How I Landed My New Role At Paddle And The Story Of AI Launchpad (ft. Tharshan)

The role that I'm excited here to embody and play here is, of course, Launchpad. Winding down BIPF, the Building Public Fellowship, at the end of December was such a crucial decision for me and my career.

The founders want an opportunity to share with each other where they are on their building story, like a building public, but amongst the community.

Where is another place in the world where I could do the exact same thing and play the game of tailwinds? Every community in the world, every tech region in the world will have to hear about Launchpad and Paddle. And earlier I said about the way I chose Paddle among many options was like sensing care and passion over the flashiness of the logo. Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP, and on this show I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of the Build in Public Podcast. I'm your host, KP, and today I am super, super, super excited. I used 3 supers for this guy on the show. Tarshan, welcome to Build in Public Podcast, man. This is your first time.

Yeah. Excited to be here and yeah, let's do this. I mean, this is weird seeing you like in this mode and not like, hey, Zoom, like you're panicking. I

know, bro, where's the Zoom link? That's the typical relationship that he and I have, 'cause he just DM'd me yesterday on Slack, on our Paddle Slack saying, I need the Zoom link, man, where's that? 'Cause you sent these invitations and they don't have Zoom links. I'm like, ah.

Your voice is never this polished either. Like, this is like a— I know,

I put on this podcast voice. But for the folks who are listening and just joining and wondering like, who the heck is this guy KB's talking to? And why is he, why is Tarshan like ready to roast him for about 40 minutes? nonstop, you know, I'll answer your— the big question you're wondering, which is Tarshan and I are working together, if it's not obvious by now, at Paddle. And I just crossed 30 days, I think 31, 32 days now of being at Paddle and surviving Tarshan as my colleague. That is the true, you know, I think achievement apart from all the other stuff that I've been collecting through my career. But what's that?

How long is your probation again?

My probation? I don't think I have probation. They let me in without probation, man. But truly stoked to be at the company. And I think, you know, there's a big— I wouldn't say big, but there's a sense of mystery around why I joined Paddle or what kind of role am I doing here? You know, what kind of— because I, you know, I was a founder before joining Paddle, right? So and that transition from being a founder to now, you know, a role, an employee with a W-2, with a payroll, and like, what do you call it, the org chart, and all of this thing feels new to me. Felt new to me for like a day. But after that, I got used to it, but may feel new to some of the listeners, some of my audience on Twitter and LinkedIn, whatever. So let's set the table a little bit, you know. So what are we going to talk about today? What are you excited to share with the audience today? Like, let's set the agenda as we would typically before a meeting, you know. So let's, let's talk about it. What do you have in mind today?

Yeah, I think one of the things I want to first do is like understand a bit more about the decision to move from Build in Public to Paddle. I think that journey is something that we want to hear more about. But then obviously the big shiny thing that I'm here for is this thing called AI Launchpad, which to most of your listeners, won't mean anything, but I suppose that's what you're here to do, right? Make AI Launchpad into a real thing. I think AI is a bit of a buzz. Like, is it gonna last? I don't know, but we're gonna milk it for, for as long as we can. So yeah, I think trying to understand, I'd love to, for me, I know this is for your audience, but for me, I'd love to understand like your motivations of why you transitioned from building Public to Paddle, but also a month's a long time. Like, congratulations. Like, what's your next month look like? What does your next year look like?

That's, that's exactly what we're going to cover. First, let's take the first question, which is why did I transition from Building Public Fellowship and to Paddle? What's the journey been like? I've written a blog post around this, like winding down BIPF, the Building Public Fellowship, at the end of December was such a crucial decision for me and my career because I had such of my identity wrapped around the Building Public Fellowship, right? And what I got to do was run 4 cohorts. In 2023. Actually, if you include the podcast special bonus cohort I ran, that's 5 cohorts in the year. And all of them were geared towards founders, early-stage founders, and helping them with, you know, GTM tactics, growth tactics, building in public, of course, is the ethos, but generally, like, you know, product development, co-creating with your audience, being public and open, kind of like what we're doing now with our journey here at Launchpad. So that's been what my focus has been. So I really love that. I really loved cohorts. I really loved, you know, helping small small groups of founders, and there's a sense of mentorship and a sense of like problem solving that you could do for them, you know, that really excites me. It's almost like you're being a consultant for 15, 20, 30 startups at once. And so I had a lot of fun. But the challenge that I ran into multiple times when I was announcing the cohort and I was doing interviews and, you know, collecting payments and things like that was that is a— I was building a B2C model, Tarshan, right? And B2C education, especially targeting early stage founders who are not super cash rich, they're time rich. They have more time than maybe an average employee in the company, but they're definitely not super cash rich to pay for like $2,000 or $1,500 programs. And at that point where they are in their career, they're trying to resource allocate efficiently and they're trying to use that money to, you know, buy some LinkedIn ads, buy some Google SEO, you know, do some stuff like that. Yep. So it was very challenging to kind of get that pricing positioning right without going underpriced and vast, like high volume, which to me dilutes the whole experience anyway. So I was caught in that catch-22. Yeah.

What's interesting is you're saying all of that, but you did get Build in Public up to what was it, $100K? Like in your last year? Yeah, $100K. Like, how were you able to do that then? Like considering—

I knew it was possible, but I knew that there was certain, like, I knew that repeating it again next year and then again next year and then again next year made it feel like I was running an uphill battle. The founder, the gritty side of me was like, don't quit. You know, this is how it is, supposed to be hard, but I also have a bit of a, you know, let's be honest side, which my sister loves to, you know, help me with that side where she's like, cut the BS, you know, be unemotional, be logical, think like Spock, like what would Spock do? What's the more logical thing here? Also, you know, I have a family in America, I have a son, and I'm doing the math. I was like, this is a natural ceiling here. Now, if the ceiling was expandable, if I could expand the TAM, And if I had a feeling that with my big thesis point, which I think as a, you know, I know you're a, you love GTM, like you love like invalidating thesis and stuff like that. The founder in me got really disillusioned very quickly by the end of the year, because the main thesis bullet point that I had at the beginning of the year was if the 4th and the 5th cohort feel just as hard to get off the ground and get off, you know, in terms of sales momentum, then there's something off here because compound interest should actually favor you, right? Yeah. Like after 4 or 5 times of something, the product gets better. So you would normally, if you were serving a true unmet need, things should get easier. In fact, it felt just the same, in fact hotter. So I realized that, okay, there's a bunch of missing pieces here. I could spend another year racking my brain against this problem statement, figuring out all these components, or I could take a step back, take a humble pie. And I've taken many humble pies in my life, so at this point it doesn't hurt me. But then think about where is another place in the world where I could do the exact same thing and play the game of like, you know, with tailwinds, like instead of trying to the uphill battle, right? Right. And so I made a post which many of my followers saw, reflecting on this honest reflection, which actually— I got 20 DMs that day when I made the post saying, that was so courageous, that was so bold of you to put this out there, because I exactly said what I just said despite the fact that I had that revenue number or whatever. But to me, it felt so cathartic because truth is so cathartic, right? You know, if you're BSing on the internet and it feels like you're carrying some weight, and I was like, you know what, just say the truth. And in my head, I also had the feeling that the confidence that once you're a founder, you're a founder forever, right? No one's going to take that away from you. There will be 7, 8, 9 opportunities for me in the decade to create something. So I was not worried about that. And when I made the post, fun fact, Tripp, which was a silent follower of mine, which I did not know— Tripp is our Vice Global VP of Sales, right, for Paddle. I made a post and reflected on this on a public— I mean, on a blog post and turned that into a Twitter thread, the building public style, and then put it out there and said, I'm looking for a company that has culture that's like this and serves founders and where I could run some version of community or cohorts and education, right? 8 hours later, I get a DM from Andrew, who is our fearless leader and the boss for both of us, our chief marketing officer, saying that, hey man, you know, we have this thing called Launchpad. I don't know if you've heard of it. There's this crazy freak who started this called Tarshan. I think you might want a, you know, helping hand. You might want a partner in crime for this. And like 8 hours later, I got the DM from him. And of course, within like 24 hours, I get on a call because he moves quick. And this is like late December where the rest of the world is snoozing down and like, you know, in the holiday Christmas mood. Andrew and I have been like DMing each other like this. And so within 3 days, I had a first call with him. And the next day he made a call, he set up a call with you and then with Tripp. And Tripp is the one who clarified that, by the way, KP, I was the one who assisted. Like I did the assist. Yeah. You know, Andrew did the shot. Yeah, we're like 2, 3 weeks later, fast forward, I was at— I'm at Paddle. So the role that I'm excited here to embody and play here is, of course, Launchpad, right? And folks who don't know Launchpad, I'll let you introduce that from your words, but basically excited to recreate everything that I've been doing in my career so far, except for Paddle founders and Paddle's startup ecosystem, you know, which is amazing. So that's my role, is called Founder Relations. I know that's a made-up role by Andrew. He's just like, literally just, yeah, he's like, he just put some words together to make KP feel happy. Um, and I was happy because I saw the name founder in it, founder relations. I'm like, all right, that's good. But yeah, so this is sort of my version of the story. I'm curious to hear about Paddle.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before, before we get onto the Paddle stuff, just again, I'm conscious of who's gonna be listening to this, and there's gonna be founders who probably like relate to a lot of what you've just said. Like it wasn't just Paddle that you were talking to, right? Paddle didn't just magically appear. Like what, talk me through the thought process of like when you made that bat signal. I remember, I remember seeing that LinkedIn post through to like the conversations that you had, whatever. How did you like refine that thought process to then land yourself at Paddle?

I had a very clear criteria on what I wanted to do next, you know, cuz again, this is not my first rodeo. working at a scale-up. I was at On Deck before, I was at Day One, which is Gary Vee's incubator, before. And so I realized that, okay, I needed to be clear on what the fuck do I exactly want? Because I had the confidence, which as you can tell, like I'm extremely confident that I could get a job in America, right? Like this is not rocket science. Yeah. But the question becomes, what do I really want? And how much do I have to morph myself to fit into the role? And that is the big worry that I had, that I have to change myself. You know, like I have all these things that are entangled into who I am, right? Like I have the community side of me, the Twitter side of me, the podcast and all these things, I'm like, man, I don't want to shrink myself to fit into a role like a product manager or a data analyst or whatever. Instead, I want the role to kind of rise up to who I am, you know, and let me be me, you know. And so the clarity I wanted to seek was, all right, I spent like I think 2 or 3 days reflecting on my bullet point criteria of what do I want exactly. This is very, very hard because I never—

Yeah, what were those points again?

You remember, I think I mentioned this to you in our interview.

Yeah, one of them was like your wife said it, not you, right? Yeah, I think it was the—

so the first The first one was join a— don't care about the logo, care about the boss. First bullet point was basically join a high-trust leader who gets me, right? This is again a very counterintuitive thing, right? Like a lot of people, you know, a lot of my friends too, like they're still like logo chasing. They want to join Google, join, you know, whatever, Facebook, Meta, Instagram. Yeah. And the challenge there is, yes, you may have on paper, on your resume, you may have like Spotify, but if your boss is a psycho, like, I mean, I'm not saying that there are people like that, but I know there are people like that. I've had one boss like that, you know, 8 years ago, and it was horrible. The logo was great, but my day-to-day was a literal mess. So I over-indexed on finding a great leader that I admired, and I felt like I could be myself under him. And that within seconds with Andrew was like, this is, you know, this is the guy. Second thing was join a company that serves founders because so much of what I do is entangled around serving founders. So I wanted to make sure that the role energized me And had a component of serving founders. Hence, all the companies that came into my funnel in the batch signal, all the leads were all founder-based companies. That was intentional, right? But I got fewer leads, but high-quality leads. You know what the, you know, I got a bunch of other paddle competitors too, right? Which is so funny. I was like, that's, I didn't expect it, but like they're all paddle. When

you mentioned them, when you mentioned them, I was trying to be professional, but I was just going boo boo.

So that's 2. The 3rd one was a more mature late-stage company as opposed to an early, super early-stage 3-person, 4-person startup. Why is that? Partly because I didn't want to have another financial, like, anxiety 6 months down the line about the next funding round or the next, you know, that. And also, I think my wife was like, she was like, join a company where there's more adults in the room and like a little bit more mature, you know, because again, we didn't have any processes in some of the companies I worked at and everything was just complete Chaos. We still have chaos at Paddle too, but it's managed chaos, you know? So, I think that's one of the things. But yeah, I think these 3 were my factors, and I forgot there was maybe one more bullet point. I forgot, it's been a month. But it was a very intense month. It's been months. Yes, I know. But I was definitely— one thing I remember from the experience was that I was very, very intentional. I've never been that focused and intentional in my whole career.

Yeah.

And I feel like the universe just delivered what I wanted on a silver platter at the end of it.

When I think about like the intro conversation, I'm gonna be very frank here. And you know this a month in, for someone whose role is like partnerships and like market related, I am so not in with like the software SaaS community in terms of, I don't know, like I don't wake up and be like, oh yeah, like I wonder what this SaaS thing does. Yeah. But then when I was on the call with you, one thing I quickly gained was like, you're passionate about this and you can't really fake that passion. And I think that's one of the things when I was telling Andrew was like, yeah, like maybe this guy, I don't know what your competence is when it comes to like doing a task or something like that. Like it's not that kind of a role, but in terms of like giving your all for the sake of like the founder who's, and also the team, I'd have zero hesitation that you're gonna be able to deliver that. And this is where I'm like listening to you saying all this stuff. I'm like, what do I care about that much? And I'm like, probably football. Yeah. And that's probably why I'm so upset all the time. Sheffield.

Sheffield United, which if there's any one lone fan here in the audience who's from the UK and cares about Sheffield, that is a— that is the team that Tarshan is on. And apparently they're like, they won— how many times have they won?

Anyway, what was the podcast topic again?

Let's go. All right, uh, always supporting the underdogs, man. Always supporting. But anyway, I said we set the stage around me joining Paddle and then, right, The role being focused on, of course, founders and the ecosystem, but also kind of being a partner in crime for you for Launchpad. So there might be a few folks here now wondering what the hell is Launchpad? What the hell is an AI Launchpad? I said that you invented it, you kind of created it, ran with it for the first cohort last year. Give us a sense of what is it first? Give it like a formal, what is it pitch? And then tell us like why you started it.

Right. Yeah. So Paddle AI Launchpad is a 6-week accelerator program. for software founders. And the 3 core themes that we cover. So product strategy, so helping find your product market fit, go-to-market strategy. So what's your target market? How do you quantify that? How do you make it something that's worth going after? The TAM that you mentioned for your one, that's that topic we help with. Well, SAM, not TAM, but if you trust all of them. And then finance and operations. One of the things that I think has been interesting to watch is a lot of software companies have really suffered from valuations that don't really make sense based off what they were going after. And if I, through this proxy of Launchpad, I'm able to help the next generation of founder build in a sustainable, scalable way, like I feel like I can sleep better at night. We initially started this off with 30 places. Spots, right? Yeah, 30 spots. Yeah, 30 spots. And that just came down, honestly, I made that number up. I looked around at other programs that exist, some in SaaS, some in software, whatever. And I was like, 30 seems manageable. And then yeah, the first few days the applications exploded. Like I think we got a couple hundred in the end. And I remember telling Andrew, yeah, I'm gonna turn down X amount. And he just looked at me and went, you're gonna turn them down? Why? And I was like, 'cause it's a lot of work. And he was like, that's— rethink that answer. So we accepted 59 people. Um, and yeah, we were able to incubate them.

And they were still global too, right? There were, many of them were like, I know there was like what, 15 to 20 countries there?

21, 21 countries. Nice. Which was like, again, When you're planning this with a whiteboard, as I was doing in our office, like at no point did I think we're going to get X amount of countries or whatever. Like the people, some were like B2B, some were B2C, some were like launching their first products, like building that MVP during the 6 weeks. Some were like multimillion dollars in revenue, annual revenue. And they were like, they use Launchpad as almost like a sprint to launch a new product. And so like that variety in such an extreme cohort size of 59. Yeah, it was amazing. And I think we knew we wanted to do Launchpad again. I was a natural like, yes, but like, this is only me. Like, come on, chill. And then I think we saw the bat signal and I spoke to you and I was thinking of when we're thinking about taking Launchpad to the next level, like scaling it, thinking about How do we get more regions involved? How do we get different calibers of founder involved? Whatever. We need someone who truly cares. And I think that's where you step in center stage.

Thank you. And you know what I loved about the foundation story of Launchpad is you mentioned this just almost in passing, like the fact that you're surrounded by founders, like-minded founders, you know, in the cohort, some of them who are 2 steps ahead of you, some of them who are 10 steps ahead of you. I think that's insanely inspiring and energizing to be in. 'Cause I've been, you know, 'cause I, you know, you know, my, I was, sharing earlier that I've ran a bunch of these cohorts, one of the recurring themes that comes out to me when I do testimonial videos or ask feedback in NPS surveys is that it's always surprising to me. They always say things like, I think I over-index and I think, oh, the curriculum is great, or the speakers were amazing. Oh, I did my best, right? From the, from the organizer point of view. But the experiential point of view, what they tell me is that, oh my God, I had this great one-on-one breakout room or a Zoom chat with this founder who was 4 steps ahead of me. who went through the same pain of launching into European market. And for example, in this case, and like, that was worth it. I'm like, what? And they're like, it's so almost frustrating. I'm like, what? Because you can't plan for those things. It's serendipity.

It's interesting. And again, this is, we're giving 2 shoutouts to Tripp here already. But like when I was designing this, so I was going around my friends asking like, what should I think about whatever? I think Tripp did On Deck or a program like On Deck. I don't remember.

He did, he did.

He told me, yeah. And one of the things that still sticks with me now, he said is like, the program was great. The content was great. The speakers were great. The collateral you gave us was great. But some of my like industry best friends are people that were in my original working group. And that was years ago. And he still talks to them now. He still meets them up for dinners and stuff. And for me, again, this is what this is. We're in a post-COVID world, right? I was just like, wow. Like imagine if, for example, in like a couple of years' time, like there's a meetup and the one thing they had in common when they meet each other is, oh, we met through Launchpad. That for me is, I don't know, man, that gives me like energy. That's exciting.

That is true brand love, right? And that is true, like, you know, it's just creating impact, you know? And that's something that I know, like what I love about working under Andrew and with him and, you know, all of you is I can almost make a case for something that is, unquantifiable in the beginning and I'll get a head nod. I'll get a thumbs up to go do that and let the numbers roll in later, which is a great culture, right? Because usually you're always fighting the other side where you're always like, oh, let me make a solid case. And it's like designed by committee, right? Death by a thousand cuts. Right. With especially the engineering— And I think— He's like, he's much more like, yeah, no, I was going to say like, he's much more likely to say, go, go do an MVP of this. Like the way he kind of greenlit the Launchpad for you, right? Like you had no resources. You was just one person, you were, and you had no ROI proof ahead of time, right? Now we do, but—

Yeah, yeah, now we do because you're here. But like, yeah, like, and it's in that moment, and this, you talked about the founder experience, whatever. For me, building Launchpad was like a, because I started stuff when I was in uni and exited to uni and stuff like this. But like, this was the first time in a while where it was just, it felt like me getting on with stuff. And It's not that people didn't help. People did help, but the group of people that helped me aren't the people that I would've thought when I'm building a program like Launchpad. They were just curious friends who were like, like Ralph, who were like, yeah, Ralph.

Yeah. We spoke to him yesterday.

Yeah. Yeah. I told Ralph as soon as he joined, I was like, you guys have to talk.

We spoke for like an hour and a half. Like he and I just went on. Yeah.

He will be a SaaS founder one day, like sometime soon. It will happen. It's just, I wanna make sure that I'm on the right side of history with him when he does it. 'Cause yeah, I just, I just back it. But like with one of the things that is gonna be an ego trip for you, which is why I'm hesitating to even say it. One of the things I was validating when I met you was you obviously had done your research on Launchpad. 'Cause again, we were making it up as we went along, whatever. The content, the partners that we had, the speakers, the structure. I remember you almost doing a tape, like side-by-side comparison with the intent that you had with Build in Public. Like, yeah, tell me more about like that. And then, 'cause then that will feed into why we're doing another one and why we're doing it to this size that we're thinking about.

Wait, so are you referring to like, uh, the, the rough sketch notes I had about doing an AI-based cohort?

Correct.

Yeah, that was so serendipitous. I was so surprised.

Yeah.

Because when Andrew mentioned Launchpad, I, of course, until then I never heard about it, which by the way, we need to fix it, which I will make sure that by end of this year we'll fix that shit. Every community in the world. That's one of your problems.

I know.

Every community in the world, every tech region in the world will have to hear about Launchpad and Paddle. I will make sure that that is something I'll take up. But anyway, so I was, I was, of course, I didn't hear about Launchpad. So when he mentioned it, I was thinking that, oh, it's some kind of a cohort program. And like, I was curious. And then he mentioned AI-based founders. I mean, basically folks building in AI and wanted to do a 6-week, exact number, 6-week program. And I was like, is Andrew like secretly reading my notes? Because on Apple Notes, 4 weeks ahead of that moment, I just documented what would I do as a cohort for if I had to pivot BIPF into a more lucrative proposition, would have to be AI-based. And so I was like, how about I did a special bonus cohort on AI-based companies and attract, I mean, and it's a 6-week program and I had an outline of it. What would be the content topics? What would be the speakers? And like generally what would be the demo day? And I was like so stoked about the demo day 'cause, you know, I've hosted the On Deck demo. Some of the listeners probably know this. Because they probably were on the Demo Day that day as participants. And that was a big hit. And I feel like, you know, in the startup world right now, the only Demo Days that have that kind of cult status are YC Demo Day, which has been going on for 15 years. But again, that's YC, like the pinnacle of Silicon Valley. And then Techstars regional Demo Days that are also, again, very investor heavy. The questions are all about— it's almost like Shark Tank, which is good, but like, right? You know what I mean? Different purpose. Different purpose. And like, you know, they're trying to close that deal, get the term sheet. My joy came from when I was at On Deck, when I ran those demo days, my joy came from giving these folks who worked so hard for 6 weeks in polishing whatever they were polishing, whatever startup they're working on, a podium where they could present their work and the world would watch. Now, the world is a big word to say there, but I mean like as much as possible eyeballs, because in my head I'm like, even if 8 new leads come into their pipeline and 4 of them convert, Huge. They had a happy day. They had a great day. And that's because of us. Right? So I was— and that was the design I was trying to come up with for even the AI cohort. And of course, Andrew talks about Launchpad AI, and I was like, damn, you know? So I showed him and you too, I think side by side, the comparison of what I had. So there's so much like, this is serendipitous, like the universe needed, wanted me to be here and do this here. So.

Yeah, which is why, like, again, crazy for me to think that you've been here for a month already. But yeah, I'm excited. And KP, you've obviously helped me design this new Launchpad, which is, I don't know if the podcast is launched beforehand.

It'll come later. March. Okay.

Later.

It'll definitely be the March 12th to 15th week or maybe a bit later, but yeah.

Sometime this week, Launchpad, there's a new version. Like talk us through what some of the changes that you've helped us to help evolve Launchpad moving forward.

First of all, I wanna shout out that we're gonna be live by the time this comes out. So everybody should go check out paddle.com/ai-launchpad. I'll include the link in show notes. Shameless plug because I'm like, I'm worried that if we lose like 20% of the audience after that moment, I want to make sure that they hear that. Anyway, so—

Good.

Good. That's the official website and stuff. But the second cohort, I think what I'm super stoked about in terms of some of the changes is I've, of course, you know, thanks for all the references and help that you've given me in terms of the programming we did for the first cohort, in terms of the curriculum, the speakers we had. I loved diving into our previous curriculum and looking for opportunities to level up a little bit more, you know? Yeah. And again, this is my first time taking a look at this. So my goal was not to like dramatically change it up exponentially because it worked, right? Like don't screw up what worked. But I was looking for opportunities to incrementally boost it up to the next level. But selfishly, between you and I, like 5 years from now, if we're still running that same curriculum, then we're screwed. We need to level up every cohort. I love that reaction. Damn, that was a dagger to my point. But anyway, regardless of how you feel, because I know that was your baby for the first cohort, what I'm saying is there's always opportunity to level up the curriculum and switch up the speakers and kind of make it better and better, right? And so that was the angle at which I was looking at, and I feel like we've found a few opportunities where we said, okay, what, who else can we bring in here? You know, or what are new topics we can add? And everything was stemming from the fact that we wanted to make sure the curriculum and the content in the program answered the questions and challenges our AI SaaS founders typically seem to have, right? So that is the, I think the key difference, I think.

Yeah. And I think like building on that to help inform Some of the changes that we've done, like we spoke with the actual Launchpadlers who completed the program themselves. And like, I—

How many calls did you have? I feel like you had like a 10 or 9 or how many you have?

So yeah, I think I did. I actually did. So we had 59 people who did the program, of which 30, I think, submitted and qualified for the competition with their pitch deck and their demo, all this stuff. I think I was able to get on a call with, I think, 20 of them, of which I think like I naturally made like 8 or 9 of them like, hey guys, Can I record you saying that and put it online so that more people like you apply? So like the engagement of the program was like nuts. And I think the feedback that from the content side that I got, and I'm like so excited that you are here with your experiences, like they want more opportunities for founders to talk with each other. Exactly. So for example, we used to do like weekly masterclasses. So we would have a partner or 2 come in and speak on an expert topic. Like who's better to talk about partnerships than Partnerstack? So we would have Nagar come in from Partnerstack and she is brilliant. Like she has done sessions like that.

Same with like Patrick Campbell, right?

Come in and talk about pricing. Like who else?

That's crazy, right? You're learning from the legend in pricing domain. Yeah.

And it's not like a lecture, right? It's not like them reading out a slide and like Patrick's one and this is the feedback talking here. It's like I was able to change my pricing strategy in front of Patrick with him just talking me through it. through it. And I think that, so we're still gonna keep the masterclasses, but now we're like, huh, the founders want an opportunity to share with each other where they are on their building story, like a build in public, but amongst the community. So then we're thinking about, okay, how about the workshops? Like, yeah, KP, have you had experience facilitating that? How would that look?

And that's the thing that I'm excited about too. Like, I missed it in the first take, but the interactive piece, the interactive workshop, which are going to be a recurring thing. which I'm super excited about because there'll be breakout rooms. They'll be basically applying some of the insights that we discuss, you know, so it's no longer just talking at them. It's like talking with them and letting them talk amongst themselves, right? I think that's super exciting. That kind of shit energizes me a lot, man. Like, I've, you know, there's so many times that I would like back, you know, either at BIPF or On Deck, innovate on the fly around the event format in ways that there have never been any other events like this before. And I I'm not trying to innovate just for the sake of it. Innovate because I know, like, just like how you got the sense of like, what are they looking for? You, once you get that intel from them, you can't go to bed thinking like, all right, this is it, right? You have to find a way to like create something new. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think even like another example of this is that the partners that we had last time, and again, big shout out to everyone who helped in collaboration with that launchpad. But like, I remember I, I made the conscious decision not to put in any VCs or PEs as partners. Usually when you do a program like this, you want to have something like this to— the thought process being hopefully one day we can push it in there. Considering where the world was in terms of valuations, in terms of like markets like consolidating and all this stuff, I just, I wanted to show those other opportunities of fundraising that isn't so obvious. So for example, non-equity financing. So we had Right. It's like Founder Path and Gillian, who were called Art Capital back then, like those kinds of companies coming in, speaking specifically on those topics. And that got great feedback. But then I also got then the feedback that I didn't want to hear, which was like, yeah, but we still want to talk to VCs though. Like it would be still cool to have that opportunity. So like this time around, I've reviewed like that partner list with you and we've gone, okay, which VC do we want to work with that speaks solely to this audience? And it's not like a mini fund within a monster fund that looks at this audience, who will speak and invest into companies that KP was once serving last year and is still able to serve this year through Launchpad. And I think it's those kind of like iterations. And that's why I made that face when you said about the content being so different in 5 years' time. You're probably right. But like, I think 5 years is too difficult for me to think that far ahead because I'm so excited about the iterations that we're making for now.

Right now already.

Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. Okay. So give me a sense of, you talked to a bunch of these founders at the end. Yeah. Yes. I mean, you've been so, how do I say it? You've been so communicative through, through the cohort and program itself, because I've heard from Hayley and others on the team that you've like, you really were immersed and talking to them every week. But that aside, you had an end of the program reflection with many of them, the ones who did testimonials. If you have to reflect here in public and summarize maybe 3 learnings What were they? I think you covered maybe one or two in the previous points, but like just to kind of formally summarize them.

Yeah, it's 3 for the whole like program as a whole, like Build and— Yes.

What were your 3 learnings that maybe positively surprised you or?

Yeah, I think taking time to like trust my intuition or my gut, I suppose, with like who we should partner with and why. So I think with Paddle, we're in a, and you've probably like noticed this, we're in a fortunate position where our branding Like, especially in the world that we're serving, it's so loud. Like it has a personality, it's understood, it's helping define this merchant of record as like a proposition. So it would've been quite easy for us to go and pull the 12 flashiest logos possible and like get them involved. Because again, like this is a new thing for us. One of my immediate fears was like, are we gonna have enough signups? Are we gonna have enough people like applying all of this stuff? But how I structured the partnership side from this was if I was a founder, what are the first like 6 or 7 tools that I need? And then from that, I then went and spoke to AWS or banana.dev or Customer or something like this. And we got that list and some of the partners. Well, so for example, Denise from SaaS Launch, like she does some amazing work helping and coaching founders to go and get investments from VCs and that kind of stuff. But like, I remember it was such a lucky opportunity where I think she happened to like subscribe or there was some world where we happened to meet each other whilst I was planning Launchpad. And I was thinking the work that Denise does and the depth of quality that she will be willing to put in, because this is a great opportunity for her and her growing customer base and this stuff. Like, I remember feeling like I had to justify that to a lot of people at the start because again, we could have gone and got a VC to But then you see the feedback from the founders of, we loved partner X or Y because of how detailed and how passionate they were on Launchpad, on our journey, on that kind of stuff. So that was a very rambled way of saying, number one, I'm glad from the partner side, like I took time to think about it through the lens of what does a founder need to build their product, but also like who can grow with Launchpad. So this isn't just a one-off thing. We want to do Launchpad again and again. Who are repeat founders?

You know what, before you go to number 2, I want to kind of relay a piece of the thing that came to mind when you said that first bullet point is something that's a great reminder for us as we continue to build the brand of Launchpad, because we will always have more partners than we can honor, right?

Of course.

What I love, the way your gut directed you, which is what earlier I said about the way I chose Paddle among many options, was like sensing care and passion over the flashiness of the logo, right? And optimizing for the former, right? Optimizing for a sense of care and passion versus just the logo itself, right? I think that is a, again, being intentional. It's a hard thing, you know, in the moment because sometimes you're like, oh, maybe the easy route is just to take the logo.

I was gonna say, you can argue both sides very easily. Yeah. Like easily you can do

that. But the upside of having someone who truly engages and then truly wants to give first and wants to come back and, You know, you can, you know that they're not phoning it in. They're not just like calling it in, like, you know. So I think that is so key and something I will remember and I have to, as we work towards a better Launchpad. Anyway, so what's your second one?

Yeah. So number one was that. Number 2, yeah, this is going to be an interesting one. So what, okay. So once we actually started the Launchpad, so I reviewed every single application. I did every personal communication of accepting people onto it or explaining to people why this time around, Like the application didn't work out, whatever. But like my personality, I hope this is true. It's easy to say this, but I feel like my personality didn't budge or change whilst I was on the program. So like, it's a community, right? That there are gonna be moments where you need to like take control of the room and like really get the vibe going and that kind of stuff. Fortunately, the way Hayley built the community for Launchpad on Slack, we had people like Hannes from Bulby. Or like the TeamGPT team, like all engaging on the channel anyway. But I think that was one of the things is when I was doing my session, when I was running the final or hosting the final, when I was running the, going through the applications, like I stayed consistent to my personality, which is what I think I thought would be harder to find in someone to partner with Launchpads going forward. But I feel like with you, you've presented yourself and again, it's been true so far, so far. It's been true so far. It's like, your personality is this, this is what I really believe in. And this is how I'm gonna go and do it. And you're gonna, things aren't gonna work out, but own it. And I think so that summary of that second point is like, I'm glad I kept true to myself during that with whether it was partners, whether it was with the actual founders themselves or the team helping.

Yeah, I think that sort of the second thing reminds me of being authentic to yourself. And it's tricky because when you kind of do something new, or you're put into a new environment, there's a tendency that you kind of second-guess yourself a little bit. I felt that in my first month at Paddleware because, you know, outside Paddle, like, I'm me, right? I can— I know me and I'm very self-aware. I'm like, if I want to give a particular shout-out to a particular founder for whatever XYZ reason on Twitter, I'll just do it because I'm like, hey, you know, or a product on launch. I'm like, yeah, why not? Or talk about a particular benchmark within SaaS, like, you know, churn still sucks, but Let's say churn is, you know, if the ongoing narrative is that churn has been dramatically bad the last few months, KP's version would be like, so what? Because that's KP, right? So I'm like, so what? I can walk on water. Like, this is just unbelievable feeling, man.

Let's go with it. Let's go.

And so what was interesting was I kind of had, I felt that maybe I had to reel it in a little bit and like, you know, be a little bit more moderated. In the initial days of being inside the Paddle team and all. But when I did the SaaS market report with Ben, it just naturally came up where he asked me— take 1 was me recording to the screen with no Ben or anyone involved and giving my commentary on a piece of, what do you call it, a report. And it felt so moderated and like tempered down. And he said, KP, this doesn't feel like you, because he sees me, he knows me from my content. Sure. And then take 2 was him and I like this, and him like him reach pointing out like, hey, B2B churn has declined. And I'm like, so what? We got this, you know, that kind of thing. And he was like laughing so much saying, oh my God, I've never seen anyone get so hyped about a B2B chart. And I'm like, that's me, right? So I finally embraced it. And I got a DM from Jessica that day that it was such a great, you know, segment. And Andrew also said like, thanks for doing this, whatever. So it's not so much the validation, but it felt so cathartic for me.

Yeah.

To still be me on the report. and do a different kind of job there, right? So Ben's immediate response was, let's do this in March again for the new month report. And I want you to carry your optimistic, you know, ethos and I'll be, I'll be like, hey, be cautious, you know? So I'm like, okay, that's good.

Yeah. I remember texting you, calling you a nerd when that came out, but I'm glad that that didn't make the cut compared to the Jess and Andrew nice comments. But yeah, like, but this is what I mean. Like, it's so, Like, I know this is our job. I know we get paid from this. Like, let's not hide that. Like, that's very clear. But like, I still want to enjoy myself. Like, I still want to not have to think about how do I present myself and then that. And I think with, when you're around a group of founders, like they will sniff you out if you're not fraudulent, it's not the right word, but they'll sniff you out if you're not being yourself. Like they'll roll your eyes as quick as I do. Yeah. And that's, that's a, as we scale and grow Launchpad, like That's, that's the thing I'm curious about is like how true to ourselves can we keep it?

Yeah. So third one, you have a third one?

Yeah.

In terms of reflections and takeaways.

Yeah. Third one is, look, obviously I will write my own history of like, I founded AI Launchpad against the walls. There'll be like dramatic music in the background, like rain and just me just like looking mysteriously and all that stuff. But the reality is I was a, because I was excited of what I was doing, but also I'm not gonna lie, I was quite nervous and like really concerned of failure and like what happens, how quickly do I have to kill this if it doesn't work? What happens? All this stuff. I was overcommunicating with people that I trust. So people like Hayley, people like Ralph, people like Muzz, who their day-to-day roles doesn't necessarily overlap with Launchpad. But then that, I think, then got them excited and like they wanted to share the journey. So Launchpad stopped feeling like a job quite quickly because I would be sat in, so in the London office, I'd be sat on the first floor on my own with a whiteboard and Muzz would just come down because he's got a 15-minute break. And we'll just have a quick chat. I tell him about Launchpad and we have a back and forth. And then I've got 2 or 3 amazing ideas out of that. For him, that wasn't like, he didn't have to do that. But for me, it was just like taking the team on that journey. And it wasn't an intentional team. It wasn't an intentional journey. But now when I thought about, okay, how do I make sure that KP is onboarded onto Paddle, understands the dynamics of the team, of the direction, the market that we're going to. One of the first things on my onboarding is like, here's my group of like core friends that helped with Launchpad. Go befriend them. Like go talk to them, be yourself. You'll be fine. You'll get there. Because the reality is they're the ones who made it happen. Like if I didn't have Hayley doing what she did for the community, sharing about all the founders on LinkedIn, on Twitter, all this stuff, Launchpad would've flopped. Like undoubtedly. Yeah. So all 3 answers were very long-winded, but in conclusion, Number one was that really taking time to invest in the founder journey to make the partners and prioritize the right ones. Number 2 was I forgot. And number 3 was I also forgot. So I hope the listeners had a better experience than

me. Than me at the receiving end of having to— well, this is the true human side, you know, of both of us. So that's fine. We will go to One more question that I have at the end, which is, um, we, we talked about, well, you kind of highlighted the iterations and improvements, you know, we have in store for, from Cohort 1 to Cohort 2, right? Give us a sense of like any specific startups or founders that you talked to the last time that you would love to see more of this time, you know, like who would be a great fit, right, for this cohort?

Yeah, so this is the thing, right? There's such a range. So I'll give you 2 or 3, like, profiles or situations. So virtual staging was the winner of the inaugural—

Virtual staging AI, whether it was a winner of the cash prize. Yeah.

And long story short, if you want to sell your house and your house is a bit of a mess like mine is, you can use AI to get rid of the furniture or add new furniture to help you sell the product and sell your house. Sorry. That's what virtual staging is.

And they were, do you remember where they're based out of? London or?

No, no, no. They're based in the US. So they actually, so the founding team is interesting. So they actually finished Harvard Innovation Labs and they were working on this as a, like a product project for credits as part of their original degree that they were doing. And yeah, then they launched on Paddle and during the program, what was interesting is they had already got to, I think like, I think it was $20K MRR by the start of the program. So They found a little niche that they were working on. They implemented a few changes to the product experience. They targeted new markets. They got a better checkout experience. They also like changed their pricing structure. So they actually monetized annually. They gave that option. And within that 6-week program, they went from $20K MRR to $200K MRR. So like in terms of like revenue growth, all of this stuff, none of that was in my like predictions of what launch fund they'd be going to.

On your bingo card, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the poster child. That was such a great, you know, I knew their rough, I knew the rough story around it with them winning the cash prize, but I just did not know the crazy trajectory of MRR.

Yeah, it's a crazy one. So that's one where it's like you're beginning to see, you've found a bit of your market and it's like, how do I get to the next level? The next level quickly. Yeah. The other one would be, so one of my favorite founders. Yeah, I'm not gonna share too much about the, like the background, but long story short, they are a product manager at a big software company. And so they were doing, they were building their side hustle, I suppose, through Launchpad. So they would take like lunch breaks or meeting breaks out to do the actual sessions and take part. And on the weekends and evenings, they were building this. And I think their intention is to leave their current role because they've got their first recurring customers through the Launchpad. Nice. So they built the MVP, they got initial customer feedback, and now they're gonna make it into a real, like, business that they're going to commit more and more to.

I feel like we will have— I can't wait to see more of those in our cohort. I feel like we'll have a lot of those people, you know, because so many of them are, especially in big tech, you know, if you work at Instagram, if you work at Spotify, if you work at any of these, like, you know, bigger companies, or even like startup, let's say startups, you— this is a great window of opportunity to build something in AI, right? Like, this is incredible. This is like the 1997 or '96 For the dark com era.

The barriers to entry are so low. Like even people like me, I'm not technical, I'm lazy, but like GPTs are a thing that enable me like to, to just do stuff. Like, like, yeah.

Like the other day you were playing with ChatGPT, the, the custom GPTs, right? You were trying to create some stuff in there.

Yeah. It's just like,

yeah,

it, they've simplified it so much. And I think again, when you have more technical-minded people who've always had that, like that itch to scratch, I think that's a real like Launchpad is a good opportunity because it's not committal. If you think about what the program actually is, it's 6 weeks. You do your masterclass a week, you come to your workshop a week. One of them is where you're learning. The other one is where you actually talk to founders about your story, that kind of stuff. The competition at the end is you submitting an updated pitch deck and updated demo and show us like some sort of like real traction, quantifiable traction, not reviews or how have you monetized or something like this. Like for a 6-week period, that's not that deep, like to do that.

That's no equity. Like if you have a legal company, it could be a C-Corp, it could be LLC in America, or it could be any other private limited in the world. We're not taking any equity. And it's of course free to attend, which is, remember my VIPM journey? How could you be like, I was like so relieved when I was like, ah, it's powered by Paddle, paid by Paddle. Thank you. Now I can go sell 100 of these spots because it was so hard to sell them. You know, they're early-stage founders, right? So—

Yeah. And let's not hide it. Like, obviously, if they, if they are trying to monetize, and they have a use case that Paddle can serve, obviously, I want them to use Paddle. But like, there's, there's no salesperson.

But it's actually also, I think, to clarify, this is not only open to our Paddle current customers. That's important to put it out there. I'll try to include it in our show notes. I'm sure it's on the website for Launchpad too. It's open to anyone building, any ambitious founder, building in the AI and software tools space, whether or not you have the intention to use Paddle as your billing tool, right? So, or any of our tools like Profit Mail or anything. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's just not that committed. And I think that's the profile that I would, I enjoyed it because they not only took part in the program, but they, because they were a product manager, they would then give me product feedback on Paddle. And I, I personally can't do anything with that. All I did was turn around to our product marketing team. Danielle was amazing. And I turned around to our product leadership team and was like, hey guys, this is some immediate feedback that we've got from someone who's really engaged with Paddle and the Launchpad. Here you go. And they took a call with them and all this stuff. And like, yeah, that was just such a relationship building opportunity where to the point where when they launched their thing, I'm going to be like, hey, Hayley, can you do a LinkedIn post sharing? their thing because we want them to grow. So that's one. And then the third one, and this is like, I'm gonna put this as like a joker bonus category. Have you ever heard of venture studios? Is that a thing that you come across?

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

I've been tracking them a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

I cannot emphasize enough how disconnected I am from the world. Clearly that's what you've exposed to me over the past month. I'd never heard of a venture studio before. So to your knowledge. I know, I know. 2 of our partners, not partners, sorry, 2 of our Launchpadlers were from the same venture studio, but they'd split their teams up for 2 different products. And what was for me super exciting was I was watching 2 teams, they're not competing or anything like this, but I could see 2 teams like working as like independently working on their own, working on their own branding on social media, on LinkedIn. They came in, they hadn't had a LinkedIn presence before. And then they started posting, they started posting about their journey. They started, and obviously people like me are like interacting and engaging with their LinkedIn posts or their tweets or anything like this. But then they see, okay, this is resonating with the market. Let me do more of that. So even at the end of the program, and fortunately both products are gonna become their own businesses and they're gonna do it. But even if worst case scenario, the project didn't work out, which can happen, It happens every day, right? Any business.

Yeah.

Yeah. They've built their audience, they've built their immediate network of founders who are building in the same space, going through the same challenges, but also externally they've built a brand for their venture studio. So specifically I'm talking about Camplight. The work that these guys did was awesome. But for me, again, I don't know what the new thing that is gonna apply to Launchpad that I've never heard of, like the new type of founder or the new type of relationship across businesses. But for people like me, like, that's how the, you know, we were talking about like me being myself, like I had to ask questions. I was like, yeah, but how are you not helping each other? Like, how does this, how do you monetize? Like, what happens to your other product? All of this stuff. And yeah, those are the free role profiles.

You're saying that they were educational for you, right?

Yeah, I learned. I enjoyed that. It's all about me. Can you tell?

I'm so glad that you were able to, you know, level up a little bit and educate yourself. Which you should have known a long time ago. Just kidding. But, you know, that is a true untapped— I feel like it could be a true untapped niche that we can explore a bit further through the year, you know, for our pipeline. Yeah. I'm just thinking out loud with you here because at least in America, there are so many venture studios. Actually, one of my close friends, his name is Whit Anderson, great guy. Love you, Whit. He's in Atlanta and he's working at a venture studio here called Neighborhood Studios, and it's founded by Dave Payne, who's kind of like a mentor of mine. He's a great guy, but they have this— a bunch of EIRs, entrepreneurs in residence, and they're all working on independent ideas on their own, but they're like a team. It's kind of like how you and I are on a team, but like—

Right.

You might be doing something else a week from now for partnerships, and I might be continuing Launchpad or whatever, but so there's— they have a shared resource around dev team, but they're testing and validating so many other unique ideas. That's typically the model of a venture studio, and there's so many of them in Denver, many of them in New York. So I feel like if you're doing— at some point, if you're doing targeted outreach to say, hey, would you be interested in sending your EIRs to the program? That could be a big untapped market.

That's the thing that, like, again, let's go back to your 5 years, the content will be different, whatever. Like,

yeah,

again, We can debate that for days, but I think that I don't disagree that the delivery of the content will be different. It will be evolved. The types of people who are partnering with us, the way that we are actually— so for example, one of the things that I was— I told you about straight away is I love the global aspect of Launchpad, but also something that plays on my mind is like, how about those markets that— so for example, I'm currently in Dubai and I was able to attend Step conference. So I was able to see a lot of the Middle Eastern startup scene here and it was super exciting, but it's like a raw market, like a raw market that needs like a little guidance of, okay, this is how people internationalize to the US or to the rest of Asia or to Europe or something like this. And maybe a regional component. There's gonna be so many ways that we, I think, can slice and dice Launchpad in the future. As long as we are true to ourselves, the partners we choose actually care about the audience that we're serving. Yeah. And also founders are talking about Launchpad long beyond the program. So the reason I'm quite confident that we're gonna be able to get the 50 people, a good quality 50 people onto the program is because the people that I was from the Launchpadders of this current cohort, they've already been forwarding me their friends or someone, a project to someone else that they know and being like, hey, let me know when the next Launchpad is on. I want them to apply. And I'm just there like, yes, you, you, because I haven't pitched them Launchpad. They did.

Yeah, yeah, they did. You know what's funny? When I talked about, um, remember when I first joined, I made a post around like, I'm joining, uh, Paddle for, you know, to run, uh, Launchpad sometime down the— later this year. I have a call coming up with 2 folks, um, 2 of my favorite founders who are part of BIPF cohort cohorts like last year. And one of the guys said KP would love to be part of, because he's building an AI tool. It's like, we'd love to be part of Launchpad cohort, the new cohort. And I haven't even announced yet, right? We haven't even publicized this will go live, right? So there's a lot of this, like, you know, organic simmering demand that's coming up to the surface, I feel like. And, you know, I'm so stoked, man. This is going to be a big year for us. And in many ways, we're going to learn so much. I would love to do a round 2 of this exact episode later in the year, maybe in December, or, you know, like when we reflect on, hey, what's 2024 been like? What did we learn from, you know? From March of this year and stuff like that. But yeah, I'm excited. I want to leave on one thought, which is actually, I'm personally curious about this. And since we're already on the topic anyway, what is going to be your big focus for this year? You know, apart from Launchpad, like what are things that you're excited about personally?

Yeah. So, so just for context, like my background and experience both with Paddle, but also beforehand has been on go-to-market strategy, like sales development, all of this, the commercial side, right? The go-to-market And with Paddle, one of the things over the last 2 years we've done really well is, so we acquired a business called ProfitWell for $300 million, big explosion to the market that we could serve. Like so many companies suddenly opened up.

I found out that they have 34,000 products connected to ProfitWell metrics dashboard. 34,000. It's

insane. Yeah. And it's active. Active companies.

Active.

Yes. Yeah. That's the nuts thing. And so That market was so big. And part of my focus then over the past 18 months has been how do we refine the markets that we go after? What value propositions do we speak to? La la la. Which is where like programs like Launchpad, it's like, okay, let's not sell Paddle, but let's go and serve the actual founder persona that we know we can serve really well. And okay, great if they are able to use Paddle at the end of it, but if not, cool. Like this is still good for us from a brand awareness, all this stuff. So using that mindset, now that we've defined our market and feel like we understand, and now it's like, who do we need to befriend around that audience? So this is where partnerships comes in. So stuff like investor partnership program, customer referral program, an actual tech integration, like all of this stuff is things that Paddle have flirted with in the past, but we haven't doubled down. Like Ralph, who we mentioned earlier, he did the initial foundational work for partnerships maybe 2 years ago on his own, just like going out there doing it just because he was passionate about it and he loves it and whatever. And he gave me a whole load of knowledge of what worked well, what didn't work so well, and some like hypotheses that he's had. And that's really helped. And it was, he did that in coordination with Alan, who's awesome and a GOAT as far as I'm concerned. And that has now fed into what my focus for this year is, is like What's our partnership function look like? How are we building that? And that kind of thing. And it's lucky that Launchpad obviously has been an opportunity where we need to partner with people. Yeah. And this multi-track—

for content or for speakers or for demo day appearances for many reasons.

Yeah. Yeah. Like both from the actual thought leadership side, but also content distribution. Like that's the 2 arms that I think about the partnerships and how to prioritize them. So yeah, like So actually this will be live whilst this podcast will go live. Our page, www.pardoor.com/partners, will have been updated and we'll be calling out the types of partnership that we are proactively trying to build out. So the investors, like, went to all of this stuff, but also like, we're new to this. Give us your ideas. Like, tell us where we should go. Like Denise from Launchpad, she came inbound to us and was like, hey, I work for SaaS Launch. We serve similar audiences. Let's partner on something. 3 weeks later, she was one of the first partners on Launchpad. Like those are the kinds of the ideas that I want to hear about because it could spark something at the right time. So yeah, I'm excited to—

Which is amazing because that is also could be another takeaway for us or a bat signal for us in this episode where, because that particular page will be live and I'll put that in show notes. But if there's any partners looking, hearing this episode or listening or watching this episode and wondering, oh, you know what, Paddle serves the ICP that we talked about, maybe there's a way in which we synergistically can serve the same, please reach out to us, reach out to Tarshan, hit us up. And we're like the foundation level of building a partnerships program, right? So all ideas are welcome.

Super excited. My final question to you, I know you're the actual host, but I guess I shouldn't be asking you questions. But like, you're a month in, like, how has, like, how has it been? Not just like, don't just wax lyrical about Paddle, but like mentally, you've gone from being a sole founder to now having a team around you, all this stuff.

I think, first of all, I want to say one thing. I've been saying this to the last 2, 3 one-on-ones I had with like Ralph and Carly, which is one month doesn't feel like one month to me. Mentally, I feel like it's been like 4 days, literally. And it's so crazy because it's moving, we're moving so fast. There's so many things that are moving pieces because just like your role, my role is also cross-functional. There's all these, I got these 4 or 5 priorities that kind of float a little bit. Of course, P1 is Launchpad, but, and so because of that and because of some of my own pet projects, like going and talking to customers and some of the stuff that I've been doing, which has been really educational, I feel like the 30 days feel like 4 days personally. And so I asked Raf like, dude, you've been here for 3 years. Yeah.

Yeah.

How— what is your equivalent of my, you know, my feeling? And he said, it feels like 8 months KP, the same thing. And I was like, oh shit, so this doesn't go away. Like, it feels like— but also he said, when I look back, I'm like amazed at how many pivots and changes of mind, because he went from the BDR, the EAE, and all that stuff. And he was like, it just feels unreal, but so much happened so quickly at Paddle. And I'm like, wow, you know, so that's— so that is the true reaction. Like, Whoa, it feels so fast.

So Bianca, who leads our brand marketing function, and she's been at Paddle for I think over 5 years. So a lot of the rebrand, all of this stuff, she was wearing the captain's armband and really running to the market and working on that. When I joined Paddle, because she'd been there I think 4 years or coming up to 4 years when I joined, I asked her, how is Paddle actually to work? You've been here long enough, you should know where the skeletons are buried and all all this stuff. And she said, it still feels like the honeymoon phase for me. You know, when you join a new thing and it's like a honeymoon phase.

Yeah, you feel that honeymoon. Yeah.

I asked that same question. So I'd just done my 2 years recently and I asked her the same question because we were catching up in the office. She said the same line. Like, she's like, and like, I understand what she means. Like, Paddle has evolved, right? There's no two ways about it. Like the company that I joined versus the one we are at now, the things that we're working on is completely different. But I wake up and yeah, I'm enjoying what I do. And as long as I have people like you to really carry the energy, as far as I'm concerned, like, yeah, bring it on.

I knew a roast was coming. No, I feel the same. I love it so much here so far that there was one of my founders, I don't know if I briefed you on this. One of my founder friends who 3 years ago, I invested in his company as an angel investor, like way back, you know, 3, 4 years ago, was winding down his startup. He raised a bunch of money, but like didn't hit PMF, but a hyper-talented product guy, kind of like Ralph, pings me after I talk about Pattern on my Twitter, like a week after I joined, saying, KP, here's like my wind-down story. You sharing the way you wind it down helped me believe that it's okay, because there's a lot of bullshit shame around this, right? I'm like, why? Of course. I've never felt more happy in the last month than Being a VP, how is it any different? Like, it's what we believe in our head that's fucking you up, right? I'm sorry, that's like screwing you up. So, um, he was— he felt— he felt that, you know, it was really cathartic to read my stuff, and he also felt the same way, etc. And he goes, uh, I just saw— and I thought, where is this going, right? And he goes, I just saw that there's a product marketing position open at Paddle. He's in Canada, okay? Okay. And I shot my shot and I applied just because, you know, you— the way you describe it and all that. I was like, Awesome, you know, so happy because I knew this guy was a great founder like Ralph, right? I had this— Yeah. So, it's also the culture that we talk about is a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? What we believe internally is true sometimes leaks out to the world and the world catches a glimpse of it and they're like, oh, maybe I want to be in a culture like that, you know?

Yeah.

We're not saying this is perfect, but I'm saying like we're saying what we feel, right? And so, I was so happy that he was in the pipeline. I don't know, you know, would happen later. But like Jessica pinged me the other day and said like, I'm talking to him on a call because that's product marketing, right? Yeah. But it's so crazy, right? All of this coming together makes me feel like, you know, it's always the team and it's always the culture to me. Great companies are people, they're not products. And people make products obviously, but I believe that. And, you know, so that's where I'm right now. Maybe my answer will change in 6 months or 1 year. And mostly because of you, Tarshan, but—

I'll take full responsibility and credit for that downfall. Absolutely.

But I am having the time of my life and enjoying and feeling great and then excited for this new cohort.

Yeah, dude. Thank you.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here. Thanks for stealing the mic and the spotlight from me and being the host default, you know, in this episode. Just kidding. Super excited that you were here. We're going to put everything out there with the show notes and the links. All the good stuff, and it'll come out maybe in, um, you know, 7 days from today. We'll make sure that it goes live during our promotion weekend. Hey, thanks for being here once again, man, and we'll see you on a future episode again.

Thanks, man.

Everyone listening, it's, it's a wrap.