Scaling From $10M-$100M ARR: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly with Showpad Co-Founder Pieterjan Bouten

Alright, good morning everybody. Welcome to this beautiful room in Saas. I think I'm very happy that we got the best room, definitely the best view of the whole venue. I'm here today talking about scaling from 10 to 100 million in ARR, sharing the good The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I founded— co-founded Showpad about 11 years ago together with my co-founders Louis and Peter. And, you know, since then we've grown the company. By the end of the year we should cross that magical $100 million ARR mark. And I'm very happy to be here with you to share some of the lessons learned along that journey. I've led the company as its CEO from obviously founding the company to a couple couple of months ago, uh, 2 months ago, I handed over the helm of the company to our COO, somebody who I hired 6 years ago, who has grown with the company. And so now I have a bit of time to do these conferences and share a bit some of the lessons learned. Um, the first slide I wanted to show is, is this quote. It's a famous quote of Jason M. Lemkin: Getting from 0 to 1 is impossible, getting from 1 to 10 is unlikely, and getting from $10 to $100 million ARR is inevitable. And for me, I remember thinking when Jason tweeted this quote, Showpad was about, I think, we were somewhere north of probably $1 or $2 million ARR, growing fast, scaling, but still a very small company. I remember thinking, man, I really need to make sure that we get to that $10 million so that we get to that inevitable stage and get to that $100 million. In ARR. As I'm sure a lot of you come for probably the bad and the ugly, let's start with the good, because obviously starting a company, growing a business is an amazing journey. And for me, what I really enjoyed about, you know, building and growing Showpad to this day is turning a vision into a reality. When we started Showpad, We basically wanted to solve a problem and make sure that we deliver value to customers. And we started the company— my first company was a mobile app developer out of Belgium. Again, founded that company 12 years ago anticipating the mobile revolution. And while we were building that company, that was a service business. And we were looking for, hey, we want to build a product company, get recurring revenue streams. We were on the lookout for— a product to develop, a problem to solve. And one of my friends, he had an artificial grass business. So artificial grass comes in all kinds of forms, shapes, specifications. He had a big reseller network. And so he was always— they were doing a lot of trade shows. They had to provide their resellers with marketing materials in many different European countries. And I was traveling with him when I heard him on the phone, like, being quite upset because his marketing agency had delivered German marketing and sales collateral to a French— in France on a French trade show. So that was pretty bad. You know, it's hard to have a booth on a French trade show full of German collateral. And again, this was 12 years ago. And I was like, well, you know, I heard— I overheard a conversation. I told him, like, hey, why don't you just buy all of your sales guys or girls and girls an iPad and just, you know, get the content on the iPad and make sure they can present and share the materials from a tablet device. But as it turned out, 12 years ago, that was like super hard to just get content on a tablet, easily share that. You basically had to email it, you know, to your inbox and then open it in iBooks. And again, it was a very clunky experience. And so basically that's how we came up with the idea of Showpad, started building the product. But initially, you know, we didn't have a really bold vision or a big vision. We just, you know, build a product that solved a very specific problem: making sellers productive on a trade show. Eventually, as we built the first product, started to market it online, sell it, we had a free trial, people could use it, we got some traction. We realized like, whoa, okay, you know, getting— we're starting to get good feedback, but, but we missed a a bigger, bolder vision of, you know, where is this going? Like, people were asking us like, hey, you know, how are you gonna evolve the product? How are you gonna evolve the company? And so that's when we started focusing on, on what we call buyer experience, because ultimately what Showpad solves is, is that buyer experience. And we developed this big vision. We've developed that we wanted to impact buyer experience for, for basically all customer-facing teams in the world. We made sure that we evolved from that single product solving a content problem to a broader platform. I'll talk more about that later, but that really helped us to, you know, propel the company, ship the right— ship the right functionality, get traction, attract money from investors. And that's really exciting to see as a founder where you start with this basically what seems like a very simple problem, solve you know, make sure that sellers have the right content on a booth on a trade show to like a broader platform vision that helps to power buyer experiences for commercial teams. And so today this vision has turned into a reality. Showpad is a multi-product platform. We're integrated in with all the sales and marketing technology you could wish for, and we've obviously built a whole whole products around that, but also services, a marketplace of applications. We have third-party developers developing on top of our platform. So I think that's what I really enjoy about like growing a company from, you know, zero to where it is today. The second thing which I really enjoy is the people part. I think what is really good about scaling a company is, is the amazing people you get to hire, the amazing people you get to to work with, the talent that you can see growing in your company, and taking along amazing people on that journey. And the screenshot I shared here is a screenshot from Culture Amp. I think some of you might know Culture Amp. We use it to track engagement at Showpad. We've been tracking that over the last 6 years now, so it's a great way of measuring engagement, how engaged is the workforce. It's basically a— if you work together with Culture Amp, it's basically a fixed set of questions we've been asking over the past 6 years. And the end score, the aggregate score, is an engagement score which you can use to measure engagement at your company. And again, it's not— you know, we use it as one data point to measure. And especially I think what's really interesting is obviously as you drill down into teams, regions, managers. You can even filter it across age groups or gender and stuff like that. So it's really interesting data. But I think what I'm really proud of and really enjoy in building a company is that we've, over the last years, we've actually, as we scaled as a business, growing from, you know, Shopify is close to 600 employees now. We've managed to actually improve the engagement of our workforce. And that's a lot of hard work. And because as you can see, we started off 2 years ago at about 68%. Again, if you would benchmark this, this is still a reasonably good score probably if you compare it across many different companies. But we made a deliberate effort to really increase that engagement to also drive our attrition down, to make sure that people stay longer at the company, are happier, feel that they can have an impact. And basically the way that I approached this and we approached this with the executive team was treating culture as a product itself. And, you know, making sure you gather a lot of data. Again, Culture Amp being one of the ways that we measure it and the impact input that we get there. Also talking obviously with a lot of people in the company and getting ways to get feedback on how we're doing as a business, what can we improve. And I think what a couple of the really impactful things that we've done is one, really deliberate investment in leadership skills. I think if you're scaling a business, it's so important as you evolve from being a group of 10, 20, 30 people where you all know each other. Where it's not needed to have the values on the wall because everybody knows those values or lives those values, where it's a very informal culture and it's not really outspoken to really be— we became very deliberate about our culture. So putting the values on the wall, but again, it means nothing if you don't operationalize that and put it into practice. And so some of the things that we've done there is a program to really invest in leadership skills across every people manager at Showpad. They get a boot camp. We work with some partners there who up-level the skills of people. We create IDPs, individual development plans, of leaders and every employee. We also made sure that the values in our company, that consistently every 2 weeks we have this— we call it the Show Pie. It's because we've always, in the early days, we would always eat pie on a Thursday afternoon. There's a pie shopper on the ground floor of our office, our first office. And so we have a show pie. It's basically our all-hands, company all-hands. We do that every Thursday. But we also started to like, we developed a system where people could nominate colleagues anonymously why they they should get a showing award. And the showings are our values. And so every 2 weeks, we celebrate one employee who then exemplifies a certain value that we think is very important. And again, all these things, we've put a lot of effort in this. And I'm super proud. The last 2 years, again, tough times, especially for a company like Showpad. We had a big office culture. In our offices in Chicago and Ghent, London, Munich, Poland, Wrocław being some of our biggest hubs, and San Francisco. But obviously with the pandemic, people were working from home, working remotely. And despite a challenging environment, we actually managed to increase the engagement of our employees. And that I think is really— yeah, it's just fun. It's rewarding. And it's then great to see people people, you know, building careers, being successful at your company. And the impact of evolving that engagement score in that way is that it has— this is the graph where you can see our retention or attrition actually. So it's a percentage of people annualized attrition by quarter of Showpad. And so like we've seen a massive downward trend. Now we're actually close to like 20%. It's still too high for my liking at 600 employees. But so we're aiming to get it sub-20%, but really investing in culture, treating it as a product, investing in leadership, and making sure that your employees have a good understanding of their— what's my career path at Showpad? In the early days, you, you just don't— I'm not gonna say you don't care, but you're, again, you're 20, 30 people working hard. But the moment you come at like 50 people, 100 people, 200 people, you need to think about like how do careers of people, you know, what's the road of different roles and different level of experience at the company. And so this had a massive investment, massive impact on our attrition at the company. So around 20%, so basically means on average people stay 5 years at Showpad, which again, we'd love it to be higher, but I think that's already a good a good place to be. Then on to the bad. I think the first thing I want to talk about is creating a category. And you would hear this often, especially when talking with VCs or building new products. People always— there's generally sometimes there's a question like, are you building a new category? Are you creating a category? For some people, it's an obsession. And when we started Showpad, we're in the sales enablement category now. There, now there's a category. When we started Showpad, we did— we didn't have a clue of what category we were in. We were basically solving a specific problem for, you know, sales and marketing teams, and we're focused on delivering value there. But as you obviously start to talk with more customers, as you start to talk with VCs, as you start to talk with analysts, you start to realize like, okay, You know, if people are able to put your company, your software into a category, it actually helps with selling more deals. It helps with closing funding rounds because people have a better understanding in which space you're in. It impacts attracting certain talent to the company. So, but it's also extremely hard and it takes way more way more time than you would ever think to build out a category. And it's also something with Showpad. I think, again, in the early days, we were basically an iPad app for sales teams. Sales enablement wasn't a thing. Then as you spend time with analysts and you see this— we saw the term sales enablement come up. And there was one company at the time who was kind of a big owner of that category. But they were like an on-prem— super old-school software vendor. And so over time, you know, as you invest, you know, money in marketing, as you get more competition, I think here it's really important when creating a category, it's actually good to have some really strong and good competitors. I actually think it really helps to, you know, you can basically use some of their VC dollars as well to evangelize the space to create more awareness about the category you're in. And then you just have to make sure when people are researching your solution that you show up and that you can, you know, close and win those deals. But the reason why I think it's important, because it's, you know, understanding that category impacts marketing, product marketing in a big way, how you're positioning your solution. So I think that's That's really important. I think also another reason it's hard is, again, it takes a lot of dollars. You need to do so much evangelizing, show up at a lot of events, collaborate with other players in the space. I mean, if you think about the enablement category, so you have sales enablement, but then adjacent to Showpad, there's companies like a Clari or a Salesloft or an Outreach or a Sixth Sense. And again, all these players together do help to like build more momentum into the space. But again, that takes time. It takes patience. But the moment that that category is there— so for example, in the beginning, there were no Forrester Waves. There was no Gartner Magic Quadrant. Now there's been a couple of Forrester Waves on sales content management. And there's also a coming one on enablement. Gartner has now released several reports also covering our industry, not yet a Magic Quadrant, but they say it's coming. So again, it takes time. I think another great example, which I always love to give here as well, is Nick Mehta, who's a friend of mine. I think what he did with Gainsight and like really basically creating the customer success category is also a great example that it takes time. It's hard, but it's definitely worth it. The second thing which I think is really, you know, which at Showpad we definitely underestimated, and that's why I put it in the bad, because, you know, the things I put here in the bad is not necessarily because it's been bad for Showpad, but it's because it's been much harder than I thought it would be. And for us, that's been the evolution from going from single product to like a multi-product solution. And we started off as basically a content solution, right? Solving the content struggle for sellers, making sure they could find the right materials. As we evolved from that iPad app, we became available on the web. We integrated with CRM. You know, made sure we were available on iPads, tablets, smartphones, wherever sellers would live. The first thing that we solved was the content struggle. But again, as we build out that bigger vision, had that platform vision, realizing that if you want to make sure that sellers deliver a great buyer experience, you also have to make sure they're smart and informed, that they can engage with the modern buyer in a great way. And so we started developing you know, a roadmap around that. And that involved— we've done a number of acquisitions. So we've acquired a company called Hiccup, and they actually had built a platform to basically create experiences on top of Showpad. So imagine most sales teams, especially 10 years ago, they would just have PDFs, PowerPoints, and videos. Those were the most of the assets that they were using. We acquired a company that on top of our APIs had built like a solution to basically create more immersive experiences. Think about playbooks, guided selling, the kind of ROI calculators type of things which are way more engaging to interact with, with sellers. And so that was our first step into like becoming what I would describe multi-product, making sure we not only have a great way to, you know, find content, but then also like to, you know, create playbooks. That was a first step. Then we've started investing in what I would what we would call the engagement layer, which is more about like personalization, creating collections. Then we acquired a company called LearnCore, which was all about training and coaching because we believe like, okay, sellers, if they find the right content, that's great. If they can now personalize that and share that, then great. And marketing has— and sales have a lot of insights. But you also need to train and coach them in the right way because else they cannot deliver that great buyer experience. Acquired a company focused on training and coaching. And that really was the, I would say, the big step and kind of a manifestation of that platform vision. It was also like we acquired that company, it's now 3 years ago, but that also was a big struggle, or 4 years ago. It was also a big, big struggle in terms of integrating it. It took way more time to integrate that product. It totally changed how we we went to market. Our AEs, our customer success teams, they were used to talking, you know, content and engagement and those playbooks. That was all kind of like in the same realm and pretty easy to kind of, you know, pitch and sell. And we had like, I would say predominantly the marketing persona we were selling into. And being a sales enablement solution, a lot of the content is owned by marketing. But suddenly we're talking about sales training, sales coaching. You have to involve involved sales methodology. So the way, not only on the product side, we had to like figure out how to, you know, LearnCore was about 50 people, had about, I think at the time, might be off 1 or 2 million, probably 6 or 7 million in ARR at the time when we acquired them. And, you know, integrating that solution on the product side way more took, you know, we thought it would take like a year. It basically took us 2 years. But then also like retraining the whole go-to-market organization, making sure that people adapted to the value proposition which evolved, making sure that we from a product marketing point of view get our act together, making sure that, you know, your messaging in the market is consistent. I think that is something that we really underestimated because like you're basically, yeah, have to retrain and re-enable. I mean, the good thing is we have software our own solution, but we had to like go through a whole cycle of like retraining the entire go-to-market organization on that. And that was pretty tough. And as well, what happened, another thing, when we acquired LearnCore, 50% of their revenue came from selling into like HR organizations because they were a training and coaching platform and a lot of training, coaching, even some of those sales training courses were owned by HR at some companies. And 50% came from, from, yeah, the true sales use case. We made the wrong assumption that it would be quite easy to convert that other 50%, the 50% that was sold to HR, that we would say, yeah, you know, they will understand that they now need Showpad as well to like, you know, do more, and we'll get, we'll get a foot in the door with the marketing organization. And again, that was wrong. And so what happened is churn started to— we had basically up until that point always had like single-digit gross churn, amazing net retention. But suddenly like our gross churn was like double digits. It was like we had a year of like 50, going from like 8% to like 15% or 16% because we were churning out those customers who hadn't bought us for that use case that they were now part of. And again, that's tough. Like as a company, like you're— you're basically churning through revenue. The good thing is we got good traction on the platform side and we were able to basically evolve our customers from a single product line to now, you know, having a content product, a training and coaching product. We later on also acquired a company called Voicefox. Like, we have a bunch of customers using our meeting intelligence products, things like that. But it was definitely a tough journey and it took us, you know, way longer to evolve involved there. And if you're becoming multi-product, make sure you think through the steps very carefully and really think about like impacts on product marketing, enablement, all those things. Then we're on to the ugly, maybe the most interesting part here of the presentation. And I mean, obviously, you know, the journey of Showpad, there's always tougher moments when you scale a company. And I've decided to share like two things which I think are really key when scaling and where, you know, we've definitely had our struggles as we grew as a company. And I think this is an important one here, hiring the wrong executives. And the way I see it as a— CEO of the company or as, you know, leaders in your company, basically hiring the right talent is probably one of the most, most important things that you do, especially when you're scaling, and then making sure there's a structure in place to scale, also hiring the right talent into the companies. But obviously hiring executives is definitely one of the most important things a CEO needs to do. And I think that from my experience, like, The way I think about hiring execs, very simplistically put, is like you look at— there's obviously a skill experience element that's really important. There's the, I would say, the mindset of the people that you interview. And then there's also like a culture fit kind of. And it's linked to mindset, but still you could have people who are definitely an amazing cultural fit with the company, but maybe don't necessarily have the right mindset. And for example, an example would be You have an amazing, you know, big shot executive who definitely has proven that he or she could like scale into the next phase with your company. Has, you know, definitely, you know, you interview for the values and you see all those things, you know, check, check, check. Like you feel a great cultural fit with the company. But then there's also an aspect, for example, of mindset, meaning, you know, do they have the tenacity, the grit, like the drive to really make sure like to do maybe something that they've done one or twice already in the past again with all of the effort and intensity involved. And for me, I think— and timing here is super important. I think where I've made— when I made mistakes in executive hiring, for me, it centers around either compromising on the skill experience, mindset, cultural fit, and making a compromise there because you want to move too quickly. And second thing is like getting the timing wrong in the sense of like either bringing in somebody with too much experience too early or somebody who basically has the right experience for the moment, for the time that you're at, but not— who won't help you scale into that next phase. And ultimately, it's, you know, it's not an exact science. I think there's— yeah, there's there's a lot of time you spend as a CEO interviewing people. What I learned how to like do this better and how to really make sure that you, you get the right executives there is making it more of a collaborative effort at some point with— once you have hired some strong leaders, involve them as well in the hiring process. Be very deliberate what everybody interviews for, and also leverage your network and experts experts that you have in certain domains. Because, you know, to really then make sure— you definitely want to check, you know, to check off the skills and experience box, I think, is really easy. I think to check off mindset and cultural fit, which I do think are also two really important elements, just, you know, takes time and takes multiple people to interview because people will ask, you know, different questions, probe into different things. And another lesson that I learned there is take more time. Like, even when you're in pain in the sense of like, ah, we need this person now, and you found somebody who's maybe, you know, 80, 85% there, you're kind of like, maybe it's even 90, but you know, as long as you have, you know, some doubts, you know, don't settle. You know, dive in deep. And I think the moments that I haven't done that, And one example there is we were crossing like $10 million in ARR, growing really nicely, hired at some point in a short amount of time. We hired some executives into the US because, like, again, things were exploding there and we needed more leadership. And basically, as I reflect upon like some of the hires I made there, again, it was a compromise on one of the three dimensions there— skill, experience, mindset. 100% cultural fit and then getting the timing not 100% wrong. And at some point, basically what happened is I basically made the decision, like, I came to the conclusion, like, oh, my go-to-market leadership is, like, you know, off and decided to make a change. Was pretty tough because at some point, basically the entire go-to-market leadership, I decided to replace them, but I didn't have, like, any new people yet. So I ended up with, like, 18 direct reports, a pretty, a pretty tough couple of months. But, you know, took the time to like change the way we hire. Also, you know, having a bigger focus on diversity, for example, making sure we make more collaborative efforts, change the interview process. And I think eventually we came out a lot stronger. And then my last topic that I like to cover is CEO exhaustion, because I founded Showpad 11 years ago. Up until 2 months ago, you know, run the company as a CEO. Showpad basically has a big presence in the US, a big presence in Europe, which also meant I spent, you know, pre-pandemic for sure, spent a lot of time in the US, you know, lived for a couple of years, half time in the US, half time in Europe, in between a ton of travel. And for me, I think this is something that I, you know, I see a lot with fellow founders, fellow CEOs. I'm also a pretty active angel investor. And in the early days when I founded Showpad, it was basically, you know, basically you work day and night. You work through the weekends. Didn't have the most healthy lifestyle. I am basically, you know, not eating super healthy. Obviously, when you're building a company, it's fun to go out with the team, you know, drink some beers. A lot of travel, and then at moments there will be very intense moments as well of like, and maybe elevated stress, you know, fundraising, people who quit, big customer you lose, a release that's not on track, you know, there's always stuff happening, right? And for me, I always thought I'm immune to stress, I'm immune to like I can basically keep doing this for, you know, whenever, however, how long I wanted to do this. But, you know, in those 11 years I had like 2 episodes, and they lasted a couple of weeks, but I'm generally like a super good sleeper. Overall, I would say I've generally lived reasonably healthy, but definitely not the first years, way too short nights. I thought I didn't need sleep, you know, like the hustle culture, you know, like work hard, play hard. But at a certain moment in time, like, my body just said, like, I went from, like, being an extreme good sleeper and sleeping, like, literally I go to bed and a minute later I'm asleep, to, like, having insomnia and, like, laying awake all night, lying awake all night and saying, like, hey, fuck, like, you know, what is this? And, you know, eventually I made some change, you know, that made me realize, like, okay, health is, like, pretty important as a CEO. I think if you're exhausted, if you're tired, if you're fatigued, you're gonna make, you know, probably not the best decisions. It's gonna impact your team. It's impacting your company. It's impacting how you show up in front of investors, customers, the team, things like that. So as I had like my first kind of like, whoa, exhaustion episode where my body basically— and that insomnia was just a way of my body saying like, hey, PJ, like, after after, you know, 50 jet lags in the last couple of years and stuff like that, like, I need some rest. And basically started meditating, started being more focused on, you know, partying a little bit less with the team on the Friday nights or in the week or, you know, like, have a drink here and there, things like that. Really kind of living a super healthy lifestyle. It helped me to be a way better CEO, be more rested, and I see— I really think it's really important prioritize your well-being so that you're gonna show up better for your team, you're gonna show up better for the company. And for me, you know, those two episodes really learned me that I think as a founder, the most important thing that we all have is our health and our well-being. And I shared some of those stories as well internally with the company to also show like, hey, it's okay if you're fatigued, if you're feeling burned out, if you're you know, what is really important is also to, you know, recover. And it's like every, every great athlete in the world, you know, why they really perform is because they actually— there's moments of big intensity, races, you know, moments they need to show up and perform, but they also know really well how to recover and make sure that they listen, like, listen to their body, listen, picking up the signals of, okay, I need to rest or change my routines a bit or adapt. And for me, that has been a big change. I just pick up the signals earlier. I try to, you know, it's still super intense. And no matter what, like, building and growing a business is always gonna be intense, and it's always gonna be a lot of hard work, and there's gonna be moments that you're gonna be flat out for, you know, a couple of days, couple of weeks. But make sure that you pick up on the signals. I encourage you to definitely think about, like, hey, what can small habits can really improve lifestyle, productivity, and ultimately have a way better impact on the company. Because ultimately, the moments that I was fatigued and the moments that I wasn't showing up really well are also the moments that, again, you know, exec team notices it, the employees notice it. And again, think about that as you grow and scale your company. So I have 1 minute left and then we're going to do some Q&A. So start thinking about start thinking about your questions. Some of my key takeaways is I think— and maybe the first one I should maybe rephrase that a little bit. Like, the way that we start is like solve a specific problem. And we've actually— maybe it's maybe how the reverse of how some other companies have done it. But from solving that specific problem, we've built an amazing vision around that that helped helped us to guide our decisions and our product, and then really focused on building culture as a product in our company. The second thing is, if you want to build a category— and sometimes I'm jealous of fellow founder CEOs who have like a super clear, you know, buyer persona category they're in, very clear what they're disrupting, doing things— but no, if you, you want to create a category, it's going to take more time and, you know, quite a lot of, you know, dollars to make it happen. But it's also super rewarding and amazing if it works out and if you can grow, you know, once you get that kind of additional oxygen in your company because of you're part of a category now. And then I think in terms of hiring, make sure you hire the best for the next phase. Try to get that timing. Think about that timing. Think about those different dimensions which I shared. And make sure to prioritize your own well-being. Don't run into the exhaustion trap, which I've seen many people run into. And yeah, that's it. So I hope you guys enjoyed the session. And we have a mic over there, so feel free to ask me anything if I see any hands in the air. We're going to have a mic coming over. So I think we're going to take like a couple of 5 or 10 minutes or 15 minutes to do some questions. I see a question there.

Hey, my name is AC. I lead Stitch, a fashion tech company. I was really curious. You were talking about the step from 10 million to 100 million.

Yeah.

What's the biggest difference with the first phase when you went from 1 to 10?

I think 1 to 10 for me is you're way more— we were at least way more focused on like figuring out the product. Yes, we were already selling, but it was like not yet in a super repeatable way. So there was a big focus on the product. There was, I would say, less— we had less kind of KPIs to know like, hey, how are we doing on the go-to-market side? Like what is, for example, now Showpad runs of like 4 or 5 key metrics that we measure and we're really focused on improving. So it's, for example, LTV over CAC, and we want to see lifetime value over cost of acquisition. We want it to be, you know, at 4 or higher. That's where we want to be. We're looking at net retention. We always need to be, you know, we have certain targets per quarter depending on the renewal rate, but it's like we have targets there. We're looking at attrition, like we want to get that sub-20%. So we're doing a lot of— we focus a big group of people around those KPIs and try to make it clear how they influence it. I think in the first phase, it's like, it's a bit more chaos, I would say. It's a— you're less maybe— I mean, at least from our side, we were still kind of figuring out what is the category we're in. We were still figuring out like you're also like constantly upleveling that team. And I would say in the beginning you don't have managers, directors, VPs, all of those things. And, you know, obviously I think once you cross that $10 million mark, usually you're gonna be more than 100 employees. You need way more structure. You need to think about communication. You need to think about like things need to become a bit more repeatable. People expect— you need to give a bit more more guidance to people. I think that's the biggest change. Maybe in summary, it's more from chaos to a bit more structure, I would summarize it. So cool. I saw another hand here. Oh, there in the back. Cool. Hi, I'm Latawa, co-founder and CTO at Voice.

My question is, what structure of management meetings or executive meetings did you find worked?

At this stage? Yeah, so at our stage, we have a pretty simple structure. We basically have one executive meeting every week. And it's like, it lasts maximum 90 minutes. We try to make it shorter if possible. There's a good amount of work collaboration that we already do over Slack or over— I would say it's more Google Docs and Google Slides where we collaborate a lot. As a CEO, I had my weekly one-on-ones then with everybody on the exec team, and the only exception was I would probably spend 2 times— I had 2 meetings with the CFO and COO, but more like 30 minutes, like 2 times a week. And then we had a— we have a, like, every 2 weeks we do more kind of like a meeting more focused on the go-to-market side of things, which is like a longer meeting, which the go-to- market leadership runs. And again, they set an agenda. And we would have every 2 weeks a more product-focused meeting, which again, product would run. And we would make sure we would select the right leaders to be present in those meetings. Generally, I find meetings to be the biggest— maybe that's also a difference with 0 to 10 and 10 to 100 is like the more you grow, I think organizations As they grow and you have more leadership, it tends to increase the number of meetings. I would say as a founder CEO, try to fight super hard to limit the amount of meetings. Make them productive. Make sure that there's an agenda, that people take ownership, because I see a lot of time being wasted in basically useless meetings. So try to have as few as you can. Yes, there's a guy first. Okay, yeah, we'll pass along to you then. Perfect.

Can I go? Okay, first, thanks a lot. Uh, I do have two questions. The one is about how did you go from your service company at the beginning— I think it was an agency— yeah, to a product company.

Yeah.

And the second, if you can, if you can share What was the evolution of your, of the pricing of your product from when you started to now?

So agency to product, very short answer there. The agency still exists. We are 3 owners in that, in that business, no venture capital, and it's 160 people growing nicely organically and turning an EBITDA. I always, always joke that I know how to build a company that's profitable. But then, and how we did that is we were lucky that one of the co— one of our founders in that agency business decided not to, like, you know, join on the Showpad journey for his reasons. But we made it work, and we always— we basically surrounded and then made sure that our first founder in that service business had some great people to help him. Focused on the service side, and he's really excited about service and positive EBITDA and growing a business like that. And Louis and myself focused on the product. So I would say it was mainly due to the setup that we had. And the first 2 years, the businesses were somewhat intertwined, although we had set up pretty quickly separate legal entities, and there was a Chinese wall in between them in terms of, like, you know, people and, and and revenue and resources. But we did leverage some of the resources from our service business. But we would always— because we had a founder who was not in Showpad, basically, or we did give him a little bit of shares to make those conversations easier. But we would always make sure that we would have like a kind of like, OK, if we're using 100 hours of developers from our service business, we would basically add it to the depth of Showpad and say, hey, that's when we're going to pay it back. And then, sorry, what was your second question? Pricing. Pricing, yes. Pricing evolved. Like, in the beginning, we had a— basically, we had a free trial. We were kind of a PLG type of product in the early days. I think our pricing when we launched, it was like— it was good, better, best already from the start, basically. Very, you know, very basic. And basically the best was more kind of like had some enterprise functionality. The best— the good— sorry, the good was like very basic. Better, more around experiences. Best, enterprise. And I think it evolved from like, it's always been user-based, per user per month, one year upfront. I think the big difference now is that we always do— we don't do one-year contracts anymore. It's always 2 or 3-year contracts paid upfront for a year. And again, in the early days, it was still possible to pay with credit card and do monthly. And like, but Shopat sells into pretty traditional businesses. 75% of our revenue comes from like traditional businesses like Johnson Johnson or like big manufacturers, Schneider Electric, things like that, with big field sales forces. And so we went more into the enterprise route and also built it around services package there and added enterprise functionality. And so I would say now it's still 97% of our revenue is recurring. But we definitely— I think the pricing probably tripled on average probably over the last 11 years. I mean, that would be probably the summary. Where on average in the beginning was like $19 per user per month, I think I think we're now at, like, on the high side, probably closer to 100, and on the low side, probably closer to, like, 40, you know, 39, 40-ish. There was a question here. Yes?

Thank you very much. So, first question is, you mentioned competition. Yes. I was curious, how did you find your uniqueness? Second. What do you see as next in a market, big market trends in the sales sector?

Yep. So I think, how do you find— so good question on competition and uniqueness. I think how you find it is just spend a lot of time with your customers. I would say they, once you reach a certain scale, they have all the answers. And for example, what makes Showpad really unique is that whole experience layer that we have in terms of where you can take that content to like the next level in terms of like, we have customers doing obviously guided selling type of things, but also really interactive things like augmented reality or 3D things. And we've built a lot of, a lot of focus on traditional businesses and manufacturing companies and things like that. We've built a lot of like unique functionality there. And listen to your customers. I always say customers to the product team, customers, they have most of the answers, not all of them, but definitely a good amount. A good amount of the answers. And I think what's next for an industry, I think, I mean, obviously it's an exciting industry. There's a couple of big players in there. We have Seismic, Highspot, Showpad on the, like, I would say, enablement content-focused side. But it's also very interesting to see how, like, Salesloft, Outreach, Gong, Clari, we're all ultimately, I mean, we're solving different problems and many of those companies are very focused on the tech vertical. I mean, except for maybe Seismic. But I expect, I mean, there's been some form of consolidation already on training and coaching side. Seismic did some, for example, acquired Lessonly. We acquired LearnCore. Highspot created, for example, their own training and coaching product. Showpad was the very first to really put out that platform vision, and we've seen basically the competition mimic a lot of that. But at the end of the day, I still believe we're kind of like— I think enablement is at like 10% penetration today. I think it's still a massive market. And yeah, so what's next? Keep shipping great product and listening to our customers and scaling the business. Cool. Andreas, that's a familiar face. So I'm a bit scared. Scared of the question that's gonna come. There's a mic.

All right, this will help. Well, as you grow as a founder and as the company grows, I think of it as a bit of like a pyramid. Like, for a half a million or $1 million ARR enterprise SaaS business, there's dozens of founders who've done it. Once you get to like the, like the unicorn kind of kind of region, there's not that many people who have been there. But how do you keep, like, finding people to learn from? Where do you keep learning as the resources grow a lot scarcer?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, from my side, and I think one of the biggest journeys of going from 10 to 100 is probably— it's also a very, you know, there's the journey of the business, you know, revenue, customers, team, growing the team. I think there's also a really big journey as a person. It's probably the biggest journey in that sense, is like how you evolve and grow as a person. For me, there's a couple of things. One, I've had, you know, I've had in the last 7 or 8 years, I've had 2 different like executive coaches which I took, which helped me more work on certain, you know, work through certain kind of, call it more personal kind of growth, you know, growth that you want to have as a leader, how you show up, how you deal with some of the challenges. I think there's always— I think as you scale, usually it means you're going to raise money from investors. Hopefully they're good investors. They usually have a lot of portfolio companies which have been on that journey. And I think they— what I really enjoyed a lot is like our investors organizing, you know, very, you know, in a very intimate setting, smaller events where you can spend, you know, obviously SaaS is great and in a short amount of time you can meet meet, you know, a lot of people and have great conversations. But they, you know, as a founder CEO, sometimes you also want to have deeper conversations on some of the maybe tougher topics. And then for me, what worked really well is like, for example, Don Capital or also Insight. They've organized events where you can, you know, connect more in-depth with peers. And also then obviously after those connections, like, you, you keep those conversations going. And for me, that's always been interesting. Just learning from other CEOs, other founders, I think is probably one of the best ways. And just talking and listening. And it's not always this 100% identical problem they have, but it's you or other people have it. It's usually like 90% close, and you can really learn a lot from it. I don't believe in like there's a fixed playbook to do this. I think, yes, there's a general understanding of how to like scale, go to market, and do certain things and solve certain problems. But I think then you have to make it your own and kind of apply that to your own business and find great people to help you do that. So cool. I don't know how much longer we can go for it. I'm happy to take a couple of more questions. And I'm going to be here the next two days. So if you see me, you can quickly spot me with my bald head. So always feel free to approach me. So maybe a last question, if that's fine for you. Yes. Thanks, great talk. What was the biggest challenge you faced with one of the 3 acquisitions that you had on the board? That I would say that the biggest— for me, the biggest challenge was around like really, really not making the right assumption on like how As a founder CEO, you live and breathe the product. You live and breathe the— you know the market. You understand why an acquisition makes sense. You can easily explain it in a couple of sentences. It makes sense on— when you talk about it, it makes sense on slides. It makes sense if you look at the two products. It even makes sense if you talk to customers. The challenge is, if you at that time, if you have more than 100 people in your go-to-market organization, who have for the last couple of years have been going to market with a certain message, with a certain, you know, how do we, how we looked at the world, how we talk about the world. And we've, you know, we suddenly started to pivot really strongly from our side from being, you know, everything starts with content to like being super focused to everything starts with like the platform. And that platform proposition, I would say that the biggest challenge was like, making sure that then from— because it also impacts product and engineering, how they think about the product. It impacts your AEs, how they talk to your customers. It impacts customer success when they want to do an upsell. And so really underestimating— it's not because it makes sense for you and then in here and even with your leadership team around the table and everybody's aligned. And yes, then executing that, I think, That was way harder than I would have ever imagined. It's also great if it then works. I mean, now I think if I look at platform revenue from Showpad, not single product, we're a couple of years later now. 70% of it is platform. So great. But it was definitely— we went through a couple of challenges there.