Live Workshop Wednesday: Your Belated SaaS New Year's Resolutions with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin
Jason Lemkin walks through nine growth layers SaaS companies can add this year, from outbound sales to international expansion. He uses examples like HubSpot and RevenueCat, then answers founder questions on advisory boards and multi-product strategy.
Chapters
Wednesday. We have our backup speaker today, Jason M. Lemkin, CEO and co founder of Saster. We move things around. We've got a, we've got, I don't know what. Amelia, 10 different sessions for Saster AI Day next week and next Tuesday.
Yep, next Tuesday starting at 8am Pacific. Yeah, we've got 10, probably 10 speakers, six different sessions. We just added another one. So yeah, full, full day of content.
Full day of content on AI and SaaS. We had the ex head of marketing from Cohere I think going to do it. You move to AI day to be more so if you haven't signed up, it's free, it's digital. Jump into a session or two. What's the URL? Amelia? Saster aid2025netedu what's the URL? Just saster aid.comsasterai day.com any caps or. No, just saster aid.com okay, next week. So I, yeah, what I thought I would do today, and I'll go through this calmly but as expediently as possible is some, what seems like some pretty basic stuff, but this is where I find, especially in the beginning of the year, this is what separates the folks that are going to have a great year versus those that are going to have a mid year. And it's if you're adding a layer, if you're adding a layer, if you're really wanting, not only doing everything you had to do last year, which was hard enough, not only do you have to hit the plan and make the hires and make your 100,000, 10,000 customers happy, not only do you have to drive up NRR and drive down Churn and solve those 82 feature gaps and build that integration, but you got to add a layer if you really want to do it. And the best teams, the most agile teams, the ones that are killing it, are doing this. And so all this stuff's going to be pretty basic. I'm going to go through, I think, nine layers that you can add to your business that always work. Always work. Nine things and but people talk about this, they read about it, they LinkedIn post about it, but they don't get it done. And so it's going to be basic. And my hope is that we go through these nine and that you just pick one, you pick one of these nine. I sure hope it's nine because I'm saying nine. Let me flip through, hold on, it's nine. I sure hope you pick one of these nine to do now. Pick it in January, get it going Tom, so that you can add a layer, you can add more if you're growing. If you're going to go from 10 to 14 this year, add a layer, to add one or two more. 10 to 16 versus 10 to 14 is not only a big deal this year, but think about next year when that layer goes from two to six, okay? It's your future of growth. So again, some basic stuff, but I'm going to go through it. And so just when you hear it and think about it, maybe you'll pick one of these and say, yeah, you know, I know we've been talking about that, but it's, it's time to do it. It's time to get off the can and do it. And there's a little tweet I did to tee this up related to it the other day. So a lot of founders, I have this conversation today. I'm like, why don't you, why don't you do this? Why don't you have, why don't you do outbound? Why don't you do events, why don't you do webinars? Why don't you go meet your customers in person? Why don't you have a business development team? Why don't you have an enterprise edition? And a lot of times sometimes there I say this to folks that are struggling, but more often than not I say this to folks are doing pretty well and they're like, well, we're doing great. You know, we went from four to eight last year. That's pretty good. But what if it was 10? Draw that curve out that compounding because this stuff always works. And so I'm going to go through it and again, some of this will seem basic, but I want to dig a little bit between the surface and the number one is like a classic theme for Saster for years. But literally today I know we're overwhelmed with emails. I know almost none of us believe most outbound SDR AI's work. I know we get the dumbest outbound emails. Literally I put one up on Twitter the other day that I got from Salesforce, the worst outbound email I ever got, asking me if I wanted to use Slack in all caps. Well, hello, we've been a paying customer for half a decade. This was the worst email from a 300 billion, the largest SaaS community or couldn't even get their outbound right. Literally the worst thing ever worked. It linked to a video called a Slack number one video. It was copyright 2004 and it asked me if I wanted to learn about Slack. I mean, literally, even in our little team, we must have set 500,000 slacks over the years. And we pay every month. Like, it's pretty bad. So of course that doesn't work. Of course crummy Outbound doesn't work, but I talked to so many founders that say it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But usually they're doing a bad job of it. Literally. You know, if your product is truly valuable, if it's a game changer and you email the world's best email to the buyer, assuming that this is a market that uses email, they're going to look at that email. If it solves my problem, what's your think about it? What's your number one problem that you solve for your customers? Write the world's best email telling them how you're going to solve that problem. And it's funny. I'll give you an example. I think the other day we had. I'm an investor in a company called Mango mint, which is SaaS for spas and salons. And we had the VP of sales on she's great. Go watch this one. It was one of the great ones. It was 10 things that are a little bit different in vertical SaaS. And one of the interesting things is when she started, she was the first sales professional in the Mango Mint. Now they're coming up on 20 million. She was the first. She'd actually owned her own spa, so she knew the vertical when she came. And she said, I'll do sales. I'll work for you for free for six months. What a dream employee, right? And then she did it. And, you know, the first year, no one had heard of the company, so it was all outbound. She was walking into spas and salons and said, let me. The software is so good. I joined the company, right? I love this, this, this thing so much. I left. I'm leaving my spa to be the unpaid head of sales and literally, you know, walked in up and down the street selling the software. Today, the brand's big enough that at 20 million, the model is 100% inbound. 100% inbound. They grow 100%. Great. And then I was talking with the CEO. It was great last year, and I'm like, that's great. You have a very efficient engine. You're not burning the lot. It's all inbound. But based on all the other vertical SaaS companies work with, I find it hard to believe that outbound won't work. And it doesn't have to be perfect. Like, if you're already growing 100% from inbound, don't you want to grow 110, 120%? It doesn't have to be perfect. And also, if your core engine is working, the other thing the CEO was concerned about, Daniel, who I love, was that it was going to be more expensive, right? Because they're fairly efficient. I'm like, it's okay if 100% of your, if you're inbound, you go profitable on the customer in five months and you're outbound, it takes 12 months. It's blended, it doesn't matter. As long as you break even on a new layer, as long as you break even on a new initiative, it's worth it. As long as your core is efficient. Not every marketing campaign has to have perfect roi. Not every sales motion has to be profitable instantly. It just has to average out to something that's decent. So anyhow, we did it. We added an outbound team at Mango Min, and within 60 days, it immediately worked. Marshalle, you can watch her video. She only targeted the high value prospects. She only targeted the right ones. They weren't. It wasn't random. Wasn't that awful email I just described about whether I'd like to try Slack, which I've been using for a decade? No, it was very targeted, very specific, a subset of lists. It was not to make or break the company was to add a layer. It worked magically. I have never seen this work. I have never seen creating a list of 10, 100, 500 top prospects, slowing it down and writing the perfect email about how you're going to solve the problem. Okay, I'll just give you a silly example. Like, I mean, we get so much. I mean, yesterday, there's a vendor we've been using to manage ticket sales for our events for a decade. It completely broke yesterday. Completely broke. Okay, Imagine we got this email that said, listen, we see the problem, we notice you can't do ticket sales. We know you have to sell 4 to 5 million of tickets this year to keep the lights on. We can solve this problem, Amelia. We can solve it today. Here's how we solve it. Here's a demo. We're 10 times better and five times simpler than your existing investor. And we'll do all the migration for you tonight. You don't have to do anything. You'll turn it on tomorrow and all your problems will be solved. Amelia, would you take that meeting? Amelia. HEARTBEAT now, if the email said in all caps, new ticket software company, do you have this one hour next week to meet like I got from the slack sdr. There's just no chance, right? That's just an extreme example. That was our problem of the week. We have a lot of them hit that one and you know, I remember. I'll give you just another example. I didn't know anything about Outbound when I started. We had one SDR back in the day. Sam Blonde, who you all know then went on to be cereal of Brex and more. He was our, he was our sdr. I was learning. I was good at doing big deal outbounds, not small stuff. But then I did an event with a big public SAS company called Success Factors. It's part of SAP, a $5 billion company. And I, I'm embarrassed to say I'd never met our, our user, our buyer. I'm like, how did Success Factors, this big 5 billion dollar company start using us when we were at a couple million in revenue? When I was on a panel with him, he's like, well, it was the end of the quarter. I couldn't get the damn contract signed. I got an email from someone on your team and I signed up that day. It was the right time to solve his problem. So just do this. Start slow, pick fewer names. Prove it out. Pick 10 names as founders. Rewrite the emails yourself. You know this works. You know this works. It's just crummy. Crummy Outbound doesn't work today. We're just flooded and it works even worse. Not only did we all get overwhelmed with cadences, but we, but AI is making it worse. We're getting 10 times more cadences everywhere. So the crummy Outbound is going to work worse and worse. But the best Outbound works at it. Add it. Work for Mango, man. It worked for me. It's going to work for you. Okay, this one is my passion topic. You gotta add a second core product if you're at it. Listen, if you're watching, if you're here in the room or you're listening or watching and you're at a half million of revenue, don't add a second core product. A little early at half a million. But I think what I've learned across all the companies I've invested in, all the founders I work with, this is so hard. But everyone regrets not going multi product earlier. Everyone regrets not going multi product earlier. I was in Europe. When we were at Sastra Europe in London, I was backstage with the founder I knew wasn't speaking, but happened to be there. He was at 100 million and kind of despondent because growth had slowed to the teens. At 100 million, growth had slowed to the teens. And I'm like, what's, what's wrong? It's like, I just, I just wish I just done this earlier. It's almost too late. It's too late. When growth had slowed to the teens at 100 million. To start now. To start now. Right. And you know you're at 100 year, even if you're at 30 million, you launch a second product in the first year, it does 300k, it's almost too late to get the momentum in the company. Right. So this is my new challenge, is that before you get to 10 million in revenue, whether, wherever that is, at least launch a second product. Unless it doesn't make sense. Look, Canva didn't need to do it. Stripe didn't need to do it. There are exceptions. If your TAM is so massive that you are just being pulled so quickly into the market, of course, don't get distracted because fewer things are more distracting than building a second core product. How are you going to sell it? How are you going to market it? How are you going to tell customers about it? How are you going to distribute? It is so hard. But I just find this is the number one regret that founders waited too late and they see just growth stall later and it's like, too late. It's almost too late. They can't change the team DNA. It's too complicated. They need too many people just to ship the product they have. So do it or whatever it is, do you brute force through the pain and do it earlier. And the one other thing I'll say is you're thinking about a second core product is that make sure it really is a second core product. I see too many founders pretend a feature is a core product. Okay, We've added single sign on. We've added this integration with HubSpot, we've added whatever those are, great. And if you can monetize it, great. If you can charge another $5 a month, $10 a month, $10,000 a year, it's great. But it's a feature. Be honest. A core product, A second core product has to unlock much, much for a discrete reason than the first. You know what a second product is. Don't pretend. I see too many pretend second products. And they will. They can give you more money, but they're really just features. At the end of the day, you're not unlocking more tam. If it's just more features on top of the same product. And then the last point on this, and this is the craziest one, as you're thinking through this, should you. Should your second product be to the same buyer or a totally different one? This is a complex question. I've asked so many folks from this. I asked. I asked Brian and Dharmesh from HubSpot, I asked the CEO of Samsara when we did our deep dive with him just recently, should it be the same buyer or different. This is complicated. If your second products to the exact same buyer, it's pretty easy because you can get them. If as long as they actually like you and you actually still do customer success, you could just get them on the phone, you know, hey, hey, hey, Amelia, I know you buy our event production software. You want to take a look at our registration software. If she likes the vendor, she will take the meeting nine times out of 10. But Amelia's budget still fixed. Amelia's budget is still fixed. If you go crazy and sell instead to me instead of Amelia, I have my own budget. And, you know, when Brian and Dharmesh talked about that, it was crazy that they launched CRM at HubSpot back in the day because their core buyer was a marketer. Right. The easiest thing would be to sell more marketing products to a marketer, which they did. They added marketing automation, other things. But, you know, back in 2013, they made a big bet on CRM, which is now as bigger, bigger than marketing and growing faster. But it was crazy because they had to get CROs to buy HubSpot who had no interest. HubSpot was a marketer's tool. Back when they started CRM, no one was interested. So if you watch the interviews, I don't. Then they're like, yeah, it is crazy. It is harder. It took us years to get CRM off the ground. Literally. It was a completely free product for years. I don't know the answer here. I just know if you can magically get to a different buyer, you're going to unlock more budget. This is, this is something to think about. So even though everyone's going to say, go to the same buyer, your board, your VCs, especially, realize if you could magically get your second product to a different buyer, just mathematically, you're going to unlock a lot more budget. And look at HubSpot. They now sell more CRM than marketing. It would be a company a fraction of its 40 billion size. It was just marketing, selling to marketers. Okay, so that's pretty darn strategic second product. If I really? Was your. Was your coach? I might whisper this in your ear to an annoying level every week. How are we thinking about second product? How are we thinking about second product? Because I know it's hard. This one's easy. This one's easy, but people still don't do it. Okay, this is the easiest if you have someone in marketing and they're not lazy. And I know I don't want to get in trouble, but so many folks just don't want to do things that require leaving the house today. But do a customer conference. This works so well. And this is the key. Magic. Invite your prospects. Invite everyone in your funnel. And you're like, oh, my God, I don't want to do a Dreamforce or an Inbound or a Saster annual or any of this stuff. Of course you don't. Don't do that. You want to know how much it costs to do Saster annual? It costs $5 million. Unburdened, it costs close to $8 million fully burdened. Okay, that's a lot for most. Anyone wants to spend $8 million on their customer conference, raise your hand in the zoom. Of course you don't. But honestly, you don't have to do any of that if as long as you have any size. Rent a ballroom for an afternoon. For an afternoon. For an afternoon. And it's gonna cost you almost nothing at a nice hotel near wherever you live, near your office, if you have one, a ballroom. Okay, do it for half a day. Use the AV they have. Use whatever awful coffee and food and beverage they have at the event and do it for half a day. And invite all your top customers and all your top prospects. It's magical. First of all, your top customers will deeply enjoy meeting with you in person. That always works. This is the cheat code to meeting as many of your customers in person as possible. Not having to travel there. Have a little event and bring them. Have them come. 2. If you haven't done this before, and I'm sure many of you have, but you haven't. My goodness. When you put the customers and prospects, your potential customers prospects in the room, they can't help. Your customers will just sell your prospects for you, even if they're critical. Like the only. Like the customers that are going to leave, you aren't going to show up to your customer event, even if they're a little grouchy. It's only your most engaged customers that are going to drive Uber or fly to your customer event. And when they see someone from a prospect and they introduce Themselves. Oh, wow, you're a, you're a canva. Have you, are you, are you. How long have you been a customer? Oh, we're not a customer yet. We're just thinking about using your app. They're going to immediately sell you. Look, it's not perfect. It took us 90 days to get going, but it's magical today. That's why I'm here. They're going to sell them for you. This is, this is your, the magical extension of your sales team. So do it this year. This is my advice. It's the start of the year. Pick a date, pick a ballroom and honestly, if it seems overwhelming, do a half day event with like three pieces of content, some coffee and some kind of meal. Okay, you can probably do this for 20 or 30 grand. If you have to do it scrappy, you could probably do it for five grand. But it might have to be at like the neighborhood bar. That's okay. It's not quite as, it's not, maybe it doesn't, it's not quite as slick. You could, but you could do this for 20 or 30,000. And if you walk out of this meet with this customer conference with a couple, couple 5k or I mean five figure, six figure deals, it's magical. It's magical. Okay, so do it this year. You can do it. Just do it for this one is, is maybe more obvious these days than it used to be, but I want to talk about it anyway. The, what everyone's doing now is raising prices. I mean it's awful, right? Literally. We have a vendor that we used to pay 300amonth for, then we paid a thousand dollars a month for. And then on January they increased the price from a thousand dollars a month to 1200. Didn't even tell us. We didn't even get an email. We didn't even get an email. They were raising price, they just increased 20. This is what everyone's doing. Raising prices and raising prices. Raising prices, hooray. More power to you. But that's not at, that's not earning it. Raising prices is not earning it. You know what's earning it? Adding a new edition with more value, adding enterprise edition. It will force you to go up market. It will force you to build features. But here's the thing. If you're not seeing this, and I'm sure many of you are seeing this, all the growth in cloud budget and B2B budget is for AI. Some of it, sure, for, for, for AI native platforms. Some of it's for other things. But all this AI budget is basically in the enterprise, okay? That's where you see the growth. It's all enterprise. And if you talk to folks that are selling, that have an AI offering and they're selling in a, in a B2B platform and they're selling to small customers, medium customers and large customers, you're going to hear the same thing from all of them. Our AI products, great. But only our top 20, 30% customers, largest ones, can really use it. They really have the team to train the model, to deploy the agents, to tune the system. Okay? The smallest customers can use cool things, can use automated website builders, automated marketing automation. But this, the budget, the real budgets in the enterprise. So it always works to add a more enterprise edition, but today it is a way to capture this AI budget because that's where the money is. That's where the money is. And literally I was having this conversation just last week with a startup I invested in that just crossed 30 million in revenue and they're almost fighting with each other. The CRO wanted to go much more upmarket because he lost a couple six figure deals. The CTO wanted to fix, wanted to get the AI working better for the SMBs. The head of product felt like he was being pulled in 11 different directions. I can't do all these things. It's complicated because the more, I mean, most of you know this, but the more enterprise you go, the more crap you have to build. And they were arguing over security and identity and analytics and dashboards and all the stuff you have to do in the enterprise you don't have to do with SMBs. And those are tough conversations but almost always pays off. So add a more. At least think about taking this seriously, adding a more enterprise edition this year for no other reason, then that's where the money is in AI. Okay, point five. This is a niche one, but this is a mistake I made and I really see like 80 to 90% of founders make, which is they don't staff partnerships, right? They don't staff channels, right? And I say add a real VP or maybe it's head or Director of Business Development or whatever. But way too many founders hack some sort of partnership, right? They get to know, they get on the Shopify platform, they get on HubSpot, they get on Salesforce, they get something going with Stripe or OpenAI or whoever it is and it's great and there's some synergy and so there's some lead sharing or there's something great or product access and then the CEO thinks because she or he has gotten to know Bob or Brian at Stripe, that that relationship exists, but it doesn't because there's 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 people at stripe working on this product line. And the CEO spends an hour, a quarter on it, checking in with their contact. And the relationship is very narrow and very thin. And you know what happens? Your competitor, they're checking in with the 40 people at Stripe that work on this product, the 50 people at HubSpot that work on it. And they box you out. They box you out. Even though the, your stakeholder, even at the top, the CEO, the SVP, likes you, knows you. The 40 people that work for her, don't, don't. So I see this way too often. We hack it. As soon as you have one or two big partners, one or two big channels, one or two big whatevers, you need a full time person managing that. And ultimately, as it scales, a full time team. You cannot do partnerships and business development on the side. You can get it off the ground on the side. That is a superpower of founders. You get it off the ground, but you can't manage it over time. And the ones that do are going to box you out. Okay, some of these, the, the product stuff's pretty strategic. This, this is one of the ones that's pretty darn tactical. Just be honest. At the start of the year, are you visiting enough customers in person? 90% of you aren't. I know you're busy, I know you've got other obligations. I know it's tiring. I know it's this. You're not. Ask yourself as, not as a head of sales, as a CEO, are you meeting three to four customers a month in person. This should be your budget. Be honest. To start, it could be getting on the road, it could be flying there, it could be Uber in there, it could be over steak dinners, it might, you know, you can get, let your customer conference count as one that month. You can meet 40 at your customer conference. You know, we're. Some folks are making fun of Davos, which is this big tech gathering in Switzerland, because it's the same time as the inauguration. A lot of the, a lot of the meetings aren't full, but Mark Benioff's been going for 15 years and you know, I didn't understand why for a while. He's like, I sit at the top of this one, he said. Mark Bennett said, I sit at the top of this one staircase and I just meet 100 customers in person. It's the most efficient thing you can do to meet his like multi million dollar customers. He flies, he, he, he fuels up the jet in Hawaii and he flies to meet them too. But that's one off. But he can go to Switzerland and meet a hundred of them. Okay. In person. He's still meeting them in person. It's critical to him. That's why he's in Switzerland. Okay, so first of all, be honest. Are you meeting enough a month? I know you're not force yourself to. And then second, they don't want to meet with me, Jason. They don't want to meet with me. I mean, we get so many vendors that reach out to us, even on our little team, it drives a million nuts. We don't want to meet with them. Like all they want to do is sell us crap. And they certainly never want to hear about the complaints we have about how the product went down yesterday. They just want to sell us crap. Okay, so you're right. If, if your meeting is just I want to sell you crap, you may or may not get the meeting. But, and I know many of you know this, but many of you have never done this. You know what always works? A roadmap presentation. It always works. Tell your top customers. And this works for prospects too. Hey, I, I'm coming to Dallas. I'd love to just show you what we're building over this year. I'd love to show you and get your feedback. I want to show you what we're building and get your feedback. Why does this always work? Because your product is most likely pretty darn important to your customers. And in fact, for many of you, your product is actually more important to your customers than you realize. Like, you think this is just one deal. Your sales team closes one deal, they move on to the next one. You don't realize the amount of business process change that happens at your customer. We don't realize how important it like, you know, if you have a more important product, as you scale, as you get bigger, there will be whole teams that only work on your product. We forget how important it is. And I remember back in the day I went to visit Dell, which was like a hundred thousand dollar customer for us. But I'm like, we're not that important to Dell. I mean, I, I mean I, I don't know. And I went, I'm like, we're doing a road. We've showed up to Round Rock in Texas for a road rap review. There were 40 people in the room. 40 people. They got everyone together to meet the team. The this echo signed Adobe sign team. And then I just started doing them forever. They always worked, whether it's 2 or 40, whatever. But that people don't always want to take the time out of their day to. To meet, especially if they're a hybrid, especially if they're not in the office all the time to be sold. But if they care, they want to see the roadmap. They want to be stakeholder. They are stakeholders in your future. They want to be heard. And it's great as founders because unlike a lot of folks in your sales team, you can actually answer the question, you know, when's the HubSpot integration coming? I don't. You know, some poor guy in sales doesn't know you as a founder, you know, thank you. It's coming in December. Thank you. I know we want it. It's high on the list. I can't make any promises, but I'm adding it to the notes. You send some notes after the meeting. You send a summary of what everybody wants at the meeting. You don't over promise. Magical. Magical. It's the best excuse to go visit your customers in person. Okay, just a couple more and then we'll open it up to questions on this or anything like this. Here's one boy, I know for folks of you that follow Saster B, you'll know this is my passion topic is sort of the dismantling of customer success that so many folks are either getting rid of their CS departments or worse, rolling it into sales. I know it's a controversial topic, but I find anytime customer success is part of sales, customer success is just weaponized to do upsell. It's literally just weaponized to do upsell. I just wrote a post recently on Saster. We have a thousand. We're. We're a customer. We're paying a thousand dollars a month. It actually turns out to be 13amonth for a product we've turned. They don't even know it yet because they've never met with us. Okay? This is happening all the time. So listen, I. There's a debate here about what customer success should do and who it should report to. I'm making a more simple suggestion. Rather than cut customer success for your smallest customers, add it at it. We just lo. We just left a thousand. We're a thousand dollar a month customer for this company doing 500 million a year. Okay? But that's still 12, $15,000 a year that no one ever followed up with us. Okay. I'm pretty sure they cut their customer success team to the absolute bare minimum. The last two years to get super profitable because they're at 500 million revenue. But listen, if they lost us at 15 and they lost another 20, that's 300,000. You can't afford to have someone talk to those customers. And we've been a customer of this one vendor for eight years. Eight years. So do the math. Right, yes, you still probably have to have one and a half million, even 2 million of revenue per CSM. But man, don't send the small customers all to your wiki and your mediocre AI only tool. It doesn't work. Even the best AI tools, and I've invested in several. The honest truth is if you really talk to the best AI vendors at scale, even the best AI support tools, and this isn't customer says, it's just support the best ones, if they're honest, can resolve 30, maybe 40% of issues, right? Maybe if there's no human, you're gonna, you're gonna have a very suboptimal experience. So this is my challenge. I haven't seen anybody say added for your smallest customers, but do the math. What if the churn went down 5% for your smallest customers? It almost always pays for itself. Okay, last two and then we'll open it up. This is a nuanced one. This could be a whole session. But as you're planning out your marketing spend, your marketing strategies, your marketing goals for the year, ask yourself how much customer marketing are you doing, what percent of your money that you're spending in marketing and what's percent of your time are going to marketing to your existing base. Now, if you talk to some of the best CMOs at scale, right? And I've asked them many times over the years, they'll typically tell you 15%, 10%, usually not more than 20% because of the pressures to deliver for sales. But they're spending double digits of their budget on retention, on supporting upsell, on supporting cross sell, on supporting NPS and nrr, on doing special are is all your content or all your webinars just for prospects? How often do you do a webinar where the only goal is to add more value for your customers? Okay, and a lot of this what you know that this is where one reason you know customer events and all this that we talked about earlier come in, it sometimes comes out of this budget for customer marketing, right? When your event is as much about making your existing customers happy is bringing them and your prospects together. But what I find is that for most folks, when I ask them this question, it's 0% 0% of their marketing budget is going to their existing base. You know that can't be right. You got to arm your advocate. So think about how you can take 10% of the at least 10% of the hard and soft cost you're putting to marketing this year to arm your advocates. Okay, very last one. This is more just a challenge because I write this up almost all the time in our five interesting learning series. Just, it's really simple. But I find so many founders are slow here, slow here. Go global if you can. Go global if you can. 50% of many Cloud Leaders revenue is outside of the U.S. more than 50% of HubSpot's revenue is outside of the U. S. Almost 50% of Asana's revenue, about 50% of Monday's revenue is outside the U. S. And I'm just shocked. It is. This, this can mean a lot of things. At the very earliest, localize your application. Localize your application. If you talk to your CTO or talk to your developer, anyone that's been through, you're going to hear that like no one really wants to like fully localize the app. If it, if you didn't start off that way because it's a lot of work but the longer you wait, the harder it is. Okay. So it's always worth it, right? And look folks, sometimes folks can afford to wait here. I read that, you know Klaviyo, we love Andrew. He was at Saster annual this year. Watch his session. Klaviyo is a vertical marketing for E commerce. They're at over a billion in revenue. I think they only just recently got their application fully localized. More power to them. But I find you just win deals. You just win deals. And look there are, if you're in a heavily regulated industry, if you're in parts of fintech, insurance, healthcare and you can't cross borders for now you can't. Right. You know I, we, we talked with, at sastranial this year we talked with Renee Lucert, CEO of Bill. They're at a billion something ARR. They're doing complex billing and financials and, and payment processing. They're just getting going, you know, just getting going on their international journey. But I find, here's my point. I find most classic B2B apps, APIs, B2B apps and others that can flow across borders really start to pretty early in the single digit millions. Single digit millions. And here's a little picture of me. I was the first investor in a company called Revenue Cat that now about 40% of all mobile apps that have subscriptions use their API to manage subscriptions. Look, this is Japan. Here's me and the VP of marketing in the upper right having fun. But they're all over this, right? They're all over this and it just works. And when you go global and the competition doesn't, you can just start winning deals. And this doesn't always mean opening an office and having a hundred sales folks in all these places. Revenue Canada is, you know, one person in Japan, you know, coming up on 50 million in revenue, they have one person. But localizing it, going all in, supporting that audience is huge. So you know, localize early. If nothing else that works, showing up helps, right? And maybe just two other tips and then, and then we will break. You know we, we did at SAS to Europa two years ago. We had the CEO of Braze there, which is great. Braze's I think coming up on a billion in ARR and I, we talked about going, going, going global because he was in London meeting with their, I think he had hundreds of folks in their UK office even, even two years ago at Braze. And I asked him, you know how it went? And he said, look, when we were in the beginning of Braze, we were selling just to, to cool tech companies and we could do it over Zoom, we could do over the Internet. They didn't, they didn't care whether we showed up in person, they didn't want to meet us in person. There it is. Embrace, he says. And then we started to sell the folks like LVMH and folks in fashion and industry and in traditional commerce. And when we didn't show up in person, we lost 100% of those deals. So another way to think about it is localize early, show up in person and then just realize if you're having success in certain segments selling over Zoom, but you're not showing up in person. What if you did show up in person because a lot of the world outside of tech wants you to show up in person? And then my last little tip, beyond the meetup cycle with Revenue Cat here, if you have even $1 million in a geo outside your home, GEO or North America, and it's growing quickly, just hire a full time person there you trust to get it to 2 million to 4 to 8 to 16 people. Wait until 10, 20, 30 million in a geo to hire a leader there. No, just like centralized customer success, centralized sales, centralized one of the two in that person and have someone you trust on the ground. Never, never seem to be ROI negative. Okay, so These are my nine ideas I could probably come up with with quite a few others, but to kind of add a layer this year and happy to answer. Emelia, if we have any questions from folks on this or anything even vaguely related.
Yep, you've got a few questions in the chat. Chat. So let's see. Let's go to. Michael. I think you had a few questions. First let me bring you up.
Was about the customary advisory board you mentioned customer meeting. But like setting up a cab.
Yep. Always works. Yeah, always works. What's the question? Always. It's a good, it's a good tip. I, I don't, I think the customer. So I don't mean to wrap. Let me maybe answer then you could ask a quick follow up. I think we customized advisory board always works. But I will say in my experience, customer advisory boards are overrated and customer events are underrated. Okay. What do I mean is people put so much energy into trying to get Denise from Snowflake on their customer advisory board. And look, it looks great and all that, but the amount of energy it takes until you're at scale to assemble, this is usually high. Right. And the amount of benefits you get are real but modest. It's a lot of energy for a modest game. But do it right. Get 10 of your top customers on your customer advisory board. It decreases the odds they churn. It creates more engagement. It's great. But I actually don't think it's a game changer in the same ways. Instead of spending six months assembling this cab for 10 for five people get 500 to come to the, to the Hilton Bayview down the street. Right. It's just the cab is, it's, it's great, but it's also an obvious lazy thing to do. And so I just don't want to over. Over index on it. But do it right.
Yeah.
I don't understand changing the names of, of whatever you're trying to do to fit that ICP and Persona.
Yeah.
You might want to call it lunch and learn for one and TEDx talks for another. And then you might want to call it a mastermind or master class. But just realize the topics and the name of it needs to resonate with the target audience. And don't only make it so general, make it specific to that group so they actually go up.
Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I do the customer advisory board, it's just one of these things like, like, you know, just make sure that if it takes a lot of energy, it's a, it's above the line because sometimes, sometimes that's something you could defer to later in the year. But I'd rather right now be getting 100 of my customers and prospects together and then working on my advisory board in Q3. But anyhow, thanks for the question.
Thanks for putting together the events. Sasters of them. I'm looking forward to coming.
Awesome.
Cool.
Let me. Sorry, go to the next one. Okay. You've got a couple questions from Ryan.
Okay.
Here I got a few rhymes. Okay. A lot of people here. Ryan, do you want to ask a question?
Yeah, sorry. We're trying to figure out. I liked what you said about adding another product. And I definitely see more of a hub future in what we're trying to build. So I got that path. But we definitely offer the customer a lot of features. So I think I'm starting to learn the difference. But I'm trying to understand if we need another product, if our core product gets diversified into two different markets. And so we build subject matter, digital subject matter experts for large technical product companies that are losing their technical knowledge base inside the company. And we build those same things for their distributors and we build those same things for their customers. The Teslas and the Apples of the world, each of those is a different version of that core product. And it's a. They have their own tam. They have their own revenue base like it's its own market to go after differently than the vendor, differently than the distributor, differently than the oem. So do we need a second product, was my question. Or is. Is that enough?
Look, I don't. I don't know. And maybe some of the things you're saying are beyond the scope of my. Of where my head is just the moment. Or I can give you a more loose answer. Um, maybe not. Right. I'm not saying you truly do. I just am struggling. I will come up with this number. I'll write a post on it. But I'm confident at least 90% of the B2B companies going public have been multi product for years now. For years. For years. And I. And the more. And I think what we've learned is the more vertical SaaS you are, actually, the more important is to go earlier because it's often hard to add enough value to an industry if you're not really. It's erp. If you're not doing scheduling and payroll and payments and all the other stuff in horizontal, maybe you can wait longer because people will stitch together six or eight applications and get value. So I think we've learned all of That I don't know. But I think what you have and all I can tell, and this is not a perfect answer to you as founders. I think we can smell decay before anyone else can see it. We can smell decay and growth. We can. Even though our number two person that can smell it is our usually our of sales, right. They can smell it but they're. They're so sniffy that they over smell it. Like they lose a deal and all of a sudden, oh my God, like things are falling apart. The passionate ones are right. So, so their, their spider sense is not as good but not as keen as ours. We can see it in the sub metrics. We can see it when a little corner of our product isn't being used as much as possible. We can see it when the last time I met with three customers, it was that much harder. We can see it when even though no one else can tell, the competition is slowly pulling ahead. Not like massively, but we can see that. Wow. Last year I felt like we were kind of equal and now they're like a smidge ahead. So we are spider senses. And I just think as soon as your spider sense says we're maxing out our market, slow it down and figure out if you need a second product. And that's right, the time when your team won't want to build it because it's. Everything's getting harder when it slows down, right. And it. As odd as it is, in some ways the easiest time to build a second product is when things are blowing up and accelerating. There's more resources and there's more momentum. That's sort of Parker Conrad's point of this is thing to build 50 at the same time, right. With a lot of momentum. So I don't know. But what I do know is be like don't. I see too many founders when they're reaching out just a little bit of tam exhaustion, start doing instead of, instead of addressing it, they start doing smaller stuff. Like for example, if the market's all SMB and it's not very enterprise, they start going more enterprise. But maybe it's just a little bit of the market, right? If you're toast or something, there aren't a lot of 10,000 restaurant chains. You're serving small, small pieces, right? By the same token, Salesforce agonizes every year or two about wanting to go SMB, but there's no money for Salesforce and SMBs. It's all enterprise, right? So when you get a little desperate, you start doing things that are not that aren't bigger than what we're doing. They're smaller. You put all this energy into little things and. And the real point of the second product is ideally. Ideally is to create. Is that the second product will be even bigger than the first one. And if you. We did this old one, it's where it but session with Peter Gassner who's the CEO of Viva which is a pharma specific CRM and more. Much more today. And we did an OG Saster annual session with him back in 2017 and we were all learning about second products then and I asked him what the number one learning was and he's like the second product has to be bigger than the first. And they owned kind of this pharma for CRM and actually back then were built on top of Salesforce's platform and then they launched this thing called Vault just to manage and store your pharma data. Right. And I don't know within four or five years we wrote it up, it was bigger than the core CRM. He's like, if you're not doing that, it's not worth your time. So he was already thinking about these issues back then. If you look at the. We've done a bunch of great sessions. We had a great one with also the chief product officer of Samsara where he talked about how he built five products in time. Right. I don't know but I will. We can go on to the next question. You got to use your spider sense and not if you're moving. Here's. Here's what I'm going to say. If you're starting to think about doing things that are smaller, that's you got to build a second product. I see this way too often. We're going to do. We're going to do. You know, if you. For example, I've gotten to a lot of folks in the Shopify ecosystem. Shopify is 95% of the core piece. Like there are other tools. And what I see a lot of folks in the Shopify ecosystem is talking about building on BigCommerce. If you look at BigCommerce, it's like 3% of the market. Right. So as soon as I hear someone in the Shopify ecosystem saying to grow they're gonna like more power to it. BigCommerce is a good company, but it's not gonna move the needle, is it? If it's 3% of the market. So appreciate it. That's my rambling spider sense and spider sense when you're doing small stuff Your job as founders, as hard as it is to do bigger and bigger stuff right. Or it just doesn't scale. So thanks for the question. Thank you.
Cool. Okay, we've got one more question and then we'll see what we have time for after that.
Okay.
Navneet, I'm bring you up. Sorry if I said your name wrong.
You got it right. Thanks.
Okay.
Huge fan. So I'm the co founder of Bake Street. We are vertical SaaS for bakeries. Strong presence in east coast. The question I have is how many employees? Very lean team.
Okay.
Yeah, everything mostly founder led. The question is we tried and experimented couple of marketing channels and we identified walk in is working great for us. We have SMBs customers. Now you mentioned adding a layer. We have been thinking about outbound cold calling. Now we know that walk in is working great for us. The conversion is pretty good. Would you still recommend exploring other channels for marketing at early stage?
Well, okay, so right now walk ins working for you. Going into the office, engaging with the bakeries. Right. If you look at the deep dive we did with the Sierra Slice, Lauren Paddleford, it's great. Go watch that one. If you haven't seen it, slice is at 100 million. There's, there's still number one channels. Walking into pizzerias.
Yes.
Okay. Now we just talked about mango mint. You can see their CRO2 from a week or two ago. They don't do it anymore. Right. It's all digital because that works for them. So I don't know, like vertical SaaS is very different. Like we had the CRO of owner for restaurants. Like restaurants don't even read email. Okay. So it's a mix. Like Kyle, if you look at the one we do with Kyle, the Sierra of owner, they do, they do digital, they do irl, they do walk ins, they do texting, but they don't do a lot of email because no one in the restaurant is sitting there in front of their imac reading email. They're working. Right. So it's, it's the fact that Slice at north of 100 million, they're still doing walk ins is probably telling. Right? So I'm just saying with this like it's not automatic. What I would say at your size is spend 80, even if it's slow, spend 80% of your time on what's working. Do the experiments. But even if the walk in is slow, at least it's working. Right? At least it's working. So I don't want the worst thing that can happen at your stage is taking your eye off the ball. Too much shiny penny, too much frustration. Gosh, you know, guys, we're only. We're only getting four new bakeries a month. We got to do something new. But that 4 becomes 8, and then 16 and 32 and 64 and 128. And if anything in the early stages. I'll summarize. If anything in the earlier stages is working, always double down on it. And if it feels slow, you're misunderstanding it. You'll just get better and better at it. Because most things don't work when you're tiny. Most things just don't. No one's heard of you. You don't have an epic brand. So if it works at all, do more of it. So thanks for the question.
Okay, thanks.
Yep. Cool.
Okay. I think that's all questions we have for now.
Okay. Good enough. Hopefully it was helpful.
Yeah.
Cool. All right, well, we can wrap for today then if we don't have any extra questions. If anyone else has the last one, put it in before we run out of time. Otherwise, we will break. And next week, we'll be back for Digital AI Day. And then, remember, in May 13th to 15th, SAS Triangle2025, you all have to come. It's required. Thanks, everybody, for the time.
Thanks, everyone. See you next week at AI Day.
