Tiago Paiva (Talkdesk), Daniel Chait (Greenhouse) & Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia): The 20%-ers Club

Wait, am I supposed to go? Hello, I'm Jason Lemkin. Look a little different. Went for a tan during the break. So I'm Nick Mehta, excited to moderate the panel of 20 percenters. We'll talk more about that in a second. I feel kind of like Stephen Colbert taking over the Daily show, so no pressure here. So what we're talking about is 20% and companies growing. 20%. I don't know if it's 20% per month, or did you just go 20% last meeting? But 20% something, right? 20%.

Stop.

Exactly. Great. Okay. And none of you guys are public, right? Nobody's public. Okay. So straight up, no SEC regulations, none of that stuff. All right, good. All right, so we've got three awesome panelists today. Really excited to have these folks here. I'm gonna do the pronunciation. Amazingly, Thiago Paiva. Pretty good. Yep. CEO of TalkDesk. TalkDesk spent two years getting its Zendesk for voice product. Right? And then boom, boom. Went from almost nothing to 6 million in ARR in the last 12 months. That sounds pretty good and is accelerating. Six months ago, Tiago was the only US employee. It's pretty amazing. And I did some research on you, Tiago, so I've got some stuff. First of all, you win the coolest name prize. Although Nicola also has a pretty awesome name. So good job. You started your career at Procter and Gamble, which was probably a little less fun and energetic than Sasser. And you have a presentation online that's called Unsexy, which you have to explain to me later. So, okay, next up, we've got Nicolas Desane.

Right?

Pretty good. CEO of Algolia. Algolia went from 0 to 7 figures in revenue in 12 months in the launch of their search as a service product and grew pricing from $19 a month to $100,000, which sounds amazing.

What's that, a month?

Yeah, not a month.

A month exactly. A lot of change. Nicola has a PhD in computer science, search engine background, text mining, worked in search for a long time. I'm assuming all your friends ask you for advice on how to use Google. Is that kind of your common go to? Yes, pretty much exactly. And then we've got Daniel Chait. Daniel, CEO of Greenhouse. Greenhouse followed a similar path to TalkDesk and should cross 10 million ARR later this year, up from almost nothing at the start of the year. And they built themselves into a core platform for HR 2.0 web services. So welcome. Daniel, did some research on. You were at lab 49 before Michigan undergrad, go blue. Harbaugh pro.

Harbaugh, go blue twice.

Awesome. And on your Facebook page, at some point, accidentally or intentionally or ironically, you liked Bud Light lime, which I don't understand that at all.

That's deep background research.

Explain that. Exactly. Awesome. So you guys are not growing 20% every month, but sounds like overall you guys are growing really fast. Truly amazing story. Can't wait for all of us to get to learn from you. So let's start with Daniel. So, Daniel, you grew to 3 million in AR before you hired a VP of Sales. So you had all the reps and SDRs reporting to you managed it all yourself. How did you do that? Like, did you have like a million one on ones a week? Like, how'd you manage all that?

So we followed kind of a lean startup approach to building our sales process. So first thing I did was I didn't focus on growth or numbers or ARR or anything. I focused on learning and getting the process right. I did all the sales myself. So I had an engineering team and the sales team was me with a laptop. And only once I knew that I had a repeatable process, that we knew why people would buy it and for how much and who the buyer was and all that. Then I hired three sales reps. They all started on the same day, and they sat next to me and they watched me sell for a month and then I turned them loose. So they were kind of like they could manage their own deals at that point because it didn't take a lot of effort because they just did what I kind of had them do and we kind of grew it from there.

Did you get a lot of people telling you you needed to hire a VP of sales sooner and were you kind of holding them off?

You know, I think we may have waited a few months too long, but I don't think it was tragic. I think we kind of worked through a year where we went from that. We're not trying to grow, we're trying to learn Mode.

And.

And then the next learning was, okay, how do I run a sales team? Right? How do I run a SaaS sales team? And so I watched it very closely and trolled through Salesforce every day and sat with the guys and really figured it out. And only once I felt like we knew how the sales team worked, not how I sold, which is different, did we feel like, okay, now it's time to bring in a VP of sales and step on the gas and go from 3 to 6 to 10 and on up from sales rep standpoint and SDR and marketing came in alongside.

Awesome. Cool, cool, great story. We'll come back to it in a little bit. So Nicola, in 14, you tilted from a $19 a month product which sounded really great value to being able to do these huge deals and really focus on the enterprise. How'd you do that? Like what were the things that you did in terms of outbound and inbound organization?

Take us through that one step at a time. So really the first pricing was just testing the market and we iterated a lot on it up to today. We have displayed the enterprise prices on the website today. Really transparent and of course just when we launched we couldn't land like six figures deal at that time we didn't have the trust from the customer. So it really using one customer at a time in the beginning say the first one like we got crunch based in the beginning. That was huge for us. I mean that's really a thing. And and then progressively we added up customers, bigger live stream genius and that's ads up that create a kind of trust and from there you just continue to scale and step after step.

Got it. And you said you kept the pricing on the page on the website.

Yeah, the pricing enterprise is maybe around 60% of our revenue. It's not the whole deal. So we keep. We needed to go to market the long tail of developers, product managers that would simply self serve on the website and then the enterprise deals where it's more like a standard size process. That said, we are just building our sales and marketing operations today.

Oh wow.

We did that with under 10 people last year and yeah, so we are hiring like crazy today. But scaling the business, that's great.

Awesome. Love to talk more about the pricing. Come back to it a little bit. So tiago, you pulled Talkdesk from its first 1.4 million in ARR and I guess you were the first US employee. You came over here and what would you do as a US Employee? Sales, marketing, kind of everything.

Exactly. So we started the company in Portugal. We were two people and for the first year and a half we pretty much just spent the money we had building the product and trying to learn from customers and grow as much as we can with the resources we had. In the first two years and a half I was in the United States by myself and I did pretty much customer success, customer support, sales and everything. Not engineering. So everything else was here. Engineering was in Portugal.

If you could do it over again, would you have hired some folks here sooner? Because I know a lot of other People start businesses in Europe and other places and come here.

I would. I think we could have started hiring six months earlier. We didn't have. It was a decision because we didn't have that much funding. So we decided to stay a little longer, lean with six, seven, eight people. And then when we raised money in July, then we started hiring VP of sales, the sales team, marketing team, etc.

That's great. What's the one person you wish you could let's say you had the money you wish you could have hired sooner? Was it the VP of Sales?

VP of Sales, yeah.

Cool. Great. Keep talking about that a little bit. So you know, when you think about kind of going off that thread. Hires on the senior team. Which one? Let's go to the other two panelists. Were you too slow to hire somebody? And when you hired them, you're like, gosh, I should have done this so much longer ago. Nicole, I'll start with you.

Yeah, VP Marketing.

Marketing, definitely.

And we are still looking for him.

Oh, great. Might be in the audience. Go talk to some folks there. So, and why, why is marketing really important for you to bring in right now?

So most of our leads today are inbound, but you know our well, if you want to accelerate the velocity of lead generation inbound, you need to be there out there. You need to have your brand known, especially by the developer communities. So for us, marketing comes before sales, especially because it's mostly inbound today. That said, we are also hiring. We just hired a bdr, so we are starting also to do some outbound.

Outbound.

Great.

And Daniel, how about you? What's the person you would have hired sooner?

A recruiter.

So we're a recruiting platform. Obviously I believe in talent and recruiting, but for me the thing when you have a recruiter on staff full time, it's an incredible superpower that early stage companies don't necessarily have. You can't generate more candidates on your own or it takes time and attention away from the executives and senior founders. So when we first hired a recruiter, it immediately took our inbound funnel of candidates to another level and really started filling roles that we just didn't have the power to fill on our own. So that was long time coming. But it was really important for us to get the right hire. So for us, the reason I hadn't done it earlier is I was looking for the right person. It took a little while to find.

What employee number should the recruiter be if you have enough money to hire them?

It depends how fast you're growing Right. But I think if you're at 20 people and you're funded and you're growing and you know you're going to be growing for a while, I think that's not too late at all to have a recruiter join the team. You know, it feels a little bit early. You can certainly get by without it for a while, but all your hires will be better and faster if you do that sooner.

Yeah, that's really, really good advice. I hear that a lot.

So.

Great. So let's talk about 2015 plan. Most of you probably have your plan done and kind of working on it now.

Right.

So all of you are going to hopefully get into eight figures or close in ARR this year. So pretty big moment for most of your companies. When you look at it, how do you think about setting that revenue goal? I'm sure you have a board, you have investors. How do you think about being conservative versus aggressive? And how much deliberation was there on your revenue goal? Why don't we start with Nicola this time?

We are not the most experienced in setting these goals. So what we did is simply we looked at the months over month growth we could sustain and shake up where that would lead us. And of course, going back from there, okay, to get that kind of growth, who should we hire today in six months? And that was the way we built the plan.

So you started with the growth rate and then you figured out what do you need to do to hit that growth rate, basically in terms of people and things like that?

Exactly.

That's a good model. Okay, Tiago, tell us how you think about setting the number.

So the way we did it, we pretty much have three plans. And we got together and we decided that what revenue do we want to be at the end of 2015? And then we have the three plans. The one is externally. That's when we share with investors, with people we talk with. We have the internal plan that the team is working to get, and then we have the too good to be true plan that if we get there, everyone gets compensated for that. And the way we did it is we defined that that plan at the end of the year, how much we want to be at. And then we go backwards and we say, okay, how many leads we need, how many salespeople we need, and then we hire according to the plan.

So if you guys hit just the lowest, the kind of external plan, do people feel good, you think so the.

External plan is $12 million at the end of the year.

And what I meant was, would your team Feel good if you hit that kind of lowest plan or that's the lowest plan? Yeah, that's the lowest plan. Okay, Daniel, how'd you think about it?

I mean, I kind of looked at it as, what are we trying to do objectively as a company first and build a plan from that? And for us at the time, the first time we ever made a plan was we had raised our A. And so we sat and said, well, what would a great series B fund raise look like? And one component of that was revenue. There's other components, too. And so based on that, we said, well, if I'm gonna. I mean, I'm the guy that raises money, so I have to go raise a B. What do I want that to look like? And so we created this graph that you've probably seen on everyone, like, okay, how do we hit that? And we tried to then go from that. That was how we set our goal.

And.

And then we try to make a plan as to hit that goal based on achieving that outcome. So hopefully it works.

So you guys all going to hit your plan for the year? Working hard. Awesome. That's good. Never easy. So one of the other things that's great about this panel is each of you has an element in the Bay Area, but also has an element of your team elsewhere. So I'd love to talk a little bit about how you think about the Bay Area. Is it just a recruiting office? Is it where you have to move to eventually? So, Daniel, you're in New York, which I think is still part of America, on the other side of the country, but quite different. Right. How do you think about the Bay Area over there in New York?

I mean, you know, I'm from the Midwest. I've spent my whole life kind of having people look down their nose at where I'm from. And now being in New York, you know, I built a big business previously to Greenhouse in New York, and I'd never really been to San Francisco, certainly never been to Palo Alto. Never talked to a venture capitalist before I started Greenhouse. And so when I came out here and started talking about our plans and ambitions and heard people saying, like, well, is there enough talent in New York? Do you really think you can build a company there? I was like, what planet are you from? Like, New York's a big city. There's tall buildings and lots of people. It's like, how many people do you think I need to hire? Like, yeah, I can build a company in New York. So it was very mystifying to me that that's a thing.

New Yorkers there also. All right, so Nicola, Paris, also a big city.

No offense to the California people here. I love you.

Exactly. So Paris, also a very big city, very similar concept.

Right.

But now you're different country and how do you think about the Bay Area? And you know, some people would say if you want to go big in SaaS, you got to come to the Bay Area.

Yeah.

What do you think?

Actually I think along those line too. What happens is that we do a product like API as a product and the experience is in that field is definitely here, not in New York or anywhere. It's really the Bay Area Stripe, Twilio, all these companies. So while we can find great developers everywhere in the world, speaking of marketing, sales talents in that domain, they're all here. So that's why for us it's so important to build that functions of the company in the Bay Area. And then for a tech company like we are, being here is being also kind of legit. What I mean is that even to sell, let's say to a customer in London, it's easier for us to do it from San Francisco than from Paris. So yeah. So for us it's very important we raise the profile of the company. That said the US it's only half our customers. We have customers in 45 countries today. So it's really well and that you can bid from anywhere. I mean the tech.

So Tiago, you kind of voted with your feet. You moved here and you moved here a couple years ago now, right? So tell me what your thought process was and you know, how did you position that to your company? Are you guys an American company now? Are you a Portuguese company or you both.

So we started talk desk in Portugal but on the first month we had the opportunity to move to the Bay Area. We got investment from 500 startups so we moved first month when we were building the product. Then after three months Christina, my co founder, she went to Portugal and I stayed here. And I think that was the best decision we made because being here allowed us to grow very, very fast. In the beginning, for example, the first 50 customers, I met them all in their offices. I flew everywhere in America just to meet them. And we were able to close six figure deals in the first two months or three months of selling because we had this personal relationship with all the customers. You, if we were in Portugal, it wouldn't be possible to just fly here every single day or every single week. So totally changed how the company with the company is now based on me staying Here.

That's good. Yeah. Well, obviously you guys are all very successful, so three different ways to do it, which is really great. So let's talk a little bit about how you decide when to accelerate. So I know you're running a company and you never know when to go faster or go slower. And particularly probably around hiring and investing money especially. And you're kind of driving sales. So how do you think about when the right time is to put on the brakes versus the gas and maybe specifically in your current situation with your 2015 plan. So let's start with Nicola this time.

Tough questions. We were wrong at that. I mean, it's very difficult when you are growing very quickly and you are a first timer. So you'll see second timers soon. But you don't realize what it means when projecting six months later. It's very difficult to project yourself and to hire for the next six months. So we definitely kind of under invested last year and we didn't see that we were ready to really scale faster soon enough. So we saw that pretty late, say end of last year, around October, we started to realize, oh, it's getting big. And so that's when we really started to look at what it would take to accelerate even faster. There is no specific metrics like the number of customers, the number of the size of the deals. So we spoke a bit about that. Like when you started, we started. We signed our first Fortune 500. Even if it was for part of not a huge project. But you start to see that as, okay, we can sell to big enterprises. That works. We need to accelerate.

That's great. Daniel. Let's make it more specific. What's the thing in your spreadsheet that tells you you need to hire more reps? What's the thing that like, you're like, okay, time to hire a rep?

Well, we're hiring them as fast as we can. But the sort of signal to me on that was specifically for growing the sales team was, you know, your lead sources. Right. So if you can generate leads, you can keep sales reps busy. I think the hard question is, what's the right balance there? You know, I've always kind of opted to try to have. It's difficult to keep all of the little pieces of your revenue pipeline exactly perfectly in sync. Right. You have leads and then you have SDRs, then you have reps, and then you have account management and onboarding and everything. And like, there's always gonna be a little bit imbalances either way. And I've always tried to Keep a little bit more pressure on the top of the funnel. So I'll overhire SDRs and I'll overspend on marketing. And it means, yeah, your sales reps aren't as efficient as they could be and they sort of don't pay attention to, to all the deals throughout the funnel. But nothing is worse to me than sitting a sales rep sitting around shooting baskets because there's no leads.

Right.

So when you have those trade offs to make, juice the funnel a little bit, get a little bit more leads in there than you maybe need. You're not starving to death and it keeps things moving along. But those are hard balances to make between those. As someone moves through that whole funnel, it's lost track.

That's a good model. So let's ask Tiago. So I don't know if you use leads in your kind of forecasting model for sales. Assuming you do, how do you think about the fact that probably not all leads are equal? And how do you. Because your sales team probably thinks some of the leads are great and some aren't that great. Right. So how do you think about what leads you're using, what quality to determine how your pipeline's growing?

So at this point, even though we are growing fast as we are, we don't have a VP of marketing. So that's one position that we really are looking to hire, VP of marketing. We're ahead of demand generation. And what we do now is we have a VP of sales and we agree on a number of leads per rep. And then at this point, it's my responsibility to make sure that we provide that number to the sales team. And the forecast basically goes backwards. And every month we know we need X amounts of sales reps and we multiply the number of leads that each one needs. And that's also what marketing has to produce. In this case, I'm marketing. Hopefully soon I'll stop being marketing and we'll just have a machine that will works on both ends. So we get leads and then we get more salespeople. We get more leads and more salespeople.

So if I called each of your sales reps and said, do they get enough leads or not, what would they say?

Absolutely. They would say they have plenty of leads.

Plenty of leads. Nicola, what would they say? Lots of leads.

Yeah.

Okay, well, they always ask for more, right?

Yeah, exactly. You'd be a little different than most sales teams I've met. So that's great. Okay, so let's talk about reps because it's a Good segue. So, you know, you could hire very experienced reps. You can hire people and train them. What's your philosophy and maybe how's it changed as you guys have learned? And so let's start with Thiago this time.

So the way we did it, and it's not so much it wasn't defined by me. So we hired a great VP of sales and very experienced VP of sales. That was Jason's VP of sales at Ecosign and why he did it, which I think is very helpful. And that's the way to do it, is the first couple of reps were very experienced reps that already knew what they were doing. So the first month, first two months, they just killed it. They did really, really well in the first couple of months. Then after that we started hiring less experienced guys, but with a lot of potential that then the VP of sales or the other sales guys can teach them and coach them to become great reps. So that's how we did it.

And you do that over again. You'd start with experienced reps and then build in less experience over time. And step one is hire somebody from Echo Sign. Is that the way that it all starts? Probably, yeah. That sounds like a good pattern. Actually, Nicola, tell me a little bit about what's the, let's say one of the best reps you've hired so far and what was their profile?

Yeah, actually we hired our first rep last month.

Oh, there you go. Hopefully they're working out so far.

It's doing great. Just hired a new one this month, so it's scaling up from there. So of course, because it's the first one, same thing. We need the experience ones. And later on once we hire a VP of 30. Makes sense to get more juniors people, but for the first one, it's very important to get people with experience.

Daniel, let's talk about a mistake. Have you guys had a rep that didn't work out so far? No, no, no.

That's good.

Okay, but maybe tell us a little bit what you learned from the best versus the ones that are performing.

Yeah, I mean, for us, we look for ability to sell on value. So we have a solution sale kind of lightweight solution sale product, and it requires a relatively junior person. Our sales reps are kind of early career, you know, five or six years experience to make a fairly sophisticated ROI argument to someone on the other end of the phone. And so not everyone at that stage can do that. You know, it's not selling a $99 product where I take your Credit card. And so for us, we test very explicitly during the interview process around their ability to convey value and to dig for pain and to sort of solution, sell and spin, sell on those things. And that's been the best indicator of salesperson productivity for us.

Is that like a mock sales call? What do you do to make that practical?

Yeah, we give them case studies and tests. We have them write, you know, we have them do writing exercises. We have them do a mock pitch. We have them explicitly, you know, like, sell value. So we give them a scenario and we say, you know, pitch me on not the price or the features, but the value. I want you to convince me of the value of this thing. And you'd be surprised how many times people go through that. And it's like, feature, feature, feature, feature, feature. You just want to hang yourself and the people that can do it, right. It's night and day. I mean, they come in and they just nail the value and the roi and you just want to buy the thing.

Great. So some of you guys are doing larger deals, and I think one of the things people wrestle with in the audience and elsewhere is a larger deal might have lots of different touches from marketing, from outbound rep, from the sales rep, maybe even from one of the executives. So tell me a little bit about when you close a larger deal, how you try to break down what drove that, whether that was a marketing source or a sales rep or an sdr. And I'll start again with you, Daniel, because we talked about this a little bit in the prep, so.

Yeah, so I mean, in, like, super practical terms for a second. I mean, we track in Salesforce both, you know, the source, but also the marketing lead source. And so we just track both of those things. And I think we talked about this earlier. If you look at all of the deals that we had that were influenced or somehow caused by marketing, and you add that up with all the leads that were done through outbound, what you find is that that adds up to more than 100%, because lots of deals are influenced by both. So if somebody reads our, you know, subscribes to our newsletter, the Modern Recruiter Wrap up, and if somebody comes to one of our events, and if somebody, you know, reads a bunch of our case studies and then an SDR rings them up and they answer, you know, is that an inbound or outbound deal? So we definitely track both, and we absolutely see a huge lift from some of our marketing efforts that aren't specifically lead gen activities. So I think you just have to expect that and back to your question about plan. Your plan therefore for the year has to count on the fact that marketing is going to generate 60% of it, SDR is going to generate 60% of it, and together you get to, you know, your goal.

Nicola, you have an interesting situation because up till now it's been all inbound, right? It's all kind of marketing, word of mouth and you got a great product. You know, as you start hiring sales reps, how are you going to figure out what was the impact of that rep versus the impact of the word of mouth and marketing?

You know, again, I mean, using CRM Salesforce, of course to follow up who all the touches and so on, but that's something we need to put in place yet today. So far when you have only a couple of reps, it's pretty easy to follow. So it has not been an issue yet. But even if they like say customers come inbound, I mean that doesn't mean they don't need some high touch conversations with sales, especially for the bigger ones. So it makes sense.

Great, awesome. Switch gears again. So this morning Jason talked to Aaron from Box about big deals and how much do you make concessions to get a big check. Right? So maybe if any of you guys have a story, tell me about a deal you walked away with or a market you walked away from or a deal you walked away from because they wanted something that was just not aligned with your core product vision. You don't have to name the company.

Yeah, no, no, that happened once last year. So to give you a bit of context, actually when we created Algorithm, our first product was a bit different. We created a search engine able to run locally on a mobile device. So it was like the limited hardware really pushed us to reinvent a bit search and that's what made us successful later on when we pivoted to SaaS. And so last year when we were full in our SaaS model, we had this opportunity to do a deal on this offline SDK, an OEM deal in the car industry and it was like kind of potentially like a million dollar deal. So at that time we were like at 10k mrr. I mean potentially a million dollars. So that was kind of crazy for us, but we really thought a bit about where we were going with the company, where the market was going and we knew we wanted to stay in SaaS. And so that's why in the end we said no, not for us. It would have completely made us lose our focus. That means that we wouldn't be where we are today, especially in terms of growth. So no. So we walked away.

Thiago, do you ever say no?

So we actually do that all the time. And we didn't used to, but when we started doing that's when we started to grow really, really fast. So what happens is we sell a very horizontal product, it's voice, so anyone can use it. So customers or leads come to us with every single use case they can imagine. Really every single use case they can imagine. And before we try to get every single customer to close every single lead, we tried try to close either for support, for sales, for marketing, you name it. And we realized that we were just spending time on leads that after a couple of months didn't take advantage of the product because the product was not built for them. So what we decided between myself, Brandon, VP of sales, let's focus on the customers that we know. We are a clear fit. And that's for the supportive skies. So now everyone that comes to us with a supportive skies, perfect, we close them. The average sales cycle is three weeks. Even for six figure deals. It works perfectly if they come for sales, for marketing, for everything else, we are not there yet. So we will. But for now we prefer to handle just the use case we do now.

Awesome, that's great. All right, so you're at the end of a month, end of a quarter. How do you get customers to buy? So you've got monthly plans or quarterly plans. How do you drive urgency? And this is probably less relevant for Algolia at the stage you're at. But let's talk about greenhouse.

I mean, I think we try to be patient, to be honest. I think if you know they'll buy when they're ready. And you can't really force customers, especially for a solution like ours where they really have to buy in the philosophy they're going to roll it out firm wide. You really, you can't just make them do it. So we try to be patient and they'll buy when they're ready and when.

Do you do a lot of end of month discounting or do you try never?

Never.

Oh wow. Okay, great. Thiago, what's your thoughts on discounting?

I don't like discounting very much, but we do especially on the bigger deals with 300 seats, 400 seats, we do definitely do some kind of discounting. But to be able to create urgency at the end of the month, I think it really depends on the salesperson and on the VP of sales. So there's always ways. It's very Very rarely, when we have to discount to close the deal at that month, it's usually not the way to go. And I think, actually Brandon, he has a great blog post about that where he explains how to create urgency without having to give a discount. And that's what we try to do.

What's the thing that you've seen him do that you're like, wow, that's awesome. In terms of driving the end of the month, any stories, it's very difficult.

To describe because it's just natural. When people are that good, you just talk with the customer and you can, without being rude to them, explain and make them understand that they should close at the end of the month. There's really no logical reason most of the times, but just make it happen.

Cool. That's great. Awesome. I like the philosophy. So let's talk about partner ecosystem. So, you know, what do you do thinking about partners that want to work with you, you want to work with partners, opening up your APIs. And I think Greenhouse actually has pretty well defined philosophy on this. Let's start with you.

Yeah, so we have, we have a lot of APIs in our platform because it goes from, if you think about the candidate lifecycle, it goes from prospecting all the way through interviewing and sourcing and testing, and then all the way to a hire. Each of those steps. There's lots of different technologies our customers want to use. So for us, there's like dozen, two dozen, three dozen categories of partner. Each of them have like a dozen players in it. So how do we choose which to do? It's customer demand. So if there's mutual customer interest that their customer is asking, hey, we want to go onto Greenhouse, and our customer is asking, they want to use the partner. And the partner has the capability to execute because there's a variety of capability that the partner can actually do to execute the integration. Then we'll queue it up and kick it off. But it's really, for us, it's less of like, we make a bunch of money off partners. It's much more about solving customer problem. And so if the customers are asking.

For it, we'll do it.

If a partner comes to us and says, hey, we want to integrate into Greenhouse and we don't have any mutual customers in common, it's really hard for us to dedicate any resources to that against all the other priorities that we have. It's really a product management question, not so much a sales question.

Can you say we've driven this much revenue because of our partner ecosystem or Is it something you just believe in and you just do it?

Yeah, we don't really think of it that way. I mean, for us, there's a huge number of problems that our customers need solved in recruiting that aren't part of what we do. It's video interviewing or it's social scraping or whatever. And so they're gonna get those things from partners. And our job is to make it all work well together and let the customers have visibility. So it's not really a revenue kind of opportunity. I mean, there's little, you know, rev shares and referral partnership deals that we do to kind of make it make it happen, but it's not. I mean, it's not a meaningful piece of the business at the scale we're at. I mean, maybe when we're Salesforce.

Got it. Cool. Nikolai, your business isn't fundamentally an API service. Right. So partners are everything to you. How do you think about it? Do you want to just set up a set of standards and let people integrate, or do you want to go proactively tie into people's applications?

Yeah, partner wise, I would say that we are just starting on the Rev Share side. What we started with was actually more reaching out to communities like Product Hunt, Hacker News to power the search, just because that's exactly our target, like the people being in that communities. So it's more on the marketing side than actually on the business side for that. And we are just starting today on the business side with agencies. They integrate us for one of their customers, and then they come back to us and they ask us, okay, could we do something? I want to integrate you in other customers. And maybe the last thing is that something we are pushing this year is also integrations inside marketplaces, say Magento, for example, to really ease the onboarding of customers inside these ecosystems.

That's great, Thiago. I think you actually have driven meaningful leads from your partners that you can track and attribute. So take us through that. I think a lot of people are interested in that.

So the idea of Talk Desk, the idea that when we start a Talk Desk, is really, really what? If you could receive a phone call for support, for sales, for anything, and you have all this information about the person calling. So to get that information, we rely on partners like Desk, Salesforce, et cetera. So in the first year of building the product, we actually built all the integrations. And the first, I would say $2.53 million of revenue came from these integrations. We had no marting. We didn't spend $1 in marting on the first, first year and a half. So they all came from these integrations. And I think the secret really, or there's no secret, but the goal is how do we add value to the partner versus just ask for something. So we don't ask, we help. We add value to help. Desk systems to CRM systems to E commerce systems and then things just go from there.

That's awesome. I think you'd get mobbed afterwards for advice on that. So that's a great story. Nicola. You've built an amazing business, mostly on inbound. So I'm guessing you look at where these people are coming from. What's the one that surprised you? What's the lead source? You're like, wow, I can't believe we closed deals through that.

Word of mouthwash. Design is huge in our business. What we discovered is that early developers, they really speak among themselves. So for us, the best investment in marketing is actually investment in customer success. Because in the end, like an example Ugata today I think it's 10 customers in Dubai. Dubai? Why Dubai? Well, the first one discovered us on Hacker News and I'm very confident that the nine others came from word of mouth.

Awesome.

So that's really. Well, our goal today is really to accelerate that, of course. But yeah, and then of course Hacker News product hunt are really working very, very well.

That's great. So let's talk a little bit about pricing because I think a lot of SaaS companies struggle with it. Should you be transparent? Should you be simple? How do you do big deals? And I think it's interesting, maybe starting with Tiago, because you have, you sell into market where people think about seats and per seat and probably how you compare to other things that are per seat. So how do you guys think about your per seat pricing and how do you position it when somebody says, well, how does that compare to something I've already purchased?

So we sell a critical platform for companies. So just because we do this, you can actually charge higher prices than most SaaS companies can. And in the last three months we doubled the price and added the plan. That's another 50% higher than the plan we had before. And the strategy was. So we have three plans, goes from 29 to 125 and the middle one is the 49. And the plan was, okay, 29. We don't give a lot of functionality. 125 is just there to make people feel good to buy the 49. And we didn't expect anyone to buy the 125 what you realize is when you are selling something as critical as Talkdesk, customers will pay for it. So now our biggest deals and last month we closed three or four six figure deals. They are all on the enterprise and it works for us and we're probably going to double prices again soon. It also works because the competition is always more expensive usually. But it's also more expensive because they sell to bigger enterprises and the bigger you are, the more functionality you need and the more you are willing to pay to sleep well at night. I think that's the answer.

Daniel, you probably deal with people comparing you to all kinds of competition that may or may not be comparable to what you do. So how do you position your pricing versus your competition?

Yeah, I mean I think one of the smart things that we've done on pricing is to price the contract terms that people want explicitly. So we price not just based on overall the organization size, which is kind of the primary price point driver, but within that. Then the length of the contract commitment and payment terms are things we price. And it's a very useful tool because we often get people in the pipeline who say, you know, the system seems great but I'm not really ready to commit to a year or I don't really like paying up front. Nobody likes paying up front. That's why we give you a discount if you want the discount. You pay up front if you don't want the discount. That's awesome.

We love you.

That's fantastic. Here's the price and it's totally up to them and so it empowers them to make the trade offs. And it's very surprising to me how different organizations value those different parameters. So some people have an absolute hard and fast rule. They cannot sign anything longer than a one year contract. Other people are very budget driven. It's like what can I do to get the lowest price? And they end up with longer commitments. So it lets them kind of have the freedom of movement that they want and still happy outcomes for us all. Up and down the dial.

And you put all those parameters online? No, no. What do you advise somebody else to do the same? Keep that in your back pocket or how would you think about that?

I don't know. We're thinking about it. I don't know the answer. There's a website about sales strategy, Saster, you may bread. So I'm hoping he writes a blog post about that.

That's great.

It's hard. You can't unring that bell.

Right.

Once you put it on your website, it's not there.

Nikolai, you've got your pricing on your website, right?

Yeah, we went the full transparency approach. Yeah.

What do you think could you envision as somebody wants to pay you a million dollars, two million dollars, Are you gonna have to have different things that you cannot find out online?

Yeah, that's prostitute us to add different things. But you have to consider our public is a bit different. Our public is only developers. And as developers they would never buy something when they don't know the price because they wouldn't call you to know the price. So you need to display the price and then of course when you want to upsell, you need to add more value to the price that is displayed. And so that's why we are working on things that are adding up. Like we, we just launched end of last year a distributed search network making our customers able to replicate their data kind of CDN for search. And that adds value. It's an option and enables us to go higher in terms of price point and especially enterprise customers would value that a lot and are not so price sensitive. So you can go quite high in the price.

Great.

Awesome. Let's talk about hiring a little bit. What's the some? I think so you know a little bit about that. There you go. Perfect setup.

How many hours do we have for that?

I know exactly. What's the hardest role to fill in your organization? Thiago start right now.

Like I said, it's marketing. We have sales, we have products. We need marketing. Marketing is the thing we need now.

And why is it hard to fill? Is there something that you're looking for that you don't see enough of in the market?

So we are looking for someone that can with specific skills and in this case we are looking for someone really strong at demand generation and there's definitely people there, but we want, we have very ambitious goals for the year. So we want someone that can really carry us from the 5, $6 million to 15 and $20 million and just not easy to find that person.

Nicola, you say you're looking for a VP Marketing? I think yeah.

Marketing and other position difficult. Maybe customer success engineers because we're looking for developers, engineers that can really speak to customers and yeah, that's difficult to find the good ones.

There's usually not a lot of overlap in those two things. So I see that. So what do you. A greenhouse.

I mean I think the hardest things to hire are always the ones where it's the first X that you're hiring and you've never done the job Yourself.

Yeah.

Right. So for us, like, you know, I was an engineer and then, you know, I've done done sales, I've done hr. I've never done marketing, I've never done training. I had never done outbound sales. So every time you get into a new thing where you don't have the experience, it's really challenging because you don't know what success looks like and what it's good at. So for something where we're hiring the 15th SDR, I know exactly how to do it. But the first time we hired an sdr, it was a complete mystery. And so there's a lot of learning that you have to just go through. And I always advise people to start with a research phase of the. If you're hiring a new role, you don't know what it is yet. Go meet people that aren't candidates. You're not trying to recruit them. You're trying to say you're someone in this job that looks like a successful outcome for me. I want to know you and know what makes you tick so I can go try to hire one like that.

It's great advice. That's great. Awesome. So we're going to do some quick, rapid fire, kind of just one word answers. So your comp plans. Monthly, quarterly, or annual? What do you guys say?

Monthly?

Monthly.

Monthly.

Monthly.

Quarterly.

Quarterly. Okay, you have to defend being the. The dissenting vote there. Why quarterly versus monthly?

I mean, again, like, you know, the saster thing of ACV drives everything. So for us, like, you know, as we get into larger deals, you know, monthly isn't. Isn't so relevant. And to your earlier point, like, you know, if it's the last day of the month and the customer's not going to buy and they're going to buy next Monday, like, great. I don't want my sales guy in a dead panic trying to harass me for a discount so he can close it that month. So it's just like, more sensible for us.

Patience. That's great. Okay. How do you celebrate as a sales team? Gongs. Champagne. Something else. What's your celebration? Champagne.

Champagne.

Shocking. Yeah. And that's real champagne, not sparkling wine or something like that. Right.

So bourbon and trivia. Oh, trivia and bourbon.

Are you good at trivia?

What?

Are you good at trivia?

I'm terrible at trivia.

Okay.

But I like bourbon.

Bourbon with trivia makes your trivia worse or better.

It makes it better for me, so it's something for everyone.

Awesome firing. Tough subject. Do you do it too fast? Or too slow or both.

It depends. It depends. We try to hire slow and fire as soon as we see that it's not a good fit. But sometimes if you are growing like we did, from six people to 40, you can't really afford to wire slow. So it's a combination of.

Not really sure. It can be too fast. So probably on that side.

Daria?

Same.

As soon as you're trying to worry about it, you have to fire the person.

Cool.

All right, we're going to do word association and close it out. So December 31st, what's the word that comes to mind on December 31st for you?

Last one or this one?

The last one. Let's do last one.

It was amazing.

Amazing.

Champagne.

Champagne.

Dick Clark. I don't know. Yeah. Happy New Year.

Awesome. Happy New Year. Festive. Enterprise sales reps. What's the word that comes to mind?

I use the first.

Okay.

You ever found.

I stuffed the way this.

All right.

Suit and tie. Suit and tie.

I don't know.

Enterprise sales rep. We don't have any.

So none. Yeah, we don't have any eyes or none. So it's kind of.

You have one? No. None. Okay. So no word comes to mind.

All right.

Board meetings.

We had one.

What's the word that comes to mind? Nice. Nice. Okay, that's good. Good board.

Friendly.

Funny.

Friendly.

Friendly. Oh, good. Awesome.

Productive.

Productive. Good boards. Good investors. Last one.

Close it out.

One word. Jason Lumpkin.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Crazy.

Crazy.

Opinionated.

Opinionated. Awesome. Well, with that, some great closing. I want to thank the panelists. Amazing discussion, really great insights. Thank everyone.