Jack Altman, CEO Lattice: "From $5m to $100m: Founder Secrets to Scaling Multi-Product"

You hire great people, make sure they're happy, empowered, and successful, you're gonna have a good business. We basically built this bundle around modern people management, and it's all wrapped up in one so that all of these tools connect. I really believe that people-centric businesses are the future. Lattice has gone through like a crazy amount of growth. One of the big transitions is this trend towards the employee at the center as opposed to the company at the center. People strategy is a craft. The way Lattice would grow and support our customers would be through a community what a tremendous key to our success it's been. I do believe that everybody has a superpower of some sort. I think everybody has some area of true genius where they are truly world-class. People are capable of wildly outsized impacts on returns. The role of the leader is to help people find, hone, and express that. Please welcome to the stage Jack Altman, CEO at Lattice. Hello! Wow, what a hype video! That was awesome. Um, I'm really excited to be here. Uh, the talk I'm giving today is called, uh, From 5 to 100 Million: Founder Secrets of Scaling a Multi-Product Startup. Um, I'm really excited to talk about this because this is something I really deeply believe in and that I think has been kind of like an open secret behind a lot of great companies that I think is somewhat underdiscussed. And my goal today on some level is to convince you that many more companies should be multi-product than are, and that for the types of companies that being multi-product makes sense, maybe going earlier than you thought could be a good idea. I'm the founder of Lattice, so obviously this is, we're a multi-product company. We've built 4 product suites over our 8 years of existence. So I do have some sort of survivorship bias in this belief, but I do really believe that the ideas that I'm gonna share here today are applicable to the majority of companies today. So this is a visual that I think we're probably all somewhat familiar with. This is like a market landscape that somebody at an investment firm probably made. And this is what it looks like in some narrow segment of a relatively niche market. If you perhaps maybe zoom out to a slightly broader set of categories and you open up a couple more adjacencies of what the product does, you might get to a market map that looks like this. And they're probably missing a ton in here. You look at even like a YC batch. There are hundreds of great companies going through YC every 6 months. That's like 1% of all the companies that applied, and there's huge ecosystems outside of it. You zoom back 5 years or 8 years or 12 years, and the breadth of companies is just narrower. Now any startup that gets started in any reasonable category has many or dozens of competitors, and that's just the way it is. And so my belief is that multi-product in 2023 and going forward is one of the best strategies that you have to compete. It's a great dimension to compete against this backdrop. Workshop. Before I get into a little bit of the tactics of how to do it and what it looks like and some pitfalls, I want to just start with why this is happening. I think by understanding the mechanism of why we got to this place, that'll help you understand sort of how to approach it and what it means for you. So Jason talks about this all the time, but it's worth repeating. We are like so many years into cloud and yet here we are at hundreds of billions in annual cloud spend and We're still growing 6x over like 8 years at this kind of scale. That's unbelievable. And so the demand from companies to use cloud software is just going to naturally lead to a ton of supply. But there's more than just like the basic economics of it. There's a bunch of sort of micro reasons at the company level why things have changed. The first is that it's become much cheaper to build software. Like in the past, like in the far past, you had to like set up servers. But even like once we got past that, we didn't have nearly the ability for people to build really high-quality products extremely cheaply. You look at brand new startups with a couple smart founders, you can be in a dorm room and have a laptop and a couple subscriptions and you can, you can build something great. And that didn't used to be the case. So that's one. Another is that it's the sort of shoulders that we are all standing on when we build software now is unbelievable compared to what it's been in the past. There are incredible libraries, There are great integrations out of the box with other companies that you can pull into. There are just so many reasons why now the tooling and systems let you build better products. So now everybody is armed in a way where they can build better products cheaper, faster. Um, on top of that, the access to capital is much better. So, you know, there's obviously a real surge in 2021 of venture capital. It declined obviously recently, but generally speaking, the overall trend, if you look out over years or decades has been many more dollars going into the space. And so what you see is rather than just a few companies with real traction getting funded, is anytime there's a good idea, a ton of companies can raise capital, build early teams, and build these great products. And so the capital going in behind the companies has obviously changed. And then this is a super important final point, that startups are no longer fringe. You know, when I graduated from college, I guess like 12, 13 years ago, it was not really— even then, which was many years into tech, It was still not the case that everybody wanted to go into tech. Today, the big finance firms are competing with the big tech firms trying to lure talent, and it's super mainstream. And so it means now that lots and lots of smart people who used to work in other industries now work in tech. And so the supply of talent for companies just looks completely different, obviously. And so given that backdrop where it is cheaper, easier, faster to build high-quality products, where markets are more crowded than ever, it's become my view that I hold pretty dearly that multi-product companies is one of the best ways that you can compete given this sort of reality that we live in now. A quick instance that I'm most familiar with, obviously, is Lattice, where we've built many products over, over the years. We started in OKRs and performance, but over time we expanded out to a bunch of other products. And I think the thing that I learned doing this with Lattice is that you don't— the right way to do it isn't just building sort of random products that you think your buyer might want to build, but instead thinking about the user journey and what does this sort of human who's using your products, what else exists chronologically in their day? What else do they need? And sort of take them through a journey. So, you know, as an example for Lattice, it might be you onboard at the company, you need to get set up with your goals, you need to have one-on-ones with your manager, you're going to go through a quarter, you're going to get feedback, you're going to share back how you're feeling, and you sort of think in those terms. And this applies to basically every software category, and that can kind of guide your roadmap and lead to a much more holistic solution for customers. I sort of share this timeline of when we built our products for a couple reasons. The first is you'll see that we've done it consistently, but there's like, you know, years between each of these products. It doesn't come quickly. It takes time to build these things and it's really hard work. Building a multi-product startup is definitely extremely challenging. Just to give you like a quick sort of tangible story that applies to at least Lattice's early days, we launched with OKRs. That was not really where we got footing. We got We got a foothold with performance management in 2016, but then in 2018, we built our first sort of second product. And the shape of the way that went is we were at $2 million ARR and we had 7 engineers and we put 5 of them on this engagement product for like 9 months. And so that was like painful. That year felt like chewing glass. We, you know, we were defunding the effort on the current product. We had all of these, the majority of our resources going to this thing that wasn't yet in market. And that was a difficult period to go through. And so it's not to say that this stuff is without cost. Like breadth and product depth absolutely are in some amount of tension. But I'll talk about the ways that you can resolve them. But what we found time and time again is that when we got through the tunnel of building these second products and the challenge of that on the other side, we were rewarded with these huge benefits. A quick disclaimer before I talk about those benefits is that I'm definitely not advocating for infinite breadth. There's judgment call and every company is different. There are real trade-offs to these things. And when you go too wide too quickly, you do trade off the ability to serve customers in certain ways. But what I'm advocating for is that most companies should be pushing this thinking further than they are. So just to walk out like the quick value of what was so helpful about being multi-product and what we've experienced at every juncture. First, just think about the demand side, like what's in it for the customer? That slide I showed you at the beginning of the market landscape, that's what the customer is facing too. It's dizzying when you're looking at that and you're trying to figure out, geez, I need to do 19 things and they each have 14 vendors, like what's going on here? And so it's really helpful to the vendor if you're like, I can take care of multiple things for you in one solution. So you're not sitting on tons and tons of software and vendor relationships. I remember at Lattice, we looked at some point a couple of years ago and we had like 370 vendors or something like that. And it's just like a lot for the company to manage. You're also going to get a deeper data connection between the products. So to the extent that the products tied together in a relevant way, it'll be easier inside one solution than if you're sort of stapling across companies. The cost of ownership tends to be cheaper. I'll talk about that more in a bit. But generally speaking, when you buy from a multi-product company, you'll get cheaper pricing overall, even though you're paying that company more than you would pay for like, you know, an individual SKU. And then it's just way less taxing to employees. The people have to roll it out, the people have to use it, another login in Okta. It just makes things easier. And then on the supply side, you actually get— it turns out you do get a lot of benefits too. It's not just trade-offs. Your go-to-market gets unbelievably more efficient. The cost of selling a net new customer is unbelievably higher than the cost of selling an existing customer or just renewing a company with sort of a new product. You do get some product advantages through data integrations getting much stronger. You get shared UX patterns, so usage gets easier. You might have elements that you can copy over, so it's faster to build the next product. And then you get much stronger customer relationships. You just get a deeper connection point. You're more embedded in their workflows. You have more reasons for them to stay with you, to buy more from you, and so the relationship does grow. So the way that we saw things happen in the funnel was surprising to us each time because the impact of the second product was not always what we expected. But let me walk out for you what the advantages are because a lot of people I think think, "Oh, it's just gonna give me higher pricing and that's the value," but it turns out that that's often or maybe even mostly not it. So one is you can think about your growth curve inflecting at the top of the funnel with more leads. You're gonna have more reasons to talk to customers. You're gonna have more touchpoints with people. You're gonna have an innovation story to tell. People who maybe weren't interested in your first product but are interested in your second product are gonna come to you. So you're gonna end up getting more leads. You're gonna end up with better conversion rates. Once people are in your funnel, they're gonna have more reasons to buy. It's gonna seem cheaper to them. You might hit people who weren't as desperately needed your first product, but need your second one. So you're gonna get a lift to conversion. You're gonna get a higher price point per customer, which is the one that everybody expects, but is not always what ends up happening. But you do, generally speaking, get the ability to add pricing. And then you're gonna get better retention. Some amount of customers both are going to want to stay with you longer because you've got more touchpoints in their system and in their workflows. Interestingly, for example, when we launched our engagement product in 2018, we had a humongous lift. We almost doubled our quarterly bookings rate overnight when we launched it. But then when you pulled it open, like 20% of the lift was explained by the higher pricing. Almost all of it was explained by the better conversion rate and more leads. And so in that case, you know, that's what happened. We've had other products where the balance is different, but just know that when you build these products, Every part of your funnel stands a chance to improve and it all compounds. So the logistics, hopefully that was a good case for what the value can be. Now talking about some of the logistics. I'm not going to talk about the building of the products because it's almost too nuanced per company. It's out of scope for a talk like this. It's a whole thing. But I did just have to throw up for fun, this is month 1 of Lattice when we were building our first product. Products, and there's so much of the craft there. And all of the go-to-market stuff that I'm about to talk about, that only exists on the back of a quality product that real customers need. It is in many ways back to day zero, back to the product-market fit moment of starting a company. And so I'm glossing over that part, but in many senses, that's the most important bit. So on the taking it to market, obviously every company is going to be unique. Every product is going to be unique. Every competitive landscape is going to be unique. But let me just share a few of the things that are going to be worth thinking about when you, when you build multiple products. So the first is on go-to-market teams, on your new business teams. Some of the things you're going to want to think about are what are the ways that you're going to set ARR goals and other targets. There are many cases in which setting ambitious goals will help you. There are going to be times when actually attaching ARR goals is not going to be helpful to you and you really just want to be getting distribution. But this is something that you really want to think about and like, what are those incentives? Second is gonna be who's gonna do the selling. Do you wanna have an overlay team that only sells this new product, or are you gonna try to enable your entire, entire sales force? And this question exists whether you have 2 sales reps or 12 or 50. They're just fundamentally different things, and it has to do with the complexity. How able are you to train? Is it the exact same buyer? But that's a really important thing to think about. Are you gonna have net new sellers? Are you gonna have your current sort of account management team do the selling? Those questions really matter. One thing to note, and I've seen this at Lattice, I've seen this at a lot of other companies, is surprisingly, you would think, generally speaking, you would expect to see more velocity on cross-sell because you already have the customer relationship. What tons of companies find is it actually comes more easily on the net new side than on the cross-sell side for various reasons. And this won't be true for every product, but just knowing that you're going to get surprised. And your intuitions won't always be exactly right. So not always overplanning, but getting in market quickly and then going back to that zero-to-one mindset is really important. The second logistical set of questions is around making your customers successful. If there's one point that I think is important to remember here, it's the difference in maturity curves of your different products. So you've got your first product, which is going to be up some maturity curve. It's going to be— battle-tested, it'll be hardened in the wild, you're gonna have customers who've used the thing, you're gonna have integrated real product feedback, and you're gonna know how to talk about it, how to sell it, how to talk about competitors, and it's gonna have some amount of maturity. And you got this new thing that has zero maturity and it's a day one product. So how do you do that? Generally what we've found is you have to go back to the reasons why a startup can compete with a big company. And a startup can compete with a big company usually on the basis of individuals who are making up for the lack of all of that institutional experience with great care, attention to detail, white glove service. And when you do that and you can segment that out on the post-sale side, you can get incredible results. But you have to remember that these maturity curves are just fundamentally different for your current products and your new ones. On the marketing side, the biggest learning we've had is that it's hard to evolve your brand and your, your story to customers. It took us a long time after launching new products to get customers to know that we had those new products. We thought we were beating the drum on it, but we learned that even years after 2018, when we had launched our second product, people still just thought we had a performance management product. So you really have to find ways to transform your story, to do product marketing, to make sure your customers know that, to enable your sales force. Because if you've gotten to like a mini brand or a full brand, your customers are going to think of you as that first thing. The fourth point is existing customers and distribution. It is just, it is, this is like the centrality of the advantage. It's that cross-selling and bundling is much more effective to the company. It is so much cheaper to do, it drives so much better retention, and so you want that to be happening. But back to the maturity curve point, it is easier for everybody in your org to not do the new thing. They know how to do the old, the old product. Your customers know it. They know how to talk about it. It's easier to sell. They're going to get more commissions. So you have to find ways to design incentives so that individuals want to make that happen. And you can do that not just through financial incentives. You can talk about it. You can make it a company mission. But certainly designing it that way helps too. So those are the 4 logistic things. I realize those are more prompts than they are answers, but every situation is unique and It just takes a lot of thought, experimentation, and effort. Okay, the last thing I want to talk about is some of the pitfalls that I think you can get into as you go into multi-product companies. Obviously, a startup at all is full of the pitfalls. There's a million things that can go wrong. Finding the happy path is very challenging. But when you're in multi-product, you definitely do compound sort of the surface area on which things can get weird. So I want to talk about a few of those. The first is clarity of ownership, which probably we all are focused on that concept no matter what. What I've found is that when it comes to building and then taking to market new products, having unbelievably clear ownership is really essential, or everything gets tripped up over everything. So when you build, one of the things that I think you end up needing to do is really cordon off, for example, the resources on the engineering product side and make clear who owns it. Because there's going to be an existing draw for engineering and product resources on your current products. You're going to have, hopefully, lots of customers by the time you're on your second product who are banging down the door saying, I need this thing tomorrow. I want this for my renewal. A salesperson is going to be like, hey, we can beat our competitor if we build this thing. But you're trying to build this new product. And so having this clear ownership structure where you figure out upfront who's doing what, and then you really empower those groups and you protect them is like the only way that you can make it happen because the natural pull will go against that. The second is preparing for post-sales on the new product. And if you're not intentional here, things can get really challenging. And it's all to do with that maturity curve. And so what you need to remember is you're going to launch this thing. And all of a sudden, your customer base is going to pull you really hard to want to swoosh all those resources back to the first product, because people have been waiting, the roadmap got backed up. But you launched a product that is just nascent. So you have to figure out a way to keep investing in that product. You have to keep those lines clear somehow while getting back to your current product. So there's a couple things here, but the key is that you're going to be tempted to defund the product after you've gone to market. And it's actually the better that new product's doing, the more important it is to not defund that product and keep leaning into that investment, keep having the go-to-market teams wanting to incentivize it and sort of don't let off the gas because we all know from even launching one product that nothing gets off the ground that quickly. And so you gotta, you gotta keep sort of the separation here once you've launched. A third sort of pitfall I think a lot of companies can get into is around the question of build versus buy. Let's say, you know, this next product category category you want to get into, you fundamentally have two choices. You can build it yourself in-house, or you can buy another company. I'll reveal my bias, which is I think that the vast majority of the time, building is better than buying. I think buying companies, particularly when you're small, comes with a huge amount of overhead that is hard to foresee. You have to integrate the team, the culture, the product. You're not going to have the integrations. It's generally speaking going to be more expensive than if you just build it in-house. It's going to be a huge distraction to your leadership team relative to building it in-house. You might have different tech stacks. And so it just, it's, it's not the optimal path most of the time. So I'm a huge believer that when you can, until, you know, companies are big and there's real leaders that you're considering, and I think the early stage purchases of products are often challenging. There are a couple caveats. Obviously acquisitions do make sense and there are situations where they can transform companies. One is when you're buying a true winner or a true number 2 in a category that you know will be like just too hard to compete into, that's strategically critical, and you've got enough scale to pull that off. I think that's, that's one. A second, which happens at a smaller scale, is there are instances where a different company or team has done a long complicated build that will actually take you a very long time and you won't have the product expertise to do, and so you're acquiring like years' worth of R&D and a team that really knows how to build it. There are instances where that has worked really well. And then the last is if you have to. And when you have to is when the market is moving so quickly that you just need to get on the map and it's worth it to go faster even if it's a little bit messier because otherwise things are going to get away from you. And so buying today and then spending the next 12 months integrating can in some of those instances be preferable to building for 12 months and not coming out for 12 months. But generally speaking, I think buying is a last resort situation rather than building yourself. But, you know, that's a bias. The fourth pitfall that I've experienced is you really need to simplify everything. Everything wants to get complicated once you're multi-product. The way that you're building product gets more complicated, the way you're talking about go-to-market, the way you're thinking about commissions. All of it just gets complicated. And the world is a complicated place. You have to have some of that. But wherever you can, look for ways to make it simpler, make the goals clearer, make the plans simpler, streamline the people on the project. It always makes things easier because there's so much natural trend towards complexity. And then the last I talked about a little bit, the company resourcing thing. More than any other sort of project I've ever worked on, at least, and that, you know, by projects I mean a new product, but also things like going international, changing segments, trying to expand into a new industry, standing up a new function. More than any of those, a new product, both the build and the launch, can suck company resources at a rate that you didn't expect. And so the, the only antidote that I know for this is to go in with some clarity of this is not that important. I'm only willing to invest 10% of company resources on it. Maybe the number's 40%. Maybe it's a bet the company thing and you're like, I'm willing to invest 70% for a year, you know? But if you don't have that clarity as you go into it, you can get trapped extremely quickly. And so having that up front, I think, is really important. OK, so just to summarize the key takeaways I shared. The first is that we are in an extremely and increasingly noisy SaaS market, which is natural. And the market is getting bigger and bigger each year. And so it is just sort of the way of the world. Um, but multi-product, given that context where building products is cheaper than ever, taking products to market is sort of more expensive than ever. Multi-product, I believe, is one of the most powerful forms of differentiation that's available to many companies. Number 2 is that when this is done well, it actually is better for everyone. It is like a truly better experience for customers. In many cases, it's a truly better, uh, go-to-market machine for companies. In better cases, in the results, should be better software. And so this is the path, I believe, that leads to better solutions for customers over time. And then the last point, which I alluded to many times throughout the talk, is it's really hard. That's, that's the catch of this whole thing, is it is super hard. And so getting advice from people who have done it before, who can help you see around some of the corners, hiring people onto your team who have worked in a multi-product context, the more advice you can— and then just sort of mentally preparing for a more challenging build. But the rewards on the other side are very high. So that's my talk. Thank you. And I think we have time for Q&A if anybody's got any. So I think there's mics up there in case anybody wants to ask anything. Hey, can you just— thank you for the pitch, really exciting. Using your product actually back when you launched the OKRs, we left, but then back when you launched the engagement, all this stuff. A quick question, uh, how can you clarify how is your product team is built? Like, this is different products for each of the team? Like, just a bit about— totally, yeah, that's great. So the question was about how do we set up the product teams. This is a whole great topic. And there's basically two choices on some level. You can either stick with a functional product org where you have product, engineering, design each rolling up functionally, or you can do a GM structure where you put one person basically at the helm of a mini eng/product/design unit. We've done both. Basically, what we've ended up doing is for our smaller builds, we've kept the functional structure. But then for the big builds, which we're like at— the current big build we're doing, we've had a GM for it. And the advantage of it is then you have one person who's got the whole thing in their mind and can cordon off all the resources in the company. So generally speaking, what I would say is the higher percentage of your resources you're going to give to the new product, the more likely a GM structure makes sense. But a lot of it is also like the personalities in play and, you know, who you have specifically. But those are the two choices, is functional or GM. And we've gone GM when it's bigger. That's basically how we've done it. Question: How do you go about deciding if something is a new feature or if it's a new product? Because as a builder, you just want to give more and more away for free, right? But we're also supposed to make money, they told me. 100%. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the question here is like, when is a feature a product and when should you just inject value into the software? And the truth is, it's a great question because you need to, right? If Lattice wasn't shipping more value and more feature improvements to our performance review product each year, our customers would be like, what are you doing? And we can't just charge more for that for no good reason. So it depends on the area. It's easy if you're in an existing area because you can look at what are the line items that your customers are used to purchasing. So in our case, performance management was one line item. Engagement surveys was another line item. Compensation management was one. And so you can actually take a sort of, what's the customer's budget look like, and just ask them, what are the tools you pay for? And if they pay for something else, you can likely ascribe value to it. But then, yeah, sometimes on your own product, on your central product, if you're just adding better roles and permissions, like a cool new thing, but really inside, it's all a judgment call, but you do have to do both. But yeah, sort of it's like, customers, what do you pay for? Like, tell me the list of things you pay for. They're buying a point solution, that's a good— That's a good answer that you could charge for yourself. It's hard though. For the engagement product, who is the defining person in your company that really led the charge for that product? Like, is it sales based off losing to a competitor that you kept seeing, or was it you just personally talking to maybe a customer advisory board or CPOs? I'd love to know those dynamics. Yeah, it was. Well, we were small. It was me and my co-founder. My co-founder was our CTO and ran product design. And so he and I kind of figured this out together. And the way we figured it out was, you know, in the early days, hopefully you're spending a huge amount of time with your customers. And we were just at dinners with our customers all the time and talking to them. And they were just raving about engagement surveys and how important it was to them. And we just heard it so often. And you'd say, like, what's your tech stack? And it would be, you know, an HRIS, a performance tool, an engagement tool, an ATS. Like, every time it was It was always in the stack. And we pulled it open, we realized it wasn't that hard to build, and it's the same buyer, and we went for it. Yeah. Cool. And what was like the title of that? Was it like CPO or was it head of people? Because like that role was really forming during the time when you were building that. I mean, co-founder CTO, but you know, found, you know, when it's co-founder, the title— Oh, sorry, I meant of the customer. Oh, head of HR. It depends on the size of the company, but it's CPO at a big company, maybe VP of HR, director, but head of HR. Yes. Which is totally what I believe, by the way, is talk to that— the top-level exec owns the budget most fully. So yeah. Hi. Are there any product areas where Lattice is currently looking to develop next? And what are the hot things in talent management, the next upcoming things? Yeah, it's a great question. We have one big launch that's coming in 2 weeks, so we'll share more. At our, at our conference shortly. That's like the thing we've been— it's the 5th product suite that we've been working on within talent management. A lot of what we're doing at this point is to do with our performance and talent review— performance and talent reviews, where we're basically increasing the functionality for our bigger customers. And now we're at the point where the product's really mature. So a lot of what we're doing is handling more customizations. We're doing better roles and permissions. We're handling calibrations. So that's a lot of what's going on there. I, my, you know, my every bone in my body wants to talk about AI here at some point, but we're not building that yet. But that'll come at some point too. I think there are ways it can be impactful. But yeah, so, but we'll have a lot more to share very soon. When you, when you were talking with your board about the R&D spend for a new product, did you carve that off to the side or did you lump it in with your overall R&D spend and try to manage that? That's a fantastic question. We do both. So today even we look at what would our run rate spend be without new product investments, and then we also have of course the add-on. So we understand both, these aren't the numbers, but end product design percentage as spend as a percent of revenue is 45%, but it's actually 33% if you take off new product investments or whatever. So we look at both. Awesome, thank you very much. Yeah. Hi, what recommendations do you have to train the salespeople? And also, how do you do to maintain their focus on the actual product? Yeah, it depends. Unfortunately, the answer is it depends on how complex is the new product. So if it's a simple new product, you can enable the new sales team very easily. If it's a complex new product, you can't. It depends on what the pricing structure and comparison is. So you think through a sales rep's perspective, or you listen on Gong or something, and you're like, where are they focusing? And their incentives will show you. Well, they're just talking about the old product because it's easy, or actually they're spending all their time on this new thing because it's what's helping them close sales. So there's no perfect answer, unfortunately. It is really case dependent and requires like a first— we've done both where you enable the current team, where you enable a new one. So I wish I had a here's the answer every time, but it just depends. Okay. Sorry, it's such an unsatisfying answer. Okay. Yeah. Hi. We're doing exactly the same thing now for the last 6 months, and we have 2 new products, and one is higher market and one potentially is lower market for like many people, and it's a lot cheaper. And what do you do if the buyer's not the same, or like the offering is for like— So do you have different products for both different segments and different buyers? Yeah, the buyers may be different. That'll just be challenging. It's not, it's not like it's not doable, but it's just more layers of complexity. So you're going to need to do different marketing and different go-to-market motions because of the different buyer. You're going to need a different product on board when it's like more self-serve versus if it's like implemented. Hopefully at some point you'll have a vision where you can connect them somehow. And it doesn't have to fully connect, but you'll want some bridge between the things. There are examples of companies that run just different products. That are selling to wholly different buyers, and they're basically, you know, you could imagine an extreme version of this where like Lattice launched a marketing cloud just because we felt like it, and then we just tried to start marketing that, and it was to a different buyer, it was a whole different thing. It's not like it's impossible, it's just you get less of the valuable synergies. So I guess I would just, I would encourage you to try to think of where are the overlaps that you can get value from, and then is there some path to increasing that overlap over time? Time. It's not undoable, but it's just more dimensions of difference. Okay, thanks. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm, I'm Preeti with Freshworks, big customer, big fan. Thank you. Uh, question for you, uh, you know, what is your vision for the next year to 3 years? Uh, uh, because you have launched a lot of products which we're using. And second question is, as you grew it from 0 to 100 million, when did you focus on growth, and when do you return to profitability? Yeah, totally. Thanks for being— Freshworks is awesome. To me, at some point we realized we had two choices. We could either take our narrow suite of products and performance and try to just go all the way to the enterprise, serve McDonald's, try to go serve the biggest companies that we can, and that could have been one approach. Or we could do what we've done, which is stay really focused in the mid-market. So not for tiny companies, not for the massive enterprise. Basically build a whole suite. So over some period of time, the goal for us has to be to keep building out that product suite to do as many things as possible for the buyer as we can. So given, given sort of that strategy, that's where we're going, is just continuing to build out for the current customer base rather than expanding our market. Yeah. And what was the second part of the question? 0 to 100, when do you focus on growth versus profitability? Yeah, I mean, it also depends on what the year was. right? Like, you know, in 2021 versus in 2023, the mindset's different because the cost of capital is different. But it's a balance, you know, and we're still investing in growth. But now we're at a stage, I think, as you round, you know, 100, you want to be— you do want to be charting your own path to profitability. Like, you don't want to keep raising rounds, right? So I think like it's a gradual change. Yeah. Hi, thank you. My question is, can you elaborate Could you speak a little bit more about how did you rationalize, especially at the early days, focus versus diversifying? In other words, have you thought about what could happen if you have invested all your time, effort, and resources in the OKR products? Could be 10x, 20x better and growing faster or not? It's a great question. One of— I ultimately, after a lot of reflection, and obviously the reflection was based on closeness to customers and being steeped in the market, I basically concluded we had no choice but to go multi-product. One of my board members said something really wise to me, which is like, as a SaaS company, if you don't have some way to see yourself at $100 million of ARR, still hopefully growing 50%, You just can't build a big company. So even in the early days, you need to be planting seeds where you can see a path where one day at 100 of ARR, you're like, we can add 50. And I was like, there's just no way in the current setup of the product category, given how competitive it is, the total share of wallet, what segment we seem to be able to plan. And so I was like, the current path just can't— it just isn't going to be possible. It won't be big enough, and we won't be able to get a big enough share of that pie. Then that led to this conclusion of we either really have to go upmarket or we're going to have to go wide. Then it became clear to me to go wide. That was how. But it was about thinking about that future state where I was like, "This isn't big enough and there's not enough differentiation with that crazy market map." When we started, we had 12 companies doing the same thing. We thought we were doing it better, but every single sale was a knife fight. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Thank you. Hi, thank you for the session. So my question is, how do you build like a multi-product at the same time that are all demanded pre-product market fit with a small tech team? Just generally? Yeah, I mean, to figure out like building MVPs and, and that are all in different areas. Yep, totally. It's basically— I've found good luck with hiring founders to build some of those products who have that mentality. But you can often do it within the existing team in a functional setup. But you do really have to separate those resources because the demand from the rest of your company to do things is going to be so high that you have to give somebody the freedom to spend all of their time on the thing, or some set of people to spend all their time on the thing. But it's kind of the same as building your first product. It's just you've got to figure out how to carve that out inside a company. There's a great book called Zone to Win, which was very helpful for me to figuring out team design. So I think that could be a good read. Yeah. Thank you. So each team has to focus on the different products, or one where just like the same team works on and just span? I mean, in my experience, it's much better. Yeah. We've tried the other way. It's just, it's too disconcerting for everybody. OK. Thank you. Jack, since you're in people's performance space, I just wanted to know, and I don't have skill testing SaaS, what do you think is the future of skill testing? It's a great, I think that skill testing is extremely popular right now in a positive way. I think there are basically two ways to think about performance measurement and growth. You can think about inputs and outputs. I think skill testing, skill development. I think that's a really healthy thing for companies to be thinking about. It's very input-oriented rather than just like testing people's metrics. So you're seeing skilling as like a growing concept for HR teams. My hunch is it'll just keep growing. Like the popularity seems to be increasing right now. You know, it's a different philosophy. It also takes like, it takes teams and effort and it takes infrastructure inside the company to take it seriously. So it tends to skew for bigger companies where it exists. Like, I don't think skilling software works in a 100-person company, but it does work in a 5,000-person company. But it's a real thing, and I think it'll stay. Yeah. Thanks. Hi. Oh, shit. So as you launch new product lines, what should be the relationship between the messaging of your entire company versus the specific product lines you you launch, like should you change that entire messaging and/or just focus on the micro messaging specific to each product line per marketing channel? Yeah, good question. Hopefully you can just evolve the messaging. So hopefully you're able to tell a story that is the same mission, the same end result, but it's now served better because you have a more complete solution to it. There are cases where what you're doing in the new product for various reasons has to be so different or so disconnected that you do end up needing to like wholesale update what you stand for in the world. But ideally, you're able to talk us about a story where it was this thing, and now it's just a bigger version of that same thing. So hopefully you're able to stay in the same essence, but in a way that just expands the story. It's much easier. Um, but sometimes you do just have some products so different you have to like wholesale change. We haven't done that before, but, uh, yeah. Hello. Hey, Jack. Hi. Like FreshBooks, we are Lattice power users and huge fans. Thank you. First of all, thank you for what you've built. But my question for you is, when there's competing priorities in terms of either doubling down on an existing product versus launching a new product, what framework do you use and what framework does your leadership team use to determine where to allocate the resources? Yeah, this is like the hardest question. I think this is one of those questions where you do a lot of math and you try to get all your best inputs and you try to think about the new market. You look at your current growth rate, what can you sustain? You then try to think about how big is the new market going to be? You look at the competitive landscape, you get all of these inputs, and then I actually think this is one of those areas where at the end of it, the founder using gut feel is probably the best number. You know, like, I think it is too hard to, like, make an equation or have a perfect framework. I think you need to get all the inputs and then hopefully through directional intuition, you know, whether the number should be 20% or 60%. Awesome. Super helpful. Thank you, Jack. Hi. Hi. How's it going? Great. I'm the CEO of a company called SamSales. And so this is a question for all the salespeople out there. We try to teach all about show me, you know me, and quality over quantity. So I totally agree with you, right? Go after your top stakeholder. How does a salesperson get your attention? How do they, how do they get your attention over email, over LinkedIn? How do they stand out from all the noise? Me in particular? You in particular? Oh, I'm the worst buyer of software of all time. Um, I use very little. I, but I would say for me, probably like a warm intro. That's probably the best way because It's just, you know, any company that has a certain amount of funding, you just get on all the lists and it's just too overwhelming. So I don't know how to tease through it. There have been cases where cold email has been so ridiculously good. Yeah. But it's like once a year or something. And I usually just compliment the rep and ask if they want to join Lattice. That's perfect. Yeah. What if somebody sends you an email that has a subject line that references Princeton and maybe some common connection you have, even if they can't use that as a warm intro, or you list giving them an open. I think that's good. I think all that stuff is good. I just, for me personally, there's just, there's too much of the noise. And so I think someone's gonna have a better time going to one of the like departmental execs. I think when I was smaller and I knew what soft— but like I don't even know what software we use a lot of the time 'cause there's just too much noise, right? Like it gets to a certain size where it just gets to be too much noise. That's how I operate. I know there are CEOs out there who operate differently, where they know the products, they know the implementations. So I think you can go after CEOs. I'm just like, I gotta find sanity somewhere in my life, and I'm just not gonna buy software. So that's the honest truth. Thank you. Hi. The technology disruption happened in the tactical HR space 20 years ago. It's now happening in the strategic HR space. How do you How do you see that playing out over the next couple of years? And how is Lattice responding to that? Yeah, you're 100% right. So that basically we went, you know, 20 years ago we were talking about as we went to like cloud, you know, we just like took it from PeopleSoft to Workday and we had SuccessFactors, you know, like we brought it to modern usable technology. The thing that happened now, I mean, you know, kind of like I was mentioning at the beginning is you do just get better software as the years go on because of, you know, it's cheaper, better, all those things. But a lot of what happened actually is due to this secular trend where the like employment relationship, the balance of power really shifted from companies to employees for a whole bunch of reasons. And I think that's the underlying trend that led to updated people processes and companies responding with performance management being about growth and development rather than just evaluating and about compensation needing to be like up to date and thoughtful and engagement surveys being a thing you should do at all because you should care what your employees think. So I think even though 2023, this dynamic is different than 2021, the secular trend is so obvious. This is like definitely the future. Like I think going forward, HR is like strategic, not back office. And because of that, do you see industry consolidation because certain tech HR companies don't have that strategic HR? Yeah, I do see consolidation also just because the trend is you get a certain number of years into any trend and what happens is is first come the point solutions and then comes the consolidation. So we had cloud, that leads to a bunch of point solutions, then you get consolidation. Now in this HR boom, you had a dynamic where a lot of point solutions were able to come up. We all started building wide, it'll just keep going. Until there's a new thrust of change, consolidation will be the fundamental dynamic. There'll still be point solutions, but it'll more trend that way now, I think. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I see we're at time. We need to bounce a bit. I think we just ran out of time, but okay, last question. How do you think about pricing when you have different products? Do you bundle them together, or is it like an entry point to the funnel, every product, and then you expand from there? Yeah, well, there's different entry points, but generally the overall mindset I have is be slightly cheaper than what the leading combo of products would be in the market. So if you have 3 products, And those, you know, if you were $10 each out in the market, like generally speaking, I would try to land at a place of if we offer all 3, it should be $22, not $30. So we can still get a lot of those benefits, but a customer has lower cost of ownership. And then in terms of like what's the on-ramp, which things are your hooks, do you have to buy the whole thing at once? That all depends. But yeah, generally I try to be a little cheaper than the premium set of independents. Yeah. All right. Thanks everyone.