How to Outmaneuver the Giants in a Mature Market

What's happening, everyone? How's everyone doing today? Good. So my name is Sam Parr. I'm the founder of a company called The Hustle. Is there any Hustle readers here by any chance? Cool, a few of you. So The Hustle, we're a daily newsletter that goes out to about 600,000 people and tells everyone all the business news they need to know in the morning. And they asked me to come to talk to my buddy over here, Sean Sinha. We, The Hustle, at our company, we use HighFive on a regular basis, and we've been friends with this company, and they said, "You guys just gotta come and talk to him." And so here we are. So Sean, I don't know if you guys read this or not, but Hi5 just had some big news today. But Sean, do you want to give like a very like quick, like 15-second intro on what Hi5 is and who you guys are?

Yeah, fantastic. Has anybody heard of Hi5 before? Yeah?

All right.

Well, that's good. Hi5 is the easiest, simplest video conferencing system that you can deploy across your entire company. We do hardware, software. We put an end to that first 15 minutes of pain that anybody who's ever worked in an office is familiar with. We're now 5 years into the company. We've raised now, we just announced this morning, we've raised over $75 million in capital. We're busy growing and scaling and doing all kinds of fun things here in 2018.

Wonderful. So here's, before we get into it, I always ask people these questions 'cause I wanna know who we're talking to and we wanna make sure that we give you all the information that you want. So The Hustle, we're a 20-person company. That's so very much a startup. High Five has just kind of left the startup phase, but the story that we've been asked to talk about is very entrepreneurial with High Five's and Sean's journey. So I want to know, where are you guys in your journey? So how many people here work at a company that's under 40 people?

Wow.

OK. OK. How about— how many— let's do over 40 now. How many work over— OK, how about over 200? Over 1,000. Okay, so cool. Mostly small businesses. Two more questions. How many of you are at the executive level at your company? Okay. How many of you own your— or are one of the founders? Awesome. And how many of you one day want to start your own business?

All right.

Okay, cool. I think we have an idea of who we're talking to.

All right.

This is an amazing amount of small business and small business owners. So what we've been asked today, or what I was asked to talk to Sean today, is about how Hi5 has grown very quickly in an industry that just has huge competitors. You've got Cisco, you've got Polycom. These are huge multi-billion dollars, tens of billions of dollars valued companies. And the way in which they've grown has been really unique. And so what I wanted to do is first hear about, for 5 or 10 minutes, your background, your story, and how this company actually came to be. And then I would love to dig deep into some of the strategies that you've been able to use to attack this huge market. Because you guys are, like I said, doing wonderful, wonderfully in an industry that is very competitive. So would love to hear your background. I know you had a company before this. Maybe we could start there and then go into about 5 years ago how Hi5 got started.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, totally. So I've been in the world of technology for— my entire career. And what ended up happening was 15 years ago, I started off in the world of collaboration. There's a product called Microsoft SharePoint. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that. I like the laughs. That's like the first thing that happens every time somebody says SharePoint. The promise with SharePoint was to help people collaborate. And it turns out that they didn't quite deliver on that very well. But the product was really fast growing, and so that's where I got my sort of introduction into the world of collaboration. I left Microsoft and started a company called DocVerse. That company was a tool that helped people bring documents to the cloud. It helped you synchronize documents, have conversations, all of that. The company did reasonably well. We ended up getting bought by Google.

What year did you get bought?

So we got bought by Google in 2010. And once we got to Google, the product that we built at Docverse became— we turned it into Google Drive. I imagine most of you are pretty familiar with Google Drive. And so that ended up being a pretty exciting experience. As part of that process, I got a chance to run Google Enterprise Apps. And Google Enterprise Apps— how many of you are Google Enterprise Apps customers? G Suite, I guess, now? Yeah, yes, a reasonable amount. And so what was amazing about that was early 2010, you see this move to the cloud. And what you saw happening those couple of years was there was this question of— and this will become relevant here in a second, I promise— but there was this question about, well, why would I move my stuff to the cloud in the late 2000s? And right around 2010, 2011, 7 or 8 years ago, what you saw happening was companies and customers not asking the question, why would I move to the cloud? The real question was, OK, when am I going to move to the cloud? And because at Google, what we were selling was email to small and large companies alike, it was a pretty amazing opportunity to see how that market was evolving. And I think you look at a room full of people here that are— large majority are founders or executives of what I presume are SaaS companies. This was the very beginnings, the late 2000s, the early 2000s was the beginning of that trend. We didn't even have vocabulary at that point in time like ARR, churn, what's your CAC ratio, or what's your CAC to LTV ratio, what's your payback. All these metrics that are now very well understood, they just didn't exist. It was a pretty amazing opportunity to not only see how collaboration technology was moving to the cloud, but also the emergence of more sophisticated and mature cloud business models that really are now the norm. And so now fast forward a few years, now mid to end of 2012, we saw a pretty massive opportunity to solve a problem that was something that I think all of us are familiar with. That first 15 minutes of meeting is— of every meeting is a joke. You talk to somebody, and you and I talk about it all the time. Your initial instinct is, "Let me just take this thing and throw it out the window." And that's a pretty commonplace experience that everybody in the technology world has— well, everybody in the world has faced. But who's going to fix that outside of people in the technology world? And so we sat down, saw a bunch of things from our customers at Google, and saw a huge opportunity to leap and start High Five. Ultimately what led to High Five.

So you and a partner?

That's right. Me and my co-founder who was with me at my last company that came over to Google.

So I guess this leads into the second part of what I wanted to talk about, which is your framework for attacking the market. But I imagine that was there early on. And I forgot to mention, at the end I'm going to be taking questions. So you guys can tweet at me. My name is— yeah, my name's over here, so Sam Parr. But it's @TheSamParr is my Twitter. So tweet at me, and at the end, I'll try to get to all the questions. But anyway, so in 2013, you said, OK, clearly there's something wrong with video conferencing. These first 15 minutes, I want to throw my computer out the window. But if you said that to me in 2013, I'd be like, well, there's Cisco. There's all these other companies. What made you actually think that you were gonna be able to take these folks on, and what was your framework for addressing what is a really hard problem?

[Speaker] Yeah, so I think the, so it starts from a couple of different places. I think number one, it's all, whenever you think about entering a market, I think there's always a question that you have to be very honest with yourself about. This is startup number 4 for me. The first 2 didn't really go anywhere. And so I think through all those experiences of trying to bring something new to market, one of the first questions I like to always ask, not only myself or companies that I'm either advising or helping in whatever set of ways, is what sort of market are you actually in? And I think question number 1 is, are you in an established category that is well understood, or is the thing that you're building giving somebody the ability to do something they hadn't been able to do before?

[Speaker:BRIAN FITZPATRICK] What are examples of each?

[Speaker:BRIAN FITZPATRICK] So for example, if you're talking about when Google Docs came out 10 years ago, being able to write a document in the cloud and share and collaborate, that was something that didn't really exist before. Now the act of writing a document did, but that idea of this collaborative surface was in some ways representative of a new product category that was emerging. You look at our category, video conferencing, this is a very well-understood category. It has 20 years of history. You've got dozens of vendors in the category. And you're entering a space that is, call it, well-understood. And so I think the way you think about entering or building something in either each one of those different types of scenarios is very different. You're going to have to deal with a lot more— a larger foundation of expectations from customers and users in a market that's well understood. In a market that is new and kind of primarily centered on early adopters using technology that they hadn't used before— another good example might be Amazon Echo and some of the intelligent, or the automated assistants that you're seeing at home. That's a market that didn't really exist before. So the job there is to disproportionately delight your end users, and figuring out what that key is becomes much more important. In our case, it was, well, you have all of these different tools and technologies, you have big vendors, Cisco, Polycom, Microsoft, everybody had their own offering in the space. And the question that we had to struggle with and figure out is, well, not only how are we going to build a product that's going to be unique, but then how are we actually going to get it into the market in a way that people would actually pay attention and listen?

I think that whenever I, my friends, whenever they're, we're always just brainstorming, talking about new businesses and just having fun. Something, they'll bring up some crazy idea. It's like, okay, that idea is neat. But most, 9 out of 10 times, they forget the second part, which is actually maybe more important, which is, okay, how do you get that into a customer's hand?

That's right.

Because we can all name thousands of products that are horrible, but because we just saw an ad for them, or because we saw them at the store, or because they were convenient, we bought them. And we also can name a whole bunch of other products that are fantastic products, but you just don't ever buy them because they're not convenient. And obviously, the first one is the winner.

That's right.

They've just won.

That's right.

And so distribution is so important.

That's right.

And I think that people forget that far too often, that distribution is equal, if not more important, than how good your product is.

Well, and that was one of the big things that we did uniquely when we started Hi5. So a lot of times there's this tendency particularly in the earlier stages, and I think this might be more targeted at some of those folks that are in the earlier stages here, but in the earlier stages you spend a lot of your time obsessing, and correctly so, obsessing over what product you're building, what's the feature set, what do you need to do, what's a user's reaction to the things that you're describing, but if you're tackling a more entrenched market, if you're tackling a space that is well understood, it's an equally important question to ask, well, is the message that we're going to say about our product something that will resonate and land in a differentiated way? And so there's a number of different exercises that I've always liked to do, particularly in the earlier stages. And I'll describe a couple things that we did here at High Five. But one thing that I always love to do is I call this my cocktail napkin test. It's, you're at a party, and you're having a cocktail, and you want to tell somebody about some product that you just bought. What are the thing, what are you going to say in that conversation that's going to catch someone's attention? And what you're really trying to do is reverse engineer, as a founder, as a builder, what you're really trying to do is reverse engineer that set of things that somebody's going to say in that circumstance. And the thing that's really critical about that is when somebody's in that context, they're going to be talking with a budget of maybe 30 seconds or 45 seconds. You know, I bought this car because it was safe, reliable, whatever it is. What they're not going to do is they're not going to go through and list off all the features that it can do this, X, Y, and Z. And so I like to turn that into an exercise that we use to go and figure out, well, is the message that we're going to say about the thing we're building going to resonate. And that is always the first step to figuring out what your go-to-market distribution strategy can look like, because you've got to first start with, well, what are we going to say? The next thing— and I'll describe one other thing that we did that I think is really— that was particularly unique about something that we did, which was we hired somebody— we brought somebody on to do product marketing for us as one of our first 6 or 7 folks in the company. The question is, well, what's a product marketing person going to do if you don't have any product built yet? We spent 2 years building our product. Well, what we did was all kinds of crazy things. We built a fake company that had multiple different products that we were creating. We were testing all of these different messages. We were running outbound campaigns to go measure conversion rates on value props and things like that. Of course, it didn't land anywhere. But we actually got a bunch of insight into, well, this value prop seems to resonate, this value prop seems to not resonate. And we spent, I would say, it might not have been 50% of our time, but certainly 20 to 30% of our first, call it, year and a half to 2 in stealth mode, trying to understand the value prop and how customers would actually react to the overall message while we were busy actually building the technology itself.

[Speaker:AUDIENCE] So I think that's amazing. It's something that I've done for just years when thinking of an idea. And that makes you able to start stuff very quickly. And I'm wondering, for everyone out there who raised their hand when I asked if you worked at a company above 400, you're constantly trying to create new products or new services for your customers. Do you think that that type of mentality— so the whole point of this talk is outmaneuvering giants. Do you think that the, quote, giants even think about that stuff or have the ability to do those types of rapid testing?

[Speaker:BRYAN FITZPATRICK] Maybe they do. But I think the thing that's really interesting about competing with large companies— and I did that in my last startup company and definitely doing that here— I think the thing to understand about competing with large companies is that the reason why they're large is because they took something that worked and they just kept scaling that. Oftentimes what you find with large companies is that there's just the bias that comes from that saying, well, look, the thing that we do works, and as a result, there's an organizational disincentive to go and experiment and try new things.

And break your own shit.

And break your own, yeah, exactly. And so you look at that, and if an organization is unwilling or maybe unwilling is kind of too harsh of a word, but if they're more risk-averse to doing something that they fundamentally or intrinsically believe is working or has worked for them, then until they're compelled to have to break something that's working, there ends up being a general advantage that smaller companies can take advantage of. And so one of the philosophies that we are, one of the values that we spend a lot of time talking about internally is, Speed matters, experimentation matters, and so getting into a mode where you're not only experimenting and iterating both on the product side and the go-to-market side is really critical to being able to find your way through. And I think it's one of the things that I think we've done a reasonably good job of over the course of the last few years.

[Speaker] And to go back to entering into this market and what you guys do now, which is, you go directly to your customer. Can you talk a little bit about how that has, that methodology has helped you guys outmaneuver some of these larger companies, and also give context as to how other folks typically do it?

[Speaker] Yeah, so what's interesting about this whole category, there's typically, you have a bunch of old technology that is converting over to new technology. And I know I'm talking about our context, so I'm kinda using it to hopefully hopefully provide insight that may be relevant to everyone here. But I think what you tend to see is you have all these old companies like Cisco and Polycom that are selling all this technology that's now 20, 25 years old, and the way that they had really built their businesses made sense for where the world was 20, 25 years ago. They're working with They built some technology, and their focus is on being the technology provider, and then they tried to partner with people that are indirect distributors of their technology to their customers, so they work with resellers and integrators and value-added resellers and things like that, and the entire ecosystem evolved around that, and so there's a multibillion-dollar industry. There's industry, conferences that we go to that have all these folks there. And what we decided to do was take a different approach. What was unique about us, we were doing hardware and software. So I think there were some interesting constraints that came from doing that. But what was unique about what we decided to do is we decided to take this product that had both hardware and software components and just sell directly to customers. And the reason why we felt like we could do that was all the complexity of legacy technology that required distribution partners and value-added resellers to make, you know, to get it into customers' hands, we had a more consumer-like experience with our solution. And I mean, you're a pretty good example. We take— we have a product that you can buy online, you talk to our folks, we will ship it out, you plug it in, and it just works. And we support customers that are as small as 20 to 30, 40 people like The Hustle. We support customers that are 1,000 to 2,000 people, and the big shift that we saw was that customers of all sizes are enjoying or preferring to buy in this particular way. Now that said—

Yeah, Clayton over here, he came to my office. We had to give him a ladder 'cause we told him something wasn't working. He had to get a ladder and just get up there and fix everything.

Oh, totally.

It was awesome.

Yeah, totally. And so there was, and so, So I think there's this model of being able to sell directly to customers that is more viable today than has ever been before because people are used to buying things online. Like think about what's happening with Amazon. You just buy all the stuff and it just shows up at your door now. You don't have to necessarily go to the store. You don't have to have somebody show up and do anything like that. Now what's interesting for us is not only was that a way to get into market more quickly, But you also learn about what's working and what's not working, not only from a product perspective, but hey, is this version of the pitch working? What does their onboarding experience need to look like? You get firsthand experience selling to customers. And so for some of you that are building more complex technologies, it's an interesting question to ask whether you're going to sell directly to customers or whether you're going to sell through partners. And integrators, and one of the things that we've gotten to at this point now is after figuring out this customer experience and what that really ultimately needs to look like, the onboarding, the training, all that kind of stuff, now that we've arrived in 2018, we're very much focused on working with partners and what's called the channel to go and distribute our product because we feel like we have a superior end-to-end experience that you can't get with any of the other solutions, and that's going to be value-add to these channel partners as well. And so we announced some funding this morning, and one example of that is that that funding came from a company that is one of these resellers or these system integrators. And so thinking about how— whether you're going to take it directly to market with your customer, directly to customers, thinking about whether you're going to go indirect, That's really where the complexity shows up whenever you're thinking about go-to-market models and distribution strategies. And in comparison to where the Ciscos and the Polycoms are, being able to figure out how you're going to differentiate there is a big part of the equation.

Where's Sahil Mansuri? You here? There he is, okay. You just tweeted at me and you were asked how, how, how that's different from Zoom. And to me, the point there is you've just explained now how you're different from the giants, but are a lot of the other startups or smaller companies doing similar, similar strategies? No.

Well, so I think the answer is, uh, yes and no. I mean, I think what, what, what we would say is I think there's a whole bunch of old technology, uh, that represents tens of billions of dollars of spend that's turning over to new new technology. And Zoom, us, companies like BlueJeans, et cetera, that's representative of the shift that I was describing, which is a move towards pure cloud-based models. And so I think what you're seeing is that migration of old technology over to more cloud-based models. And so from that perspective, there's a lot of similarities. All of us are delivering cloud-based solutions. Us, Zoom, et cetera, we're delivering cloud-based solutions. That, uh, uh, make it super easy to do conferencing and meetings. Uh, where we're different is that we take an approach of providing an end-to-end solution. So you get everything you need. You get room-based video conferencing, you get web conferencing and audio conferencing all in one place. Uh, and that comes from us. And one of the things that makes that particularly unique for us is that, uh, because we provide both hardware and software, and have a business model around that, that creates an opportunity for us to work with distribution partners in a way that some of these other folks aren't as great fits for. And so that does absolutely create an opportunity to differentiate. It might not show up as end-user differentiation, but it does show up as a differentiation in business model.

[Speaker:AUDIENCE] Do you think that going directly to your customer or selling online like you guys are now For anyone else out there who has a company that isn't in video conferencing, but it's in an industry that's old or has been around for years and years and has kind of been stagnant, do you think that strategy is working for— could work across industries? Or are other industries already doing it? What's your advice?

Yeah, I mean, I think going direct to customers is hugely valuable. I would start going directly to customers regardless of what idea or technology I had. And I'm mostly speaking about B2B technologies. I would go directly to customers unless there had to be a strong reason not to. And the reason why I think that's important is you learn way more quickly by working directly with customers. Now that said, to grow and scale, so for example for us, the challenge This year for us is take what we have that's working, and now we're going to be focused on growing and scaling, scaling it internationally, scaling it to different market segments and things like that. Now that we've got the fundamentals of what that customer experience really needs to look like, then you can start to layer on more complex go-to-market models, but that's— the reason why they're complex is you're adding layers of indirection. For example, If you decide to go with a more indirect distribution approach where you work with a partner to get your technology out to a customer, the challenge that you inevitably run into is, OK, when it's working, great. Everything's great. If it's not working, if you're not seeing the kind of traction you want to see with customers, is it because of your product, your technology, something that you're doing? Or is it because of not having the right incentives in place for your partner? Is it because they're trying to sell something else at the same time, and that's not resonating? So there's all these additional layers of questions that interfere with whether you're actually doing a good job for your customer in and of itself.

OK. Of your 90 people, how many are sales folks?

Our sales team now is about 15 to 16 people.

15 to 16 people.

That's right.

And so those guys are going out, guys and women are going out and getting, are selling.

That's right.

And with your model, not only are they selling, they're getting the feedback.

That's right.

Can you get really specific and tactical and tell me how that happens? We have a sales team, and I would love, and I mean, I'm sure a lot of folks, probably everyone in here works at a company with a sales team. Can you explain why, or how you've set the sales team up in order to make feedback part of the product creation process. Because I know that you guys have done that pretty well.

Yeah. [Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] So one of the things that we've done— so we do a lot of things. So we definitely pay attention to tooling. So we've got two databases that we maintain. One is the actual product service database. Usage metrics and user pattern, usage patterns and customer kind of deployment information and things like that. And then we have, we're built on Salesforce, and what we've done is we've spent probably a disproportionate amount of time relative to I think maybe what other companies of our size have done of tying all these systems together. So for example, our sales team, whenever they close loss in opportunity, they have a checklist of things that they are required to fill out at a product level on, well, why did this opportunity not close?

Can you name me one or two questions?

So it might be missing this particular feature, or it might be need this platform support, or something like that. And so they fill all that stuff out, and they're required to do that. We make it mandatory. And then that turns into a regular report that our product teams evaluate every 6 to 8 weeks so that we can go and adjust our pipeline. So if, for example, at a leadership team level, we say, you know what, the priority this quarter is to go raise our conversion rate on the sales side, we at least have some useful data that's coming back from the sales process that can help drive that. Now, we do all kinds of other things like that. That's at the pre-sales level. At the post-sales level, we're doing regular account reviews and taking that feedback back to the product team. But we also flip it around the other way. So all that usage data that we have, well, we send that back into Salesforce. So when a sales rep pulls up their information, or they pull up a particular account, what they can see is, oh, they're using it this much. They have this many units deployed. They have this many users on the system. And now let me go and understand at either a competitive level or whatever it is— or sorry, at a deployment level, are we getting the maximum value out of this? And that ends up being another way to get feedback when we are able to answer questions like, well, what would it take for this account to use High Five more? And so we end up driving those types of conversations. Our sales folks can have those types of conversations with our customers.

Wonderful. OK, I'm going to ask 2 more questions, and then I'm going to start doing some Twitter stuff. So if you want to ask me some questions, my name's up here, but my Twitter handle is @TheSamPar on Twitter. And I'll start reading some of those. But I wanted to ask 2 more questions. And I know a bunch of— I guess I'll make the easy one first, which is I know a bunch of your coworkers. I know a lot of them don't seem to have worked at— I don't think a lot of them have worked at some of these bigger companies who you're trying to compete against. Has hiring people outside the industry been as effective as you thought it would have been? Can you explain your hiring practices?

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah. I think that's been an advantage for us. One of the values that I think we live pretty well inside the company is this idea of thinking from first principles. And I think one of the things that we've seen is that folks that have joined us, everyone's familiar with the product and the technology and the opportunity. And so the folks that have joined us are genuinely joining us to really deliver a better experience and solve this problem. So I think it's helped from the perspective of, We're finding people that are definitely very driven by this mission to fix this particular kind of category of technology. But at a competitive level, I think what I'd say is that we're able to come up with ideas that aren't necessarily done before or have not been done before. And we come up with ideas where our technology works differently than the way that the industry has settled on as a standard pattern. And so while our hit rate hasn't been 100%, there's definitely times where we do something different and it actually doesn't land as well as we'd like it or as we thought it was going to land. More often than not, I think what our customers tend to appreciate is Hi5 does work differently. And I think that's directly a result of— it works differently but better. And I think that's directly a result of the fact that we look to hire people that care about solving this problem, as opposed to folks that have been in the industry or category for a long time. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're not hiring folks from the industry or who haven't worked on this kind of technology. But we certainly haven't biased toward that.

I see. OK, last question, which is you talked earlier about how some of the larger companies can't— It's not that they can't, but they don't experiment all the time, or as much as you, because, well, shit works.

Lack of incentive.

Yeah, right. Like, why mess with something that's already working? But yeah, it's like, we don't need this at the moment. But if you and your investors get your way, you're going to be a huge sluggish company one day, right?

Yeah.

Are you already thinking about, how do I fight that?

It's a good question. So I think we're at the very beginning phases of starting to figure that out. I think what happens is you start to approach it. I think we're going to be probably 100 people over the next month or so. And one of the things that has become very clear to me as we've reached this size and scale is that figuring out what values you're going to promote is an explicit effort that you have to dedicate attention to in order to do it well. I think the values that we seek, or that we're seeking to instill in the organization or in the company, is this value of moving fast and continuing to iterate. And it's not like any company grows up and says, "Oh no, you know what? I wanna be a big and slow company." It's, you know, what is it that makes that happen? And I think that spirit of being willing to question and break something that is working now, I think we need to find a way to instill that spirit and that value.

Have you found a way to do that?

And let that scale. I think the answer is no, but what I can say is that, at least not yet, but what I can say is that one of the things that certainly whenever I get involved in different groups and threads that are going on in the company, a lot of my focus is always on going back to the root question of asking, Well, why? And now I think the challenge that we have is how do we make that an institutional value that everybody feels comfortable asking and that it's never looked upon badly to ask that question. Well, why are you going to do something? What outcome are you trying to achieve? And what would actually enable you to do that 10x better than you did? It's something that, you know, I feel like, take a company like Google where I was at, it was a really fortunate experience to work at Google. Where I think at a 40,000-person company, they did that amazingly well, of really instilling that spirit of, well, let's get down to the root of it and let's actually try to solve our problem and truly upgrade whatever problem, whatever solution that we happen to have in place.

[Speaker:BEN COLLINS-SUSSMAN] Got it. Well, we're going to do rapid fire from some of these questions that are tweeting at me, because we've got some good ones. So we'll try to keep each answer to 30 seconds. 5 seconds. OK, done.

We can do that.

Yara Cohen asks, what do you do to match the exposure that your large competitors are getting?

So a lot of it focuses primarily on delivering a great customer experience to start with. And then we look for threads and alleys that they're not paying attention to. And so you have to be surgical and smart. And find opportunities where you can arbitrage your way through, whether that's maybe PR-driven, maybe that's markets that are not being paid attention to.

And, oh, here's an interesting question. You guys have just raised funding, $78 million or—

Well, $70, I don't know, $75, $77 I think is the number.

Total?

Total, and then this last round was $30, just over $30.

Could you have gotten to where you are, do you think, without funding? This is from Dalia. She was asking about, if you could still do this without funding?

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] No, we knew that this idea was going to be something that requires capital. Not only were we building a product that was going to require a reasonable amount of capital, because we built hardware and software. And it turns out the technology here is also another big slug that represents a need for large capital. But go-to-market, B2B companies, B2B SaaS companies, require capital to go fuel that growth. I think there are models that, the models where you can grow on kind of capital efficient, very small amounts of capital are always appealing. This particular category that we had some insight around, we knew was going to require some capital.

[Speaker] Great, okay. Sanket wanted to ask, when you guys were testing different value props for your products, what were some other ones, what did you test and what were the ones that won out?

We tested a whole bunch of different things. I have to go back and remember, but I remember we were testing video conferencing at 1/20th of the cost. We were testing make every meeting face-to-face.

And you did that by just creating landing pages with that headline and seeing—

Yeah, we did all kinds of things. We did landing pages. We created product images. We created company identities. We did email campaigns. All sorts of things.

You spend a lot of money doing that?

No, not really. I mean, I think it was, I don't know, it must have, I don't remember, it was probably thousands of dollars maybe a month or something.

Just different landing pages driving traffic? Yeah, that's it.

That's right. There were a whole bunch of different value props that we tested. We weren't sure if it was gonna be about the room or the software or no download or click. I think there were all these things that we tested. Easy, simple, 1/20 of the cost. These were all different parts of it that did resonate. And so over time, that's influenced a lot of what we've become today.

OK. And here's an interesting question. Looking back at the problems that you saw in the video conferencing industry, what other industries have you seen that were kind of controlled by these large sluggish brands that have a lot of room for new competitors who have a similar high-five strategy? Someone out there is thinking of starting a business apparently.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, that's a good question. From ones that I've seen, the whole world of sensors and automation and things like that, there seems to be a lot going on there. There seems to be a lot in logistics. And supply chain management. It seems like there's some pretty interesting ideas there. And at least those are a couple things that I've seen. I think you can go look at— a lot of the enterprise software is in process of being disrupted. I think folks in this room are probably in the middle of being the ones that are disrupting all the enterprise software. So I don't know. Those are a few that come to mind.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Cool. The last question is, was there anything that you didn't say that you think this room would wanna hear about outmaneuvering the giants?

I think the biggest thing that I would say is don't be scared. I think at the end of the day, that if you have large companies in your market, usually that's a good thing, and they are typically operating off of very different incentives than the ones that would ultimately lead to a successful new product in a category that might be around. And so I would say, don't be afraid. Seek to understand what's motivating those companies. And then find your way through. And there usually are always opportunities if you know that the customer problem remains unsolved.

Wonderful. Thank you.

All right.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.