
Building Tech Products & Scaling Startups: Launchbase · 2025-06-18 · 29 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
50 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Griffin Parry brings 20 years of experience to Meta, the billing infrastructure platform designed to operationalize usage-based pricing for mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies with revenues starting at $50M. After selling GameSpox (a cloud gaming infrastructure business) to Amazon in 2017 where he and co-founder John Griffin spent three years post-acquisition, Parry identified a critical gap: companies using usage-based pricing models face significant operational pain - from manual billing processes and under-billing (2-4% revenue leakage) to inability to rapidly iterate on pricing and packaging. At AWS, he observed the same problems and saw the bespoke tooling Amazon had built to solve them. Meta now brings that AWS-caliber capability to the broader SaaS market by serving as an invisible infrastructure layer between usage data, pricing rules, account information, and the revenue stack (Salesforce, Netsuite, etc.), automatically calculating bills and distributing insights across CRM, ERP, BI, and product layers. The timing is particularly acute as AI features add variable costs to software products, forcing companies to adopt usage-based models. Parry discusses his institutional fundraising strategy (capitalizing on his co-founder reputation and early-stage capital availability in 2020-2021), landing design partners through discovery-driven sales motions, and the shift from SaaS skeptics to market believers as usage pricing becomes industry standard.
Usage-based pricing creates under-billing problems (2-4% revenue leakage), slower time-to-market for new products and pricing changes due to spreadsheet-based processes, and lack of real-time pricing data available to sales and customer success teams.
Meta targets mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies with $50M+ revenue that have established tooling like Salesforce and Netsuite; they require raising substantial institutional capital upfront and landing design partners rather than pursuing freemium or land-and-expand models.
Parry observed that GameSpox experienced the same usage-based pricing operational pain points as AWS; seeing how AWS had built bespoke tooling to solve these problems at scale inspired the idea to productize that capability for the broader SaaS market.
When SaaS companies add AI features to their products, those features drive variable costs (API calls, compute), making usage-based pricing necessary to protect margins and align customer payment with actual resource consumption.
He conducted 60-70 in-depth discovery calls with potential customers, then invited those who validated the problem to become design partners and co-create the solution rather than pursuing a traditional product-led growth approach.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
There are genuine operational insights buried in the episode - especially around UBP pain points, design-partner GTM, and revenue-stack gaps - but they are diluted by extended name banter, host personal anecdotes, and generic startup platitudes at the end. The insight-to-filler ratio is mediocre for a 29-minute runtime.
our teams didn't have the information they needed at their fingertips to answer questions that customers had. We couldn't respond quickly enough to reasonable pricing requests from customers. We couldn't launch product as quickly as we liked because there was a spreadsheet of doom that would need to be updated
under billing, which was previously a big problem. You know, you were um, under billing 2, 3, 4% disappears
The episode recycles familiar startup frameworks (talk to customers, ask why, find design partners) and the AI-drives-usage-pricing point is now widely circulated; the one genuinely memorable idea - invisible vs. delightful enterprise software - is borrowed from a customer and only briefly explored.
enterprise software should either be invisible or delightful and you don't want to be anywhere in between
everybody's adding AI features to their products and that changes the way you need to price that product. Not least because whenever anybody uses one of your AI, uh features, it's driving variable costs for you
Griffin Parry is a genuine practitioner: co-founded and sold GameSparks to Amazon in 2017, spent three years as an AWS GM, and is now building a VC-backed enterprise SaaS product in the same domain he operated in - credible depth and directly relevant experience at scale.
I was sort of the general manager of the AWS service
we were always committed to building another business right from the very first moment when we signed the deal
The episode offers a handful of concrete data points - ICP revenue floor, under-billing percentage, discovery call volume, named customers and investors - but omits funding amounts, ARR, customer count, and growth rates that would make the claims verifiable and more instructive.
our customers are not early stage businesses. They're actually mid market and enterprise businesses. So their revenues will start at $50 million and sometimes be much, much higher
some of our customers include steakhouse Sneak, Matillion, so like really good chunky companies
The host frequently derails depth with his own anecdotes and never challenges a claim; there is one useful follow-up on product-market fit evidence, but the session is largely a PR-friendly retelling rather than a probing interview, capped off with overt praise that kills any chance of productive tension.
you guys are clearly doing an amazing job
that's actually for like Loginet and my company and what we do in that like the sales cycles can sometimes be quite long
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
In this episode of Launchbase, John Radford sits down with Griffin Parry, founder and CEO of M3ter and former co-founder of Gamesparks (acquired by Amazon), to explore the realities of scaling a SaaS startup in a fast-changing market. Griffin shares his journey from corporate life to building, exiting, and starting again. We explore lessons from Gamesparks and how they’re influencing his latest venture, M3ter. The conversation covers: Why usage-based pricing is reshaping SaaS business models How Griffin approached raising capital with a proven track record The key to building a go-to-market strategy that actually works How to listen for true customer pain points Achieving product-market fit and keeping churn low What it’s like to sell a startup to Amazon The emotional and strategic shift from exiting to starting again If you're a SaaS founder thinking about pricing models, investor conversations, or long-term product-market fit this one’s for you.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Welcome to Launchbase, a, uh, fast paced podcast exploring the latest in tech funding and product launches. In under 30 minutes, we break down key trends, interview industry leaders and uncover what's driving the next wave of innovation. And now your host, John Radford.
Speaker B: Hello and welcome to another episode of Launchbase. This is the podcast that dives into all things tech in under 30 minutes. So I'm your host, John Radford and each week I chat with individuals shaping the tech landscape. Today I'm joined by Griffin Parry. Gotta be one of the coolest names we've ever had on the podcast, by the way. CEO, uh, and founder of Meta, uh, platform powering usage based pricing for SaaS companies. Griffin's no stranger to the startup grind. He previously co founded gamesparks, which was acquired by Amazon and now leads one of the UK's most talked about enterprise SaaS ventures. They're backed by the likes of Insight Partners, Notion Capital and Kindred. So in this episode we're going to dive into why usage based pricing is reshaping the future of SaaS. Lessons learned from scaling, exiting and building again, and how founders can think more commercially from day one. So, without further ado, Griffin, welcome.
Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
Speaker B: Um, pleasure.
Speaker C: Thank you for being so nice about my name.
Speaker B: Uh, well, yes, it's a very cool name.
Speaker C: Well, can I tell you two interesting things then? Please. My co founder shares the name.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker C: So I'm Griffin Perry.
Speaker B: Yep.
Speaker C: And he's John Griffin. And we've worked closely together for 20 years and get each other's emails a lot.
Speaker B: I imagine. You do.
Speaker C: So that's what they. And the other thing is Elon Musk's eldest child is also called Griffin.
Speaker A: Wow.
Speaker B: Uh, there's obviously something in it then. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about. I, you know, I gave, I gave a little introduction. Maybe you could kind of elaborate on that, uh, fill in the blanks and you know, give us a sort of potted history of, you know, go as far back as you want to where you are now.
Speaker C: So I've had a career of two bits, the two parts. So first half of it I actually worked in corporates, I worked in media and telco. Almost all of it was at sky, so. And I joined sky, like when it was still an analog business, meaning analog satellite dishes, you know, big wide satellite dishes. And I joined just as they launched digital satellite. But it was an interesting m. I was sort of originally a management consultant. So my job was basically to work out how, uh, we responded to the digital Revolution. So you know the Internet and what it means for legacy media businesses and it was really interesting. So I would go from writing strategy papers to proposing that we did X, Y and Z, to then actually doing it. And so I did a lot of stuff in online TV in particular towards the end. So for those who know the uk, I wrote the original memo saying people watch television via the Internet and I built um, the products that became Now TV and skygo from a little experiment to core business. That's what I need to start with. And I know my co founder actually from back in those days because when we built all that online TV stuff, we didn't know those technologies at sky, we knew broadcast tech. So uh, we needed to find some external help and so we, we appointed a boutique systems integrator who, who was doing a lot of really exciting stuff in the emerging digital space. And they built the platform and John was the, the sales and marketing leader of that business. And so we became sort of close friends, sort of associated with that. And then, and then I got into startups about 15 years ago and it was John's fault. So they were uh, we were gestating an idea in that business about doing stuff in, in video games because they'd been approached by uh, Square Enix and EA and done some big projects for them about emerging online platform needs because basically at that point video games was just moving from the mobile was emerging as a platform and Free to Play was emerging as a, as a genre of game. So video games, which should traditionally been things that you could put on a shiny disc and sell and forget about, were increasingly things that you needed to have an online platform behind because they were living products. And so this was creating a whole bunch of new requirements in the game space about building those online platforms. Um, we took that idea and then launched a company called gamesbox which basically provided it was a cloud infrastructure business focused on the video game space. But what it really did was provide a backend in a box for video games makers.
Speaker B: So this was video games, not necessarily mobile games because I used to work in the mobile gaming space for like avato Mobile and QPass and people like that. And we would kind of do the operating systems for the kind of, the mobile games and those sort of fairly terrible Java games that you would pay like five quid for that then got killed as soon as the iPhone launched.
Speaker C: It was, most of our business was mobile games but on the new platform, so on iOS. Got it right.
Speaker B: Yeah, so you were right on that. You rode that wave like as soon as. Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
Speaker C: And so, and we had other customers, uh, doing PC and console games, but it was all, it's all about kind of the living product side of things. So, you know, leaderboards and virtual currency systems and competition mechanics, uh, and stuff like that.
Speaker B: Yeah, very cool, very cool. And so you exited that business to Amazon, is that correct?
Speaker C: That's correct, yes. 2017.
Speaker B: And so how did that come about? Maybe you can talk, talk us through the exit. You know, did you kind of proactively look to sell the business or, you know, how did that, how did that all kind of come about?
Speaker C: There were two, there were two reasons it happened. So, um, one was ws. Video games was a major segment M so particularly with this trend towards games being online and Fortnite and there was a huge need for cloud infrastructure. And so AWS made lots of money. One of the rationale, um, for the deal was Games Box would work very well as an AWS service and that's what it became. But there's a second reason, which is Amazon were getting into first party games at that point. So you know how you go watch Amazon prime video and you watch lots of TV programs made by Amazon, like Reacher?
Speaker B: Uh, right, right, yeah.
Speaker C: They want to do the same things with video games. And our original contact with Amazon was actually to supply one of their studios. So it was the kind of, the combination of those two things. It's like, right, this is an interesting company that can be a great AWS service and it's also a key supplier to some of our internal game studios. So that was why it happened.
Speaker B: Right. And the process of how it happened, like you had an earnout period, that sort of thing. How did, how did that all work?
Speaker C: Had an earn out period. Spent three years at aws, um, in sales, um, roles in John's case and sort of product roles in mine. I was sort of the general manager of the AWS service. Um, and then did some other bits and pieces. Was a completely fascinating period. Like I think Aw. So we really, it wasn't really Amazon, it was really aws. That's the business we were part of.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: Uh, they're an absolutely amazing business. They're huge. They're growing like ridiculously quickly. They still had the sense of being a startup, they still had that agility and it was watching how they designed the company culturally to maintain that sort of sense of being able to move fast. So we really learned a lot about that and then we also really learned a lot about standards for security and operational excellence because we Thought we were quite good at games Box. And it was a bit like joining the Marines and you get a buzz cut and say, like, no, you're no good. Actually, like, the level is here. And so we will, as a team, learn a lot about that. It's like, oh, wow, okay, this is what good looks like.
Speaker B: That's cool. That's cool. So actually you're not one of these people that you didn't, you didn't kind of hate that, uh, experience of, like, you know, going into sort of a larger organization. I know you said that they were, you know, sort of working like a startup and everything, but they are still obviously a very big business. And so there's kind of things that go with that and red tape and whatnot. And that didn't bother you at all?
Speaker C: So. Yes and no, being completely honest. So, uh, yeah, it didn't bother. The reason it didn't bother me is I've worked at big companies before, so I knew how they worked. So it wasn't. There wasn't a massive culture shock. And the other reason is that it's a really exciting company.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: That you could learn a huge amount from. So that was the good bit. I mean, the bad bit is, you know, you've taken your baby and you sold it to somebody else and you don't, you don't own it anymore. It's not yours anymore. Yeah. And they decide to do things with it that maybe you don't like very much. The analogy I always used is it's like, it's like you divorced your wife, but you're handcuffed to the radiator in the bedroom and, you know, you see what happens with her new husband. It's just like you don't want to be there. So then I watch that happen. You don't want it. Overall, it was really positive experience, but at the same time, we were always committed to building another business right from the very first moment when we signed the deal. So we always knew we were going to do that.
Speaker B: That's interesting because you took away my next question. But that, that, that's fine because it's kind of interesting to know that you're, you're obviously a glutton for punishment. And you knew straight away that, you know, I'm going to be building again.
Speaker C: Oh, we, we knew.
Speaker B: Yeah. And why is that? Is that just something that's in you or you already had the idea and you were just waiting, waiting for your own hour?
Speaker C: I think kind of partly is I'm, um, sort of ruined for Big companies now because of my startup experience, it's like I really enjoy early stage businesses and the freedom and the agency you have. It's fun building things.
Speaker B: Yes, it is.
Speaker C: Yeah. You get the bug, right?
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: And the other reason was like there was definitely a sense of unfinished business. It's like GameSpox did pretty well, don't get me wrong. And it was the right decision to sell for various reasons. But we were still there going, God, we wish we would have carried on a little bit more. It feels like things have come to an end too soon. And so literally on the day we signed the deal to sell, we were looking at each other in the eyes going, we are going to go again, aren't we? Yes. We didn't know what the idea was so we started talking about it. But yet we were always committed and we resigned literally on the day that uh, our ended. So it was.
Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. And so fast forward to today. I mean, actually what I like about your story is that you've got, you've got a salesperson and a product person, which is kind of a lot of the things that they say, look, successful startups often have is that kind of you need a salesperson and you need someone who knows how to do product or you know, if you're a solo founder, you probably need to be able to do both. You can get an engineer to build you stuff and you can get software development companies, if it's, if it's a tech business, for instance, to build you the tech. But you know, from day one it's hard to get somebody who's going to sell the business for you and no one can sell it better than the founder anyway.
Speaker C: Yeah, I agree with that. Um, the one thing that I don't, I think we were able to build a good product because we intimately understood the problem that we were solving because we'd experienced ourselves. So I wouldn't underestimate.
Speaker B: And that's the other one. Yeah, and that is the other one is that, you know, you're kind of, I'm not saying that a fresh face 22 year old can't make it as a successful business, but it certainly helps having kind of lived that problem firsthand. Right.
Speaker C: 100%. It's sort of, you have credibility with, particularly with early customers, you know, you're in an early stage business. Why would I trust this particularly what we do is critical infrastructure as well. So it's almost madness to sort of try to do what we did.
Speaker B: And so let's talk about what you do now. And you know the problem because you said you understand it, the problem that you're solving at meter and where you're at on your journey and then we'll kind of pick apart like how you got there and other bits and pieces.
Speaker C: So I'll describe, I'll start with the problem and then explain the solution. So.
Speaker B: Very cool.
Speaker C: And at GamesBox we had a usage based pricing strategy. So we basically sold on the basis of number of active players that our games had with some bells and whistles associated with it. Back in the day, usage based pricing like this wasn't particularly fashionable in software. It definitely happened in places like cloud infrastructure. So it made sense for us, but it was quite unusual. It worked. It was one of the reasons why the business was successful commercially. But we experienced a whole bunch of pain points associated with it and we didn't fully understand them at the time but we knew that they were caused by the way we were choosing to price and a, um, lot of them were operational. It's like how the hell do you get billing done properly? How do you avoid sort of under billing? But a lot of it was also go to market. It's like, you know, our teams didn't have the information they needed at their fingertips to answer questions that customers had. We couldn't respond quickly enough to reasonable pricing requests from customers. We couldn't launch product as quickly as we liked because there was a spreadsheet of doom that would need to be updated to allow for the new pricing. So we experienced a bunch of pain there. Then at aws who also price on that basis, we saw that they had exactly the same pain points. And so this was the spark for me to. It's like, oh, maybe it wasn't just us. Like AWS seemed to have the problems as well. And then so we ask loads and loads of other software companies and we're like, oh, right. When you see this type of pricing, you have a bunch of these problems and there's a lot of consistency. So that's why we knew there was um, a real problem to solve. And um, the other thing that we saw at AWS is that they had to build a whole bunch of bespoke tooling to solve for these problems. And it was really interesting to see what it was and how they approached it, what the design was. And so that created a lot of inspiration for like what we could build that could be useful to the world. So the really reductive way of saying it is like we're kind of bringing that AWS capability to the Rest of the software and tech sector. It's not quite true, but that's the basic idea.
Speaker B: No, but, uh, that's like the elevator pitch, which is, which is something that everybody needs to have, right?
Speaker C: Yeah. And it's, you know, it's nice. You go, hey, this is the team that, it wasn't just us that came out of aws. We brought a lot of our team with us. So you go, hey, there's a bunch of people from AWS who are building, uh, what AWS has so everybody else can benefit from it.
Speaker B: Yeah, very cool. Um, so you're like, a lot of people say we're the Uber of. You're the AWS of pricing.
Speaker C: And.
Speaker B: Yeah, okay, so early days, you knew the problem, you had the solution. You know what, let's, let's talk about your kind of go to market. What did you have? What did you launch with? How dirty was it? How awful was it? Or was it really polished? And because you kind of knew intricately that this is going to fly.
Speaker C: Just for background, it's worth explaining who we were trying to sell to because that influences a lot about how we went to market, particularly in the early days. Just at the very top level, the problem that we're solving for is, um, the ability to operationalize usage based pricing. Well, and so, um, our customers have got revenue stack tooling like the CRM and the ERP that um, aren't well suited to usage pricing because they were designed for subscriptions. And so they're not very tightly coupled together with each other or with the product system. And what meta does is that we come in and we're basically an invisible infrastructure layer behind them which makes them work as they need to. Um, and so at the top level I describe this as billing infrastructure, but the emphasis is really on the infrastructure rather than the billing. Sure. So what Meta does is we basically automatically pull in all the usage data, all the pricing data and all the account data and we process it and what we spit out is, uh, bill calculations essentially and also usage summaries. And they, they go into the billing system, but they also go a whole bunch of other places around the stack as well. So they go into the sales and the customer success system so that customer facing roles have that information at their fingertips. They go into the BI stack, they go into the product itself because you want to have a billing dashboard so customers can see how much they're using at any given time. Because that all works in an automated basis, it solves a lot of big problems. So billing, which was previously a nightmare. Becomes much simpler under billing, which was previously a big problem. You know, you were um, under billing 2, 3, 4% disappears. Customer experiences are much better. And you have agility around pricing. It's easier to change it. Which means that you can launch new product and pricing and packaging much more quickly. And also sales, if you've got an enterprise sales motion, sales can offer the deals that will win much more quickly. So that's the problem we're solving now. Uh, our customers are not early stage businesses. They're actually mid market and enterprise businesses. So their revenues will start at $50 million and sometimes be much, much higher. And they've got established tooling in place. So they've probably got Salesforce and Netsuite. So going back to your question, how do you get started if that's your icp, you're providing critical infrastructure for a business that's got quite a lot of operational heft and weight.
Speaker B: Yes.
Speaker C: And you're just a little scrappy starter.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: Uh, so how do you start? So there's two bits to it. One is you raise a lot of money so you can build a lot of product so you can build a really big mvp. And we were lucky in that we founded the company in 2020 and the first 18 months, two years of our life, capital was very easy to come by. So we were able to raise a lot very quickly. And that gave us the wherewithal to build a lot of product. The other thing is, how do you get your first customers? And so again, we were lucky because we were repeat founders who'd come out of aws, who had a certain reputation and also a network. So we did, what we did is lots and lots of discovery calls, 60, 70 discovery calls in depth. And then during the discovery calls, we'd always say, hey, listen, if this is a real problem for you guys, you really feel like you need to fix it and you're interested in our ideas about how to fix it. Why don't you be an, uh, initial design partner? Why don't we co create this? Because they were thinking that their alternative was to build something themselves. So to work with a, uh, reputable, smart, flexible vendor who would actually build something with them that would meet their specific requirements was quite an interesting prospect. And that is what got us from zero to one.
Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. Okay. For me and for kind of, you know, listeners and viewers, I think some of the key takeaways there uh, are, you know, unfortunately, you'd done it before. You had a track record, you have, you had experience Capital was easy to come by. I'll get onto that in a second actually. And you knew exactly who you were selling to and you knew what you were selling. So there's quite a lot that aligned well there in terms of, to maximize your chances of success on the capital raising front. So you just, at that stage you just had the idea and you were uh, you're kind of raising to what institutional investors or you know, who, who was the, who were your initial kind of investors.
Speaker C: So when we started we were going to bootstrap initially because again we had a bit of capital available to us. But we just, we realized as soon as we started talking to anybody that raising seed funding would be really quite straightforward for us. Partly because of the conditions, partly because who we uh, were.
Speaker B: So.
Speaker C: And we really wanted to go down the institutional route because we hadn't really with Games Box. So Games Box had like, we did get some institutional funding in that business eventually, but it was much more of a bootstrap journey. And this time we were like, okay, this is quite ambitious. We need quite a lot of capital.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: And uh, we want to move quickly.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: So let's go down the VC route, really commit to it.
Speaker B: Yeah. And actually that's a, that's a really key point, isn't it? Because you know, now, today, in today's market, you know, fast forward to where you've got AI based tooling and you can vibe code things to sort of build out your kind of startup if that's where you're going. If you're building like a sort of simple SaaS tool for entry level companies, you can kind of get to a point quite quickly and then it becomes a case of like, do you bootstrap revenue generate or do you then go to vcs? But the vc, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is really do you want to grow this exponentially? Do you want to go fast and hard? If so, then VC is your route. Yeah.
Speaker C: And we wanted to do that and it was partly because I think that's what the product we wanted to build needed, but also we wanted a different experience the second time.
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, and so talk about where you are now and what your sort of next challenges are like, um, you know, where are you going with the business?
Speaker C: So it's ah, I mean we're in a really exciting spot because uh, when we first sort of started, you know, we were this sweaty tooth madman talking about this transition to usage based pricing and its implications for revenue stacks. And this was going to be A really wide ranging product and everybody,
Speaker B: they
Speaker C: don't quite get it, but now everybody gets it. One of the reasons that they get it is uh, AI. There's lots of reasons why software and tech companies in particular are transitioning to usage pricing. But the one that's easiest to really grasp is the AI side of things. Because everybody's adding AI features to their products and that changes the way you need to price that product. Not least because whenever anybody uses one of your AI, uh features, it's driving variable costs for you.
Speaker B: Yeah, it is.
Speaker C: So you need to find some way of protecting your margins. And so people start introducing some kind of usage pricing. And so everybody knows that usage pricing is a thing and everybody is beginning to appreciate that, um, the current revenue stack is not well adapted to usage pricing. There's something missing in it. It doesn't have metering in it, it doesn't have rating in it and it doesn't have um, an integration layer which allows you to automate data flows around that stack, product to CRM, to erp. And you need that because you need them to be tightly coupled if you, if you're doing usage pricing. So it's exciting. We're in a really exciting market and, and I think we've got definitely a, and possibly the market leading product which is, which is cool. And you know, and the data for that is the customers that we've acquired. It's like we've been able to acquire really good logos uh, who are big. So these aren't early stage businesses. These are big who recognize the problem and love the impact that we have for them and will tell other people, which is really cool. So some of our customers include steakhouse Sneak, Matillion, so like really good chunky companies. So that's cool. And another proof point is, you know, analysts begin to pay attention and write research about the space and you know, find us to be the best player of this new next generation billing cohort coming through. Yeah, so it's pretty exciting. And so, and obviously we've got, that we've got product market fit or in the early stage of product market fit. So everything is now about market traction and accelerating sales.
Speaker B: Yeah, cool. Actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick up on something there right at the end that you said, you said we've got product market fit. What makes you think that, uh, how
Speaker C: do you know, trite way of saying it is when you talk to a customer, they sigh and go, thank God I found you.
Speaker B: That's not trite at all. That's that's just great. And that happens a lot, right?
Speaker C: Yeah, increasingly. Because uh, a lot of it is we know who to target and we know when to target them and we know the individuals in the organization.
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's. I mean so your sales cycle, your kind of. If you're targeting mid market and enterprise, it's still a fairly manual sales process. Would that be correct?
Speaker C: So it's very sales like.
Speaker B: Yeah. So sales isn't really kind of a uh metric as such in terms of like product market fit. Like for some SaaS companies it'd be a case of like churn and sales and all that sort of stuff and like okay. Like sales are becoming way easier and people are churning less. So uh, we got a feeling that we're onto something. Whereas you're a little bit more in terms of customer uh, like user feedback.
Speaker C: Yeah. Uh, I think that's fair. It's quality. It's much more qualitative because of that. But like we have very low like pretty much non existent churn. But then that's because when you install critical infrastructure.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: As long as the implementation is successful it's highly, highly sticky.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: So it's, it's more the um, qualitative feel. Do the customers feel that they've got the impact they want? Like will they leave us a five star review on Garten appear insights or G2? And they do. And so it's. So it's partly so I guess there's two parts to it is product market fit is when we describe what we do we get that sigh of relief and I gotta find you. But also we deliver on the promise and they confirm that we have done.
Speaker B: Yeah that's, that's really cool. But I like the stickiness aspect actually and that's actually for like Loginet and my company and what we do in that like the sales cycles can sometimes be quite long and like when we embed like developers onto an organization I say to uh, you know they end up staying like it's never a short term engagement even when it sort of starts off as a short term engagement because like we know that the value that this and as soon as we sort of get into an organization they end up being a partner for you know, years as opposed to months. And it's. Yeah. So that's how we know it's.
Speaker C: A wise man once said to me enterprise software should either be invisible or delightful and you don't want to be anywhere in between. That's very cool.
Speaker B: Might have to steal that or there we go. That's the sort of caption for the podcast right there.
Speaker C: Okay. And so that was Zach from Steady, one of our early customers, who told me that. But it's, um. By invisible Metre tries to be invisible. So we're infrastructure that automatically makes everything work. We don't compete to host workflows. We enable workflows where they already are. So once you're in and everything's working, it's like you're in a great position. That's why you don't get churned, because everything works. This touches a whole bunch of different things around the org. No one wants to take it out. And if anybody did, there'll be other bunch of people around the organization who'd object because it would break things for them. So we're a good example of that. Like, delightful is every time you use it, you go, how the hell could I live without this?
Speaker B: Right? Yeah. And then.
Speaker C: Which is great too. And then you don't want to be in the middle where it's like, meh. It's like, oh, I'm using this. I don't really like it very much. I kind of have to do it, but I wish there was a better way. So, yeah, we try to avoid that.
Speaker B: That's awesome. Uh, you guys are clearly doing an amazing job. We're getting close to time, which is unfortunate. But, um, I would like, if I may, if you can impart a few, few little nuggets, just a few takeaways for anybody who is at the, I don't want to say embryonic stage, but at, uh, this, should we say, kind of mvp, early stages of their journey. And any, Any nuggets that you can, you can offer them up as a little bit of advice as somebody's been there and done it.
Speaker C: I suppose I'll give you, because I'm a functionally, a product person. The one thing is, I would really emphasize, I think that was from the customer, be really outcome oriented. Like, what is it that the customer needs? And solve that problem and test it. And, um, don't give up on talking to customers and trying to.
Speaker B: What?
Speaker C: There's an AWS phrase about confirming disbelief or something. But anyway, you just got to challenge all your assumptions all the time and think back from customers. I think that really helps. Yeah.
Speaker B: To be honest, that's an amazing one to take away because it's that customer first thing. How are you doing that, though? Just quickly, seeing as we've got got tiny little bit of time. How. How are we doing that? Is that through like direct customer or forms or market research or direct customer.
Speaker C: So, you know, to start off with it, we were our, uh, customer. We understood it because we experienced the pain ourselves. But then, remember I talked about doing all those discovery conversations. That's what I mean. It's like you really talk and, and you're, you're quite deliberate. Like you're interviewing this person because you really want to understand the nature of the pain. And so you ask, you know, you'll ask why multiple times to sort of like peel back the layers and then. So that was in the early days, but now, like, uh, I don't think there's any substitute for customer contact. So, like, I definitely deliberately reach out and make sure that I'm speaking to customers and other ecosystem players, like other tool vendors and consultants that sort of do implementation advisory for customers. It's like, talk to me about it. That really helps. And we try and get everybody in the company to do the same thing. So, like, this is a tiny little example. But we do, because we're a remote first company, we do an all hands every Friday. Uh-huh. Just to get everybody together, you know, and it's. Sometimes there's some good agendas, sometimes it's just telling jokes, but once a month we get a customer to come on for that session and it's to remind everybody in the company that this is what we're doing it for. And we get that customer to talk about pain that they had and how it was solved. Yeah. So it's not about saying how great Meta is, it's them talking about the problem that they had.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker A: Ah.
Speaker B: And sometimes, well, it might spark something in someone internally. Right?
Speaker C: Totally.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: And it helps personalize. It's sort of like, oh, right, so this is the person and this is what they're going through and. Oh, right. We could. Exactly as you say. Like, we could do X, Y and Z. They're always really good sessions.
Speaker B: Uh, that's super cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna end on that. Griffin, thank you so much for your time today. It's been fascinating chatting to you guys. If you enjoyed this episode, please do like and subscribe and we will see you on the next one. Thank you, Griffin.
Speaker C: Ciao.
Speaker B: Cheers.
Speaker C: Lovely to chat.
Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in to Launchbase. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and share. Stay tuned for more insights on tech funding and product launches. See you next time.
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