Solving Your Own Problems First | Ep. 02

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Business Podcast. My name is Charles Mackay and today we had the great pleasure of interviewing Dan Curran. Dan is the co founder and CEO of a business called Org Charthub. Org Chart Hub is a really cool tool and product that you can leverage within your sales process within the HubSpot ecosystem. And Dan goes through the journey of how he solved his problems first and then that is built in, ending up in building a business that he's got today. Pretty amazing story to go from, you know, a side hustle to two and a half thousand clients and still only the two guys in the business. So he goes through that and shares some of the interesting insights and stories of, you know, where he started his career and how the problems that he's kept solving for himself ended up into a business today. So without further ado, I'm handing over to myself with Dan Curran. So enjoy guys. Welcome everybody. I'd like to welcome Dan Curran all the way from no longer London town, but he's over in England somewhere. So welcome Dan. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Charles. Yeah, good to be here.

So whereabouts are you exactly situated?

Yeah, so I escaped London. I'd had enough of it after 10 years. And we're on the South coast, so about two hours south of London, near Southampton. So it's a little place called the New Forest.

Yeah, right.

Enjoying the seaside. Cool.

So before we get into this, Dan, tell us, I suppose how we've got to sitting here now. What's your sort of career and journey been like to this day?

Yeah, absolutely. So since about 18, I've always been a little bit obsessed with training, trying to run my own business, tried lots of things on the side over that period of time. I'm now 34, so as many years, many years later. But during that journey I've worked for a bit very big business. So company that had 14,000 employees that was kind of straight out of university. Luckily enough for me, I did manage to find a small unit within that big business. So there was a team of 10 that was starting up a small business within the larger confines. So I kind of got a little bit of a startup journey for a couple of years there and then hit a point where a friend of mine came to me who just started a software company. They were looking for their first salesperson and I was in sales with that large company and I thought if I don't take this leap now and learn from like the ground up how to build a software company, then I'm never going to do this so dropped my corporate pay by about half and then joined this software company on the promise that hopefully we can turn into something. And then that journey lasted five and a half years. We got acquired in April last year. So it was a successful journey and I learned an awful lot from that experience. Yeah. And then journeying during that experience is where I finally kind of, rather than playing around with trying to solve other people's problems, I had a couple of challenges I was having within HubSpot and then solve those problems. And then here we are today, working full time on, on those particular products.

Yeah. Cool. So what was the business of 14,000? Like what, what did that business do?

Yeah, so it was actually enterprise rent a car. So I don't know whether they, I think they do have couple of franchises maybe Enterprise.

Yep, yep.

Yeah. So they're, they're a huge business now and they had a graduate scheme where you basically it was pretty like heavy handed. You work in the branch which was not much fun. But then after that once you kind of got through that period you could then move into areas that may be more, a little bit more interesting. But the unique thing about that business is everybody starts in the branch, they never hire from outside of business. So everyone's kind of like on the same playing field and working their way through. So I actually really enjoyed working for them and they've got an incredible business model.

What was the ways to grow in that business? What were the metrics that generally got you to the next hierarchy or whatever it was.

Yeah, very, very smart. So they had a thing, it was basically a customer service score that each branch had and you had to be 80% above on completely satisfied customers otherwise you could not go for a promotion. So that was like the main thing then there was profitability of each branch and the usual stuff. But like the thing that really impressed me and I think just built the culture was you could not get promoted without that customer satisfaction. And I've not actually seen that in many, I haven't heard of that in many companies but it's a, it certainly forces people to look after your customers.

It's really interesting that customer first mindset. How have they pivoted over the years to stay relevant today that what you've seen since you've left? Have they done some pretty significant things?

Yeah. So they started their business in insurance replacements. That's how they started in America and then that translated to UK and Europe. So if you have an accident in your car, they deal with the insurance company and get you a new Car. So actually quite behind the scenes and then what they did is they just built the business based off the back of that strategy and then expanded into like retail and then now they do trucks. So they've just, they've just basically used their network to then get into more, more sectors. So that's what they've done ever since. But yeah, and they're a private company, so it's just one family that still own it, which is.

Yeah. Wow, that's cool.

Cool.

So outside of, you know, you having a want or a driver to start your own business, what, you know, what else led you to down to that? Because we all know it's nice to have the idea that you want to run your own business, but what was the main thing that drove you to do it before you found the solution to how to be doing it today?

Yeah, I think it's. When I think about it, for me I think it's about creativity. So when. So I went to university and I studied product design. So my initial interests were in like physical products and I've always been someone like trying to solve problems and design products in that way when I was younger. And I think that just still carried with me through the career is like, I want to be creative and I want to be creative on my own projects and really the only way you can do that is if you can set up your own sustainable business. So that's probably the driver for me is like creativity and solving problems for.

Customers and that sort of leads really nicely into the problems that you're trying to solve today. So how did this problem come about? Like where did you first find it and explain the problem? I suppose first and then tell us where you found that problem and what businesses tried to do to solve it before you started, what you're doing now.

Yeah, so in that last business I was in, in the software company that was with for five and a half years, we in the early days we shifted around CRM. So we started with closed IO, then we moved to Pipedrive and then eventually we landed on HubSpot for various reasons, but probably the main one is just like the fact it's an all in one platform and our marketing team could work with it. And we were on the CRM back then. We were actually on the CRM very early. So it was when HubSpot just brought out the CRM. So there was quite a lot of initially there's quite a lot of missing components. They've done a great job since and filled it out. But in 2017 I moved from being in the sales team and headed up the customer success team in that software business. And so all of a sudden had three or four people reporting into me and we were looking after the customer base, so doing two things. One was expanding those accounts and the other one was making sure they didn't go anywhere and they stayed with us. The thing that immediately I noticed was why can't we tell who we're actually working with?

Right.

It's actually very difficult to figure out who the key decision makers that we're working with within an individual business. And it went to quite an extreme. So one of our customers was IBM. And IBM is a huge organization with many layers, many regions, many divisions, many different types of businesses. So there's lots of people we were dealing with just to keep the contract going and then also that we could expand into. So I looked immediately, I typed in org charts for HubSpot, didn't find anything. I can't believe no one's tried to crack this problem. So I just jumped on the phone with a good friend of mine who's a very good developer and said, is there any chance we can have a go at this just for our internal use? And we built a basic version, we started to use it, the team started to get good value out of it. I got a lot of good value out of it because I could see they understood the accounts and who they were trying to sell to on the expansion front. And then our sales team started using it. And then I had some friends who were using HubSpot and they said, oh, is there any chance we can have a, have a play with it? So we did that. And then in April 2018, we thought, okay, this might be of interest to the wider HubSpot community. So we placed it into the marketplace and it just went from there, really. So we went from when we first put in the Marketplace, we had 50 companies that have installed it and were using it. And then now we're very close to two and a half thousand companies that have AllChinaHub installed. So that was the very first.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So let everyone know, I suppose, what all Charthub does and how it integrates with HubSpot and how companies here, how I suppose they are meant to be using it. And then I'd love to hear about how companies are using it and what user cases you've seen. Cause I think that's always a fascinating thing.

Yeah. So Orgchathub sits inside the HubSpot CRM, so there's no extra Login or anything like that from the side panel within the HubSpot CRM. When you're in a company or contact profile, you can open it up and it allows you to build. Org charts on that particular company. So what I mean by that is you're basically mapping the key decision makers that you're working with, which is very useful in sales and account management and customer success to really understand who, who else is involved in this decision that I need to get involved and who am I not communicating with enough. So it really is only relevant if you deal with big businesses. If you, if you deal with small businesses and there's maybe one or two decision makers, it isn't relevant to you because you don't need to build a chart on one or two people. But if it's a really big business, usually what you find is like the average is between eight and 15 decision makers. That's when it starts to get complex. That's in essence how it works for you.

Yeah. Cool. And how are you seeing your solution used and what's the craziest thing that you've seen to date?

Yeah, so it's funny because majority of the case we see people using it in the way I've just described and mapping those key decision makers. So sometimes you see charts like for really big companies you might see charts that go to like 50 or 100 and that's starting to like that's, that's quite, that's quite big and that's, they're putting a lot of time and energy into that which is, which is great because they'll get value out of it. That's how we envisage most people to use it. And that is what we see. And then every now and then we see like a 500 person chart which is firstly that takes a while to get that put together. And also the level of understanding of that particular account is impressive to understand not your business, somebody else's business that. Well, is very impressive. So that surprises us when we always see charts of that size. I guess probably pays to the expansion that they're trying to get into to build something out that big.

Yeah. And what are some of the stories that you're hearing back from your customers around, you know, this visualizing that org chart and having it in the CRM and like what are they starting, you know, to get the value out of it? How's, you know, what are some of the stories you're saying?

Yeah, I think some of the stuff that maybe we didn't think about is. And Most people don't think about from the word go is actually helping with a handoff process. So often like in, especially in soft other software companies, they can have what they call like a sales development rep who creates the opportunity. Then it goes to an account exec or a salesperson that then manages it and then wins the deal. And then it then goes to the account manager who then looks after it and expands it. So actually like some things, some areas that have been a surprise is it's help them with the handoff. Their immediate understanding of account is a lot faster because they're going, okay, these are the people I'm about to jump on a phone call with or these are the people that I'm going to be about to onboarding. And this is where the other opportunities are going forward. So that has been a surprise on how helpful it's been on that. Those trade offs.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what about the. I know there's a feature in there called the blocker or the Roadblock. How have you seen that used and does it work when people actually use that component? Component?

Yeah, this, this one, this feature. So what we call it is sales Personas. It was tricky to name it, but because you could call it a couple of things, you could call it like key decision makers. But there's a really great book out there called I've gone blank on it. I'll send you, I'll send you a link. Sorry, Charles. But it's basically about how you need to map out the key decision makers and they have the ones that they name. So like influencer, are they a champion? Are they a budget holder? Are they a blocker? And one of the things that like the blocker, the way they describe it is just as important as the rest of them because if you can't get to that blocker. So we've all been on sales calls where somebody's not quite bought in and you can tell they're not bought in. And sometimes they'll save stuff where you know they've got another agenda. Maybe it's another supplier that they're interested in or there's something not like they're not quite comfortable with it. The key really is not only to map out those other people, but like address that blocker. And when you're on calls specifically focus on them, like try to win them over. And the other thing that we see like customers use is those Personas themselves. We built the integration so that we push that back into HubSpot. So the marketing team for Example can run marketing campaigns on budget holders because they need to see things that are slightly different, like numbers related and ROI versus like influencers and champions that might want to see like case studies so that those particular features help in that way.

It's really powerful when you start getting it done. So how have you dealt with one of the old or one of the biggest challenges with any CRM is getting the sales teams to use it. How have you gone through that roadblock to make sure it gets used?

Yeah, we, so we quite so as you would probably have seen. So you can sign up for free. So we give you up to five charts just to really get used to the product and get a feel for it. And so by the time we start engaging with you, because we stay quite hands off, because we want the product to basically sell itself in that first period. And then when you start to hit five or six charts, we'll gently get in touch and say, look, you basically moved over the freemium plan. But by that point teams are pretty up, well up and running with it. It's pretty simple. You can't go too far wrong. So probably my answer to that is like, my co founder, who's on the technical side, has done a very, very good job of keeping it simple, easy to use. So that, that has been really the main way of adoption. The best that aside, when we're speaking to very big businesses or like mid to big businesses, so maybe like from 200 employees upwards, what you find is like the director of Rev revenue is like, wants to speak. You probably have a VP of sales that wants to understand how the product works. And then you might have like a leader of the development team, sorry, the sales development team. At that point, what we do is try and engage everyone. So use our own product to map everyone out and engage the people that we know need to be engaged to make this successful. And if you can get people to like hand off from the early stage all the way through to account manager, then that's when you get your best adoption.

Yeah, and it makes sense. And you've also picked a CRM too, that has been built for the user. So it does make sense. So when you guys obviously started this, so I think it's interesting that one of your goals was to set up a business and run your own journey. And I had a very similar thing. I'm like, yep, I want to set up a business and, you know, have my business. And I did that in about three weeks. And I was like, sweet, what's next? So tell us A little bit about the, you know, from what you've gone to set out, you've built a product to what that, you know, I suppose the vision is, was then to what it is today and how that's evolved and what that journey's been like for you.

Yeah, we. So me and my co founder Austin, we both had the same drive and him from 18 as well. And what we, I guess we were a little bit careful so we didn't, we didn't want to raise money. So I've been part of a software company that raises money and I really enjoyed the journey but I did see the amount of pressure that comes on from investors and when they want to see a certain return. So both of us were wanted to kind of retain 100% and build this in a sustainable way. So what we did was since 2018, we, this was everything was a side project up until January 2020.

Wow.

So we, yeah, we spent and software takes a long time to build up. Like there's the revenue side but then also there's the. Takes a long time to get it into a place where you're, where you're happy with it really and where you want to move forward. So we just continually chipped away at it and that is hard. A side project is hard. So I had a full time job, my co founder had a full time job. Basically you've got to squeeze out as much time as possible. Last year we had our first child. That made it even more difficult. And then we got to January and earlier that year we'd been to Inbound and HubSpot had been amazing in terms of encouraging us to go full time. And we're like, yep, we will. We just got to write, we just got to get to the right revenue and save enough money to make it happen. So yeah, we got to January and we're like, yep, now's the time we were seeing all the numbers going in the right direction. The second part of that is we had maybe we bitten off a bit more than we could chew on the side project side because we built a second product in 2019. But actually I'm really glad we did that because it gives us a bit more stability and it's been a really popular solution in its own right. So yeah, bit of a waffle there. Sorry. But that was how we got there.

That's cool. So you've gone from how long did it take take you to get the first hundred installs?

Yeah, good question. So April 2018, we went in on 50 installs. I think it probably took us about six months to get to 50 and then we did 17 a week the first time it was in the HubSpot marketplace, so it was pretty quick from that point onwards we were seeing decent revenue from April.

April onwards, yeah. And you're at 2000 now. So what's the next three years look like for you guys? Like the rate of knots that obviously HubSpot's growing and they're predicting millions of customers, not just 60 odd thousand that they say they've got now. Where do you see it? And obviously free CRM users can use it. So what's your vision look like now?

Yeah, we want to remain super focused on HubSpot. So I mentioned now we've got two solutions on HubSpot we could well add. It won't be this year, but I'm sure next year we'll start to work on a third. And our overall vision is basically to help visualize the HubSpot CRM generally for sales reps and account managers. That's the way we're thinking about solutions and just finding those pockets where it's really hard for HubSpot to solve those problems because they're just there's so much stuff you can solve in a CRM and there's so many different types of customers and rightly so they've gone. The only way to do this is get partners and build a good ecosystem. So we'll just continue to be good partners of theirs. We work very closely with them. They were very helpful on like the ABM solution that they're currently putting out, like the beta stuff. We consulted with them because they asked us to on some of their stuff. So yeah, just being a good partner and really focused on that niche of just helping out HubSpot in that particular area. And I think that's one of the key things is like find your niche and we don't want to spread ourselves too thin. We're only two people, we want to stay firm.

Yeah. And how are you going to stay? Are you going to put more stuff on it? You're going to stay pretty lean and nimble.

We want to keep it as two people for as long as possible. And just because you can run a software company relatively lean if you're careful, there might be the odd thing that we'll outsource maybe in the same way, like some of the solutions partners do occasionally. But yeah, we want to try and keep it as two people as long as possible. Not that we're adverse to ever working with other people, but we Just think it's possible to build a decent business on two people.

Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. Especially if you want to do it in a sustainable way and live. You know, the amount of time you have to spend on managing people and all of that component, if you don't have to do that, makes your life a lot easier. I love it. So what's, you know, through the journey that you've got? What is the real, like the most powerful tip you've got and that you've learned through your journey that you'd like to share?

Yeah. I think if you do have the drive to run your own business. The mistakes I've made really over the years, rather since I was about 18, was I solved too many problems that just weren't my own. So I didn't really understand them. I didn't understand them to any depth. I spent far too much trying to solve. And this is. I'm not saying this is everybody's solution, but it certainly is for me. I felt I spent far too much time trying to solve B2C problems, but trying to build a B2C business is really hard. I admire anyone that manages to pull that one off because it's just that it can be very fickle and it's often very cash and you need a lot of cash to get it going. So I spent a lot of time trying to do that sort of stuff. And then as soon as I kind of settled on the fact that I was working in the B2B space in both of the companies that I worked in prior to this, that's what I understood. And then when I suddenly switched to, like, solving my own problem that I knew at great depth, like, what the problem was and I knew there were other people out there that would have the same challenges. Yeah, that's. That's the thing for me is like, find a niche that you can solve and get it down as, like, niche as possible. So when you were solving a problem for firstly HubSpot customers, then within that niche, we were solving a problem for sales reps and account managers and visualizing accounts. So it got very, very narrow. But actually the market was big enough to build a business.

Yeah.

Which to be honest, I wouldn't have guessed prior to. It's not something you can figure out until you try it.

Totally. And yeah, it's interesting too that, like, in the current environment, I. You're lucky that your niche is in an industry that's not. It's been impacted, but it hasn't been destroyed. But, you know, you know, think of how many things you've been on where they're like, pick a niche within a nation, pick the niche and how many of those niches have just been wiped out in the last three weeks or last two months. So I think you're lucky that you have a niche that isn't a pretty, pretty secure space at the minute. But yeah, I love it. So out of the last 18 months or two years since you've gone live, what's been the biggest pain point that you've got now? And looking at that problem so you're sort of doing it full circle again. Identify the problem, work at solving the problem and then another one comes up. But your, your problems getting bigger or are they slowly starting to evaluate and will go away?

Yeah, so it's different on, it's different on the two products we've got. So we've got one that now is more mature, which is the org chart hub side of things. And we have a very clear roadmap for that. Like we get regular feedback from our users and prospects as well because obviously prospects are using it on a smaller scale. And so we have a really clear roadmap on that and it will never end. People will always ask for additional functionality and we want to, we want to give that we're in a good place in terms of like we know what to do on that particular product. On the GM Mapper product, it's brand new, so it came out in January. So this is part of the fun, I guess. Like we like creating many products makes it more difficult. But like if you think about it, we're at two different stages on both products and that's quite enjoyable because you can switch from one to the other and go, okay, now what do I solve in terms of this early stage of this particular product? So on that one we're still figuring out like our marketing in terms of what are the problems we're solving on that product that resonate the most.

So before what happened in the current climate, tell us what it does and then what was that core problem it was solving?

Yeah, so this one has been hurt by the current climate. So Geomapa again goes back to like when I was working for this other company. So I had my CEO came to me regularly and said, where are our customers? We're going on a trip to America. Because we, a lot of our customer base was in the States as just like when you look at the CRM, it's really hard unless you go one by one and look at the addresses. It's really hard to figure out where all your customers are, where your prospects are. So what we did was created a plugin again. So just like Ultra Hub, no extra login, you open it up, you can create lists of your customers and we can map based on any of your properties within HubSpot. So you can map based on customers, you can map based on prospects at different deal stages. So all of a sudden like in terms of traveling and going to events and driving people to your events and when you go to trade shows, getting people to come and visit you, it's very helpful on the marketing front. It's very helpful on the sales front because of making the most of those journeys. Obviously today no one's making any gem. So we have the number of inbounds that come into us like the signups has dropped off significantly on that product and that went way quicker than org did. So that went from. So we actually had more installs. So we had 600 installs from the word go and we took our time on this product and then we are coming in on 1500. So that one flew up until the pandemic.

It's really interesting because it's such a big problem for legacy businesses that don't have a digital presence. So they're still going to do the way they did things always. They're going to do the same thing they've always done. And you just visualize that problem for them now. It's going to be interesting how they go from visualizing that problem to actually not getting in the car and driving and seeing all those people. But yeah, no, it's fascinating. I think you'll find that if you can turn that into, integrate that into some of the offline stuff like offline traditional snail mail and that sort of thing. You know, even if you had a prospecting door knocking type business, for example, that there was their map zone, you know, two days before the letter goes out, then they know where they're going and they know if they it's been delivered there'd be heaps of powerful things you do. Not saying that those tactics are necessarily smart today, but yeah, that's fascinating. So what's. What were people using it for? That what you saw in the first, you know, couple of months?

Yeah, it was well actually way more of a mix than, than all char. So because it's, I guess it's just a little bit more flexible and more broad. Like there's more broad appeal for it. So we've seen like real estate companies use it a lot. We've seen software companies when they're like trying to manage territories. So because we've got some sketch functionality in there, like you can, you can basically customize a territory rather than just base it off postcodes. Yeah. And we've seen pharmaceuticals use it again on the territory management font. But also sales reps are on the road more so managing that way. And actually because of the diversity, we've seen some customers that have, even though the pandemics hit in, they've doubled down. So like we've had a company called Advantage Maintenance in the US and they go, they go around and they're doing like cleaning offices obviously to help with the COVID side of things. So they're actually traveling just as much as they were before. So because of that diversity you do see some people use it even more and then others that just go, right, I can't use it because I'm not going anywhere.

Yeah, yeah, real mix. It's fascinating. And that's one thing I love about when you talk to guys like yourself that you know how your product is being built to then how it's been used is generally so far apart. You've got all these intentions of how it's going to get used but then it gets used in all of these left to center ways. So leading into that, what's the most, I suppose, proud moment you've had with the business and that you can share with us today?

Yeah, I think just getting to that full time moment was a big deal for both of us. It's a massive change, especially when you've been working on a side project for so long. So for us it was like, it was a two and a half year journey of like slogging away on the weekends and in the evenings and it really limits you because you can't put lots of focus. So as soon as you went full time it felt weird because it was like, okay, this is, I'm not, I don't have a boss.

Yeah.

And now I've actually got the time and my co founder has actually got the time to get deep into this problem. So that was, that was a massive, massive thing. Yeah. And then another one was for us on the product front was we were really proud when HubSpot started using OrchaThub for themselves. That was a. That moment we're like, okay, if the company you're building on has decided that they should probably use it, yeah, then that was a very proud moment for us.

Yeah, that's, you know, if you've got into that organization and they're using the product at the territory, regional level, then that's awesome. Just a quick question. How are you dealing with the accountability piece between each other now that you don't have a boss and you've gone from, you're bossless, but you've got business partners. How's that going?

Well, so both of us feel very fortunate because we both worked in the same company for a long period of time, so we both worked together for two years in the last company, so we understood, like, how each other worked. And because I was the first sales rep there and he was one of the first engineers, we worked very closely with each other to solve the problem that we were working on in that business. As that business got bigger, it just doesn't happen. Like you then have people in between and then you have product managers and those conversations just dry out. But in that time, we knew we could work with each other and we trusted each other. Then when we went to work on this as a side project, that's even harder than full time in terms of accountability because you're just eking out hours wherever you can get them. So we've just got a level of trust and a relationship that it really doesn't require it. Neither of us. We both work very hard and we have worked hard for other people in that other business. Now it's just. It's up to gain. You know, when you work for yourself, it goes up another level.

100%. 100%. Awesome. Dan, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story with us and obviously what your business does. I think it's really exciting, the path you're on and the fact that you've done it and doing it in a sustainable way. I'm sure that that money that has probably been dangled in front of you from investors and other things has been hard to say. No. But I think in the long run, especially with what's going on in the current climate, if you can push through it and build something that is so sustainable, you're going to have a pretty exciting future. How can people get in touch with you?

Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn under Daniel Curran. We have a Twitter account for Charthub, and, yeah, those are the two main places you can find us.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, thanks very much, Dan, and we look forward to seeing what's going on, the roadmap of the products look like in the future.

Cheers, Charles. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Thanks, mate.

Pleasure. No problem at all.

That was interesting. It's. It's like I still see so many user cases and I need to. I don't forget about it. But I do. Sometimes it's like, oh, why haven't I just pushed that into, like, five of my accounts?

Which one? The mapping one or the both?

Both. Especially when you've got, like, traditional businesses, so. And you just visualize that. That's. That's gold straight away. But, yeah, no, there's. There's so many user cases for it.

I think one of the things we find is like, I'm sorry if I've mentioned this to you before, but, like, Org Chart Hub was a funny one because.