you invest in growth marketing and you don't have clear, crisp value proposition and you don't have that foundational messaging done, your marketing investment probably won't give you the best ROI. So one message I want to land is that product marketers can help you stop spending money badly. They can really make a lot of other parts of your marketing, sales and marketing machine work better. So let's talk about a couple of things product marketing are great at, and then I may just talk a couple of, couple of things about hiring. So one thing product marketers, really good product marketers, are good at is stopping you talking about yourself. And how great you are and how your product works. They bring an outside-in perspective to make sure all of the great stuff that you're building directly connects to the value that the customers want to hear about. And that's much more important to them than the fact that you built this thing that does that when this happens and that happens. So make sure everything you do is connected to the value and get a great product marketer to help you do that. Alfonso talked about UX and product-led growth, and of course, amazing, fantastic, but as he mentioned, some of you aren't going to have sales and marketing teams. Now, I don't know if any of you saw Dave Kellogg yesterday from Balderson Capital, but he reminded us of all how expensive salespeople are. So on top of their salary, there's the SDR cost, you may have SCs, and he also mentioned a number of $100,000 to generate between 20 and 40 opportunities. So if your salespeople are having trouble articulating your value proposition and linking all of the great work that you've done directly to the pain points of your users, you're going to be a little bit less efficient. And in this market, that's not what any of us want. So product marketing, foundational messaging, great for the product, great for self-discovery, and also great for your sales team. Now, one thing we love in SaaS is an architecture. So, an architecture, you know, one of those diagrams that explains what you do. Sometimes it shows data flows to make things really simple. They're great because in a glance, somebody can understand what you do and how your product, hopefully, how your product is valuable to them. Now, here's my confession. We don't have one at the moment, which we're fixing right now. I actually think that we're underselling because we're getting customers come back to us for things that they didn't know we did in the first place. So very, very important, super quick read people can get if you have a great market sector. Now, I will mention they're also great for alignment. So what people say internally quite often is translated externally. So you really want to get your marketing, sales, product, you want to get the whole company using the same terminology, the same messaging for everything that you're packaging and sending to market. Alfonso, you're passionate about this. Did you have anything to add on that?

I just, I think you may get away with it at the beginning. The sooner you can get it figured out, the better. But there's no way you can scale without it. That's how I look at product marketing and architecture and this getting alignment. Look, these are lessons that we've learned growing UserZoom. And I'll tell you, We're not the very best at it. We're learning about it. Actually brought Sophie with us 9 months ago, more or less, to work on this. And it's not easy. You know, we're now 400 people and it's, you know, we have to do some real kind of looking at ourselves in the mirror. And some people are used to calling things one way, the other. You have to, again, once again, be user-centric. And the point of product marketing is to make it easy to sell, make it easy to buy, make it easy to use. Those are the 3 things. It's all about easy, easy, easy, and simple. Now, it's not— doing things simple when you're already at $100 million, trust me, is a lot harder than doing it at the beginning. So my lesson, I guess, in this case is I wish I had done this earlier. I really wish I had done product marketing a little earlier, would have built a foundation. And, you know, right now we're kind of figuring things out at UserZoom and it's going to take a while. If we had built a foundation from the very beginning, I think we would have been better off. So do invest in product marketing.

I think what Alfonso is describing, and I don't think I heard you use this word, I know that the word technical debt is used a lot. There is such thing, believe me, from a marketer, as product marketing debt. And you will get to it if you don't work with your product marketers early on to define how you're going to message position and go to market. Now, as you're doing this, you need to think about dumbing it down. Labels and copywriting. So labels, let's think about features for a minute. How many features do you want to put in front of your customers at one time? You know, how many things do they have to get through before they understand the value, value of your product? And the reason I mention this is because it's very common for product managers, and of course everyone's very excited about all the features that they're launching, they want to name every single one. And I think there's one thing we can all agree on. I don't think there's any empty roadmaps here. There is more software coming, and there will be more software coming every year. So bundling is your best friend. Simple naming is your best friend. And I'm going to apologize slightly, maybe to some of the engineers and product folks in the room, But that's where a lot of product names start, and of course they're often descriptive and they describe what the feature is doing. But at some point, I would definitely recommend that you put them through your product marketing folks and have a strategy for how you will position a name in the future to avoid that product marketing debt. Anything else?

Let's just move on because we got about 12 minutes to go.

Oh, what next, Alfonso?

Think big. I can also share my personal story here. So, you know, we're in Spain and I've lived 22 years in the Valley and the way we think is different. And I'm here to encourage everyone to think big and kind of really big, not just big, but big, really big. Because first of all, in SaaS, the world is truly your market, right? Here, I'll be honest, I'll tell you what our story is from a Spanish entrepreneur. You know, you have your Spanish market, or European entrepreneur, you have your local market, which in our case was Spain, and we weren't thinking that much about other markets. It's very typical to think, yeah, my market, my enterprises, the total addressable market in your local market or the UK or France or whatever. The way the Valley works is completely different. They don't think about California, they don't think about the US, they think immediately they want to change the world. It's a mentality rather than a place. Silicon Valley, I've always said, is more of a mentality than a place. They have the ecosystem and they're just bold about everything they do. They want to change the world. And so I remember that I got the virus, this so-called Silicon Valley virus. And, you know, a lot of people were— this is 10 years ago— were kind of calling me crazy for, you know, trying to build a great business, a billion-dollar business. But actually, it did us well. Right? So if you think sometimes maybe, you know, you're being very cautious or very careful with capital, maybe we don't raise capital. And literally last night we were talking about the, you know, the right balance between, you know, raising a lot of capital or not raising any capital at all. I told you the story about how we didn't at the beginning raise a lot of capital. Honestly, I think that And I think that if I could go back and do it again, the lesson I learned is that we could have raised maybe 3 to 4 years in rather than 7 years in. Because the problem with not raising is that you potentially miss opportunities, right? And so you have to find— that's why it's so hard to be an entrepreneur. You have to figure out what's coming, see where the puck is going, see, you know, what options there is in the market and who else than yourself to do that, right? So if you can anticipate what's coming, then that's when you, when you can think about, hey, if I had more capital, I could actually grab more opportunities. In the Valley, sometimes what I, what I see is that a lot of companies, because there, there is so much capital, they actually have this difference in terms of risk aversion, right? They just, they don't care. They just go, go and take the risk. And it's a very different mentality than how I think we operate, certainly in Spain, but I think in Europe in general. And I think that if, if we're going to have more EU-based unicorns and references, we have to be bold, have to think big. And by the way, I think we are much more resourceful in general. I feel like we're much more resourceful again because we have less access to capital and we figure things out. But let's not be guilty of not thinking big enough. Dreaming is free, and by having that attitude, I think it's going to help you grow the business. That's what happened to us. So I was talking about picking your right partners for startup and now for scale-up. Again, that's Peter Drucker with the culture eats strategy for breakfast. Quote that I like so much. A lot of people ask me about VC money versus PE money, so venture capital versus private equity. Very different, very, very different. I, you know, PEs typically invest in companies that are already, you know, $10 million or, or bigger, and they want to, you know, they're typically a little more conservative. They like to see profitability, not a clear path already, a profitability profile. VCs, you know, they really want to grow, grow, grow, grow super fast and grow at all costs. Guess what? In the last 15 years or so, I've seen several stages or several moments in the market where, like today, growing at all costs does not work. If you're trying to raise money and you're burning money, it's going to be a tough one for the next few quarters. I'm pretty sure most of you are aware of what's going on in the market and, you know, it's tough. So if you're going to pick or if you're thinking of working with a VC or a PE, think about the market opportunity. Opportunity. Is it a really large market that you think you can grow fast? We're talking, you know, 40, 50, 60% or so per year at least, you know, and there's a huge opportunity and you want to be first or you want to beat your competitors, maybe VC is the route. A PE firm, however, is a completely different type of partner and they're going to help you like they're helping us right now. They're going to help you keep growing, maybe not necessarily at super hyper speed, you know, 30 to 40% growth rate is more than enough, but they're gonna help you be really good at operations and they're gonna bring a bunch of operational experience and people that have done this and been there, done that, maybe taking companies public, and they're gonna help you operate. Personally, I really appreciate it. I'm a first-time CEO, I've never scaled a business like this, and I actually enjoy having some really smart people that sometimes, they're not fun because they tell you what to do, let's be honest. But very often they are extremely helpful. Culture. I don't think that you should worry We didn't, we didn't worry about valuation in all 3 rounds, to be honest with you. You know, we didn't pick the partner or the, in this case, the private equity that gave us the highest valuation. It's not necessarily the top priority, honestly speaking. You know, if you find the right— I mean, when you, when you partner with, with private equity like we did, you're literally getting married and there's no way out. Out, right? You better do due diligence. You better get to know them well. One of my— one of the best things that we've done and advice I would give you is get to know these people for a long time. Don't, you know, don't just meet a few times. If you can actually meet with them, you know, for a few years, you know, we got to know the Toma Bravo guys for about 4 years before we eventually, you know, decided to partner up. So I think really it's culture and do they get you? Do they get you as a person? Do they get your markets? Do they get your strategy, your growth strategy? Make sure that you set the expectations right because you're going to have a board and you better be aligned with the growth strategy. And the best way to do that is by focusing on by focusing on culture, by focusing on expectations and the persona. Different VCs and different PEs, they have different partners. And even the same company might have a different person leading an investment, completely different person than this other. They may be the same firm, but the partner, the person is what matters. So get to know that person, get to know other companies that they're working with, get to know other entrepreneurs that they are backing up. It's really about culture. Just one of the biggest lessons, guys, is how culture eats strategy for breakfast. Well, last but not least, this is one of my favorites because what I've learned over these years, guys, is that especially again, me being a first-time entrepreneur, Honestly, I'm very humble about what we've created here. You know, I'm very proud, but I'm at the same time very humble. I've learned so much. Every single day is a new day. You know, every week I learn something from somebody who has more experience. You know, you think you got to $100 million. Well, guess what? There's so many other companies that have done it, especially if you live in the Valley. And so you're, you know, you got to park your ego. You got to have enough ego, but park quite a bit of it. And one of the best things as you go from being an entrepreneur to being a CEO is to focus on hiring. It's not easy. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that it's a simple thing to do. You create this, this is your baby. But if you really want to scale, again, we're talking about how we got to 100. Honestly speaking, the best thing you can do is to hire really good people, actually better people than you, that can sell, they can market, they can build software and all that stuff, and just let them know and focus on, focus on what the mission, vision, and culture is, and then let them operate. Get the hell out of the way. It's not just a good thing to do, do, but in my mind is a must-do. This is one of my favorites, honestly, because it's been rough and I'm not going to pretend that it was easy, but I don't regret hiring this phenomenal talent. They're the ones that are actually getting this done and you're just sitting there and watching them operate and it's phenomenal. But you got to park your ego. All right. So, got 2 minutes to go and basically this last slide is summarizing all 10. Again, I think that I'd like to highlight, all of them are important and I could have written another 10 or 20 more easily. But I think that the ones that are my favorite ones are build a great product UX. Make product user experience your competitive advantage and make it kind of one of the ways that you look at your— when you look at your growth strategy, think about product UX. Don't think it's just a nice to have. It's a must have. Make your users and your customers your best salespeople. And I think the last one is, well, product marketing is very important.

I was going to say, our marketing's in there somewhere, Alfonso.

Of course. I'm so thankful for the job that Sophie has done. Sophie comes from Medallia and from Google. And so back to my point about going from an entrepreneur to a CEO and hiring great talent, I never dreamed that I would have a professional like Sophie that has done 8 years at Google Cloud or Google Analytics.

Yeah, a bunch of the ads products. Yeah, she spent half time in Silicon Valley, half time here, and it's a pleasure to work with the founder.

And taking Medallia public, which is potentially a path that we're taking as well. So back to number 10, you know, hire, focus, if you want to scale, focus on hiring the best talent, let them operate, get out of the way, and enjoy the ride.