Live from SaaStr Europa 2023: Cantina Stage - Tuesday

Good morning, SaaStr!

Good morning!

Thanks for joining us today. I'm Jeff Swenk, VP of Vender. At Vender, we connect buyers with trusted SaaS products to provide the best experience for both buyers and sellers.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Katie Oates, SaaS consultant at Vendor, and I help our customers find the right software and purchase it at the right price. Here at Vendor, our north star is data. We've processed over $3 billion in SaaS spend across more than 20,000 transactions. And because we process such a large percentage of the world's software spend, we have a significant view into the SaaS market and how software is bought and sold. Today, we're gonna explore some of the insights gathered from our quarterly SaaS trends report and our predictions for the future. We'll dive into the top purchase products and categories and the trends that we're seeing for new purchases. In Q1, our customers purchased over 1,000 different SaaS products. And as you can see, CRM tools are the clear leader with the most deals. Why is this? Well, they're sticky. You don't wake up one day and decide to cancel your CRM. Software that supports critical infrastructure will continue to be purchased and renewed year over year. And businesses are spending the big money on SaaS tools they believe are mission critical. The top products purchased, including renewals, fell into 3 mission-critical categories: sales and revenue, including those CRM tools, cybersecurity, and communication and collaboration. We're also seeing a trend in new software investments. Many net new purchases are for data security, compliance, risk management, and AI-powered tools. So what's driving these purchasing trends? Costs have risen for cyberattacks 80% since 2021, and the frequency of those attacks continues to rise. This has exposed an urgent need for improved cybersecurity measures so companies can mitigate risks and protect themselves against evolving threats. Additionally, business has spent over $9 billion on GDPR since its implementation, globally. As the average cost of data breaches rise, spending money on data security and compliance software becomes a necessary spend for companies to stay in business. And the last trend we're seeing comes at no surprise.

Comp—

oh, sorry. Companies are recognizing the need to incorporate AI into their operations to gain efficiencies. AI tools made up over 40% of new purchases in Q1. And those who are able to incorporate AI into their products are seeing it pay off big time. So Jeff, what do these trends tell us and what can we expect for the rest of the year?

So in 2023, we predicted this would be the year of the price hike, and here we are. Um, contract values are up Nearly 30% from 2 years ago, representing massive growth in company SaaS spend, which is already a top 5 line item. 54% of SaaS companies are gonna raise their price this year. The obvious contributing factors are the economic climate and inflation as companies are facing higher expenses for salaries, benefits, and operational costs. But what are the other factors that are increasing software prices and how are SaaS companies handling this internally? Well, for one, funding has been disrupted. This year, global funding saw a 53% decline. This has put immense pressure on companies to extend their runway. As a result, we're seeing SaaS companies develop new pricing strategies, increasing pricing for legacy customers, stricter auto-renew policies, striving for multi-year deals and baking in year-over-year increases. But disrupted funding isn't the only reason prices have gone up. There's a demand right now for sophisticated and innovative products to keep up with customer needs. And higher development costs obviously warrant higher software prices. So SaaS companies now are starting to realize we may have overspent a little bit in areas like sales and marketing when we could have instead spent in R&D to keep up with the market. But it's not as easy as just moving dollars from one category to another. Budgets are getting bigger, and sales has to support those budgets.

Increased pricing is causing buyers to be more critical of their tech stack and more mindful of what they buy. All SaaS spend is now under a microscope, as buyers are forced to take a much closer look at their SaaS spend to cut costs and be more efficient. Companies are starting to label which software is mission-critical. This is what companies absolutely can't cut because they're generating high ROI and efficiencies from it. You wanna be, we all wanna be, in a company's mission-critical SaaS bucket. When CFOs are looking to cut and consolidate, They're going to take a hard look at the top 10 line items that are not in the critical bucket. Any software that is not in this bucket is unfortunately on the chopping block. Higher ACV non-critical SaaS is most likely gonna be the first to go. Companies are also figuring out how they can consolidate to reduce their SaaS sprawl. We're seeing customers prefer all-in-one solutions over best-of-breed tools. This is to maximize dollar value and limit the amount of contracts that they have to renew. They're going with tools that are great at several things and not necessarily the best at one. We're ultimately seeing them work with fewer vendors, reducing their tech stack.

All right, so how we buy and sell software is changing right before our eyes. As the SaaS landscape continues to grow, It's becoming easier actually to find the best products, evaluate and implement them, so the relationship matters a little less. We believe the most successful companies will aim to drive growth by investing more in R&D, engineering, AI, strategic integrations, and becoming more than just a, a point solution. So introducing you to your new decision maker, most software purchases now need CFO approval. Deals are not won until you get buy-in at this level. And we're seeing this across the board, even with our own customers today, that a business case is likely needed showing how quickly the solution can drive ROI and efficiencies. And sales orgs who can get the CFO looped in early at that evaluation stage have a much higher close rate and are closing deals a lot faster. So the next era, we predict will be, sorry, we predict the next era of buying and selling revolves around data transparency. So buyers won't just make software purchase decisions based on who they talk to first or who had the best demo. Pricing and sentiment data is gonna be readily available. To customers so they can easily compare products, competitive bids will become the new norm. The sellers that thrive in this era are going to be the ones that lean into this type of transparency. So with readily available data, it'll be easier for buyers to find the best products and harder to hide deficiencies. Is your product sticky? Is it critical to run my business? Does it allow me to hire less? Does it allow me to consolidate? These are all the questions that your decision makers are asking, and can you prove it before they buy? If you're interested in seeing our full SaaS trends report and just wanna chat more with me and Katie, we're happy to share more data. We do have crepes, so that's good if you're hungry. Stop by booth 302, and we'd love to continue the convo with you there. Thank you.

Please welcome Vanta CEO Cristina Cassiapo and Vanta's GM of EMEA, Andrew Foley.

Hello, welcome all, and welcome to Founders' Secrets to Hypergrowth. So, Christina, welcome to Europe. You made the trip over here from the US. We appreciate you doing so.

Happy to be here.

On our first secret, we have 5 to get through in 15 minutes, so why don't we move right in?

Great.

So, "Build it and they will come" is a great movie line, but not always great for hypergrowth. Hypergrowth. For the uninitiated, the phrase "build it and they will come" is from a 1980s movie, Field of Dreams. Kevin Costner— I'm dating myself, I remember seeing it as a kid— but in practicality of building something that customers actually want, you believe this is more of a myth than a reality. Tell me why.

I do.

So early in my— earlier in my career, I switched into kind of learning how to code and make things on the internet and build products. I built a ton of stuff that I thought was brilliant that turned out no one wanted at all. And I did that a couple times, 'cause I kept thinking my next idea was better, and I think that's also a lot of the myth and lore of startups is literally and figuratively, like Mark Zuckerberg went to his dorm room at Harvard and coded this thing that now billions of people people use, and that's kind of how I thought it worked. And after not getting that to work many, many, many times, I got to a point where I was like, no, no, I'm not, you know, kind of— I'm not Mark Zuckerberg, I'm not, you know, whatever enough to be able to just have this idea and build it and merge and, you know, a billion people want it. I've got to build things with customers, and that's, you know, asking people about their problems and what might solve All of them, that's Wizard of Oz prototyping, so figuring out how to test an idea without coding it. It's actually showing people things I'm building as I'm building them. And that's the process that Vanta went through. And so, kind of very biased, but I feel like I have a dozen examples of ways where I sort of went into a room and emerged with a product that no one wanted. And then Vanta is one example We didn't do that, and it is now something that still seems like people want, which is great.

They do indeed. I can attest to it. I see it all the time in Europe. Secret 2: Love spending time with your customers more than you love your own idea. So the question I have is, you don't have a background in security, yet you founded a security company. How did who you were building for factor into to what you ended up building in the end?

[Speaker] Yeah, so I think kind of related in kind of who building for, I just found that I actually really liked kind of hanging out, literally, figuratively, work context with security folks. And so one of the early conversations in what's now Vanta was with someone on the product security team at Dropbox where I had worked most previously. And I basically emailed this person and said, hey, "Can you invite me over to breakfast when Dropbox has nice breakfasts? And can I ask you a lot of questions about your job?" And this person agreed and was very kind. And one of the things I still remember from this conversation, which was probably in spring of 2017, was I had them pull out their phone and say, "Okay, look at your calendar, your work calendar for the last week. Just page through it, remember "what was your favorite part of last week and what was your least favorite part of last week?" And that was really helpful in just helping me empathize with this person, right, who I never had this job, I had a different background. I didn't, I kind of knew what they did, like I could've read their calendar, but I didn't understand all the nuance to it. And that person's answer, their best part of their week was working with product team students helping secure products that Dropbox was building. And their least favorite part of their week was doing all this reporting for customers or auditors or the board, showing that they had secured stuff, basically. And in what became Vanta, this was actually really powerful, right? 'Cause you're like, okay, the person loves securing things, and then there's this equal part of their job, which is telling people they've secured things that they dislike. And that, in some ways, is Vanta couples those two things, and it came out of this conversation with someone who was also just, like, kind of fun to spend time with and be curious about.

Good. Um, Vanta is also known for bootstrapping, right? Uh, much of its early work, and has been conservative both on when and how you accessed funding in the early days. When you think about solving solving the hard challenges for customers and the levers to pull. Why isn't cash always king for you?

Yeah, I think when you're building a startup, and whether it's, you know, you're 2 people or 20 people or 200 people, the only common thread is you have many problems, slash, many opportunities. And I think it was really helpful for us to be clear about which problems we thought cash cash could solve and which couldn't. And there was this whole phase for the first couple of years where it felt like, again, we had many problems we were trying to solve, but they weren't really ones that more money would help. So it's like a concrete example, we were powered by a lot of word of mouth in the early days, and so we didn't really have this problem of, hey, let's go spend more money on Google Ads. I mean, we could have, but actually our major problem was we we were not able to onboard customers well enough, part because honestly we just didn't invest early enough in customer success, right? And, and yes, you know, more money maybe would have helped us hire better customers or more customer success people, but I think our problem was actually more fundamental. It was that we didn't understand what customer success could be and the role it could play for customers, right? And so again, like, would money helped us, I think we could've maybe onboarded customers faster, grown slightly faster, but I think it would've come at the cost of customer experience and destroying some of that word of mouth, honestly, 'cause we were still trying to figure out, okay, post-sale, what are you supposed to do? Because we came from more of a product-building background, the, "Oh, the product just does it," answer is the one that it seemed like should've been been right, but we just weren't at a stage of maturity where that was true. And so anyway, really diving into that post-sale process with an eye to customer experience was, I think, actually the most important problem to solve. And then once we had that, then you're like, "Oh great, we'd love more leads. We'd love more new customers. We'd love more hiring brand in the marketplace that taking investment brings." But first, you kinda gotta know, right? We had to know what customer experience did we want, what roles and responsibilities would help us get there.

And I can see much of this in the investment decisions you make in Europe today as well. So it definitely benefiting us. So 3 secrets down, secret 4 and 5 to go. Secret 4, the customer you have today is hopefully not the customer you have tomorrow. So like many of the attendees here at SaaS Astra. Vanta's early customer base, and still it's substantial actually today, is startups, right? How do you think about just not just serving the customers you have today, but also building for the customers tomorrow and beyond?

Yeah, it's a tough, it's a tough balance, I think, because I mean, so in Vanta's case in particular, we very much started by serving other startup founders. We still very much do, and that is kind of the core core and the foundation of the business. And in the early days, I think it was a little maybe more second nature because it was serving people like us that we knew, that we literally had on iMessage or shared Slack, right? And could go ask them questions all the time. As Vanta has grown and as many kind of B2B SaaS companies grow, right? You serve a more upmarket user, a more specified user, so it's not a startup founder. In our case, it's a security and compliance persona. And I think it's going back to those original principles that served you so well, just being a little more conscious about them. So it's like, how do we go find security and compliance people and convince them to hang out with us? And maybe it's now in the more formal structure of a customer advisory board or something like that. It's not your former roommate's new housewarming or something in San Francisco. Fresco. But it's still kind of the same action. And I think also fully right, if you're a business serving startups, part of the magic of that business model, and I feel like we've learned this as an industry over the last decade, is that your customers are growing too, right? And some of these startups are growing, and what was like a plucky group of 2 or 3 founders a couple years ago is now this growing, scaling behemoth. right? And so hopefully those customers, those startup customers too, are also pushing you and pushing you on product, and they want more maturity, more features, deeper use cases, all of that. And this is something we've been trying to strike a balance with at Vanta, and the way we're doing it currently is still, again, I think startups are just our core and our foundation and still very important to me. Community. Like, that is not something we are or will abandon. At the same time, some of them have grown. We're attracting larger companies. And so our product development teams are building to that end. We also acquired actually a startup in January of this year called Trustpage, which is kind of adjacent to us, a product, a security status page product. So helping your teams get credit for all the security work you're doing. With customers, helping to flex their security questionnaires. And that was just a team that was building for a more upmarket audience. And so it's a really nice complement to a lot of the Vantans and Vanta folks who are just, like, much more attuned to a startup audience. And so it's that, that complementarity that I think, um, hopefully will serve us well, united around a shared customer.

Great. Okay, um, secret 5, and the final secret that we have for the, the audience today. Turn trust into your competitive advantage. So this is something that became very obvious to me actually when I joined Vanta, but not something I always thought about beforehand. At Vanta, we talk a lot about trust, from building trust with vendors that you work with to winning new deals by demonstrating your trustworthiness, right? Why is the trust— why is trust the ultimate competitive advantage for hitting hypergrowth as an organization?

Yeah, so we think about this, I mean, in some ways very, very simply, but just that, um, over Vanta, like, if we're, if we're in kind of the business of trust and the business of helping our customers be trusted to their customers, right, be secure, be compliant, be trustworthy, uh, if we want to help companies do that and we're not trustworthy, it's like game over. We should all, you know, pack pack our bags and go home, right? And so we have a set of operating principles at Vanta, and first among equals kind of is do what it says on the tin, which is our way internally of saying, hey, again, if you imagine a cookie tin, right? Just do what it says on the tin. Do what you say you're gonna do. And we have that both case. So we have that internally with ourselves, with partners, And then again, that is what we try to do on behalf of customers. And just to that point, part of the founding story of Vanta was spending time with security folks, right? Kind of talked about they really like securing things. They tend to generally less like having to explain how they've secured things to other non-technical folks. But the reason that is such an important part of their job job is because it drives business. You can imagine going to a bigger company and saying, hey, we're really on top of it. We take customer data seriously. Here's all the things we've done, and then opening up a new deal or a new industry segment, having that conversation with the board or with prospective investors and helping that be part of the pitch for another investment round. It's so important. Important, right? And that just seemed kind of, as we again spent time with security folks and spent time with our customers, seemed very important, but surprisingly undervalued, but just no one had kind of coupled the, hey, go be secure and then go build trust on it or go prove that or go use that, take all that good engineering work and IT work and systems work and use it to grow the business with the go-to-market teams. And I think if you go poll a bunch of Vanta customers, they would generally say that it's both pieces. Like, yes, we are now baseline more secure and more reasonable. And the reason we prioritize that work is because it grew our business and we're actually seeing that trust in security posture. We're gonna open new markets, close new new deals, let us move upmarket. And so it's this really powerful incentive and motivator that we try to harness around our mission of securing the internet.

And likely more important today than it's ever been and will be again in the future, right?

Yeah, and I mean, it's just like we have less— I think we have generally less trust in software and software companies and the big tech behemoths. And some of that is reasonable, but as someone who believes in the transformative power of software I think some software I would like to be trusted or software that is worthy of that. And hopefully that is in fact helpful.

Absolutely. I've seen it day to day. So these are the 5 secrets. I hope you found it valuable today to listen to it. By the way, Christina, you will be at our booth.

I will be.

If anybody wants to have a quick chat and catch up with you. That's booth number 3. We'll probably head there, I think, in the next 10 minutes. Right after. Right after. And thank you so much for attending. Thanks a lot.

Thank you so much, Andrew.

Thank you.

Great. Please welcome Greenhouse's head of head of sales, Ranu Jaggaru, and Growth by Design's founder, Jill McCree.

Hi everyone.

Hello everybody.

Welcome.

It's great to see you all. Um, in the next 15 minutes, we're going to run you through a framework for hiring your first head of sales that will excel for your company. But first, I would love to start with a story. So my name is Renu Jaguru, Head of Sales at Greenhouse for EMEA. I've launched a number of sales teams in my career at different companies such as SAP, ServiceSource, LinkedIn, and now Greenhouse. But I'd like to take you back to a specific moment within my career. So for a moment, I'm just going to paint the picture. It's I'm 16, I've just started at LinkedIn, and I've been hired to hire and scale the DAC team. We were in hypergrowth at the time, so, want to know. Now, my first mandate within the first 6 months was to hire 14 people on time. Of course, they all had to be German speakers, which was not easy given the limited talent pool that we had in Dublin, Ireland. I was also very interested, and it was highly important for me to have a team with a very diverse background. I'd also inherited a team that, say, wasn't doing too well when it came to results, and we didn't have really such a great talent brand. Oh, I also forgot to mention that I don't actually speak a word of German either. So that's a tough one. Now, of course, with all of that, there was a a lot of skepticism when I started from my team as to whether I could actually pull this off. Now, really happy to say that fast forward 1 year, I had won the Hiring Manager of the Year for EMEA. I had gotten the entire team in place, high-performing team on time, all German speakers and all with diverse backgrounds.

I love that story. In a moment, we're going to talk about Rainews' secret secret sauce to hiring well. I'm Jill Macri. I am co-founder of Growth by Design Talent, and our company has helped hundreds of founders scale their teams, and we have seen what goes well and what doesn't. So we'll talk to you about how to avoid the pitfalls. Um, Rainu and I are up here together because I was actually a very early customer of Greenhouse. I'm actually still a customer of Greenhouse, but prior to starting my own company, I led global recruiting for Airbnb, and I did that from when we were about 100 people till 4,000. And we used Greenhouse's philosophy of structured hiring to do it. So first off, I know everybody always wants the silver bullet to this topic. So like, what's the job description? What are the 3 key traits? What do we need to avoid in a sales leader? But let me ask you this. Are any of you the same leader? Probably not, right? Do you have the same product? I hope not. And you probably have a very different growth strategy than the person sitting next to you. And so there's not just one perfect sales leader. So we want to show you these 3 steps. Really, it's a process for getting the hire right. And in order to do this, we're going to take a very specific example. We're going to go through a scenario, and then we'll talk to you afterwards about how you can and adjust it for your company. So, Rainu, do you want to introduce the scenario?

Sure. So in this particular scenario, I may be in the position that some of you are in. Let's imagine I am the founder of a company. I've been doing a lot of the sales up until now. I have a very small AE team in seats, and so really I'm looking for somebody to come in, manage that team, and scale that team.

Great. So, um, we're going to get into these 3 crucial steps, and this is something, really clarifying what you need in a hire is something a lot of leaders never learn to do well, and it can really make the difference between an excellent hire and a mishire. It's kind of like building your product roadmap. First, you need to know what are the necessities in the product, then what are the qualifications, and then how are you gonna prioritize? It's the same thing with finding the right hire. So we'll go through, uh, defining a success profile, we'll back into the qualifications, and then we'll prioritize. But first, we just wanna do a little bit of clarifying on what we mean by qualifications. We look at these 3 buckets of qualifications. So experience, that's pretty straightforward. Those are career milestones. They're often things that you can see on someone's resume. What would be examples for sales?

So perhaps somebody that has managed a team or somebody that has hired a team. Great.

Exactly. So then we have We have skills. This is really the what of what somebody does, so they're very specific abilities, and they can be learned on the job, they can be taught. What would it be for sales?

Negotiation skills, hiring again, for example.

Great, yeah, hiring skills, very important. And then competencies. So competencies are this broader bucket, right? They're really the how of getting things done, and they cut across somebody's entire body of work, and they often transfer with someone as they go to role to role. And competencies can be harder to train and upskill on. What would you think of as competencies?

So maybe something like collaborative, or are they a self-starter? For a sales leader, can they actually drive results?

Yeah.

So I just want you to take a moment and think in terms of the success you've had in your career, and everyone who's in this room, by definition, you've had the measure of success to be here. And when you think about your success, do you attribute it to one experience you had or a skill that you have, or is it really more about the competencies that you possess that cut across your work? Generally, we find that high performers are strong in certain competencies. Like, I know that my superpower through my whole career has just been the ability to navigate in ambiguity, and that's been really key to being successful in a startup environment. Not to spring it on you, but what's yours?

Superpower?

Superpower?

I would say probably coaching and mentoring.

I love that.

I think your team would say that too. And why is it important to bucket out the qualifications in this way? It's really important because we often see that founders will use experience as a proxy for the other two, right? And then they don't effectively effectively define or test skills and competencies in an interview process, and that most often results in a mishire. And then the second reason is that from a diversity perspective, if you can really focus on transferable skills and competencies, you can open the aperture on the type of experience you're looking for, and you actually can get a higher quality talent pool and a more diverse talent pool as well. Okay, let's get to the success profile. These are the 3 questions that we ask when we're defining a success profile. And I just wanna point out that this is great for roles that you don't know really well. So you might be a founder of a company, you might not know sales very in-depth, you might not know all the qualifications you need in a sales leader, but you probably do know the outcomes you want them to drive, right? You know the objectives. So let's start with those and back into qualifications. All right, so we're gonna go back to the scenario, if you all remember, Reynu is the founder of a company that has high-volume transactional sales, a couple of AEs. So Reynu, let's define the success profile. I'll ask you a couple of questions here. What do you want this person to accomplish in year 1 on the job?

Well, being a sales leader, obviously we want to ensure that they're achieving their revenue goals. That's top of mind.

Okay.

But of course, to be able to do that, they need to have a winning team. In place. Um, and I would also expect that by year 1, they're in a position to be executing on their sales strategy.

Okay, great.

And then when you think about exceeding expectations in 90 days, what would you add to that list?

Yeah, maybe as a first example would be that they have actually observed, listened, and understood the business, understood our customers. I would also expect that they'd have maybe their first draft of their strategy in place at that point.

Okay, those are great examples. And I just want to point out why we do this exceeding expectations in 90 days. We often find that these are the things that will differentiate a good hire from an excellent hire. Okay, so using that success profile, and it's a little bit abbreviated, we just want to give you a snapshot today to work off of. How would you— what would you say they would need from an experience perspective to achieve those things.

Yeah, so sales skills would definitely be important. Um, I wouldn't, however, just put, let's say, 5 years of experience. I want to be a lot more specific about what I'm looking for. So in this particular case, as Jill said, uh, let's imagine in this scenario strategy is very much transactional volume sales. Um, I want to make sure that that experience is relevant to that. So it may actually be better to be Hiring somebody with only 1 year of volume sales experience versus somebody that has, I don't know, 10 years of large enterprise sales, for example.

That's great. I love the, the specificity. It's so important. And then when you think about skills and competencies that ladder up to that success profile, what comes to mind?

Yeah, so we've talked about a strategy. Any sales leader needs a strategy that's long-term to be successful, and I tend to think about that strategy in 4 pillars. So we have talent, process, process, obviously driving results, and relationships. So just to touch on a couple of examples, you know, we've talked a lot about talent. In this case, this leader will be hiring very, very heavily in their first year, so I want to make sure that they have, you know, the ability to better scale a team during that time. And let's say by 90 days, we all know that relationships are absolutely key, so I will be looking to see they're actually collaborative. Can they communicate well both externally and internally?

Great. Okay, so we're gonna take this snapshot and we'll move to the next step, which is prioritization. Prioritization is both really hard and really important. There's a couple reasons why, but one of the things that I observed as we scaled the team at Airbnb is that optimizing for the most important qualifications What qualifications got us the best talent? There's kind of a regression to the mean that happens if you're trying to check the box on all the experience that you're looking for and all of the skills and all of the qualifications. Really what you want is somebody who spikes in the most important things. And then the second thing, and I get really excited about this, is that prioritization is really the key to operational efficiency in your hiring process. It doesn't sound sexy, but it will save you so much time scaling your company. The key is that every single step in the interview process needs to map clearly to one or more of these qualifications, right? And you wanna be testing for the most important things first. That will save you a ton of time. So, Renu, tell us a little bit about your ranking here.

Yeah, so, I mean, of course, if it was my hire, I would want it all, all of it. But, you know, to Jill's point, prioritization is absolutely key here. For me, it's probably the most important step in the process. So in this particular case, I decided that ability to scale a quality team and then coach and mentor that team should be top of mind. Then when it comes to competencies, I'd say a demonstrated growth mindset is key here. I would actually give up most of the other parts. You know, they don't even need I want them to have experience within the industry because I will have quite a lot of time to invest in this person's ramp so I can help them with the rest. So demonstrated growth mindset would be my thing there.

Great.

That's good. Good job making the trade-offs. I know that's hard. Okay, so we've done a lot in the past just 12 minutes, right? We've gotten a lot of clarity on this role for Rainu's company. And as we pointed out before, what you might need in a sales leader might be very different than and what Renu needs. But the good news is that you can use these 3 steps and this process to get super clear on what it is that you need for your company to get the best hire for you. And as you walked in, you may have gotten an ebook, or if you didn't get one, you can get it on the way out. They're also available at the Greenhouse booth, and this walks you through all the steps in the process and additionally also how to run an effective interview process as well.

As well.

Well, we've come to a close. Thank you all so much for your time. We would actually love to connect with you, so we will be hanging around outside for any questions, any chats that you may have for us. So thank you very much.

And we're also hosting the pub, so we'll see you there.

Please welcome GP's Senior Sales Director, Katherine Kotaritz.

Well, good morning everyone. My name is Katherine Kutteritz and I'm delighted to be here today. I am the Senior Sales Director EMEA at GP and I've been fortunate enough to see the company grow from less from less than 30 people to almost 1,400 in the past 6 years. And I'm really delighted to share with you today the 3 secrets to retaining top talent and how to drive productivity to scale. So let's get started. What do actually current retention trends look like, or how likely are your employees currently already looking for a new job? There's been a Bankrate Job Seeker Survey. This year in March, and they have asked employees how likely they are looking for a new job in the next 12 months. And around 28% of baby boomers said that they are looking for a new role. In contrary though, 61% of millennials and even 78% of Gen Z said that they're looking for a new job. So if you have any of them on your team that you want to keep on, this is now the right time time for you really to think about what you need to do to retain your top talent. So what is it actually that they're looking for that you need to look at? GP has done a global employee survey last year across 9 different countries, and there have been 5 topics that came up across the globe. One of it is better pay, kind of obvious, right? But it's also career progression, the want to feel more fulfilled, having more flexibility around their work schedule, as well as the want to learn something new. And this now is kind of obvious, but I think it's really important to talk about as well when we are thinking about retention and increasing productivity, because the same study also showed that there is a correlation between happiness on the job and productivity. Productivity. So again, kind of obvious, right? If people are not happy on the job, they're most probably not gonna throw themselves into it the way that you actually want them to. And we can see that this is true in all countries, and in South Korea, even 83% of people said that if they are not where they want to be from happiness standpoint with their role, they're not gonna work as hard. So how can you make employees employees happy and increase productivity and retention. Now let's take a look at the 3 big secrets that you're probably waiting for all morning. And the first one is autonomy. So if you're actually providing more autonomy to your employees, you will increase productivity. And that means that we really have to rethink the way on how we manage employees. We have to get away from thinking about how many how many hours they need to sit in front of the laptop, but rather the outcome, right? Defining what is it that you want to see from them and letting them run with that a little bit as well. There's been a study last year from an independent research organization, also called Autonomy, funny enough, and they have reviewed from June to December last year the impact that a 4-day work week would, for example, have on company companies. And 61 companies in the UK participated with around 2,900 employees. And on average, 35% revenue increase was seen for these companies in comparison to the same time period the year beforehand. And some of them, some of that may have been organic, right? But it definitely showed that productivity and retention, productivity and that revenue did not decrease, and it actually really helped to have a 4-day workweek. And moreover, 57% less people left the companies during that timeframe. So it was really a great tool for companies to retain the best talent that they had on board. And out of the 61 companies, 56 of them actually continued to have a 4-day workweek after the test. The second part is focus time, and focus time is really uninterrupted time that you have to focus on the most important task of your job. And 2021 data shows that even back then, employees got an average of 125 Slack messages a day, and that's probably even more now. And that doesn't talk about any of the emails or text messages or calls that you get. And the problem with this is really that it takes you an average of 23 minutes to get back to what you were actually doing. That is a lot of lost time that your employees have just by being interrupted all the time. And this is really important and it matters because a report from the German think tank Next Work Innovation showed that it can cost your company up to €58 billion. $1,000 a year in productivity and outcome. So you have to make sure that you actually allow your employees to set focus time where they can uninterruptedly focus on the most important task of their role. Because by encouraging that, you will make sure that you can increase productivity and decrease frustration. The third point that we see is coaching. And companies really need We need to invest in the employee not only on a career base but also on their personal potential. And Gallup State of the Workplace study from last year showed that there is a lot of dissatisfaction across workers nowadays, but there's also staggering rates of them being disengaged and actually just not happy on the job. And they found that 60% of the employees said that they are emotionally disconnected from the role. So they already quietly quit what they're doing for you. So they're almost like dead weight, right? And 19% of people that they asked were miserable on the job. So it's really, really important for you to be able to address them and get them on board to stay with you. And one way on how you can do that is by utilizing co- coaching. And Upcoach actually states that one of the huge benefits that business coaching brings is an increase of self-confidence. And 80% of the people that have received business coaching have said that they had an increase in self-confidence, and 70% said that their work productivity went up. So historically, coaching has been something that we only set out for the leadership team, right? So a lot of you probably already had business coaching in your life. But it's really, really important to actually roll that out as a retention tool across the board because if people see that it's not only a career growth potential, but it actually changes the way on how they live on a personal level, it really makes a big change. So the focus should really be to blend business and personal growth. And when it comes to autonomy, we just saw that companies can grow their revenue at an average of 35% even by working a day less. And if you give workers the autonomy to be flexible with their workflow and to actually find the time of the day that they work best, right, it will really increase for them to be much more likely to stay with the company and to be much more productive. Productive. And one way on how you as a leader can actually define what are the goals that they should be working at is to utilize OKRs. And maybe a quick hand sign, who of you have ever heard of OKRs? Yeah, perfect. So you probably know the book Measure What Matters, right, from John Doerr. A lot of companies that are really, really big utilize OKRs to get to where they needed to be. OKRs, it stands for objectives and key results, right? So if you can define what is most important for your company as a goal and as an objective, you can work with your employees to define themselves what are the key results that are measurable that they need to put in place to get there. And a study of the Stuttgart University of Applied Science and Haufe Talent showed that 78% of employees that use the OKRs are satisfied in their role. And when it comes to focus, Focus time, we at GP, we are actually using Microsoft Viva Insights, and that's a possibility where you can block off up to 4 hours a day on focus time. If you want to set your preferences, it will roll out to other days that you are defining. It's a great way on utilizing metrics as well to see how much focus time you've utilized. The same tool is also fantastic if you actually work with colleagues in different time zones because you You can schedule your emails to only be sent out in the business hours of the recipient. That means that they don't get emails, which is your work time, but it may be 2 o'clock in the morning for them, or they wake up at 5 o'clock in the evening, 5 o'clock in the morning to a whole bunch of emails, which will really make a change on how they are actually focusing on their work. And by reinforcing a culture where it's okay for people to turn off their devices and not having to answer anything straight away, it really helps them to be able to really focus on the most important parts of their work. And last but not least, investing in coaching for your team really enables them to look at barriers that are not only in their personal, personal life, a barrier to get to where they want to be, but also in their work. And things that you can focus on with that, that you— they can work at is interpersonal skills, communication skills, obviously self-confidence, work relationships. So there's a whole array of areas that can be addressed with coaching. And these areas are transferable to their personal life, and that's what makes it a great tool for retention, because people see that it's not just work-related, but something for their personal life. And if So if you have some of these people that are more than a dead weight, that are emotionally disengaged on the role as well, coaching can be fabulous because you can actually coach people out of your company without having to go through all the HR part, right? And you can do coaching a lot of different ways, especially if you wanna roll it out to a larger group across the team, across your company. You can obviously do it in a one-on-one setting, in a team setting, or they are actually subscription-based apps. Apps as well that allow your team members to utilize coaching possibilities. And with that, I think we're at time. It's been a pleasure. If you have any questions, you can find us at the booth back there. Otherwise, I'm gonna be around. Thank you so much and hope to see you later.

Good day baby!

Good thing they— good thing they...

Please welcome exclamers CEO Marco Costa and Glamour CMO Carol Howley.

Hello guys, good morning. My name is Marco and I'm the CEO of Exclamer.

My name is Carol Howley and I'm the CMO at Exclamer.

So before Exclamer, I spent 5 years as a Chief Operating Officer International for Talkdesk.

And before Exclamer, I was at Skyscanner and Canonical building the marketing teams.

Today we're going to talk about about the product-market fit deception. All right, let's jump into it. When I joined Exclamer in October 2021, I got a call from someone saying, "That's a great company that does email signature management." What? Email signature management, that's what we do. So we allow marketing, branding, IT to centrally manage what goes into the email real estate. Basically, that's all we do. If you wanna know more about this, there's a team there, there's a booth, you can learn more about that. So I look into the numbers, I look into the KPIs, and I saw amazing KPIs. 50% conversion from SQL to Close One, few weeks, high velocity. 30% plus year-on-year growth. 40,000 customers, not, Users, customers, enterprise that use the product in more than 100 customer countries. So what's the problem? The problem was that there was a strong dependency in one single channel, PPC. And one of my first hires was Carol because I said, I need to change marketing.

Yeah, absolutely. So the reason they were looking for us was that we had good retention, we had reasonable growth rates, but it was starting to stall. So the short-term vision that we had within the marketing team was starting to kind of— there's so much competition now in marketing. We had to change something and change it really fast to make sure that we could drive growth. So we'd become very complacent as a company, very dependent on this short-term growth and very dependent across the board on really kind of just letting things happen. And we just sort of sat there and let the world happen to us. We weren't proactively driving. And with these kind of growth rates, to take advantage of that should be a crime not to.

Yeah, absolutely. So it was amazing product-market fit, but until when would that be enough for us to grow? So my approach was, okay, let's look at how we can grow the company. 3 steps, usual: diagnose, define, and deploy a repeatable process. Let's dive into the first one. So the first thing we had to do is look into what's working. What skills do we have? What are the KPIs that really drive the business? What's really driving the growth of the business? And people, what's going on with the team? We brought in some benchmarks, like, built from the TalkDesk times in terms of what are the SaaS KPIs we should look into. Bring them benchmark, exclaimer, against those KPIs. And two things stood out immediately. Of course, there was an amazing product-market fit, clear, but the return of that PPC channel was going down. And people that didn't realize it was going down, just throwing more money, but it was starting to sink. And the second thing is people. These people have been successful for so long, so why change? I was telling, ah, we need to change. Why? Why do you need to change? This is just working. There's no need. And so, yeah, there was a need to change. And we actually deployed a plan to start changing the company.

And I think what Marco and I and the other leadership team Jason M. Lemkin brought in was the fact once you get to that scale, once you start to scale, you have to have a managed, directed approach to drive to the next. You can get to that sort of first $10 million or so, but actually to get to the $100 million to start to build the company, you have to really manage that approach. You have to set very clearly where you go. So in defining that strategy, we wanted to really set out exactly where do we want to go as a company. What's our 3-year goal, our 5-year goal? We really defined that strategy very very hard and we set OKRs. I love OKRs. I talk about them quite a lot. I love the kind of managed approach and making sure that you go from a top-down and bottoms-up model to make sure you can drive your growth in a managed way that you can actually see happening in a month-on-month thing. So we implemented the OKRs across the company and we started to rebuild the go-to-market. We knew that we were focusing everywhere. The good thing with email signatures, everyone could be a customer. Every business could actually benefit from it. But if we're going to really try everyone, if you focus your time on everybody, you don't end up focusing on anything and you don't drive anything. So we wanted to focus on key markets. We went down to under 10 key markets from around pretty much everyone who'll buy from us. We wanted to introduce new products. We didn't have a managed approach. We didn't have any way of saying, what stages do we start to kind of buy our products in? What do people look for? What do the customers actually want? So we refactored all of our products, all of our pricing, We actually voluntarily took a hit in terms of our pricing to make sure that we could increase our price per user so that we were really focused on the key things we knew would drive success. We also started building an amazing customer success function. We knew that in customer success we had good retention, but people didn't buy into it. They weren't engaged, they didn't care, there wasn't a reason. So we started really focusing on that, and we also kind of looked at how we could rebuild that go-to-market approach. In marketing, you can't just rely on PPC, you can't You can't just buy your traffic. It has to come into SEO. It has to be your content. You have to offer value and talk to people. So we really rebuilt the whole structure of the market and the go-to-market motion.

It's funny you said that. We actually reduced pricing to increase price per user. So playing with pricing is paying back big time, big time. So we did all that, but how does it stick? How do you make sure that you actually have a company that follow this vision. We hired a lot of people, and over the last 12 months, we've hired 7 executives for the business, and those executives hire their teams. And making sure that everybody's aligned was very key for us. So getting that cadence, building the cadence. So for us, start building QBRs. First time we did it, not great. Second time, better. Third time, better. So every quarter, we get the team together. Get all the management team together and start aligning where we're going as a business. Communication. You need to talk to a lot of people, and you need to talk a lot and repeat what you're saying a lot so people will really understand where you're trying to go as a business. People. You can't have a company that is twofold, the old guys and the new guys, the ones that brought us here and the ones that take us forward. That just won't work. And so you have to make sure you blend the talent you bring, and don't get me wrong, we need to bring new talent, but with the people that brought the company here and knew a lot about the business, knew a lot about what works with us. And so developing people, giving everybody a chance to actually be successful in this new culture as being part of the equation. I'll say work with the board and get alignment on resources. If you want to build a new go-to-market motion, that takes time, more than you want, more than I want, and money, more than you wish. So get a clear alignment and get the resources, support the resources, and throw money into the right initiatives because those things just take way too long to build. And finally, I used to say that Exclaimer, given the velocity, given the number of customers, the number of leads we see every month, it's kind kind of a playground for A/B testing. We see tens of thousands of leads per month. We should test what's working, what's not working. But it's not me, it's not Carol, it is the team. And so the team needs to feel they are in a safe place to test, fail, and come back. And if they fail, we don't retire people, we retire the program. We just keep going, keep learning. And building that motion, building that cadence, that culture of yes, you can fail as long as you learn has been something very key, very key for us. So, and with that, Carol.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think this process that Marco and I have kind of developed really brought together what both of us experienced in scaling previous unicorns. And we felt just to simplify, because the hardest decision is almost what you don't do. So simplifying our process into 3 steps and making sure that we could kind of really define, really diagnose, really kind of deploy those processes, 'cause change management ultimately is so hard to embed, and that communication is really key. So anyway, we wanted to kind of give you some 3 key takeaways. Obviously for me, it's ruthless prioritization. You do have to make those decisions, those hard decisions, and you have to take them fast. Whether it's people, whether it's process, whether it's not going into every market or pulling out of markets where you don't have the coverage, You've got to take those hard decisions to make sure that you can scale and then you can go back, but you have to take them first.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, the operation cadence is key. It's too easy, especially when you are bringing so much change into the business, it's too easy to see people going in any direction. You need to make sure that you align and bring in the process, repeating the process, creating the new muscle memory and breaking a bit the old muscle memory. That takes a lot of effort. That operation cadence is absolutely key.

Yeah, and I think for me, we live and die by our go-to-market motion. Our teams are completely aligned most of the time. We do have the odd moments, but our teams are aligned. We know what we're doing. We set our targets together. We do our forecasting together. We measure, you know, what can we convert? What pipeline do we need? What coverage do we need? How do we know that we're on track? So making sure that you can do that and accepting that changing those go-to-market motions will take longer than you think.

Communication is key. I used to say keep beating the drum, otherwise people won't understand. Answer any questions. We are completely open in our hands. We share all the data we have. All financial data is no secret in the company. We disclose everything to the business. We answer any question. We make sure if you want to be part of our journey, you need to understand where we're going. You need to have the data to understand where we're going. So we talk almost every week with the teams. We do all hands. We do all all that because we want to make sure people really understand where we go. And outside, the final one is definitely the product-market fit. I mean, product-market fit is a blessing. I'm sure a lot of startups struggle very hard to have the first customers and to have a product that almost sells on its own, but can be a problem, can be a curse if you don't understand that that won't last forever. And at some point in time, you need to start building the new go-to-market motions. And as I said, that takes a long time. To be fair, it's working for us. Over the last 18 months, we grew the business from 30 to 52 million pounds of ARR. So growing quite fast, given, especially looking outside what's going on in the world. It's working for us, but it's never done. It's something we have to continue. My advice would be, let's make sure that whenever you see a product-market fit, don't let it crystallize the company. Because at some point that will stop working and then you have to build it again. So look, this is us. This is what we have to share. If you want to know more about Exclaimer, our team is around, our booth is there, and thank you so much for coming.

Please welcome Make's Head of Product Design, Lisa Kleinman.

All right.

Hello everyone. I'm Lisa Kleinman from Make, and Make is a visual automation platform that allows people to build out workflows and move data across their different systems. And it's a no-code solution, which means it's really for for anyone. And when you're building a product that's for anyone, you really have to care about great design. But design isn't just for our company. It's really for all products, because every dollar that you spend on understanding customer needs, really listening to them, and making decisions based off of that, you can more than double your revenue. And that's kind of a big deal. I want to bring this comes to life with a story, and it's a story about cake in the 1950s. So in the 1950s, Betty Crocker, a cake company in the U.S., knew that people loved making homemade cakes and eating them with their friends and family, but people were short on time, just as they are today. And so they came up with the perfect product, this mix where all you had to do was add water and 30 minutes later Voilà, you could spend time with your friends and family with this great-tasting product. So they launched it, right? Perfect product-market fit, but it wasn't selling. So what do you do? Do you spend more money on advertising? Maybe change the flavors? Or I don't know, maybe they have to lower their price, change, change with their manufacturing process. But instead of going that in that direction, they first started to talk to their customers. They hired a psychologist and found out that people felt really guilty offering these great-tasting cakes to their family. It felt like they weren't actually homemade. And so what Betty Crocker did was they changed the formula so that you now had to add an egg, and just this simple change in the mix, this friction that they added now changed people's mindset, and now people were buying these mixes, and even 80 years later, even today, this is exactly how these mixes are sold. And so this is really about the design of the experience. And so when I talk about good design, of course that's about having a good, great tasting or a great looking product. That's absolutely table stakes, absolutely fundamental, but the type of good design that drives drives business is design that's really meeting a psychological and emotional need of your customers. And so let's talk about how this is happening today with software products. And I'm going to use Notion as an example of a really great product that is applying the science of design to all of their business decisions. And some of you may be familiar with Notion. It's a productivity tool that allows people to take notes, collaborate on documents together. People have even made their own company intranets or personal blogs using Notion. But when the product first launched, kind of Notion 1.0 in 2015, the company was really struggling and they were about to go under. The founder, Ivan Zhao, one of the co-founders, said, you know, we'd focused so much on trying to build this perfect product that we wanted to build that we actually weren't listening to what the world wanted from us. And really it was this shift in mindset that really reinvigorated Notion, and as of last year, they have a $10 billion valuation. And so of course this talk is about, so those 3 UX secrets, right? What are the 3 UX secrets driving design for Notion and other great companies? And I'm gonna share those with you. And we're gonna go back to some physical products. I like physical products. We're gonna start with IKEA. And 3 Harvard psychologists were trying to understand what happens when people build their own products. And what I mean by that is they were trying to understand if someone builds a paper origami crane versus an off-the-shelf IKEA box, would they value it more, right? And so they were where they were testing people's willingness to pay based on how much effort someone put into building a product. And what they found was that it actually really didn't matter what type of product people built. The fact that they had built the product made them value it more. And they called this the IKEA effect. And the underlying component here is really the sense of pride and accomplishment that people felt when they built their own products. And so greater labor leads to greater love. And that probably is obviously very familiar with what I just shared about the Betty Crocker Cake Company. But how does this relate to Notion and other great SaaS products? Well, it's really the fact that Notion doesn't tell you how to use it. People have to customize it and tailor it to their own workflows. And once they've done From this, they're engaged. They've perfected the product to fit their own needs. And while the average user of Notion may spend multiple hours per day in the product, this type of engagement doesn't have to be so heavy. One of my favorite features from Slack is just their custom emojis where you add your company brand or funny inside jokes. And just in a few seconds a day, a company is building their own team team culture through Slack's emoji feature. And so you've spent all this time now optimizing a product to fit your needs, and this really ties into the next secret, which is once people have built this skill, they wanna use it across multiple situations. And so Abraham Maslow, this is the same Maslow from the hierarchy of needs, had another great observation about people where of course, that once you have that hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. And this is really a cognitive shortcut that we all do because we want to use the same skills we've built across multiple situations. And so the design of great products is really about this flexibility. And so maybe you've just started with Notion using it as a simple to-do list, but you start to get curious and you're like, can I use it for for meeting notes, or maybe I can use it as a mood tracker. Airtable is another great example of this where simply a, you know, I'll call it a spreadsheet product is now being used for apartment hunting and novel planning. And so building tools that really have this flexibility is essential to driving this engagement. And what I've really shared so far is really about driving this individual adoption. But in order to really generate that PLG motion, you of course need some virality. And that happens through the wisdom of the crowd. And what does this mean? It's the fact that we as humans tend to think that other people know more than we do, that the collective intelligence is trusted more. And this was demonstrated in another—

ah—

in another psychology experiment back in the day where people were asked to judge whether line A, B, or C matched another line that they were looking at. Super easy task. Not hard to do. People didn't get it wrong when they were asked to answer this question on their own. But when they were in a room with other people where other people were purposefully giving wrong answers, people started to change their response to match what the group was saying. And this doesn't have to have such a negative connotation. There's a reason forums like Reddit and Quora are so successful. This collective intelligence is important. And so when people are sharing their knowledge, right, so with Notion ambassadors or the way people are using Miro, there's this excitement where people want to share their passion and grow, and this helps grow their user base. But what's really important here about community is that it actually smooths the way into enterprise. And what do I mean by this? Once people are using their— these tools in their personal lives, there starts to be a groundswell within a company where people want to keep using these same tools. So I've even seen this myself with Miro in particular, whiteboarding app, it's a great one, where at my last company, which was a large enterprise, everyone wanted to keep using Miro. And so even though the the IT department was saying, hey, we've gotta switch things up, we gotta use the standard tools, people were like, no, we wanna stick with the tools we love. So from using it in their personal lives to then bringing it into enterprise, this is a really important component of great design in building PLG motion. So that was a very fast run-through through 3 UX secrets that drive revenue. As we saw with Notion, they well exceeded the revenue of, or the ROI number I mentioned earlier of 229%. But this doesn't just have to be for Notion only. So we got the IKEA effect, Maslow's hammer, wisdom of the crowd, and if you enjoyed hearing about all this, please come visit our booth, make.com, booth number 202, and join us for our Happy hour at 3:03, ah, 3:00 PM, 2:02, 3:03. It's been a long day. It's only, it's only like 11:30. Anyway, it was great talking to all of you. Look forward to talking more about no-code automation, design, UX, good stuff. Thank you so much for your time today.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] Please welcome Vertice's CEO Eldar Tavi and welcome Vertice's Head of Product Marketing JK Adekunle.

Do you have the clicker?

Yeah, I do.

Great.

Hi everyone, it's exciting to be here. I go by JK. I have built my career partly as an entrepreneur, and today I head the product marketing function at Vertiz. I'm here to share with you some some of my lessons on my entrepreneurial journey.

Brilliant, thank you. Um, don't mind us, we're just presenting. If you'd like to come and sit down, we won't, won't mind. Um, hi everyone, I'm Eldar Tuvi. I'm the CEO of Vatis, and we're here to talk to you and share with you some of the sort of lessons that we've learned in our careers, having some successful exits along the way. For myself, I was a CEO and founder of a company, a cybersecurity business out of the UK called ScanSafe, that was sold to Cisco in 2009. I went on to start another cybersecurity business in the mobile space called called Wandera. That was sold to a company called Jamf. It's American, US public company in 2021. And because I'm a sucker for punishment, decided to do it again. And we've started a new company called Vatis. It's a SaaS purchasing platform. We help companies manage and optimize all of their SaaS renewals and purchases and help them in that procurement process. So we're here to share with you some of these sort of lessons that we've learned along the way. So the first, I think, is always hire the right people. Should be no surprise to anyone here. I'm reminded of my first job, which was an analyst at an investment Bank, and when it was like 3 in the morning, I would— they didn't have Glassdoor then, so I couldn't write like bad reviews about my employers. But they used to say, people are our greatest asset. That was like Goldman's thing, people are our greatest asset. And I was like working out how much I got paid per hour, and it was less than a McDonald's guy. And I was sort of gritting my teeth saying it's all rubbish. It doesn't make any sense. But it turns out that they were true. So people are your greatest asset. I've learned that the hard way running these different companies. We, when we look for people to recruit, always try and look for the very best people that we can attract to our business. And that's not always easy, but we believe believe in that one great person is better than sort of 5 mediocre people. So that's kind of rule that we live by. And I think it's important because we've had a few companies and sometimes you can fall into the trap of just bringing the same people with you. But we believe that it's important to kind of refresh the DNA and have people with new talents, new experiences come in. And I think, like, if I look back, you know, we had a deal once with AT&T which gave us distribution in all the U.S. to about 500 customers. That was done by one guy. Same guy then did a deal for a second company with Verizon. That generated us like 1,000 customers. So one amazing employee can really make a transformational difference to your business.

Just—

I can't give you any advice about how you find them. Find them. That's difficult. But if you can, they do make, make, make all the difference.

Yeah, I mean, we get it that SaaS is super competitive as an industry, but in my experience, I realized that some of the biggest successes you can have is really focusing, aligning your team around fewer problems and doing those very well, right? I had an experience where we were serving a big customer because we had gone upmarket, but we quickly realized that was a mistake. We were pulled in different directions. The team was burnt out trying to build new solutions for them, and it was very distracting. But what really helped us was making that brave decision to let go of that customer. So if you needed permission to do that, I'm saying it's good to align your team around fewer problems, even if that means making hard decisions like letting go of a customer. All right, so focus on your mission, um, have that tunnel vision, and be super obsessed with the success that you want.

Um, finding product-market fit. Okay, so just in terms of the history that we had in our previous business, um, we started— I think ScanSafe was email marketing business, then it became a web marketing business, then it became an email security business, then it became a web security business, and eventually was the largest web security as a service business and got bought by Cisco. But my point, I think, that I'm trying to make is that it's not always very easy to hit right on your product market fit from the get-go. Our second Second business we started as a consumer data compression business, which ended up as a mobile security business for enterprises. So, just things along the way. You know, the way we work is if something's not working, we think about it, try and figure out another way of doing things, figuring out what are the areas where we've got any competitive advantage, and then and applying that, trying something else, but basically never giving up. It's worked for us in the past. Those two companies that we exited from, each one was sort of a grind over 10 years, eventually ended in some sort of measure of success. But in this particular business where we've started, which we're talking to you about today, we seem to have hit it get from the get-go. So it's been kind of interesting. I've never seen it before where you just come to talk to a customer and they completely understand what you're trying to do, what you're trying to solve for them. They get it, they want it, and they buy it. And so, you know, now when we go and talk to customers, they generally are very receptive to what we do, and that's been a revelation for me. It took us 10 years of trying and innovating and searching in our previous companies. So finding that product-market fit, all I can say is when you, when you have it, you know it.

I'll tell you a story. So I once led a brand relaunch project and we had burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars and it wasn't a success. We were mostly sounding like all all the other players in our category. And when we went back to the table, we tried to figure out how can we make ourselves a bit more memorable as a brand. And one of the things we did was, one, we learned that the term A-OK was something that was popular within a demographic. The second thing was realizing that, well, our company name is AA. Why don't we just say AA is A-OK? And that took off. Basically, when people asked, okay, so what's the best insurance company, it was easy for people to just say, well, eh, is A okay? So I guess the lesson there is try to be more memorable than sophisticated. A good way to test for that is if you have to be present in a room to explain to people what you do so that they understand it, then you need to go back to the drawing table, right? So it's important that people remember remember you and can explain it to anyone. If it's easy for anyone to talk about it, it's easy for anyone to spread it.

Okay, so just as we heard, I think, from Jason and the other presentation that I was listening to, it's all about efficiency. The reason that we've had some success in the past is we've always believe that you need to stay optimized. You need to be in the game long enough for your runway to last long enough, for your cash to last long enough to keep innovating and finding that product-market fit that I discussed. You know, in, in previous businesses, we— there was a, what I think was a nuclear winter for sort of technology in 2001. We ended up buying out of VCs for like, I think it was 6 cents on the dollar at the time, because we were under a mountain of preference and we wanted to keep going. So we bought them out. We ran basically most of our business on R&D tax credits the second time round just to keep going. But eventually, if you're in it long enough and you work hard enough, you make the right decisions, I think, and you have some sort of modicum of luck, you can reach that sort of area where, where your business starts taking off, and then it's about managing that growth. So everything that we believe in is all about that optimization. That's what we have tried to bring to help our customers of Atis with optimizing their SaaS stacks, with their technologies that they use, removing duplication that they have, removing waste licenses, helping them buy the very best software that suits their purposes. And so far it's been very successful and we've had a good reception to it. But that's the ethos that we believe in, is that it's all about being optimized, reducing waste, being efficient so that you can last the course and hopefully at the end succeed. So these are the key takeaways, our I'm sure you can all read for yourselves. We've gone through them, but I think the presentation can be summarized as you've got to be in it to win it. And so that's what we believe in. We believe in being there for the long run until that success comes. So thank you very much for your time. We've been told no questions, so thank you.