SaaStrPRO AMA with Jason Lemkin

We've got about 10 questions on Reddit that we're going to go through in order so that you can know roughly what part of the recording you should watch. And then we're happy to take live questions through Zoom, so submit them anytime. Like Amelia said, use this module at the bottom and with that let's just jump right into the questions. Unless you want to add anything.

Jason Nope, Sounds great. This will be a fun way to to kick off this series and we'll have different folks do different AMAs. I'm happy to do as many of them as folks want and at least provide one person's opinion to some of these and we'll mix it up as time goes by and take questions from all of you folks who were kind enough to be in the first batch of Saster Pro, which has gone great. So let's kick off a few and just learn from this and I'll just share my learnings, which may or may not be right, but at least, at least it's one set for folks and I'll go through the first five or six in order. The first one is what do you think the biggest blind spots and challenges for European SaaS companies expanding into the US are? And we could certainly substitute European for many other countries. What are the biggest blind spots? Certainly it's something I've talked about a bit, but having probably invested in 20 European SaaS companies and been involved at some level with a bunch more, let me just rattle off a few to think about. I think the biggest one and if you read Saster lately, you can realize I'm getting a little jaded on the San Francisco Bay area because everything here is just so expensive the last couple of years. But I think the number one blind spot literally for European startups is going to New York. Kristof Jantz and I talked about this on the first day the pre session we did at the Saster annual this year. But the number one bit of advice I can give you coming from, especially from Europe, because of time zones, unless your customers are in New York, unless you're doing financial services or some parts of ad tech or otherwise, going to New York is the worst idea. You get almost none of the benefits of being in the Bay Area. You don't get the customers here, you don't get the ecosystem, you don't get the partners, and most importantly, you don't get the recruiting benefits. You don't get the wealth of VPs that you get in the Bay Area. But you've schlepped all the way over the United States and dealt with all the trouble. And yes, the time zones are. It's so much easier communicating with Europe from New York. It's not just a little bit easier, it's an order of magnitude easier. But my one big advice is don't do it. And then most of you will do it anyway. I know Algolia started in New York. For a little while, other folks did it, but once you do it and then you realize it's a mistake and it doesn't feel like you're getting the benefits of Silicon Valley. Come to Silicon Valley. At least one of the founders should come here. And so that's the number one. Don't go halfway. Don't go halfway into Silicon Valley. Either come or don't come. Second, blind spots and challenges. The second one is getting starstruck by resumes. I learned this from the Chopad team and some others when they came from Belgium. But if you're from outside the US and you come to the Bay Area, everyone worked at Salesforce and everyone worked at Box, and everyone worked at Dropbox and Twilio and Mulesoft, and you're just starstruck. But it turns out these companies got big and there's probably 96 directors of sales that were at Box and box is doing 500 million in revenue. And don't get starstruck, by the fast talker. Don't get starstruck because you come from Sweden or Estonia and you haven't met a director of sales from Box and you meet 30 of them and you immediately want to hire all of them. Take your time and don't. It's true of all of us. I fell in love with. With the resume, with the logo. Everyone's gonna. Every founder is gonna make the mistake. Every founder is gonna over index on a logo or two. But I definitely found this is like the number two mistake for European SaaS companies is they immediately hire this great logo and it's. And they. It's not the right person. So number one is New York. Number two is probably logo. Number three, and this is even harder these days, is paying up. The third mistake I see with European startups. This is crazy. It's crazy that Paris is half the price of San Francisco fully burdened for an engineer. And it's crazy that London is cheaper than San Francisco. I'm still struggling to figure out how this makes any sense, no matter how much I write about it. A lot of it's turnover, a lot of its other things. But what I see with Many, not all. But with many European SaaS companies is they're so frugal, they're so bootstrapped that they just can't get their arms around paying even close to market rates for folks here. And what usually ends up happening is they underhire for a position. Instead of a director, they hire a manager. Instead of a vp, they hire a director. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work. You're much better off paying one hundred and something thousand dollars for a real director or VP of marketing than paying $80,000 and $90,000 for someone that never gets you a lead. It's not worth it. You're hiring mid level and senior people to be accretive to get you more leads, more sales, to retain more customers, and you just have to pay up. And so my Uber recommendation to folks is, is this is how what I try to do as a CEO when I've been a CEO is it's hard. But with startups, my recommendation as a rule is don't ask people to take salary cuts. I know you're the hottest startup that there's ever been that no one's ever heard of, but don't ask people to take salary cuts unless you have to. If you have to, you have to. But if you don't have to and they made whatever 100k in their last job, don't ask them to take 80k in your new job. And if you do understand the commitment you're making back and if you at least don't ask people to take a salary cut for a position, you'll learn to not go too cheap. So too cheap is the number three. So go here, don't fall in love with logos and somehow get comfortable with the fact that you're going to pay a lot more for executives here than you did there. Next question. That one we could spend all the time on. That one is a fun one. The next one is, boy, this is like the unanswerable question, but let's have some fun with it. How do we 10x our inbound leads per month? We'd all like that. I'm going to turn this over to Amelia, who handles demand gen for us on the other side. And she's going to tell you how in one week you will 10x all your leads. She's laughing. It's not that simple. There is no magic formula. But I'm only half laughing. And the question if you read it, is ignore companies like Intercom or Mixmax that have a virality to it or even that I had at EchoSign even though I didn't realize it. We could spend more time talking about virality than we'll have. But talk about other companies, they say Greenhouse, Automile, Talk Desk, pipedrive, T Mobile. These are good questions and let me step back for a minute. I don't know if I've yet written this post. It might be in my 300 post backlog. But what I want to talk about is lead plateaus. And then let's talk about how to improve it. What I found with almost every B2B SaaS company I've worked with there are a series of lead plateaus. And think about it for a minute. You start your company, you have no leads because no one's heard of you. And then you figure something out. You figure out Product hunt, you figure out Reddit, you figure out adwords, whatever. Your thing that finally works is content marketing, blogging. It gets you a couple leads per month. 5, 10, 20 something. Something works in the beginning and it's not enough, but it actually becomes a steady tiny flow. What tends to happen is that plateaus and that's enough to get you to 10k, 20k, 30k, 40k in MRR and then you may start still grow quantitatively but that lead plateaus and it almost always plateaus until you figure something else out and eventually a lot of folks at 2, 3, 4, maybe 5, 6 million in revenue when the brand kicks in and the mini brand, you may get a more steady stream of leads, but you usually have to hack it. So a Couple thoughts on 10 x ing your inbound leads and let me talk about these companies in particular. I actually think the bigger exercise is how to increase your revenue per lead, not 10x it. That's easier once you have 10, 50, 100 leads per month. The best way to grow your MRR is to turn that lead, that average lead instead of $1,000 per lead into $2,000 per lead. That's kind of the magic. And if you look at the 78 posts I've done on the magic of a VP of Sales, that's what a great VP of Sales does is with her team. Doubles the revenue per lead and maybe you're not ready to hire that person. But just hire two great sales reps. Do your best to hire real sales reps, hand them each half the leads and see what they do. Hire two people who their only thing they think about day and night is how to get more revenue out of their leads. That's my number one hack is getting more Revenue per lead. Figuring out how to raise your pricing in a way that is still customer centric and doesn't rip anybody off. That gets you more revenue per lead. Hire a director of demand gen at as early as 20k a month in revenue. That's when I did it. And it wasn't a week too early. As I've written about. Hire a director of demand gen. And even if she doesn't 10x your leads, you know what she will do? She'll manage your pipeline better, she'll manage your funnel better. Amelia opposite us already does that for us. Just do better drip marketing, talk to them more often, do a webinar, do an AMA like we're doing right now. All of these things will increase your revenue per lead, even if they only increase your leads 1.2x instead of 10x. So that's my number one advice on the magic. Because usually nothing does 10x overnight. AdWords reaches limits. Facebook is great for so many folks, but there's no 10x magic. But there's block and tackling on better marketing and leveling up on revenue per lead. So with that, a couple quick learnings from some of the companies that were asked and then we'll move on to the next question. And I think the fun story from these companies is they're all different. So the first one's Greenhouse. And I was lucky enough to work with Greenhouse since pre revenue. They were sort of their superpower in the early days was Outbound. So Daniel, the CEO hired like 15 SDRs before he did any real marketing. That's nuts for a guy that's not a sales guy, for a guy that wrote the first line of code in the product. But somehow I don't know how he did it. Respect, Respect, respect. He loved Outbound. I don't know if he really loved it, but he was good at it. So he literally penetrated accounts in a space that back then when sort of HR 2.0 was happening, you could get a lot of meetings because there wasn't a lot of vendor competition. And so he was good at Outbound. That's how they 10x'ed it. I was terrible at it. I remain terrible at it. But that's one story. Automile is the next one. You can track them on Twitter. Their metrics are pretty good. And they've accelerated as they approach 10 million in revenue. The real story for Automile is they tried everything. And the real key, and it took a long time. It took a long time for Automile to really enter a very Crowded space for fleet management software. But they had a superpower. Their superpower actually was not marketing or sales in the early days. Now they're quite good at both. Their superpower was they had the best hardware and software in the industry industry. And they made their customers happy, even though it took them longer to get to a million than it took other folks. And they probably burned a few more nickels than other folks once they got to a million with SMBs, they were growing 15, 16, 20% a month, almost no matter what. And the majority of that was from organic upsell folks buying more units, more devices, buying more. And they made plenty of mistakes, as we all did, but they had the highest NPS of any company I've been involved with, literally 80 plus in the last round. And so by making. We all want to have happy customers, but what a lot of us can't do at 1 million AR is have the best software in the industry. Everything's a hack. We don't have enough engineers, we don't have enough time. And in particular, Jens, the CEO was an engineer turned lover of sales, but he was a hardware and software engineer of the top order. So he again, his superpower was great hardware and software and he didn't. He had struggles, but he focused on his superpowers. And that's what I'm going to say again and again. Daniel's Superpower Greenhouse was outbound. Yens at Automyle was the best hardware and software. And once you get to a million or two, you start to build up a mini brand, which we've talked about. And then your mini brand is aligned on what your superpower is. Talkdesk was a different superpower. The third one, Tiago, when I got to know them, there was one employee in the U.S. didn't even have a desk and five hackers in Lisbon. And they were already doing a million in revenue. But it took. You can watch the old video we did with Tacos Thess. It took them almost two years to get to that million in revenue. But by the time they got to a million in revenue, they were growing over 20% a month, which was jaw dropping. I mean, Talkdesk went from 1 to 15 million I think in 15 months, which for the companies I'm involved with was a record. Amelia is shaking her head. One to 15. Sounds like a lot in 15 months. And what was Talkdesk good at? It's changed as they've gone enterprise and done seven figures today. It's totally different. But the superpower back then, their superpower was integrations. This was true for me a little bit in the day. Back in the day, Talk Desk. It sounds crazy, but a couple years ago, talkdesk was the only way to really do a voice call center in the browser. And with their five hackers in Lisbon, you'd email in and you'd say, do you have an integration for Intercom? Do you have an integration for Mixmax? Do you have an integration for Desk or Zendesk or whatever? And the answer was yes, but the real answer was no, they didn't have that integration. But the guys back in Portugal at the time zone would launch it before they would email back the customer. And by the end of their first year, at a million revenue, they had like 80 integrations. Now, those all had to be rebuilt and refactored, as Thiago talked about. But my point is that was their superpower. Their superpower back then was not outbound or even inbound, frankly. Automile probably went from 1 to 15 with the least number of leads compared to some companies. But they were able to ship the integrations in your workflow that no one else could. So I could spend all the time on this. But I think that the real learning is do whatever it takes to get to 1 million, figure out what your superpower is and then stop worrying about things you're not good at. If you're good at outbound and not good at inbound, hire somebody. But don't bang your head against the table. If you're good at building the world's best software, keep doing that. And we're all not great at things. There's many things to this day that I may be even worse personally than I used to be. But even with Sastra stuff, I try to focus on what I'm good at. And you got to let the other things go and then bring great people in like we've done here, to let them work on the rest. So a lot of answers to that one. Then we've got a bunch on customer success and money. Let's chat about those a little bit because these are good sort of meta topics. The next one, how do you compensate sales and customer success? When the expansion sales potential is 10x the initial deal size, you close a customer for 100k ACV and you want to grow it to 1 to 2 million. Implementations work intensive. Certainly there are many of these folks. And if you actually go back to the SAASTR annual for last year for 2017 and watch this amazing video with Jeff Lawson from Twilio, you can see I asked him a lot about this. It was a pretty fun topic because so many B2D products in particular work this way. They're natural, they're almost utility pricing. So with utility pricing, if you're not growing the account, you know, at least geometrically after you close it, something's wrong. But simple answer. Let me answer the question of how you compensate folks. It's the same answer here. When you're growing the account a lot in the first year is the same issue you're going to have with partner sales and channel sales. Let me give you the simple answer that most of you aren't going to like. You got to pay twice. You have to pay twice. You have to pay sales for revenue that comes in after the contract is signed. And you have to pay customer success. However, you're gonna pay them for the work they do. And when work overlaps over an extended period of time, you just have to double pay. It's like when you, when everyone develops a channel partnership or partnership strategy and I'm partnering with, with a company, do I have to pay the partner 25% of the first year and then I gotta pay my sales reps 20% like that's 45%. The answer is tough luck. If you don't pay both people, both people don't do the work. And this is just built into your business model. But you have to realize that if you're going to 10x these deals from land and expand, you have to invest something and investing in an extra sales commission and a customer success spiff to do that is just part of doing it. And bear in mind here's the beauty to partner relationships and land and expand. They have one similarity. You're not double paying for marketing. If a partner brings in you a deal, they're doing the marketing for you. So paying them 25% of the deal is less than you're going to pay fully burdened to acquire an average bigger customer. And if customer success and sales works on growing a deal 10x, you're not going to pay them more in commissions even by double paying commissions than you'd pay to go out, find market and bring in a new deal. So think about it holistically and just try to make the business model work. Try to keep the total commissions you're paying on deals. If you can under Even in a startup, 20, 25% of your first year ACV and add the lead and expand to do that and then just suck it up. And later when you're doing 10 million, 20 million, 40 million. 50 million. And you have a huge team. You can refine this. When I worked at Adobe and I was a VP in the Fortune 500, I guarantee you they didn't pay 25% of the first year ACV on deals. Okay? Every single customer in the world was an Adobe account. They didn't even have leads because there wasn't a customer on planet Earth that didn't use Adobe products. They probably paid 2% of a deal. But you're not that. So again, don't be too cheap. Like compensation and double pay is the answer. That is a fun topic. That one we can spend more time on. Okay, this next one is another error we all make. How do I capture more value for enterprise customers when I'm saving them so much money? I'm saving them 300,000 a year. 3 million a year, $33 trillion a year. If I'm saving them $3 trillion a year, can I keep 3 billion of that 3 trillion? I would caution you, I would say 92 times out of 100, that is the wrong business model. I remember back in the day at Ecosign when we closed a huge deal at Comcast, we went out to their office in Philadelphia where they had archived all their contracts and we did 500,000 plus contracts from the year. And we went into this huge tomb of contracts and it was empty. There wasn't a paper contract left. And then they walked us to an aisle where the paper managers were and those folks no longer had a job. So not only did we sort of disaggregate a floor, but we saved all these folks. But there was no way we're going to get 3% of every contract signed on Comcast. And that's an extreme example. It's not quite what you're saying, but there are certainly examples. You see it in procurement, you see it in, in buy side applications where we literally save you this much money. And it's like there is no doubt because the system says I saved this money, you can take a little piece of that. Just like if you're doing a lot of financial services transactions, you can take a little piece of it. But if you. My end advice is if you cannot prove in app the amount of money you've saved and it's crystal clear, like it's 100% clear that the day after you turn on the app you save this money, then all you need to do is build the classic savings calculator that people have been doing enterprise software for 15 years, put it on your website and then charge your normal rate because you will just create friction in the sales process if you cannot prove in app the first week the amount of money you save and let it go and then leave some money on the table. And then later in six months, if you can prove in app then change your pricing model. It doesn't matter. But don't spend all your time in your conference room at WeWork pulling out your hair trying to figure out how you're going to take some of these grand savings. Just close the customer. Okay, the next one is one of my very, very favorite topics. And I keep bringing Amelia in across the invisible barrier here to get her opinions on the marketing side. But this is a fun one because I want to. I know I've said I could say this a million times, but at least think about this idea that I'm going to have. The question is how can I assess if I'm not spending enough in cac? We're recovering. We go profitable two to three months after we close the deal. Which makes me suspect we're not spending enough. Sure, of course you're not right. You could spend if you're going profitable on month three and you're in a negative especially if you're in a negative churn by revenue model. Of course you're underspending, right? I mean, at least you definitely want to. If you're not spending 20 to 25% of the TCV of the total value of the whole customer's lifetime in the early days, you're definitely underspending. You can spend more, but it's more nuanced than that. Let me make a suggestion. For any startup, that's before even 10 million in ARR, it's more simple. You will try different channels and programs. You will try everything in the world. You will try paid content. You will try field events. You will try AdWords and Facebook and Instagram and Snap and Telegram. You'll try everything your talented demand gen. You will buy purchase lists. You will buy lists off the dark web. You will do whatever you're going to do and they will Basically, the reality is no matter what anyone tells you on a sheet, they're going to break up into two types of marketing. Ones that get you any customers and ones that get you like no customers. You have to blend them. And once you have a mini brand or anything, you will have channels that cost essentially nothing. You will have folks that come off Google search. You will have folks that find you from an old blog post. Yes, there's a tiny cost to those, but it's essentially zero. And you have to blend them with the paid channels. And there are actually very, very few companies that have a two to three month channel. That's usually where you come up when you blend in the free stuff. And so what you'll find is if you have a channel that even pays you back in 12 months, that's great in the early days because if half your stuff is 0 and half your stuff is 12, it averages out to 6 and you're doing great. So my advice is don't be overly critical. On demand gen and marketing in the early days. Anything that returns a dollar for a dollar, put another dollar into it until it doesn't return a dollar for a dollar. If someone comes up with a 25k program and you get a 25k customer out of that, that's great. And imagine that customer stays with you for 5 years. You actually made 125k out of that customer. And where in particular you'll find I used to hate trade shows and field marketing, which is ironic considering we had a $10 million event for the Sester annual. But I got very frustrated with the payoff. But I learned I was wrong. Because if you go to an event and you spend 50k in your event and you come back with the 50k, 50k worth of revenue and those customers last for life. Do all the events that get you 50k? You'll find events break up into two categories. The ones where your whole team goes out and you get nothing and ones where you get leads. And so everything's binary and lean in on anything that works and then be merciless about the things that don't work. Kill those and shoot those almost immediately. Okay, so that one I have a strong thing. Lean in on anything that works. Anything that gives you a dollar for a dollar. Next one's more nuanced and I don't have the perfect answer, but it's worth talking about for fun when you close a big deal like 2 million ACV, congratulations, whoever that is. What does your customer success team look like? Just one CSM. A team, a couple of CSMs. Onboarding support, project manager. I don't know the answer, but let me tell you at a high level, I think what we've all learned over the last couple years is more and more specialization is better. So I think a few years ago everyone would staff a large account with a dedicated CSM and that's how you handle it. And they're kind of off on their own to grab the help, grab the engineering resources, grab the se figure out the onboarding, do it all themselves and maybe adjacent to them there was an account manager with a quota, but that account manager, as soon as the account was mine, checked out and wouldn't even respond to an email. That's kind of where things were four to five years ago and everyone was a generalist. Salespeople were more generalists. CSMs were certainly more generalists today. As this question asks, you want more specialization? Do you want a project manager? Yes. I think big accounts today need someone that can whiteboard an account that can map business process change over multiple years. And in the early days that's often the CEO or the founders, but that doesn't scale. So do I need a project manager? Yes. Do I need support specialists? Yes. Should I have a couple of CSMs? Maybe. Maybe. Here's something to think about. This is what you want to accomplish for a big customer. Here's a story I'll tell you and I don't know all the answers but back in the day when Groupon was one of our big customers, I flew out there to one of the meetings at Groupon and I learned a couple of things and Salesforce, they just, Salesforce had just landed them as a huge customer. Back in the day it was a marquee customer. I don't know how much they paid Salesforce, but I know it was eight figures a year and they had in the middle of the sort of support team a huge phone. Like it was like a product prop phone it looked like. And Salesforce had brought this phone over. I think it was red or something, I don't know. And anytime, day or night, someone picked up that phone. Someone from Salesforce answered in one ring. Now think about that power of that. Whatever my problem is on customers said whatever I needed isn't working in Salesforce. I pick up this phone and I'm immediately connected to someone. I'm sure in the back end all it was was tagging something on a support desk so that with a global support center for Salesforce someone would prioritize it. But that impact of that phone always being there literally day and night for a global field operation sales operation was incredibly impactful and I think somehow you want to have that effect for your $2 million account. You want to have the sense that there is a phone and maybe bring one, I don't know, maybe bring a sort of a VoIP phone that sits on a desk that no matter what and then staff it around that and your team will not be perfect and you will have non technical CSMs and you will have technical CSMs and, and you will have folks that can whiteboard stuff and they can't but have one person dedicated to that account for sure. And then make sure this phone works literally and metaphorically. That's the magic to me. Okay, next one. Next one's a fun one. Just briefly, what's the best practice to motivate customer success managers? Should you pay some percent of a deal to them? Should you have variable comp? It's funny, over here at the at the Saster CSS We've got about 20 post revenue startups working. One of my favorite CS leaders is here. He actually just came from a later stage SaaS company and joined one doing a few million here. And he was one of the biggest proponents I know of not having variable comp for csms. He thought it created a mercenary culture. He thought it dragged folks away from not being customer centric if they were too worried about commissions. He was definitely at the teal end versus the red end of compensation for CSMs. And if you and I was years ago, like even at the first gainsight customers, I was always way at the end of paying at least some variable comp for a variety of reasons. And anyhow, I love this guy. I won't name him on the podcast. I do love him to death. And this is his third head of customer success. Now he's paying variable comp. Now I'm not saying now. I may be going more teal myself. I tell you we've crossed over, but let me explain a few learnings over the last couple years. I think we've all learned that there's so much more room for expansion in accounts than we ever thought years ago. We've all learned that the best hunting is in our existing happy accounts. And I think we've all learned that variable comp is motivating. And then I'll talk briefly about I think it's over motivating. So I think this guy and I were both right, but I think having a modest amount of a customer success manager's money tied to either expansion in the account or NPS in their accounts and having it be around 10%, 15% of their total compensation is a good starter and I would pick one of those goals and they're very different goals. Whether an NPS can be game, there's lots of issues and comp can align folks only on comp. But I like if you have an organization with net negative churn and you can segment them because SMBs will have less net retention than enterprise customers. You give them a goal, they'll align on that goal and they'll make it happen. So I think that is becoming more and more common. The hard part and I'm a huge proponent of variable compensation but I've got some scar tissue the last couple years. My obvious learning is that and I wish I had a perfect answer to this. My obvious learning is that people over index on variable comp. You pay someone $100,000 a year with a $2,000 bonus. You know what they do all day long, whatever they get the $2,000 bonus for, that's all they do. They don't do what they get paid. And I would like to say that even the most, the most highest, ethical, teal, friendliest, best team members, they just do. I'm not talking about sales reps, okay, because your average Sales rep has a 5050 comp package. Half their money is variable and of course all they're going to do is close, right? But there are some frictions around variable comp sales reps but they're fairly minor. You get it right? Here's your 50 leads. Your job is to turn those 50 leads and do as much revenue as you can. I have seen more and more broken processes when non sales professionals are over aligned on variable comp so I'm still thinking about this one myself. I wish I had the great idea. My only challenge is spend more time thinking about the KPIs for variable comp for non sales professionals because you're going to get what you incent even for the smallest amount of variable compared to I wish I had a perfect answer. I'm thinking about it all year. I'll write about it more and we can do more on these AMAs. Okay. Are we going to do Saster Pro training for international startups? Don't know. Good question. Next one, Variable incentive which we talked about. They can't focus on their own tasks. Can you tell me why they can't focus? Not try much add to this one. I think we're probably done here but I do think I wish I had the perfect answer here but I think if you're going to do variable comp for your CS you have to pick just one of two goals or one of three goals and maybe do all three. You can do logo account retention. What percent of your accounts do you keep revenue retention which hopefully is more than 100% or NPS or CSAT and they all work. But I will tell you it's funny, I wrote this post about a year ago how I came to love NPS and CSAT and a great CEO. I love Andy from Logical. They just raised a $25 million round. You can see his tweet embedded in that post. When he had his CSMs realigned around CSAT and NPS, his NPS went from negative to 50. Think about that for a minute. When he changed a tweak and he said, now your goal is to drive NPS up, it went literally from negative. And negative is actually not that hard to do. It just means you're not making them happy. And it went from bottom half to top 10%. That's the goal he set. Pick one of these goals, maybe two or maybe three, but incent them to do that for their bonus and then watch magic happen and then watch them drop everything else. All right, anything else? We've got Tyler here.

Yeah, we have one anonymous submission.

Anonymous.

We're planning to do away with our free trial.

Oh no.

What are the pros and cons for this and how should we approach it? Love to hear your thoughts on it. We actually have a couple Saster pro lessons in later weeks that touch on this.

Yeah, I'm about to write about 17 posts on this when I have time. So doing away with free trials, the sales loves this. Sales loves going away with free trials. Sales loves getting rid of long trial. Sales loves shrinking the pilot process to six nanoseconds, one minute. Don't do it. At least to the founders on the call. Don't do it. As founders, we get, and I'm going to give you a couple stories even from yesterday. I'll give you some stories. As founders, we get benefits from free trials that the rest of the organization doesn't always see. Free trials forces you to build better software. This is so important. This is maybe my best hack, I can tell you, so that you can get to 100 million on this. On this point, once you give up free trials, you will never go back and you will be able to have terrible onboarding and you will be able to have all this friction behind the scenes and you will be able to have many broken processes and things and you will never build great software if you abandon your free trial. There are a hundred reasons to abandon it. We need pre populated data to make it work. We need the customers upload enough data. We don't see enough engagement. Yes, these things are all true. And anyone on your team can convince you to not do this. But if you don't let them off the hook and you force this friction to exist and you force them to improve it, you will have much, much, much better software. So you may need to lose this argument. But I would challenge you to not do it. I would challenge you. And even with Aaron Levy from Box, we were talking about this at the Saster annual this year and he's like, I still want to give away API access for free. I can't do it. It doesn't make sense at $500 million in AR on what we're doing. But I know this makes the product better. Aaron and I were having the same conversation at 500 million in ARR, and Aaron's so passionate about product too. Don't let it go. And it's too hard to do later. Folks that I know that are enterprise, that they get to a few million revenue, they try to build a free trial later, it's too late, their DNA is too gone. Everything's manual, everything's manual, Data entry manual this, manual that, manual that. And you'll never have a beloved product. I don't mean to be binary, but don't give it away. Do whatever you do, don't give it away, even though people will tell you otherwise. That's my simple advice. Even though sales and product, everyone's going to be lined up against you in your room, they're all going to bitch and whine that if we just turned this off, everyone would be happier. But you will end up going down the path to a mediocre product.

So it's a way to be accountable to your clients more often, which forces a better problem.

Some of that is. But the thing is, as you grow, most of your customers are not going to want to do a free trial. They want to be sold. They want to be onboarded, they want to be talked to. The percent of your folks that will do a free trial will shrink radically over time, especially if you're going up market. Most folks are not like us on this call. Most buyers are not like us. They do not want to deploy on their own. They want to be sold to. Yesterday, my story is I went there is a product that I've been a huge champion to all over Twitter. I've gotten to many, many customers. I really think this is a great product. And then yesterday I wanted to use it at our little Sastor Inc. And we've got a lot going on Saastr. We have like eight employees. And I had to go through an SDR and he wanted to do a discovery call with me and then a demo call and all of these things. And I just couldn't do it. I mean, it's like 10 o' clock at night. I want to just. I built software, I've shipped software. I know I'm an outlier, but I am a super fan of this product. Leave me alone. And I copied the CEO on the 11th email from the SDR who wanted his commission for setting up an appointment. And I said, and he's like, he's emailed back because the product's just not ready. Okay. And this is a company doing eight figures of revenue. And that was an honest admission. And I'm still a fan of the product. I certainly won't bring it up, but I don't think they'll ever be able to have a free trial. They're at eight figures in revenue and it's too late. So their company's doing great, don't get me wrong, but they lost me as a customer, at least for now. And they're gonna lose other folks and the product will never be as great as if this team had onboarded. But everyone else is gonna line up against you. Sonia, anything else on this one?

That's it.

All right, well, thanks, everyone. A couple things give us some feedback on if this was helpful. Let Tyler and the rest of the team know. And then the last thing, we didn't hit on the jobs thing, did we?

No, we haven't.

So, last thing, we're going to try a new thing for Pro. It's going to take a few iterations, but to help folks more on Pro, we're going to start hacking some job listings, but just for folks that subscribe to Pro. So the CO's and the VPs that are on Pro send us your job listings. We'll eventually do this in an automated fashion, but we'll push them on the site, we'll try to push them through our newsletter, which together, this is fairly epic distribution. And we'll try and drive them to whatever site or ats you're using and it'll get better. But we know when we did this get an early jobs thing a few years ago, it really performed well and we won't charge anything extra for it. So send us your ideas. Best case, we can get you a few leads for hires. Worst case, we can expose the fact that you're hiring and kind of give you some additional firepower when you go out to to do recruiting. So look for that so we can try to add some more value. And thanks everyone for the time.

Take care.