How to Reinvent a Category that’s Already Been Won | Braze Co-Founder Mark Ghermezian

Hey everybody, welcome. It's Mark Kermasian, co-founder of Braze and now general partner at MXV Capital. I'm really excited to kind of walk you through my journey of building Braze from literally an idea and thinking about how we can really create picks and shovels for when the mobile ecosystem started and really going after a category that really existed and building it into a dominant player in, in the lifecycle marketing mobile space today. So I'm really excited to jump in with you guys. Um, the SaaS community is awesome. It's something that as I was building Braze, I always looked up to, and I always looked up to the CEOs that were speaking at SaaStr 10 years ago and always wanted to make sure I had a ticket to get to the conference myself. So I'm really excited to be joining SaaStr and kind of sharing my story. Um, also towards the end we'll go through Q&A, so if you have any questions make sure to post them up into the Q&A and we'll make sure we'll do our best to address them. But I think one thing that I want to go through, I just kind of push this slide all the way to the top so you can kind of get a sense of the items that we want to really nail during this panel or this session. I think one thing for me building Braze was listening to our customers. I can't say how important that is when we were kind of building up, building the product and building the platform, especially when we were pioneering a new platform in the mobile ecosystem. I think two things that led from listening to our customers was building what we call our success squad, which was our way of creating a brand around customer success, even building the Appboy Academy, which is a glossary and knowledge base and almost a university of terms and best use cases. And I'll talk a little bit about how that paid dividends for us into the future and where we are now. One thing for me culturally, it was gratitude and humility. I think One thing that I built within the culture and the fabric of Braze was just always staying humble, learning from each other, leaning on each other. I always love to say hands together. And that's something that I really want to dive into here as well. And knowing the industry, I think staying on top of what's happening and where the tide is moving and where things are happening, I think is Understanding that is really important. Then innovate or die. I think this mobile ecosystem was moving quickly and it still is, and staying on top of everything I think was really important for us as we kind of move forward. So let's start. So this is kind of where the idea happened. I remember sitting at home and seeing Steve Jobs announce iPhone, and I just looked at this and said, holy cow, something really special is going to be happening here. And this— we're turning a corner. It's almost like a gold rush. And that aha moment that you kind of like think about, when will yours be? And I just saw this and I said, wow, every brand is going to be making an app if they don't have an app. And everybody's going to want to connect with the people making apps, and they're going to want— and the people making the apps are going to want to connect with their users. I just believed in it. One thing that I thought of was, but I don't want to make the apps. It reminded me of the gold rush and I want to build the picks and shovels for it and let everybody else create what that is. A lot of people don't know, but this was the first iteration of Appboy, which is now called Braze. The original idea was I was just trying to create almost like this social network online where if you had an idea for an app, you could submit it, or if you're a developer of an app, you can come on and choose the app that you developed, and then you can connect with your users, but all through a social network on, on a desktop. Nothing mobile about it, which is counterproductive with where the mobile ecosystem was going, but it still was kind of my gateway into this whole mobile ecosystem and connecting with a lot of developers. So one thing that I love is the robot and Appboy. We actually bought, or I bought the domain for $8.99 on GoDaddy, and we just didn't look back from using that name until we kind of thought the right time was to convert the name and change the name to Braze. So building on that, I think that was around 2008, around that time when I started thinking about Appboy and what it was, and I started creating by myself this mobile developer community. Like I said, it was a website where people can share ideas, they can create profiles. We actually started scraping the entire App Store, Google Play Store, and started building it in. And I started building it in Canada with some folks that I outsourced to. I don't have an engineering degree or anything like that. I'm more of an idea person. And I typically look at problems and I try to solve them. And that was what I was trying to build here. And at the time, if you remember when apps started, it was all about discovery of apps and how do you help developers get their apps discovered? And then how do you let developers of apps really connect with the users. So the premise of what we built was there. It was building this social network where we connected the users and the developers of these apps and building that bridge. As I started building that, I'm like, "You know what? This is not going to get big. It's cool, but it's not going to be massive." So that's when I started doing a little more due diligence and learning about what the concept of an SDK, and I started seeing like, wow, there are ways to integrate your software into an app, and that's when I started thinking about an SDK and what that would look like, and my whole idea was thinking about what Foursquare did, and back then in 2011, Foursquare was the hottest startup of its time, and people were checking into restaurants or venues, and I was like, well, how cool would it be if we can Actually build a software that allows users to check into apps, and that would solve two problems. It would solve the discovery because when you check in, you're sharing on your social networks that you're using this app. It'd also let the developers of the apps know who your top users are. So again, the premise is still there in terms of where Braze is today. How do we connect the users of the apps with the developers of the apps? And I was always trying to solve that and iterate on it. Eventually we just landed on like, okay, this is cool, but nobody really wants the check-ins. They love the SDK. They love that we can give them the data on who's using your apps. They love that they can communicate with the users of the apps. So that's when we sunsetted the whole concept of checking in the apps and we started creating this platform, which we called at the time Mobile CRM. So that's when the journey started. I was, like I said, I was just building the SDK myself for a couple years. At the time I was living in Houston and I just heard about South By, which is just wrapping up right now, and told my wife I'm going to Austin and gonna see if I can show people what I'm doing and see if I can raise some money. And we'll get into a lot of this because I'm going to get into a lot of how things evolved and just so you can really appreciate what happens over time. Like Braze is now a 12-year-old company. And I think a lot of times you think about like, wow, they IPO'd, they're so lucky, but there's so many things that we went through in that journey to really figure out how we can get to where we are today. So I went to South By and with the first iteration of the iPad, first gen, with my deck and I just walked around and eventually someone introduced me to Alex Lloyd and he was my first investor who committed to investing. I think at the time, I think it was $150,000 or $250,000 and we raised our first million dollars at a $4 million cap, and that was in July. During that time, I came back to South— After I met all these people at South By, I came back to Houston, Flew back to San Francisco, met up, followed up with a bunch of meetings and got the deal done, and then decided to move back to New York and started specifically just looking for co-founders that can build this with me. And luckily, I was able to meet Bill and John. Bill, who is the CEO now, he was my CTO when we started, and John, my other co-founder, was our CIO. Interesting fact about how we met, Bippul, who is now the CEO of Rubrik, co-founder of Rubrik, he's a mentor of mine. And during that period of from '09 till 2011, we've been talking and iterating on what Appboy should be. And I'm like, "Hey, if you meet anyone that could be a co-founder for me, let me know." And just a small note, if you're looking for a co-founder, literally ask every single person you meet if they know somebody, because you just don't know how close you can be to finding that person through someone else. And Bipple just happened to be on a street corner after my co-founders won the TechCrunch Hackathon in 2011. And he was just telling them what I was building and he said, "You should reach out to Mark. He just raised $1 million and you guys should potentially pair up as co-founders." And that's exactly how I met my co-founders and we came together and started building the team, and we launched our first iteration of the iOS SDK, and that's when we kind of realized that people didn't really care about the check-in, and we reiterated, relaunched it with the CRM for apps. One thing that was really interesting was our cut— one of our customers came to us and said, we don't want the SDK, I just want to be able to talk to my, to my customers and be able to message them, and Specifically, this picture that you're seeing here reminds me so much of the time I was looking at John and Bill. I'm like, guys, what if we could build an address book of all the users of the app and then let the developers of the apps or the brands of the apps really allow them to segment that user base based on their actions in the app and then allow them to message the apps through push, through email, whatever it may be. Based on how they're using the app. And John looked at me, he's like, so you mean CRM for apps? I'm like, exactly. So that was just kind of one of the moments that we went through. So this, this is kind of that aha moment I was talking about that happened unintentionally. So we pre-aha, and that's post-aha. So on the left side, you can see the pre-aha, which is we made an SDK which powered the platform. We were originally going after long tail, And I'll get into kind of where we decided to really double down on the enterprise. Um, and, uh, we were building an app community, um, which then eventually built into our user data aggregator. We use gamification, which got us to thinking about how we build the relationships with the customers and app check-ins. Um, although there was some form of messaging in an app check-in, we actually converted that into direct messages. So when you put all this together and you mush it all together, that's kind of how we landed on the concept of mobile CRM marketing automation. We actually didn't even know what to call ourselves. I think we changed so many times around how you define what Appboy is. Is it mobile CRM? Is it marketing automation? Is it lifecycle marketing? I think we've came full circle and now we're lifecycle marketing. For the mobile ecosystem or more life cycle marketing for brands. So what's interesting is when we, when I act, when we thought of the idea personally for me, and I can only speak for myself, I didn't even know companies like Salesforce existed. I didn't know Adobe existed. I didn't know ExactTarget existed because originally I just wanted to build the bridge between apps and their users. And as we started kind of nailing, going going more and digging and peeling that onion, we started noticing more and more that, hey, this is a massive market. I think ExactTarget just got purchased by Salesforce about for about $2 billion or more. And, but I think what was interesting for me, and I kind of looked at it as, wow, like they are really just built for desktop and laptops and email. And there wasn't anyone kind of building the next-gen platform or CRM that can really integrate into the different platforms and devices that we as users are interacting with, with the brands we love. So if you think about when mobile was introduced, we— you were interacting, and I always use the New York Times as an example. You would read the New York Times on your phone, on the— on an iPad, on your desktop, on a laptop, literally now on your watch you're getting breaking news. And then you're also reading the paper at home. And I think you just interacted with the New York Times in 6 different ways across 6 different mediums and our devices. And I think for ExactTarget, they were built to really just track you on a desktop and then follow up with an email. And for us, it was like, wow, this can get really interesting and very hard to do if we can actually track everyone across devices in real time, identify who that user is on a unique level, and then transact on that with push, email, um, whatever the message type it is. And, and if we want to do that, we really need to build the best-in-class CRM. So the state of the market was really interesting because it's very, very isolated and specific to desktop and laptop and cookies and email. And then the entry of mobile really shattered that whole thing. And I think that was a big thing for us when we kind of saw the market opportunity. I think for one thing for us also, when we were building it, I didn't know anything. I was not your traditional CEO. I didn't go to any of the top-tier universities. I'm not an engineer by background. And we had many competitors who had a much stronger pedigree, at least for me, but my co-founders were awesome, so we were able to really kick some ass. But I think for us, it was like, what are you building? Like, there's Marketo out there, there's Salesforce out there. I don't want to say the names of the competitors, but there were other competitors that were backed by Sequoia, backed by Kleiner, and there was also the big boys out there at the time. You had Urban Airship, who I think was the larger player in the market powering Push, and they were pretty dominant. You had Localytics, who was an amazing company. You had Mixpanel, who still till today is an amazing company. And I think what was happening was we were still a little early. Like we had this vision that when you launch an app, the journey was first you're developing the app, Then you had to push the app to market. So then you're going to start doing paid acquisition, and then you're going to have the analytics to kind of understand how people are using your app. But I don't think the market was really ready yet for post-acquisition, which was all about retention. So when we launched Appboy or when we launched Braze, it was very focused on like, hey, you now are out to market, you now paid X amount to acquire all these customers, what are you doing to retain these customers? And interestingly enough, nobody gave— no one cared. Nobody really wanted to really spend money on any retention methods and so on. They were very happy with Mixpanel. They were very happy with Local Analytics and attribution and tracking the attribution of how they acquired these customers and analytics. And they're happy with Urban Airship just using one pipe of push at the time. So I think a lot of people didn't really understand what we were building, which put us in a pretty good bind at the time. We raised a million, we started building this, nobody wanted it. So really quickly after we closed the million seed, we did a bridge of another $1.2 or $1.5 million about 6 months after that one. So again, there's a lot of things that we went through to think about how we're building this. And I think the point again, what I wanted to show you here is You usually have what I call the thesis of your idea or the company that you want to build, and then you have the equation, right? I think us as founders and the team, we're always thinking about what is the equation that solves for that thesis. And I think what we need to be prepared for as founders is thinking about how that equation can change. And a lot of times it's not the right equation. You have it on the whiteboard and you're solving for it, you're solving for it, and eventually you figure out the right way to do it. With that, in terms of solving for that, there's a lot of things that have to come in where people that know me, they know I'm very persuasive and I just don't give up. And I think that played in really well. So one, flying out to South By, not knowing anyone and didn't want to leave till I got one person to commit to the seed round. That was an amazing kind of thing for me. To my co-founders, John and Bill, that they won the TechCrunch Hackathon. I can't tell you how many people were probably reaching out to them. Believe me, they did not reply to my first emails or LinkedIn messages at the time or anything, and I think it took a lot of effort to get them. And then if you think about even our first customer, TextPlus, I just remember the back and forth literally for a year to get them to come sign up, to understand the importance of what we were building, And for me, that was a massive deal. It was an $8,000 monthly deal signed for 12 months. And that kind of propelled me to really get, or allowed us to really get our Series A done. It was just so hard getting that first customer. But I also think a lot, if you go back to my original, a few slides back, was there were other startups and competitors that I would say on the surface, they had the pedigree to really beat us and win this market. But I think because we had to go through a lot of like iteration and had to do fight tooth and nail and jump through so many hoops to figure out how to sell this to the first customer, that also enabled us to build the best-in-class platform because we listened to other customers, we listened to what they wanted, we heard what they wanted. And I think because we had to be the underdogs and the underdog mentality, It really allowed us to kind of like have nothing to lose and everything to win. So I think that's also a big reason why looking back and thinking back, we were able to really push the envelope and kind of dominate and kind of get to where we are today. Second, I think one important thing I'm a big fan of and one of my investors, the Bloomberg Capital folks who led our seed, Bruce Tarragon always said, fire quick and hire slow. And I think that really stuck with me. And then when you think about, as we're growing, we eventually had to hire our VP of sales, went through a lot of different folks and we landed on this one individual and hired him and it was a complete disaster. And one that I had to really step up and say like, we wanted to let him go. And a lot of the people on the board were just kind of upset and like, look, you didn't even give this person a full quarter. And I think that was something that I think you as a founder and you kind of building up your company, that you're going to have to make these tough decisions and you're going to have to really step up to the plate. And I just felt it was not the right fit. And I think on a previous panel, we had someone speaking about— from Frame.io, the founder— talking about culture. I really believe culture really resonates into the product that you're building and goes right into your customers. And it was just culturally not the right fit and not just— I just didn't see it eye to eye kind of after we had him start. So we let him go. And I think it was honestly one of the best decisions we did that enabled us again to get to where we are. And not to say that each decision got us to where we are, but each decision when put together got us to where we are. Last and not last, but an interesting point a lot of people don't appreciate is even with our series Even with our Series A, we had nobody. Every single person we reached out to passed, and we were down to 2 weeks of payroll and we had nothing. And it came down to Tom Peterson with— it's actually with Rally Ventures. I just noticed a mistake here. We put Bullpen. Bullpen was an investor as well, but Tom Peterson was with Rally, he led our Series A, literally flew out, got him to sign, got him to agree on the terms, but we still had 2 weeks of payroll left and closing wouldn't happen for another minimum 30 days. So in that time, I personally fronted payroll for that time period and so on. So that was an interesting kind of story for me. Again, those 2 weeks could have been we could have died, we wouldn't have been around. And then second, I think every company has a unicorn hire, and I think it's that hire that makes the difference between the founders and that next hire. And I think Miles Klieger, who is now the president and the chief customer officer of the company, he was at Salesforce previously, at Buddy Media, and he came on and he didn't want to. I think he kind of felt like he wanted to try something else, But again, I just felt like this was the perfect fit for him, and I literally went to his house and eventually got him to agree to come on. So again, I think the point of all these stories is to kind of show you that there's so much that you need to do as a founder and CEO to really see this, see your company through and see your vision through. It's not all just kind of black and white. I think like this is, again, we started as Appboy and we grew into Braze. And I think we started realizing that, hey, this is a bigger opportunity than we thought. And we started getting in there and started signing bigger contracts. We started thinking about what we're building. And I think, again, I think what I like to say is a lot of times when I look at different SaaS companies and different different platforms that people are building, I always think about, is this a means to an end or is it just data that you really can't do anything? Is the product actually doing something that actually equates to something in terms of something tangible, productivity, does it trigger something? So I think something for you all to think about as you're building a platform and a product is, does this create— is this a means to an end or is what I'm building just the end? The other thing is like building a platform, not a feature. I think this is key. A lot of times I've noticed that a lot of SaaS platforms out there today, the founders may have this one idea, which is more of a feature. And what that means is, is it sticky, right? I think, and does it lead to stickiness? I think if it's a platform, it's something that you want everybody using day in, day out. And does it typically And if you think about it, does it 10x the performance of the company? Does it 10x the performance of a department or an individual contributor? That's all okay if it does all that, but you want something that they're using every day that really, really 10x is how they're performing and it's not just a feature and so on. And then making it sticky. I think how do you make it sticky is having it integrated into the stack of the power user. So for us, having those key integrations was important. And so on. And then budget. I think a lot of times we underestimate budget. So who your power user is, what their budget's like. I think you can't really underestimate that, hey, I'm going to build this and I'm going to charge this much. I think you really need to understand the budgets of the power user or the department you're selling into. And you really need to take into consideration the size of the company that you're going into. Is it long tail? Is it enterprise? At what point do they actually have budget? For your product, and at what point does it actually 10x their productivity, and at what point do they actually hire someone who actually will dive into using your product. So I think again, just going back to kind of how we saw this, we realized that there's a bigger opportunity than what we thought. I think honestly, when I was building Braze and the time when I was CEO, We really felt that, hey, we could probably get this to $100 million AR, and obviously we're much larger than that today. Not even us, I think the market opportunity, you look at us, you look at some of our competitors, you look at the Adobe Marketing Cloud, you look at the SaaS, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, they're all massive, massive companies and divisions in themselves. And we started realizing that budgets were— budgets to buy software were becoming very real. People started realizing what CRM was and the enterprise was starting to invest in this. So seeing all this, I think one thing that we held onto, and this is something that Miles really honed in on coming in and building the team with us, was making sure that we stuck to our margins. We never chased deals. If it got into— if there's an opportunity where we were kind of like competing on price, where our competitors, and this happens a lot, they just undercut us by a lot to win a deal. We didn't play that game. And I think that's something that I think you as founders, as you're building your companies and you're thinking about it, obviously you always want to have what I call that anchor customer that you can really use case studies with, you could put on your website. There might be a few that you do that in the early days to get those done, but as you're building out your sales force and you're building out your company, you really want to build a culture of like sticking to your margins, sticking to your price, especially if you really believe in your product. I think what I always believed in is our product and our team, and I always felt like if we lost a deal due to price— and obviously that doesn't mean don't be competitive, but doesn't mean slash your price by 50% to win a deal. A lot of times those customers all came back. For us, we also focused on the enterprise, and I think it's important. A lot of times when I see companies in software, they're like, oh, we're going to go after long tail and enterprise, we're going to do it both. That's a big no-no to me. I think What you need to be thinking about is if you're going after enterprise, the DNA of your team changes, how you— who you're hiring as your AEs, who the marketing— I think the persona of your marketing, the content strategy you have, your customer success team, like everything changes when you decide if you're going long tail or enterprise. That doesn't mean you can't have a freemium product and you're focused on enterprise, but I think you really need to decide how you're doing that. And then that's something else that I just mentioned here, building an enterprise customer success team. I think it's really focused on like how you support the enterprise and then the content strategy. So these are things that we honed in on that I think was the big difference maker for us to get to where we are today versus some of our competitors in terms of deciding to go against the enterprise. Again, I think every domain and every, I would say, category is different. For us at Braze at the time when we were going to market, we felt skipping the long tail and going directly into enterprise was the right move for us. So this is the first slide that I had, and hopefully I kind of like addressed a lot of these when we were kind of going through them, but listening to your customer, I can't tell you how often I reached out to customers, talking to them, hearing what they like, what they don't like. We actually even created a customer advisory board where we had our key customers part of this board where we met quarterly or biannually. We invited other customers to these boards to kind of get a feel for how we're working with our customers, but also they helped us dictate a lot of our roadmap and a lot of our positioning in the market. The Appboy Academy, I think, was one thing that I think that a lot of startups and SaaS companies maybe underestimate. I think your content strategy in the early days can pay dividends. I think building a glossary of best practices Talking about how the best ways to use your product or how best to use any product in your category. Like we spoke about the best cases of push and how you should be using push to onboard customers, how you should be using email to onboard customers. And we didn't specifically talk about like why Braze is the best for that, but we spoke about why, what the best cases are for that. And I can't tell you how many customers used our Braze Academy or Appboy Academy for that. And then eventually those led to closing deals because we were positioning ourselves as a thought leader in the space. Again, I think one thing for me is the humility. I think when we lose a deal or we win a deal— when we lose a deal, I was always interested in understanding why we lost, not why we won. And that helped us understand and become better. I always say like, it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to lose as long as you're learning from them. And I think for me, I didn't know the industry. I didn't know anything about CRM and the marketing cloud and all these things. And for me, I was always trying to learn. My way of learning was listening to my customers. And then the last thing I would say is the innovate or die. And I think that just comes back to like moving quickly. And, but it also, I think one thing I want to point out here is I believe in best in class. I think for us, we want to innovate or die, but also build the best in class CRM lifecycle marketing tool. We didn't want to be a Swiss Army knife. A lot of our competitors were going down one path, and then once they saw that CRM and lifecycle marketing was getting a little more attractive and that's where the market was going, they started moving in our direction and letting go of what they were doing, what they were focused on. I truly believe if some of them stayed diehard focused on what they were doing, they would be big players in their domain while we would— we continue to dominate our, our domain. So what am I doing today? Like I mentioned, I'm a co-founder of Braze, but I'm no longer there today. I was the founding CEO, and what I'm doing now is I'm taking a lot of my learnings from the 10, 12 years that I was there building it and scaling it, and now trying to figure out how I could fund the future of cloud and how I could be supportive of, as a founder and operator myself, investing in pre-seed and seed and Series A companies. MXV is my fund. We haven't formally announced the fund, but we're a $35 million fund focused on really early stage. I just personally just love getting into the weeds with founders and understanding what they want to build, what their product-market fit is, their pricing, how they should be thinking about the market they're going into, budgets, who their power user is, You can probably get a sense of how passionate I am about this, but I really just enjoy this a lot. So that's kind of where we are today. Hopefully you found this to be insightful. We can now move into a Q&A. I'm going to try to read a lot of the Q&A questions here.

Hi, I'm Catherine from the SAS team. We're going to be going through this Q&A moderation. We'll close out this last session of the day with some great questions that have come in through the audience. So I'm going to read each of these aloud and then Mark, if you could give us your thoughts, that would be great.

Sure.

Awesome. So first here, we have an article on Saastr.com that covers the 5 interesting learnings founders can copy from your growth and journey. One of our learnings was how you have very large enterprise clients and your NRR is 135% with your over 500K customers. $100,000 customers. What's the secret to winning deals with large enterprise clients when you're just starting out? And what are some key ways you've increased MRR year over year?

Yeah, I think it goes back to one of my earlier slides. We, we built the DNA of the company to be completely focused on enterprise. And I think that's the big difference maker between us and others is we really built— and what that means is we built the product for the enterprise, we built our marketing strategy for the enterprise, we built our content strategy for enterprise, customer success for the enterprise. So, and how we operate internally, our mentality just changed that we're servicing the enterprise. And I think when you do that, you're naturally attracting obviously the enterprise. And I think we kind of stood out and carved ourselves out to do that. I think it was a big investment and a big bet to do that because believe me, when we started, I wanted to get all those hot new startups that were getting funding from Sequoia and all the hot ones out there. At the end of the day, I think those ones for our time, they didn't really have the, the investment in CRM, or they were never using CRM before. So when you think about them versus a Domino's Pizza, Domino's Pizza was doing CRM 10 years before we even were around. They were using ExactTarget, they were using other players out there. So going in there and kind of illustrating to them why we are the future of CRM lifecycle marketing, why we can actually scale with them and we can service them, we can support them and take them to a whole new level was a big difference for us. And I think that speaks to the year-over-year growth in the NR that you're referring to. Like, it's because we, we built Braze to service the enterprise, which I think was a big difference maker for us.

Great, thank you so much. And what do you think desktop leaders like Marketo and others miss on mobile? Because the growth is clear.

Yeah, you know what, the way I always explained it, and I'll go back to my days when I was even selling, we'd go into a customer and they would be using— and Marketo isn't a good example because they're B2B, so a lot of business B2B, they're using them. So I would say the right fit, the right question would be like, why do desktop leaders like ExactTarget? Because they're people that use them are targeting to customers. I think the way to look at it is we built our platform from the bottom up. You look at a Tesla and they built an electric car from the bottom up. The other electric car manufacturers, when they want to first compete with Tesla, they literally took the same body car and shoved a battery right into it and said, "Okay, we got electric too." That doesn't work. If you think about A Tesla, it's not just about the electric car, it's all the features and all the functionality that comes with it, the updates over the air. It's like from the bottom up, being mobile, being electric first is really important. I think for us, we took that same approach. We built it from the bottom up while everybody else kind of just like shoved mobile into it and said, and went into meetings with customers and said like, "Hey, like we also do mobile." And at the end of the day, that doesn't work. I think also what was important was I think the shift of the marketer and the buyer, they became a lot smarter, a lot more educated, a lot more data-driven. And I think that's true today. And they could read right through that. I think that's where I go back to best-in-class products really win because the buyers today are a lot more educated, a lot smarter than they were, I would say even 20 years ago, where it's just kind of like they would call their friend and be like, what are you using for this? And they just buy it and then move on to the next. I think now people really want to buy best in class, and I think that's why we won.

Interesting. And what was the first 10x feature for Braze, the one that really broke out?

Yeah, I think for us it was the segmentation of your customers. So I think it was the coolest thing ever when I could go into a demo and show you, here are all your potential, like in a demo environment, here are your customers that are using your app. I can segment by who used your app 10 times in the last 5 days in New York who have not made a purchase yet. And we could send them a message on their local time, in their language, at the time that we typically think that they'll engage with their phone. I know that wasn't one feature, but it was, it was like that whole thing that we could demonstrate. And that was like, whoa, you could actually do this. And could you do this for 100 million monthly active users. So I think the scalability that, to credit to John and Bill, my co-founders, that they were able to build, I think that was the, that was the item that I think took us to a whole new level.

Thank you. Um, and how about this one? What did you learn about beating a heavy hitter combo when Salesforce would pitch ExactTarget and other solutions to its existing base? They've gotten good at this.

Can you repeat that? Where was that?

The most recent one that came in. I'll read it once more. What did you learn about beating a heavy hitter combo when Salesforce would pitch ExactTarget and other solutions to its existing base? They've gotten good at this.

So you're saying like, how would we compete with Salesforce and those, and those folks? Is that kind of the question? I believe I'm understanding correctly.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think, I think it goes back to like, one, I think we're able to compete with them now because of the customer base we have, but also again, it goes back to what I mentioned before, where we built this from the bottom up. Right. So they have nothing on us when you talk about it like that. Right. And when you're coming in and saying like, look, we've been building this, we can scale and look at the, look at how we're scaling. We're mobile first. I think it's a lot bigger and easier sell for us, and that's kind of why we've been able to win those.

Thank you. Great, we still have some time here. How about, what is the future of SMS marketing? It's exploded the past few years. Is it a commodity, a standalone category, a mix? What do you think?

Look, obviously there's like really strong players out there that have done it as a standalone category. And I don't want to mention the names, but they're really growing and kicking ass, like they're amazing companies. I don't think it's a commodity, I think it's a real marketing channel. I think it can be standalone and it can be part of the mix. I think the way I think about mobile lifecycle marketing and so on is our lives are fragmented in terms of how we interact with brands we love. And fortunately and unfortunately, there's just so many ways to now be communicated by whether that's push, email, SMS, and so on. I think for brands, they're going to want to want— they're going to want it to be a mix, right? And they can choose based on your behavior how they want to be messaged. So if you told me today, I think in the long term, it's going to be part of the mix and not just be standalone companies.

And Braze has about doubled its new customer acquisition growth in the last couple of years. What's working to bring in these new customers?

I think, like, I haven't been in the day-to-day of the company in the last more than 2 years now. But I could say that from my experience being there in terms of how we're winning, I think one, culture, customer success. I think at this point, and product, best product wins. I think that's really what it is. I think if you go out to the market today and you ask about Braze, very rarely will you hear anything negative about our scalability, our product, and how we execute. And I think that goes back to culture. I think when I was there, we just focused so much on culture as a company. And I just always said like the culture we have internally is the kind of product that we will build and the kind of customers we will attract. And I think that's kind of why we're seeing kind of where Braze is today.

Great, thank you. A couple more here. 40% of Braze's revenue is global. What did you do to lean in here early, if anything?

Yeah, I think one, that's the beauty of mobile, right? It's a small world. Like we're not just when we launched, we weren't just catering to our domestic United States or even Canada. Naturally, we were attracting everybody because you could just download the software, integrate it, and go get off to the races. I think separately, one big hire we had who's our CRO now is Daniel Head. He was based in London, so naturally we had to open a London office once we hired him. And our London office is actually our second largest office after New York today. Not San Francisco, London. And I think we naturally just made a big push into there because we saw it was like, it was evergreen, it was like open. So I think because of that and because we dominated that so early when I was there, I think it's just compounded over time.

Totally. And another one here, lots of good ones. Notice that Appboy redirects to Braze. Any new plans for that domain? Surely worth more than $8.

Maybe we'll convert it into an NFT or something, but I think we're just kind of holding onto it. I think it has a lot of just emotional kind of value to it than the $8 at this point.

You mentioned Braze was built back in 2007 when the market had no mobile-first automation platform. Can you share what you're thinking about taking on next to stay ahead of current markets?

So the question is like Braze was built back in 2007 when the market had no mobile-first automation platform. Can you share what you're thinking about taking on next? Like meaning what would be the next market for now? Is that kind of the question if I'm understanding it? Right?

Yeah, I think that seems where it's going.

Yeah, look, in my mind I always think about what the next Braze is. And on one hand, maybe there isn't another Braze right now because the market's so massive. I think it's going to come down to scalability. I think it's going to come down to moving and innovating. So can Braze continue to innovate the way we've continued to innovate, which I think we can and we have. I don't have an answer to what that is. My eyes and ears are wide open right now to find what that next Braze is. And that's kind of why I want to invest and continue to invest into the next this category. I believe in the category. I think it's massive. And I don't think it's a winner's take all market. So I think there's going to be a lot of interesting ideas that founders are thinking about now, in terms of what the next play is in this category.

Yeah, I think it's a great note to be kind of nearing the end of the session and this event on to kind of look ahead. We do have two more here. I think we'll have just enough time. So what tips do you have for product leaders on how to build a platform beyond just a feature? In what ways was this piece of insight integrated to the journey of Braze?

I think when you're thinking about building a platform, you need to be thinking to build a platform. So it's not like one feature that someone will use once a week or once a month. It's something that people will use daily. And the power user is using it daily and they're monitoring it daily. Like, look at Calendly, right? Like Calendly is something that when you open it up, you're interacting interacting with it daily because you're sending out emails, you're sending out invites. I think for us at Braze, it was like naturally we became a platform that was being used daily by the marketer. Like they were natural, they were always onboarding new customers. They're always retaining new customers. They're always looking at the conversion rates of their campaigns. They're always iterating real time. So it's something that they were logging into daily. So I think for anyone building a new platform, you should really think about who the power user is. What does their stack look like today? What does their day-to-day look like? What are the KPIs that they're being tracked against by their manager or by the company? How do you kind of help 10x that with your platform? And can the items or the platform you're building be used in a way every day? Again, it has— I feel like it has to be used every day for it to be a platform and not a feature.

Power user, I like that. And last but not least, can you give some advice from the employee side of how to be a catalyst of growth for the company that you represent?

I think it's going back to being humble and I think being real to yourself. And I think growth comes from learnings. And don't be afraid to continue to take those risks and don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to say, I don't know. I think a lot of times a lot of people are afraid to kind of take that leap of faith, and you just need to do it. Just don't look back. I tell my kids, like, you— the way you learn to walk is you fall. The way you learn to run is you fall. So like, you need to keep running and fall and bounce back up. So I think if you can continue to learn from your mistakes, continue to make as many mistakes as you can. That's what I would say.

Thank you so much. That just about wraps this session and Sastre Belt. Thank you so much, Mark, for your insight.

Thank you. See you.

Bye, everyone. Thanks for joining.