Ep 33. Optimizing SaaS Product Development: Design Phase Mastery with Pete Ryan

Speaker A: Sass. Uh, and Cyrus, welcome to this episode of our show. Today I'm talking to Pete Ryan. He is a co founder of Co Sell, now rebranded as High Five. And our conversation is, as always, is around SaaS building, uh, MVPs, launching, finding a product market fit. But today's conversation is special because it's not only about growth strategies, but also about the mindset as a founder that you need to have to go through that stage from zero to one. Um, some, um, some tough truth conversation that we have. Check out this short clip just to get a quick taste of what we're discussing today.

Speaker B: Or else they just simply won't survive at a startup, right? Because you know, in the words of um, Elon Musk, right, like working at a startup is like eating broken glass every day. Um, and so you actually have to learn how to like be okay with, with um, things in the world around your startup not being okay. Right. And that's kind of an uncomfortable position to be in. Um, but if you have folks that have like just always been in this like okay world at this big company, things are like, you know, just um, growing, growing and you know, you're not having to solve like real problems, right? Um, in kind of the zero to one category, then those folks aren't really necessarily the right folks for you to uh, be looking at and hiring. And so that would be my biggest advice for startups looking to find folks is it's less about the resume, um, way more about SaaS founders.

Speaker A: This game is as much about skills, as much as about your mindset and how do you approach this game in order to win? Let's go through the full episode right after this brief sponsorship segment. This episode is sponsored by, by the SaaS Insiders studio. We help SaaS founders build their minimum viable products, launch quickly, find a product market, fit and grow from there. SaaS Insider Studio works with non technical founders that are on the pre seed or seed stage to help them execute on their product vision. To learn more, go to my LinkedIn profile that you can find in the description to this episode and shoot me a direct message there. All right, let's jump straight into today's episode. SUS Insiders, I welcome you to this episode of our show today. I'm honored to be joined with Pete Ryan. He is a founder of Co Sell and today we're going to talk a lot of topics starting from investment, bringing the right people to your team and just having those metrics internally that will tell you whether you're growing or not sustainably. With that said, Pete, uh, I welcome

Speaker B: you to the show. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Vlad, for those who might not know you yet, if you could give a 60 second introduction on who the beat is, where you're coming from, background wise and what you're working on right now.

Speaker B: Sure, yeah, yeah. So Pete Ryan, co founder at Co Sell. We founded the company about two and a half years ago. It's, um, a relationship platform for B2B sales teams. Where I started off in my career was in San Francisco working at Oracle in, in Redwood City and so selling database and fusion middleware. Spent about a year at Oracle and was like, okay, I want to join a smaller company. And that company was LinkedIn which was, had about 200 employees. And so they were just kind of getting their sales team rocking and rolling. And so I was in the first class of salespeople to join, kind of, you know, got a few, few promotions while I was there, help start up the LinkedIn Sales Solutions division, leading up their SMB sales team. And so yeah, at the time it was just LinkedIn inside of Salesforce that was the product. And obviously today it's very much more built out with, you know, LinkedIn sales navigator. But yeah, we basically brought on the first hundred customers, went on, um, to kind of join Double Dutch because I wanted to go even smaller, which was, you know, a company that was in the mobile event app space, you know, was mentored by the co founder Pankash Prasad, great experience working there, and started my own company, Gogohire, which was a hiring marketplace for sales talent and then joined Trello as their head of enterprise sales. Trello got acquired by Atlassian. Atlassian is really where I kind of stumbled across, you know, referrals for sales as being a really major pain point. And so here we are with co sell 2 1/2 years in and loving every minute of it. And that's. Yeah, if there's anything else you want to add, you know, happy to chat about it.

Speaker A: Well, you mentioned quite a few names behind your shoulders in terms of experience, so I'm pretty sure SaaS and scientists are really curious to learn from your experience. So when you start the Co Sell, because you start from zero, right, as a company, the question is how do you get the right team? I know I have a very specific opinion on how do you qualify people and how do you treat the resumes when they come in? How do you treat those big names on their sheets, on their cvs? I'm curious to learn, what's your take on this? Let's say I'm a SaaS insider, I'm about to start my own company, I need a team. Like, what do I do to pick the best ones?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely, yeah. So early days of co sell, right? It was just myself and Brendan Cassidy. And so I knew Brendan, you know, from our, you know, our days at LinkedIn. He was really early there. He was like employee 15 at LinkedIn. And so I had known him for a number of years. He was actually a customer of mine when I was working on Gogohire. And so it was just us, right? And you know, we basically had to build out our own kind of engineering and product team. And so the first place you want to start, you know, when you're, when you're looking to kind of build out that team or just really, you know, employees, kind of like 2 to 10, right, you, you definitely want to go kind of with, you know, that is in my mind just the best place to start. And so in, even when you go inside, you know, even if it's a second degree connection, you want to do a ton of back, back channel references. I think the biggest learning, you know, for us is like, even if you think the candidate is the perfect candidate on paper, right, With a lot of big names, you know, you know, experienced kind of in companies that have grown substantially in the kind of zero to one phase, right, of like two to 10 employees, you know, having those like big names are just, it becomes completely irrelevant, right? And so, you know, really what you want to look for is like that hustle, that aptitude and, you know, that love for like solving problems in the 0 to 1 category in the startup world. Folks that are, you know, resilient and persistent and just like overall driven, right? And so, you know, folks that I think, you know, somewhat have like a bit of a chip on their shoulder are the people you're wanting to look for, right? And so, you know, if they have kind of that zero to one experience, that's all the better. If they don't, then you have to look for these other attributes right in them or, or else they just simply won't survive at a startup, right? Because, you know, in the words of Elon Musk, right, like working at a startup is like eating broken glass every day. And so you, you actually have to learn how to like be okay with, with things in the world around your startup not being okay, right? And that's kind of an uncomfortable position to be in. But if you have folks that have like just always been in this like, okay world at this big company, Things are like, you know, just growing and growing and you know, they're, you're not having to solve like real problems, right, in kind of the zero to one category, then those folks aren't really necessarily the, the right folks for you to, to, to be looking at and hiring. And so that would be my biggest advice for startups looking to find is it's less about the resume, way more about, you know, aptitude. You know, folk look for traits like, you know, people that have like a little bit of a chip on their shoulder. And, and I, obviously one thing I completely left out is like they have to fit with your culture. And so, you know, early on, right, think about, kind of think about the values that you own, right, as a, as a human being because that is a little bit a part of like the DNA of your company. And then when you're probably around like, you know, five to 10 employees, like actually start to think about, okay, like, what does the DNA, DNA of our company look like? What are the values that are non negotiable for us? Write those down. And that's kind of what's going to propel your company forward and keeping everyone aligned, right? Because if your values aren't aligned, like execution becomes really, really tough, right? Because uh, you're not rowing the boat all in the same direction. And so, yeah, that's, you know, I can certainly talk a lot more about like people and culture, but I'll kind of wrap it up there.

Speaker A: Well, I, I do agree that culture is a separate topic for one hour conversational, like multiple day event. I totally resonate with what you said because when I initially started I was looking for technical skills in my, in my company. So the first three hires it was mostly like, hey, let me get someone who knows how to do this thing. But as we grew, we understood that people need to be on the same wavelength and if they're not, it's irrelevant. So now everyone's kind of afraid I'll be doing a technical interview with them. But we actually just do the talk and we shall just talk through the values and what they want to achieve in life. And based on that, of course, because we've had their skills, the technical skills, but it's most like, are there the people that we see ourselves, work with in the next couple of years is basically what defines our decision, do we want them or not?

Speaker B: That's exactly right. Yeah. It's a lot of the soft skills, right, that you can't really see on a piece of paper or resume. And because you know, you, you know, folks, and you can learn the hard skills, right? You can learn how to become a better engineer, a better salesperson, you know, et cetera, et cetera. It's, it's the things, you know, it's the soft stuff, right? The persistence, the, uh, you know, the drive, that kind of chip on your shoulder that makes or breaks. You know, that first founding team of a, of a startup.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, in the end of the day, you would probably be seeing and talking to them more than you see your family during, like, early stages. Right.

Speaker B: So this will be the people you'll

Speaker A: be talking with a lot. And if you hate them or you cannot work with them, I mean, what, what, what good does it make if they know the technical stuff, right, if you just cannot communicate with them?

Speaker B: 100. Yeah, couldn't agree with that more. Yeah.

Speaker A: One thing, uh, kind of moving to the next topic I wanted to ask you about is. So let's say you have a team and as a SaaS founder, of course, you need to launch your product, obviously the first version that everyone calls mvp, which for some reason is not objective but a subjective term these days. Everyone defines MVP the way they want to. I'm curious, how did you approach building your first version, your MVP to market? Basically, like, how much time it took, but, well, what it was, the process. How do you define what the MVP is? What do you think are the things you would do differently, maybe if you were to go back in time, Some learning experiences?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the biggest advice I can give to any founder is that in my experience, right, like, people will only use your product if it helps them achieve a job to be done or a goal that they're looking to achieve faster with less effort and higher accuracy than any other alternative out there in the market. Right, right. If, if, if you're not like at least 3x better in those categories against any other, other alternative, they simply like, won't use it and they won't continue to use it. And so there was actually a, a product manager and advisor of ours who actually recommended us checking out Thrive. So they basically, you know, they have these, this whole course, right, of like, videos around, you know, what is Jobs to be done theory, because you, you know, you can read, you read plenty of books around, like Jobs to be done. But yeah, this, I, uh, it feels like the, these videos really dive deeper into it, plus their software to kind of back it up. And so, you know, I think the first thing is like, okay, are you, are you solving a job that one is worth solving, right? And then two, are you, are you doing in a way that again is the lowest effort, the fastest and with the highest level of accuracy. And so I think if you look at like the best products out there, right, you know, they do those things in a uh, an order of magnitude better than any other other alternative. And the greater the delta, the more powerful, you know, the more expensive the, you know, the uh, the more reach right you're going to have with the product, so on and so forth. And so you know, when we built our, our mvp, I would say we didn't really follow that, right? It was more like, okay, this is a really interesting space we want to be in. We built this product, we got it in the hands of users and we didn't really think through like, okay, in their day to day, like are they, is this actually helping them solve, solve a problem or you know, accomplish a job that they've hired us to do. And you know, it took actually a few iterations, right, for us to figure that out. And we, and we're still figuring it out, right. But you know, today it's you know, for us the prop, the job, right, is I'm a seller, I need to hit my quota, I need to reach target buyers, I need to close business. And introductions and referrals are definitely the best way to do that, most strategic way to do that. And you know, especially with, with what's happened in the market, we were in this, you know, economic downturn. Companies are thinking about, okay, how do we go to market more profitably? You know, sellers and prospects, right, alike, uh, they're so fed up with like cold outreach, cold email, cold calling, cold email. And you throw like AI and automation on top of that and it actually just like makes the problem so much worse. And so for every CRO and CMO that we talk to, they're always like, you know, okay, this year, right, it's less about, we're going to do those things. We're going to do kind of cold outreach, all that as we go to market channel. We're going to do the demand gen, but we're also going to look at like partner led growth. We're going to look at community led growth and product led growth. And then for us we're like, okay, well world wake up. Relationship led growth is right in front of us, right? And so the most strategic path to entry is through someone you know. And so, you know, and that could be an investor, an advisor, a customer, a partner, a friend that you have at another company. And so, you know, for us, we kind of built this MVP that uh, basically is a Chrome extension. It sits on top of LinkedIn. And so as a seller, if I'm trying to reach so and so obviously I can figure out how to do that. I can navigate that by like sending an email to the mutual connection or send an email to the mutual connection, but none of it is like operationalized. And so that's what we built with co sell is like, it's just a couple clicks. You can request the intro. We've made it really easy for the connector to then forward on the intro. And then for the sales leader, right, and the, uh, head of marketing, it's all about like, you know, have I, you know, how many leads have we generated through relationship led growth? You know, how many deals have been closed? And so we offer that like reporting and analytics. And so, yeah, I think just, you know, biggest learning for us is spend that time really focused on the problem itself, right. Talk to a ton of users, you know, uh, and like, kind of put them into different cohorts, right? Start to look at patterns of like, okay, you know, and get super, super specific around like, who your key user is. Definitely follow the. I, I believe it, right? I believe in the jobs to be done framework hands down. You know, I think there's other frameworks you can also pull in and then, yeah, build something. It, you know, mvp, it's kind of, it's morphed over time, right? I think the bar for like an MVP has just gotten way higher, right? Because there's just more SaaS companies out there and technology companies. And so it's more like your minimum workable product, right? It has to work. It has to accomplish, you know, the job that you've set out to accomplish. And so, you know, do those things and then, you know, stay in front of your users. And you know, we talked about this before. The, the, the, uh, call Vlad. There's like certain winning metrics, right, that you want to focus in on. And our investor Tim Connery hammered this into us and I, again, I believe this, like through and through. Is that the first thing you want to focus on is winning metric zero, which is do people like your product? I'm sorry, no. Does it work? Right? Can they get the job done that they've hired you to do? The. And then the first metric is, do they like it or do they, do they like it? Right? So are they, uh, when you message them about it, they're like, oh, yeah, this is awesome. I really like it. A Lot. Right. And then Winning Metric two is, do they really like it? So look at mixed panel or amplitude or whatever you're using for your analytics and look at, okay, how many users are coming back, what cohorts of users are coming back, are they coming back and doing that desired action that you're looking to have them take? And then Winning Metric three is really, you know, can you, can you grow profitably? Right, can you can through, you know, can via the channels, right, that you're selling your product through, whether it be, you know, sales led, marketing led, partner led, relationship led. Can you do that profitably? Right. And so if you can do that, then it's just about pouring more gas on the fire. And that's, you know, I kind of took your question, Vlad, and expanded big time on it over the last two and a half years. I would say those are the biggest learnings that we've had as a company.

Speaker A: Just before we dive in into metrics and um, growth at all cost, things like becoming kind of irrelevant these days. One thing I'm wondering is, do you remember how much time it took you from, okay, we need an MVP to the point where, yes, we're launching the mvp. Do you remember how much maybe months or weeks, I don't know, it took you to get this off the ground, like the first version that you launched to users?

Speaker B: Yeah. So for us it was, I'd say three months. But we spent the like when you have all the design in place and you've battle tested the design and that's another thing I really recommend is like spend a lot of time on the design phase because like before you start throwing a bunch of code at it, like, like code is just it, it's kind of like, you know, you're uh, you're solidifying the product and to where, to where it just becomes a lot harder to change. And so if you spend a lot of time in kind of that, you know, building the high fidelity prototypes and Figma, getting users to click and click through it, you know, asking, asking them like, you know, you know, what they like about it, what they change and then just kind of view like, you know, how they're clicking through it, are they getting stuck? You know, those are all things that I think are, you know, somewhat overlooked because like we all as founders, right, we want to rush and okay, we got to build this product and we got to go sell it, right? And so yeah, the more time you can spend in, you know, user testing, user research, design testing, and then even prior to that, that like jobs to be done framework, I think. You know, again, that's where you'll. You'll learn a lot, right? You'll. And you'll avoid a lot of mistakes from you, uh, know, at the end of the day, you still need a product that people can click through is until it's in the wild and like, launched. And so that's another thing is like build. Build something that is flexible enough and to where, if you decide to kind of go right or left, you can do that because it's very likely that you're going to have to kind of change in, in a way. And so if you build it flexible enough, then like, you know, you're not kind of like hard coded into like, one aspect of the business or product. And so, yeah, those are all kind of some additional tips I'm throwing out there.

Speaker A: You know, Pete, I like three months. I really like it. It's. I would say when people are speaking about weeks, that's getting exciting. Right? But I think having two to three months to build MVP is a really good point. When I interview founders on this podcast, a lot of times they say it took us, uh, 11 months, 15 months to see the first version. And then like, oh, my God, this can be done so much faster, right? If it's, if it's done right. So I want you to recognize that your speed to execution is pretty phenomenal.

Speaker B: I completely agree. Like, I do think it also depends on the product itself. Right. I have like, one. Yeah, I have a friend who's kind of doing this like, generative AI stuff, and it's just like super, super technical. So, you know, his, his time horizon for launch is just. Yeah, I think, like, the more you, the more you can like, cut back. So if yourself three months, you're like, okay, this is where. This is our launch date. Right. And the more you can cut back, you'll realize that, like, you don't need all those features that you thought you needed. So anyways, all I'm saying is we're aligned there, Vlad.

Speaker A: So, uh, yeah, I like it. I like your concept of setting the deadline rather than the scope you want to achieve.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Because that will make it like you make the scope variable, not the timeline, and then you work in favor of making the MVP as lean as possible. One question I was wondering. You were talking about important metrics that define whether you can succeed with the SaaS business. And one of them, the last one, number three, you said grow profitably, right? And go profitably means growth, grow sustainably. Because obviously, if you're burning through cash, there's a certain limit, like certain amount of time you can do that. After that you need to raise again.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: So my question is there is an idea, or at least was an idea of venture backed SaaS companies is growth though cost, meaning that we want to acquire as many users as possible and grow to as many multiples as possible in one year and then the next year so that we can exit as fast as possible. So my question to you from your landscape now that you also raised funds for your company and you're actively running it, do you see that shifting from growth to cost into profitability? And if so, what do you think are uh, the reasons and what do you think is happening on the market of VC funded startups at the moment?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I mean you saw in the growth stage, right, just like every, every growth stage company, right, they raised so much money at these crazy multiples. We were kind of like all drunk on, you know, the market and what happened there. And so there's been this huge, um, influx of cash to the point where, you know, we're going to see just a lot of companies just either get scooped up and acquired because that's the better option for them versus raising at a massive down round, you know, or, you know, if they haven't made cuts already, right? We're going to see a lot of companies perish, right? That's just what's going to happen. And so, you know, I think, yeah, I mean your point around, grow at all costs, right? It has been that way in the Valley for a very long time. And so yeah, I think there's this whole new concept of, you know, let's, let's turn a profit, like who would have thought, right? And so, you know, now that we're in this kind of new era of, you know, profitability, it becomes even more important for companies to look at new strategies versus kind of how Salesforce grew. Right? Salesforce invested, you know, it was like one to two ratio of like okay, you know, for, for every dollar spent in sales and marketing equal $2 in revenue. Right. And so, you know, and that's just, and I would say that those days of growing in that way are really just not sustainable anymore. Right? Because those channels that we all relied on for sales and marketing have become so noisy to where, you know, it's, it's hard to grow your, your company on the back of just sales led and marketing led and expect that kind of, you know, one to two ratio, right? Of okay, uh, I'm Going to spend, you know, X amount on building out an SDR team or BDR team. We're going to spend X amount on marketing, spend digital marketing and then we're going to, you know, and that's going to equal, you know, twice as much, right? That, so, you know, and that multiple by the way, isn't even that sexy anymore, right? Because you've seen companies like, like Atlassian, right, that have been, you know, just known for, you know, no sales team. Although I did work there and I know that they have a sales team, but just, you know, uh, they've grown, they grew for like 20 years with really very limited sales team, right? They're just all product LED growth. And so, you know, they kind of invented the model of being able to grow this way. But even those companies, right, that were, you know, PLG companies that had these crazy multiples, I mean we've, we've certainly seen them, you know, that simmer down as well. And so, you know, I think you, it's almost like you have to do all these things unfortunately, right? You, you kind of have to, to do the sales led, marketing led in some capacity. You need to do the plg, you need to do the clg, right? Community led growth. And you know, in our, our opinion you need to do, you know, relationship led growth also. And so, you know, uh, it's really about like where you sequence those things, right? Because you're going to have one channel kind of plateau and you're gonna have to realize, okay, I need to figure out like what's our next growth lever, right? And hopefully your product and engineering team are building different products, expanding on the suite of products you're offering to increase your acv. So yeah, it's kind of a blend of all these things and the sequencing of them are obviously going to be different, right, because you early days, right, you can certainly get by with, you know, sales led growth, marketing led growth, relationship led growth. But then, you know, eventually, you know, you're going to want to figure out you know, PLG or you know, partner led growth, product led growth, all that. You know, and so those things can happen later. But you know, more and more companies are kind of hitting that ceiling just relying on like sales LED and marketing light. I mean, yeah, the days of Salesforce, right, Like, you know that that was their go to market strategy. I mean, I think those days are, are dwindling. I mean we are seeing, you know, uh, you probably heard on that like all in podcast, right? Uh, talk them talking. You know, are companies actually Going to need investment. Right. Or can you just bootstrap with, you know, with Copilot? Right. And if you're able to, you know, bootstrap with Copilot, your engineers are, you know, 3x more productive, you know? Uh, yeah. Is it? Or 10x more productive, these, like, you know, 10x engineers. Right. Uh, you know, so, yeah, where does that go? Right. I think that's a bit extreme. Right. I think it's a bit extreme. Like, I think companies will need to raise some amount of capital because, yeah, you can't just build a product and like, expect that users will come. Right. That's just not how it works. But, uh, I think there will be a happy medium of companies needing to raise less. Right. Because they're more capital efficient, they're getting more out of AI and other technologies. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the next 10 years looks like. I mean, it's getting. Reid Hoffman always used to say, the future is always stranger than you think and it happens faster than you think. Right. And so I think that's kind of held true even in the last 10 years. It's definitely like, you know, the things that have happened, uh, you know, Apple Vision, uh, you know, it's the. All these things are really wild technologies that really didn't exist. You know, call it 10, 15 years ago, so. Or they did exist, but, you know, not in the way that they do today.

Speaker A: So I think AI is probably the most impactful out of those that you mentioned, because just like you said, copilot, chatgpt. And you probably can have a team of three people instead of that team of 10. I've, I've seen, I've heard a lot of stories from secondhand of two people, two co founders building a SaaS company. One of them is leveraging ChatGPT to write emails, to write all of the posts, schedule hundreds of posts, high quality. The other One is using ChatGPT to write code. And when they approach VCs, VCs are asking them, well, if I give you a million dollars, how are you going to spend it? And they say, like, we don't need 1 million, right? Yeah, we need 50k. So we have two salaries. That's all we need, and we'll just take it to the next level. So it almost feels like there's going to be this era of like, micro investments where the entry barrier to enter SaaS world is much lower now because you don't need to have a team of like 100 people. You could do the same Amount of team of 10, if you do it correctly and basically the cost will go down and that will mean that they could raise a much lower rounds. So I'm really looking forward to see how it unfolds. I'm not sure how it will impact the investor side because if they have a few million, if they have 50 million to deploy, and now instead of writing a million dollar checks, they're writing $10,000 checks. That's a lot of checks I need to write. That's a printer, you need to print them. You know, that's how fast you need to do. So, um, I'll be curious to know how it affects the decision making process. And one of the other alternative ways to close those deals will be happening because if there is such a huge volume of checks you need to write, you might be simplifying some of your due diligence in some of the process. So really looking forward to see how it all unfolds.

Speaker B: 100%. Yeah. I mean the other thing too that you know, is hiring remote, right? Because you know, you can hire like if you're based in the US hire overseas. And you know, I would say we've had a lot of luck in hiring overseas and it feels like the work ethic is actually stronger. The work ethic is stronger. So it's like Beatty copilot hiring overseas. And you know, before you know it, like your costs have gone way down. Right. I think. And also like even it doesn't have to have to be overseas. I mean it could be just folks outside of New York City, San Francisco and these like large metropolitan areas where, you know, a, a, a 10x engineer, right. May cost like 400k, you know, in San Francisco, whereas, you know, 10x engineer and you know, anywhere else in the world. Right. Is, is, is much less. Right. And so yeah, it'll be, I think it's, that'll be interesting, right? That will definitely be interesting to see how, how things evolve. But yeah, it's already kind of dissipated out of sf, uh, in a way right. To other parts of the US and then the question is, okay, is it going to dissipate even further outside of the US and other countries, more so than what's happened today. Right. I don't know. I mean, I'd love your thoughts on that. Right, because you know, yeah, you moved to Austin, you know, just, just uh, a few months ago.

Speaker A: So I would say because some of my part of my teams are from Ukraine and Europe, we still have seven to eight hour difference with them and they can Definitely see it being an obstacle. It's not a hard wall that we hit, but it definitely makes things higher feel like tougher. We need to kind of, you know, ride a bike uphill a little bit because of that. So I would say time zone difference will still remain. But just like you said about San Francisco and those popular areas, if you look up the commercial real estate, which was extremely, uh, say um, unbreakable asset, it was like an asset class that felt to be the most stable. Now those offices are just empty. A lot of. Someone gave a statistic of like 40% of offices in San Francisco empty. Don't quote me on this, but I heard it's two digit percentage of offices that are currently not used because it's resource inefficient. Just like you said, profitability first.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If you can hire someone outside of the city, outside of the Bay Area, you're spending less time on the actual resources. Uh, you spend less time on money, on the office. And overall it's just like more efficient. So it's going to be a really big shift. I think that will impact not only SaaS, but all the industries that are connected to it. For example, commercial real estate as a result.

Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. Oh, 100%. I mean, yeah, you have Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, all kind of pulling out of sf, you know, the, the Salesforce tower. Right. I guess that's, you know, becoming empty in a way. So it's, yeah, it's pretty wild all the things that are happening in San Francisco. Yeah, I, I think more, more good stuff to come. I think it's all positive and yeah, it'll be, I say next 10 years. Excited to be a part of it.

Speaker A: Well, I guess people learned something from COVID and um, from the isolation. So I think over this couple years they learned that remote work exists and it's pretty much possible. So I'm also excited to see how it all unfolds. Pete, one question I'm asking all the time on SaaS Insiders, which is you probably read some books during your journey, entrepreneurial journey, probably watched some inspirational speakers join some communities that helped you grow as a person and as a founder. If you could name two to three resources, be it once again, books, speakers, mentors, communities. What are the things that you would recommend others to tap into that helped you in, in a big way?

Speaker B: For sure. Yeah. So I'm, I'm a really big advocate of behavioral psychology and so books like Drive or Nudge or Predictably Irrational. Yeah, these are books I like literally keep on my desk And I kind of flip through them every so often because yeah, when it comes to, to user behavior, when it comes to like what drives, you know, people on your team, you know, those are just like great books. Big fan of from like just a day to day. Kind of like there's a lot of CEO books out there, founder books, you know, this one I would say is different, right, because it goes into like the tactical day to day and it's a book called the Great CEO Within. And so, yeah, huge fan of that book. And, and so, uh, yeah, that's book wise. That's like book wise, I guess. Like, you know, I'm less of a podcast person and so more like I'm Audible. The latest hack is like, you know, you get the Audible, you get it, you get it up to like 1.5x or maybe even 2x and then you read along and I find that I just like fly through books but also retain the info. And so yeah, that's kind of, it's a, it's more expensive, right, because you got to buy the Audible plus the book. But yeah, I found that to be a, uh, really good thing.

Speaker A: So yeah, I'm a big fan of audiobooks as well. It helps you use your, let's say idle time. So when you're on a massage or when you're walking somewhere, when you're doing some things that don't require your like mental bandwidth, if you could use the time efficiently, you're basically, let's say winning a couple hours in your time that would be wasted otherwise.

Speaker B: So I like that. Yeah, same, same here.

Speaker A: But for those who, who are willing to suss and starters, if they want to learn with you, maybe add value to you, maybe some potential investors who will be looking to collaborate with you, what would be the best way to get in touch? We'll be, we'll be leaving those things in the comment. Not in the comment, but in the description. But just I wanted to ask you, is it the email? Is it the LinkedIn? What's the best way to approach you?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn if you just type in Pete Ryan at co sell. I should pop up and then, yeah, if anyone wants to shoot me an email, that's fine too. It's just peteosel IO M and always happy to chat. I'm a pretty open book and you know, I'll give it to you straight. So yeah, feel free to reach out.

Speaker A: Awesome. Pete, on the final note, I wanted to ask you if there was this one big idea that Sass and Sardis picked from this episode. Let's say they heard nothing but this idea. If this is the only thing they took home with them, what do you think that will be?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think jobs will be done. Right. Like for us, like, that is just, you know, for me personally, right. That's been as. As not really like a product. Product founder. Right. And someone has like, kind of up level my skill set there. As we've been thinking about product, like really thinking through kind of, okay, you know, what is the job to be done to accomplish a user's goal faster, with the least amount of effort and the highest level of accuracy? And if you can get that right, and if you can do that in an order of magnitude better than any other alternative, then you're going to be on the right track, no matter what. They're not. No matter what. But, uh, there's always market conditions, there's all these other things, and competition, et cetera. But if you can do that right, then you're like one step of the way there.

Speaker A: Pete Ryan, everyone. Pete, thank you so. Much.