Lessons from Logikcull: $0 to $10M in 19 Months: The How, When & Why + 10 Mistakes Along the Way

Please welcome andy wilson, CEO logical. All right. Okay. Thanks for having me. So a couple months ago, Jason emailed me and asked me if I could speak at Saastr. And I said, yes, absolutely. What do you want me to talk about? And he said, tell them about all the mistakes you've made. I said, okay, I don't know if we have enough time for that, but I'll try. So he came up with this topic of how we ended up going from 0 to 10 million in revenue in less than 20 months and the 10 mistakes that we made along the way. And thinking about this, I was thinking about the audience here. And so hopefully I've got this right. So a quick show of hands. How many of you are founders? Oh, my God. All right, how many of you are early stage founders? Okay. About half. All right. Okay, good. I think I got this right because I was thinking, you know, what would I have wanted to know, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, that would be helpful. And so that's how I came up with this presentation. You know, we're not going to talk about SAS unit economics or anything like that. This is going to be founder stuff, and hopefully that's gonna be helpful for you guys. Let's see here. Okay, so a little bit about me. Logical is not like new relic. It was just up here. I've been making mistakes for 15 years. Is that coming up? There we go. Okay, going on 15 years of mistakes here. We are not yet a publicly traded company because we weren't always a SaaS company company. We were a services company started in Washington, D.C. we wrote software. And the service that we did is not too dissimilar to what we do today. Basically, big banks and law firms and government agencies would ship us data for these large litigations, investigations. We would process it and then we would ship it back and we would charge them lots of money for that. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars. It was a great business. We made a lot of money. And so naturally we decided to blow it up and build a SaaS business. No, I am not a lawyer, but I do make legal tech. So during the recession, we had this idea of what if we could automate this whole service and democratize it so anybody could do this, and we decided to do that. So we basically killed the services business and built a software as a service business. It took us a long time. I thought it would be done in two years. It took us four years. And we've been a SaaS company ever since. Jason Lemkin. So this picture that you see here, that's Jason and I me pre beard. I normally don't have a beard. This is a revenue milestone beard. It's going to come off once we hit the revenue number, which hopefully is going to be tomorrow. We're all impatient about that, much to my 7 year old daughter's chagrin. She can't stand it because I give her a kiss goodnight and she tells me that when I'm sleeping she's going to shave it off, which is terrifying if you think about that. So I'm sleeping with one eye open these days, but that's Jason and I. Jason. I've known Jason for what seems like 50 years in SAS world because it all compounds and I've known him for about five years in the real world. He led our series Seed back when Saster was just a tiny group of people, not this enormous amazing community that it is today. And he was on our board for many years. And he's a close friend and an awesome investor. Hopefully you guys get him as an investor one day. He is fantastic, especially for early stage. Okay, so the way I constructed these slides is around themes. So we're going to talk about selling, we're going to talk about hiring, firing, culturing, if that's a word. And there's little mistakes in here and hopefully tips that you guys can take away as you're building your business. So let's first talk about selling because that's what we're all trying to do. We're all trying to sell more, faster. The biggest learning here, and some of this is going to be somewhat obvious generic advice, but for me it wasn't this way. Sell the way your customers want to buy. It sounds obvious, but in hindsight it actually is not obvious. I think too often we put our business model or our own personal goals ahead of what the customer actually wants to do. And I'm going to circle back to this at the end because that's ultimately, I think that the biggest learning here. Let's talk about pricing. I've made a ton of pricing mistakes from packaging the software incorrectly to pricing too much or too little. I think a lot of founders struggle with this. You know, it's often cited that founders will underprice their products. I think that's very true because it's. It's easier for us to build these things and hard to understand the value that you create for the customer and how to capture that value. There's a really simple way of thinking about this that I found to be really useful. Is to find out what your ROI is in terms of either time saved or money saved, something like that, and keep it around. 10x doesn't need to be much more than that. If it's way more than that, maybe you're actually leaving money on the table. So as an example, if you're trying to get somebody to switch from something old to something new, and today it costs $100,000, maybe your product should be more like $10,000. It makes the switching costs, which is a very real thing, a lot easier for customers to process. Loss aversion is a very real thing that I think a lot of us face, especially in the B2B world where you're trying to get people to switch for something old that was built in the 80s, 90s or early 2000s, is something new and more modern in SaaS. So aim for that 10x ratio. The other thing that I wish I had done early on, and we've only just now started to do this for about the past two years, is to template your sales process early on. This slide over here, that screenshot is from David Scott's Matrix Academy. I highly recommend you go to his blog for entrepreneurs. Com and devour every single piece of content. It is amazing. But this is. This is the one slide. That or this picture that I wish we had printed on every wall in the company. Because, you know, I think as founders we get really impatient and you're going to want to jump ahead in these steps. And if you do that and say as an example, you don't have a repeatable sales process just yet and you start hiring more salespeople, it never goes well. I've made that mistake and I recommend you guys don't do that. And you can, you can avoid that by following this basic process. And this is totally ripped off from his stuff. It's not mine. But think about this. You have to prove it out yourself as a founder, then you start hiring more people to make that repeatable and you want to template that process as early on as possible. Another way to think about this is to treat your SaaS business like a franchise. Really good book that I read early on. It was recommended to me by another entrepreneur. Was the E Myth Revisited. Some of you may have read that book. The. The basic premise of that book is when you're building your SaaS business, think of it like a franchise. Franchises are some of the best business models in the world. It's like software. You just copy and paste it, you know, all around the world. And you can do that Same exact thing with your SaaS business. Okay, more on selling. There's a lot more on selling, because, again, I think that's what we're all. That's tight top of mind here, like, how can we sell more? I made this mistake early on. You know, I think a lot of us in the B2B space especially, you probably have a product that can solve multiple use cases. And that's attractive because, you know, when you're pitching investors like, oh, well, we can try this, and then we can move into this, and we can do that. Just do one, find the one that is so incredibly valuable to the customer and nail that. Then go find 10 to 100 prospects that you think have that same use case fit, if you will, because it's not so much about product market fit, I think, at that stage, and see if you can solve that problem for them as well and make that repeatable. This is something that I think a lot of us are probably doing today, either intentionally or unintentionally, and that is getting your successful customers to write reviews for your service online. Right. Well, how do you do that? What we've done, we've automated it. Now, whenever somebody gives us a score of a 9 or a 10 in our NPS and we wrote just a little widget that comes into the application, the next day, they get an email from our marketing team that says, hey, awesome, you're enjoying the service. Would you please go write a review for us on Capterra G2 crowd software advice. We offer up a $25 gift certificate for that. It's an easy hack to do. My son does this with his, excuse me, with his pet sitting business. He's 12 years old, and after he closes, the customer and the owners come home, he asks them, how did I do? Scale of 1 to 10? And if they say 9 or 10, he says, please write a review for me on Nextdoor. And he gets a lot of business that way. And you guys can do the exact same thing if you follow that process of use case. So once you've nailed that use case, then go try another one. My business is doing this exact same thing right now. We got early traction with a new use case for our product, which, by the way, is a product that you probably haven't heard of, because we are not. You guys are not our customers, and hopefully you never have to use our product. It's for discovery investigations, litigations, those types of things. If you've read much about the Mueller hack that just happened, where they got all these emails that's the area that logical plays in. Or you might have heard of the Scott Pruitt case, where with him getting ousted from discovering all those emails. The Sierra Club and the New York Times used logical to do that type of work. So find those use cases and then rinse, repeat on those as much as you possibly can. Okay, Last one on selling. Early on, we did not have a pitch deck. Some of you probably have pitch decks and you probably change them up a lot. I know I do from time to time. But I didn't have a pitch deck early on. I think that was a mistake. And the reason why the pitch deck exists is you're trying to tell a story. You know, you want to go right into the product. You want to show the customer, like, all these amazing things that you can do for them, but they don't have the context of why you created this thing to begin with. You know, what is it that got you to come up with this idea? Like, what's getting you out of bed in the morning? What is the problem in the world that you see that only your product can help solve for them? So you need a pitch deck to do that. And there's a really simple way of constructing these pitch decks. It should not be about you, number one. And that's the tendency. Like, when I first started making pitch decks, I would put up the big logo slide from the very beginning. Like, look at all our amazing customers. No one cares about that. What they care about is, do you understand the problem that they have, which is the status quo? So start there. Like, what is the status quo? And then what happens to the people that continue on the status quo if they don't do anything? And then what happens to the people when they do do something? What's that? Promised land state? And that's the story that you need to paint that your product can only solve for them. There's some really great resources online that you can go to for that. Like, Andy Raskin has written some really good blog posts around this. But that's the way you want to construct your deck. So think of it as if you were to outline it something about them. Right? People love to talk about themselves. You know, put some research into who your customers are, let them know that you've done that little bit about you. Then the problem, then go into demo. Right? Pretty, pretty simple process. But I think to founders, it can not be so obvious. The second thing about pitch decks is you want to keep this really short. You don't want to moan on and on and on. And on and on. Right. Like I'm going to be doing up here for the next according 28 minutes. But you want to keep it really short and try and keep that under five minutes. And that's a challenge, especially as you're templating your process early on. But you can do it. And then once you find something that's working really well, you're going to know it because. And this usually happens on the status quo side when you're showing the customer like, hey, I understand your problem. They will tell you, that's right. There's a really great book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. He's a famous negotiator. I recommend you read that. And this is one of the tips from his book. And I've seen this time and time again. You'll hear some sort of flavor of this as you're giving your deck. Like, oh, that's right, you understand me. And you're building trust when you do that. So it's a small thing. So when you're delivering those decks, think about that. And if you hear that, you know you've got something right. And until you hear that, keep iterating on that deck and it'll get better over time. Okay, switching gears here. Let's talk about hiring. Product is one thing. Hiring is a whole nother thing, right? You can build the best product in the world, but if you don't hire the right people at the right time, you probably aren't going to build a really great business. And I think all of us in this room suffer from some form of imposter syndrome at some time, like, can't believe you're running this company, that kind of thing. I will tell you this. You are much better than you realize. And don't take that for granted. Keep the reality distortion fields to a minimum, of course, but just believe in yourself when you're in these tough situations that said, hire better than you. You want to get somebody that's another level or two beyond where you want to be. Not too far beyond. You don't want to go hire some huge CRO too early in your company. Most likely, maybe you need a sales manager to help those early reps get to scale faster. When you bring on executives, especially like we all have to hire executives, the tendency is to think that they're just going to sprinkle magical fairy dust on things and make everything better. And sometimes that happens. But there's a lot of knowledge transfer that needs to occur. You know a lot about your business, much more than they will ever know. And you need to transfer that knowledge with them. And they're going to transfer whatever they know into your head. So don't give them too much rope too soon. You don't want to let them hang themselves. And a way to solve that, that I've done at least since it's worked, is you block out a conference room or whatever room for the first 90 days. And you guys, you all sit in the same room together, you're gonna know within that first 90 days if this person is the right person for this job. And that's a good hack to do that. So more on hiring. Okay, I've made this mistake a lot where you've hired just based on, man, this person's really cool, really awesome. I get along with them. I could get beers with them. Don't do that. That's like the culture side of hiring. But hiring is really more about competence. Can this person do the job that you need them to do? Plain and simple, culture is number one. And I have a structure that I use and teach to my team whenever they're hiring called the three Cs. They have to pass the culture fit. And culture fit is really simple. It's what are your core values? What are the behaviors that represent your people to be true? Like don't just make them up or steal them from some other company and design questions around that. I'll get to more of that in a bit. And then can they do the job competence wise? So if somebody fails the culture fit test, then forget about it. It's never going to work. Ever. I've tried that. I've done that before where I've hired somebody who is really smart and. And you get a competent jerk. It doesn't work. So try and get the culture fit nailed down, then competence fit, then compensation fit and do that in the first call. Don't waste anybody's time bringing somebody in who you think is really cool but can't actually do the job because you didn't assess competence fit. And maybe it's too expensive to actually join your company. You can get all this done in your first phone screen. Trust me, if you design this the right way and you will save so much time doing interviews. So don't trust your gut. So how do you avoid the problem with your gut? Sometimes your gut will be right, but more often than not, you should sanity check that with data. One of the things that we've done that's worked remarkably well and we didn't do this in the beginning, we've Made tons of hiring mistakes. I mean, I've been doing this for 15 years. I've hired and fired a lot of people is to write down the objectives of the job. Seems pretty simple, right? Some jobs, this is easier than others, like sales, pretty basic. Like if you have a quota that you need somebody to hit within a certain amount of time, that is an objective. You write that down and that's part of the job ad. So people know what they're walking into. What do you expect on a sales cycle? What do you expect on their daily metrics? What do you want these people to be doing day in and day out? You gotta be careful here because you don't want to be too rigid, especially early on. But you should be clear about the objectives of the job. You can do this with everything. Customer success, marketing, how many leads do you need them to generate? So it's not a surprise when you bring these people in and you're like, oh, yeah, well, no, you have to sell a million dollars. I've never done that before. So write down the objectives. There's a really good book I read a lot, primarily business books. There's a really good book called who that has a framework that I recommend called the Scorecard, and it maps well to this. You write down your 10 primary criteria for every single job. If you have somebody in your organization that wants to hire somebody today, you make them go through this process, right? They're going to want to hire ASAP because there's a burning fire somewhere. But make them go through this process of defining who this person is, what the objectives are for the job, and follow a rigid hiring process and you will hire better. This is another good hack that we've done that I wish I had done early on. And it saves so much time. It's old school, but it works. So after that first phone screen, when you're doing the culture fit, you're doing the competence fit, and you're doing the compensation fit. Now, some people in here are probably in hr. In California, you can't ask people how much they make today, but. But you can ask around comp expectations, but you have to be able to respond back with what you pay for this job, right? That's just the rule of the land in California. Some of you that are not in California, you probably have different rules. So check with your HR people about that. But once you've assessed the three Cs, and you're checking the box like, okay, this person's within our price range, they seem smart. They seem like a Good culture fit. Go old school and send them a survey. And hopefully your survey is mapped to culture and competence. This is how we do it. Part one and part two. It's a Google document. There's 10 questions for culture that map to our core values and the behaviors that we want in people that work at our company. And then there's 10 questions that map to the job and those are always specific to the job. And you send that to them as an attachment word document or share them out with a Google document and you ask them, hey, could you complete this 24 to 48 hours before your next phone screen? That's it. That's like test number one. You would be shocked how many people who you think are amazing can't complete that simple deadline. Like really amazing, seemingly qualified people just don't do that. And that's an instant way or not instant way. But it's a very quick way of disqualifying somebody because if they can't fill out a survey that takes them one to two hours of their time, do you really want to spend the next thousand hours with them? Probably not. It's really easy way of assessing it. The second thing that you can do with the culture and competence survey is you use this for the rest of the interview process. So you share this with the hiring team and as you're going through the hiring process, maybe you do panel interviews. Those are a really good thing to do to save people time. They're using this content to ask questions like, okay, here it says that you did X on Y. Tell me more about that and it'll save you a ton of time. Okay, flip side of hiring is firing. We all hate to make fires, most likely, unless you're this guy. So the one thing that I'll say about firing and it's going on 15 years now, the first 90 days of an employee's journey almost looks the next 900 days almost exactly the same. Very rarely do you see somebody that comes on in 90 days is remarkably different than they were in 900 days. Now obviously they're going to learn new skills along those times, but you will know if this person's really a culture fit within 90 days, can they actually do the job within 90 days? And back to what I was mentioning, when the culture surveys and those things, it'll prevent those things from happening. One of the things that we've done to eliminate the problem of hiring somebody and being a mis hire is we have a mutual 90 day agreement. So if you think about it from the employees perspective, they're taking a gamble on joining your company. This is part of their career and they don't know yet if it's going to be the right decision. And the same thing for you, your trust battery is not full yet. For most of the people, some people you know, it's a known thing. But most people you don't know these people, they're strangers or they're connected to a friend of a friend, those types of things. During that first 90 days, do 30 day check ins and you're assessing whether or not they still think it's a good fit, right? So put yourself in the employee's shoes, is this still really good fit? And the manager's shoes, is this still a really good fit? And the way that you can do that is a simple thing around agreements. So we talk a lot about setting expectations. Like you guys have all said that. I bet you said that in the past week. Like let's set expectations. Don't set expectations, set agreements. Get agreements with people. You have an agreement that this is the job that we need you to do, not my expectations. Because expectations are usually one sided. It's what you think, right? An agreement is a contract between you and the employee and it doesn't have to be cold hearted or anything, it's just simple. You know, like as an example, when you, when you hire a contractor to put a roof on your house, do you, do you sign an expectation document? No. You sign agreements and the same is true with employees and try not to make as many assumptions. Okay? So when it comes to firing, one of the mistakes that I think we all make is we get really emotional. It's hard not to, especially when you're upset. And it's usually you're upset with yourself that you made this mistake of hiring this person and you know it, but you don't want to admit it and you just want to get them out of here as soon as possible. And so you'll, you end up going emotional and passive aggressive and it's just messy and then lawsuits happen, then you're signing up for logical and that's bad but we will take your money. So you know the one thing I will say with firing and these call involve all stack together, right? Like if you've done a good job of hiring and you've got a good funnel in place and you got an agreement, it's not just this one side expectation that the other person doesn't really know about. Letting somebody go shouldn't be complicated and it shouldn't be an unknown like out of the blue, they shouldn't just wake up like, wait a minute, I'm fired? Why am I fired? What did I do? It's like, well, you didn't own up to our agreements to be simple. But I would say just be compassionate. Like, again, these people, they took a risk on you. You were excited about them. On day one, you might have posted on Facebook or LinkedIn, got pictures together, you spent time together. Obviously, some things are outside the normative. If they committed something illegal or violated your code of conduct in some way, that's a separate, separate thing. But more often than not, that's not the case. Just be compassionate with these people and try and remove the emotion as much as possible. And then lastly, related to the 90 days and 900, pay them to leave. Make it easy and make it rich. That next. If you're not happy within the 90 days, trust me that next 900 days, you are not going to get any happier. So if you think about that and just the time value of money or just the value of your time, it's very expensive. This is time you're never, ever going to get back. And you really want to continue working with this person, just pay them. We have this mutual agreement where we will pay somebody roughly a whole month of their salary to go, and it makes it easy for them to walk away. Now, your goal is to make it so that never happens, right? So that you never have somebody take you up on that offer. When we're recruiting people at the very beginning, right after that survey, we talk to them about this so that they understand what it's like to work here. It's like, hey, if you don't think it's a good fit, no big deal, you can take the money and go. And it very rarely happens. And our goal is to get it to zero. But paying them to leave is actually a lot cheaper than keeping them on. This is especially true for salespeople because salespeople, especially in the SaaS world, if you have a compounded revenue model, if they are missing their number, you are going to miss an incredible amount of compounding revenue and you want to get them out as fast as possible. Okay, let's talk about advisors. This is a. It's kind of like a black art. Like there's not a lot of. At least that I've seen a lot of good content or talks about how to build an advisory board. Like, how do you do this stuff? And man, if you do this early on, it's similar to sas. It all compounds. It's Pretty incredible. And I wish I had done this early on. I did not, and it's a mistake. But I've now rectified that and what I've done. And I think you guys would find this really helpful, is you find the best advisor for each functional role, because you are not going to be great at everything as CEOs, you're doing everything, taking out the trash, picking up the trash in the hallways, you name it. You're basically just a trash man. So. And you're not an amazing sales leader or marketing leader. A product like there's somebody out there that's better than you, go find them and hook them up with your functional leader, each one. And so how do you do that? Similar to how you would get introduced to a venture capitalist. You can cold email them. Go ahead, do that. Or you could get introduced to them by somebody else that they're connected to. That's what I've done. I've reached out. Just use LinkedIn, it's pretty simple. And get introduced to people that you think would be a really great value add. And you're going to want to look for people that are maybe a stage or two beyond where you want to go, right? You know, maybe two years beyond, three years beyond, something like that. I've gotten people like Jeff, Diana, former Chief people Officer Atlassian, to help out with our HR team. Mercy Grace, she ran, she was the original product manager at Slack to help our product team. Dan Fougere, chief revenue officer at Datadog, which is an amazing company to help out with sales. And I got introduced to them, right, and you guys can do the exact same thing. So how do you pay them and what do you ask of them? 1 hour of their time a month will go a long way. And you schedule this in advance because they're busy people, just like you guys. But you ask for one hour a month for one year. That's a typical advisory agreement. And how much do you pay them? Well, you don't want to actually give them any money. An advisor that asks for money is probably not an advisor you want on your team, because an advisor is trying to help you grow the business. Right? They're trying to expand that share price. And if you pay them cash out of the balance sheet, it's actually decreasing it. And it's a small amount, but it's counterproductive. So you want to give them equity options in your company. Well, how do you do that? The way that I've structured it is real simple. What would I pay this person as A consultant. If I were to meet them at a party and say, hey, I really have this problem, can you help me to do this? How much would I pay them? Now, of course, this will vary, but a good rule of thumb is $1,000 an hour. That's how much I would pay somebody for their time. And so you're thinking, okay, that's 12 hours out of the year. If you commit to that, well, just divide that, that's $12,000 divided by what your last par value is or preferred price is, and boom, there's your options, that's it. And they vest within the year and you can renew it every year. I've had advisors that have been with the company now for three years and I refresh their grants every year and I have calls with them every month pre scheduled. It's amazing. And you also get introduced to their networks. So your networks just get stronger and stronger and stronger. If you're not doing this today, I highly, highly recommend you start doing it. Okay, let's switch gears and talk about culture. Okay, so as the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner, right? But if you have no strategy, your culture will starve. So if you think about it, you should probably start with strategy first and then build the right culture to execute on that strategy. It's a non obvious thing, but it actually makes a lot of sense. And it's true that if you do have a strong culture, you can crush that strategy. But you got to think about it in reverse. And the one way to do this is around core values. I've talked with a lot of CEOs and executives, amazing companies, and if you ask them about how they make decisions, oftentimes they will cite a core value. This just happened to me 30 minutes ago when I was talking with Doug Song, who is the CEO of Duo Security. We recently brought on a board director that was his president and coo. We were talking about that and he mentioned one of the state's core values, which I might end up adopting because I really like it, is engineer the business. I was like, oh, that's amazing. I had dinner once with John Chambers at Cisco and I asked him like, why didn't you buy this company and why did you buy this company? And. And every question he just kept coming back with was core values. That company didn't align with our core values. He's from West Virginia, has a super West Virginia accent, which I can't do clearly. But core values are really important and there's a right way to do them. And A wrong way. This is my opinion. I think you have to choose core values that are true to you and you're not just gonna come up with them in a room with two people. If you've got more people in the company, you should involve everybody. And they have to be true. They can't just be something stolen off of a website somewhere. They have to be something about your company. And I suggest you choose roughly five. And the only reason for that is it's hard to remember more than five. And we're all smart people. But five seems about right. We have four. Start with the why Pursue powerful simplicity, put the customer first and do the right thing. I highly recommend if you don't have do the right thing and you are a tech company, maybe you should think about that. Especially as we get more and more data. As you've been seeing about Facebook and Google these days, it'd be great if they had those values. The third thing I'll say about core values is make them actionable. When you make them actionable, they can become part of your whole core operating system. So we intentionally put, start, pursue, et cetera. And we didn't always have core values and it was a nightmare. We didn't hire the right people because we didn't have this operating system. We didn't make the right decisions because we didn't have this operating system. And this just makes life a little bit easier. And core values and behaviors are different. I think this often gets confusing, right? Like they don't map with our core values. Well, the core values are the way that you make decisions. Behaviors are what you expect of each other. We created our behaviors based off of my co founder who actually made his name into. He's sitting right there. Made his name into an acronym. Smart. His name is Shan. Smart and not arrogant, Humble and hardworking, Entrepreneurial and not risk averse. Nice and not a pushover. And grit and lots of it. So those are the behaviors that we expect within the company. And they're honest. That's what represents our company. And so when you do this right, you can use them for everything. You know those culture surveys that I mentioned earlier, those map to core values and behaviors. Same thing. Same thing with firing. Like I fired people that violated our core values and behaviors. You can't tolerate that. Right. What you want is people in that top right corner of aptitude and attitude. Like that's an outstanding employee. Somebody that best represents the values and the behaviors that you pride. Okay, so more on culturing, let's talk about communication. Communication and culture are really important, especially as you start to scale. You get into the phone game where it's really hard to understand what's actually going on. Connected to this is meeting cadence. I wish I had thought about this more early on, and I didn't. And you get into a meeting culture, and meeting cultures suck. Most of you guys probably escaped some company that had some horrible meeting culture where it's like, we gotta create a meeting to talk about this thing. Can't that just be an email? More often than not, it is. I'm guessing 90% of corporate meetings should be in some sort of email, at least at the big companies. So the way to think through this is to productize your meeting structure and think about your meeting structure throughout the year. Like, what is a logical cadence? Think about the meetings that you should have on an annual basis, a quarterly basis, a monthly basis, and a weekly basis. And then design the rules around those meetings, right? Like one simple rule that will save your employees an enormous amount of time and you have to live by this is if somebody calls a meeting and doesn't put an agenda together, no meeting, don't do it. That's a waste of time. Make sure that they put their thoughts down on paper. You will save people a ton of time. This is a fun hack to do as you scale. So this probably is relevant to you after maybe 30, 50 employees somewhere around there. So, you know, you probably do all hands. You probably do like team meetups, those types of things. You know, learning via all hands is helpful, but asynchronous learning is also helpful. This is a really great hack. So all of your functional leaders, have them do a newsletter every week, every Friday. And a structure, simple structure. They can go super long if they want, or super short. You probably all have goals that you're doing, you know, monthly or quarterly or even weekly if you're super early stage. But have them list out their goals, like how the progress is going, what the highlights were that week, what the lowlights were, and what the learnings. Super easy, right? And put it into a Google group. And that way your employees and your future employees can just subscribe to it. If they want to learn about what's happening in the product org or engineering or sales or marketing, they just subscribe to it. You don't have to spam everybody. Pretty simple. Another fun hack that I found to be super helpful is Notes from the Road. So if you're visiting customers, which I highly recommend you do, it's where you get to see the future. Have people Send out the notes from the road on what they learned from the customer, key quotes that were said, what they liked about the product, what they didn't like, what they might have learned about the competitors, and have that go out to the whole company. People love it. And then lastly, this is for the CEOs in the room. This requires a lot of discipline. But every Monday at 8 o' clock in the morning, email goes out to you, to all of your employees. Why do this? It's good for you to keep in touch with what's going on in the company and for the employees to hear your voice. You can control your messaging this way. That way people don't take things out of context because you are literally putting things into context. It's really easy. Email is great and it's pretty simple to do. I write mine on Sunday, it takes me about an hour or two and I use those Friday updates to learn what's going on, what are the little projects that I wasn't aware of so that I can highlight that. And so people see like, okay, CEOs actually watching this. It's a really good way to build positive culture. So lastly, let's talk about your why. So SaaS is a business model and unless you're Jason Lemkin, it is not your mission. And the business model is pretty well baked, right? And then everything else is, I think, pretty unique to the companies that are scaling. Like, why haven't I talked a lot about 0 to 19? Because that's my story. I can't tell you all the different things around that. It's probably not applicable to you. So hopefully this is applicable to you. The other thing that's related to this is I think we often forget this software as a service, not as a subscription. Of course we all want subscription revenue. Who doesn't want a compounded asset like that? That's an amazing thing. But maybe your customers don't want that. I would guess a lot of you in this room are trying to disrupt some part of the $10 trillion US services market with a software solution. Well, guess what, they don't buy software often for services. Take my example. I'm in the legal space. Legal is a $10 billion market in the United States, or, sorry, it's a 450 billion dollar market. My segment is about $10 billion. And they're not used to buying software, they're used to buying services. So you might actually need to start there, you know, sell them a way that they want to buy back to what I started in the beginning and then lastly, you know, you guys, again, you all came up with these ideas for very good reasons. You know, what is it that you're trying to do? What are you trying to disrupt? What is the mission? What is your reason for existing? Put that ahead of the business model every time. And finally, sell the way your customers want to buy. Just ask them. Don't copy the competitors. Maybe they're not doing it right. Go ask your customers, what do you like about the way that we're selling the product? It's a pretty obvious question to ask, but sometimes we naively think that that's what they want. Just ask them. And when you do that, something like this could happen. We weren't doing that for a long time, and the second that we said, hey, how would you like to buy this software? Holy moly. We went from 100 customers and starting in March of 2017, and that took us three years to do, to 600 customers in December of that same year. And then last year, we added another 740 customers, and it's just taken off like a rocket ship. And I firmly believe if you follow this basic structure of selling the way your customer wants to buy, I think you can do the exact same thing. Thank you.