Why your biggest pricing mistake is copying competitors and going cheaper | Mark Walker @ Nue

Foreign. Hey there. Welcome to another episode of Sounds Unbound. And today with me is Mark, CEO of New. Welcome to the show. Hey Anna. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Sure, absolutely. I know that you've got quite a bit of a story. I mean this is not your first job and there have been quite big companies before that. So maybe before we go any further, let's cover who you are, what you're doing and how you got here. Sure. I sort of came to being a SaaS CEO or software CEO in the traditional way. Get two biology degrees, go to law school, enter the music business like everybody else does. So no, I basically had no idea I was going to end up doing this. I'd basically been a federal court litigator for about a decade working, eventually working in the music industry. I went to the music industry to fight the first streaming litigation between between the major record companies, the publishers and the cable companies of Napster. Right Bas. And that was incredibly fun. Got to meet David Clark who invented IP protocol and then and talk geekily about how it was based on RNA and stuff like that. And. And then in about 1999 with perfect timing I decided I wanted to basically build things and so launched my first startup. Oh wow. Okay. How did that look like in 1999? It was. Can we find it? It was slowly unsuccessful. So it was actually ahead of its time. It was basically a company called Blanketware. It did essentially Ajax before there was Ajax. It did last millimeter portal integrations. There's a couple of other companies at the same time. The vision was a little bit ahead of the technology and we were just successful enough to have a good business but not successful enough to have a breakout business. About five years later of course the technology Ajax became a standard and the way we experienced the web became a thing. Whereas at the time we worked with some amazing companies, major banks, major manufacturing companies, Google providing helping integrate data at the last millimeter but couldn't quite get to that breakout moment. All right, cool. That's a great story. So what's new? What's new? What's new? I don't know what's new with you? So new is a next generation rev ops company and the best way to think about it or a revenue orchestration company. So it's basically an AWS based platform that has, that supports a bunch of different applications. So we commonly think of the order to cash or quote to cash stack. So obviously CPQ configure price quote, self service usage, billing, actual enterprise, a wide range from PLG to enterprise billing, all the credit card versions and the collections and all that, but it's sitting on a continuous stack. So what we're kind of famous for is having this incredibly amazing CPQ that's perfect for recurring revenue companies. Most people don't realize that essentially everybody, you know, in AI runs at least part of News stack, at least on their enterprise side. So some people are just cpq, some people just CPQ and revenue architecture, some people are CPQ and self service, and some people are cpq, self service and billing. Like there's quite, quite a wide range across those companies. But basically, you know, you can basically start, you know, OpenAI, anthropic glean, Jasper Lagora, you know, Harvey Cursor, Coder, Sierra, Anaconda, and a whole bunch of amazing companies that I forgot to mention, but they're amazing. But it just. Those are the ones that pop off my head in the first few seconds, right? I wonder, you know, if you're building a product for companies that grow that fast, how does it affect you? Well, I think the first thing that our amazing founder Tina Kung realized was that the pricing models of the past are not the pricing models of the future. And so architecturally New is designed to basically be able to describe and bill things that nobody's ever thought of before. And that is very, very different from the legacy situation. First of all, the legacy systems were separate, which makes that much harder because they'd have to describe both of those things in two different systems really hard. But secondly, it means that we have to, we're constantly learning. In other words, it's not like we go to them and go, hey, this is what the future looks like. You should do what we think. We do do that with our scaled software companies because they come to us for that experience from working with the major AI companies. But with major AI companies, we are literally sitting down with them and listening to what they're doing next. And the really fascinating thing is it's not all the same. That's really fascinating. Like everyone's experimenting and the experiments are all different and that's fascinating. So New gets the benefit of all that experimentation and our product gets tested and stretched by all those experiments. I wonder again, in this case, you're working with all the big names and we have been talking a lot with product Manager is here on the podcast and there's always the question, like, who gets the upper hand? Is it the bigger company? Is it the company that's paying the most? Like in, in this case? Because like you said, they're very different and they're probably running very different stuff for, for their products. How do you choose what to act on? It's a really difficult, a difficult problem to, to basically, you know, figure out that prioritization. We have really three groups of what we call strategic customers. And strategic customers are not necessarily based on size. There's one, one group is just size. Basically. They're, they're, they're very big. You know, some of our customers pay us millions of dollars a year and they get a different level of service from us that is appropriate to the fact that they represent, I don't know, five to ten other customers. Right. The other one is strategic importance to the rest of the economy. So certainly you could imagine that the major AI companies might tick a couple of those boxes. And the third one is the differential innovation that they're doing in product and pricing. So we have some companies that are not that big, but they are tackling new problems in new ways. They have different, different ways of solving that problem. And we work very, very closely. They get treated like a much larger company because we want to learn and we want to listen. And it's not that we don't learn and listen from all our customers. We do, we learn things all the time from everybody. But you have to remember that innovation may not be coming from just the biggest companies. In fact, very rarely will be coming from the biggest companies. It's, it's going to be coming from the fastest moving companies. And, and it's really, it's a very, very interesting time. Like people moving from PLG to SLG or PLG to PLG plus slg. That's generally happening at the fast moving companies, the smaller companies coming up really quickly. But those innovations can then be shared with the large companies that are trying to roll out the self service on top of an existing subscription base. So the learning goes both ways. Yeah, yeah, true. And you guys are Salesforce native. As far as I understand the cpq. The best way to think of new is I said before, an AWS revenue orchestration platform, order to cash system. This is on AWS with a staggeringly good Salesforce app. And so, but, but not all of our transactions go through Salesforce. You know, for example, you know, Chili Piper very, very heavily plg. They control how much of that goes into Salesforce. Some of it may, you know, for example, I'm not saying this is a particular Chili Piper example. So we'd never talk about customer real use cases without their permission. But you can imagine a company saying, okay, we want to have different filters about whether it goes into Salesforce. Like maybe some. Maybe one filter might be depending on how much you buy, if you buy more than X number of seats or if you buy more than Y number of capacity, they should go into Salesforce and a direct salesperson should deal with it. But the other one might be because you're Boeing. Like, it's like you buy one thing and they go, well, this is Boeing. So we're going to send that over to sales rep right away. New has those capabilities, but it is definitely a definite advantage for us that our CPQ runs natively on Salesforce because everybody knows that the AI era runs on new Metronome stripe and Salesforce. Most people miss the Salesforce part. And the reason is because these businesses get complicated really, really fast and they need the data model. Yeah. But I was just wondering because when I was doing my research, I realized that Salesforce, I'm not super familiar with it, to be completely honest, but Salesforce had its own CPQ product, which it's sunset it. And I thought, wow, okay, so for you guys working on top of Salesforce, that could be a massive growth opportunity. So I wonder if you used it and how it affected you. It certainly has been. It's an amazing opportunity. You know, Salesforce has another product, RCA or I think it's now called Agent Force Revenue Management. They've changed the name three times in three years, which maybe isn't a great sign. Everything has an agent now. Yeah. Our agentic is incredible, by the way. Has been described by some of the major AI companies as the most advanced transactional agentic system in the world by far. What they mean by that is it works out of the box with any customer without training. Like, you basically just implement new, turn on the agents, and the agents learn the context from the configuration of new, which is very, very different from other. Most other agentic technologies. But so we actually are in this weird, weird situation where Salesforce is simultaneously our biggest partner and a platform that we really believe in. I think standing up secure data at scale is hard. It's really, really hard. And Salesforce has got a spectacular or even configurable secure data. It's very, very difficult. And our customers want us to be on Salesforce. On the other hand, we. The most common competitor we have in the marketplace is Salesforce. Yeah. So, yeah, that's. That's an interesting way to go. Yeah. Look, you know, and I think from a Salesforce perspective, like, booyah. Like both of the leading systems for managing Complex revenue transactions in the world are both on Salesforce. That's not a bad place for them to be. Yeah. All right, so they don't exactly want you to, to go anywhere. Yeah, I don't know what, I won't speak for them, what they want, but it's still not a bad situation for them to be. Yeah, yeah, we need somebody from Salesforce here. But you know, the, the audience of the podcast is, you know, a little bit, a little bit earlier stage than what you have been describing so far. And honestly, I mean, what we've seen through all our acquisitions up to the point founders really handle, you know, the pricing and billing with, with duct tape. And I wonder what's your take on, like, when is it smart to start thinking about investing in your revenue infrastructure? Yeah, that's a really, really good question. So first of all, there's two major paths that people will go down and, and the answer is different depending on which path you're on. So if you are a PLG or bring your own software type modality, then effectively you have to invest in your revenue infrastructure right away, like instantaneously because in effect the PLG is revenue infrastructure and really the standard for doing that is Stripe. You could use new to do it. But most people aren't on Salesforce. They don't have the complex data models. They are selling only two or three different flavors of it and the API nature of Stripe Billing. And we have those APIs as well. But you know, we're a much more powerful system and with that system, with that power comes complexity. So, you know, we don't normally recommend that people who are just started up. You know, I just, I advise a company and I have great respect for the team over at Stripe Billing and you should start, you should start with Stripe Billing, you know, particularly if. Because they don't have, they're not even running Salesforce yet. So, so it's a, so I would say those companies get rubber infrastructure and you don't have to really worry about like burning out of Stripe Billing. What's probably going to happen is you're going to open up a, a SLG activity as you try to go up market sales, LED growth, direct sales modality. And you can easily integrate, you know, that information into, into new or you can easily, you know, adopt new and you don't throw away all the tokens you had before, like lots of flexibility. So it's the, so that's to say, I would say if you're starting that way, you should start that way. If you're going the, if you go direct sales right out the gate, normally what that means is you're selling a smaller number of higher value contracts. And so in that case, I would say, I would say it all depends on what you think your growth rate is. If you think your growth rate is going to be like a traditional SaaS company or you think your Tam is relatively tight, then I think you have a lot of time to figure this out. But if you think your growth rate is going to be like some of the companies I just mentioned which didn't exist two years ago, a bunch of them didn't exist two years ago and none of them existed in a commercial sense five years ago. I don't think maybe Anaconda, but I would suggest that you should basically go out and buy the system that all the companies you want to be have all chosen. They've all chosen the same thing. This is probably a very good reason why I'm not that persuasive and it's a technical reason and you should do it. And coming to us early and going through our Quick Start program, it does require you to, you are going to adopt Salesforce more quickly, but it is going to be really important not to switch systems while you're accelerating a 10,000% growth rate. That's the unusual thing. It is completely possible now for. Yes, they say, you know, you know, two people on the go to launch something that becomes $100 million company in revenue in a very, very short period of time. If you think you're that company, you should get into our Quick Start program. I don't even care if we charge you nothing, like just, just get in and let's get you pointed in the right direction with the tools you're going to need to deal with the fact that you're going to have GDPR problems in, in, in Europe and you're going to have, and you're going to have, you know, VAT taxation problems and you're gonna need the access to the best tools like Sphere and like Avalara and have, and not have to integrate those things yourself. Right. That's why I would, I would suggest that they get gone quickly. And if you're just selling like, if you're just selling like, I don't know, like 10 transactions a year, then you know, frankly, you can do it on anything. Yeah, that's a totally different problem. Yeah. Okay. All right. And you know, if we talk pricing, because I just yesterday had had a podcast with another founder and it was funny, he was describing how they were thinking about their pricing and how once, you know, they started getting more or less substantial mrr, a mentor told them, you absolutely have to because your pricing is four or five times less than, than your competitor, you absolutely can go and double it. And he was talking about the fact that how absolutely terrifying it was. And when they hit the button, they were like, okay, that's the end. We had a good run. So. And obviously nothing happened. You know, it's just, just like everyone else, they lost a couple, but everyone else stayed and you know, the MRR doubled. But yeah, when, when do you think is the right point in time in life of your company to do that and you know how to do it also without confusing the. So you're not that scared. Yeah, it's a really interesting time. I think historically people would say that you should. Well, my, my point of view as a repeated both founder and, and executives like CEO COO dropped into companies is the first thing you should do whenever somebody shows up in a new company as a new board member or is ask the question that that person asked. So very, very commonly, including at new, including at all my past startups. You underprice your product to get initial customer experience. It's very hard to test your product without actual customers. Nobody wants to buy it unless it's a bargain because they're taking a career risk and buying it. And so once you feel like you're getting to customer product fit, you should meet. I always ask the question, what's your most expensive customer paying you? And the entrepreneur will tell that and I'll go, okay, the new price is double what the most expensive person is paying you. Right. Not what the average because. And let's test that. I've never seen that fail because most people don't have the guts to charge market prices right out of the gate in the first year of their company or two years of their company. So I think that was sort of the old world. The new world, I think is quite a lot different. The new world has a pace of change on it that's radically different. And so I would encourage people now to go out there and really think about the connection to value. In other words, you don't. In the old world, you basically have to say, oh well, CPQ sells on seats, so I have to sell my CPQ on seats. Right. But in the new world it's like, was seats ever a good idea for cpq? Was the objective like to keep people in seats? It was the objective to drove drive revenue upwards to the right and if you turn around and make your pricing model around something that's directly connected to what the customer is trying to achieve, they won't have any comparator to really directly compare it to. And you could go directly to the value and think, well, what is the value? So for example, at New right from the get go actually we've offered competing pricing models for everything we do. So you can buy our CPQ on seats and some of our customers do, but you can also buy our CPQ on a percentage of revenue or percentage of revenue growth. You can buy our, our usage based on dollars processed or just simply, you know, usage lines process. You can buy our billing based on numbers of transactions or, or dollar value transactions. And where this becomes actually a bit of a superpower is guess what, you can kind of predict from the first conversation with a customer based on their, on their type of business which one they'll go for. And so I would say that in the old world you should basically buy your business. In the new world you should focus on creating pricing models that offer the customer alternative ways of buying where they self identify the best connection to value for them. And the example I use is you can imagine two companies with $100 million of revenue. One company sends out $100 million invoices a year. They could type the invoices, right? And the other, and definitely they're worth a million dollars, so it's worth typing them. And then the second one sends out 10,000, let me get 100,000, you know, thousand dollars invoices a year, right? Or even you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of hundreds of hundred dollar transactions. The value of the components of a system like new radically shifts. You know, you can imagine that the one sending out lots of hundred dollar invoices, they would love to pay a percentage of revenue, a very, very tiny percentage of revenue, and not pay per transaction. The one sending out million dollar invoices has no interest in doing that at all. They just want to pay per invoice. And they'll pay a lot though for value added analytics and a bunch of other things that are upstream of that to help them find white space and all sorts of things like that in a way that maybe the $100 per invoice company doesn't care about. So the new device to people would be try to understand how your customer sees value and understand that different customers will see it different ways and try to get your pricing model to be tied to that. And if you do that, you can move up market really, really quickly. Yeah, that makes great sense. What about usage based pricing? Because I mean, everyone's talking about that, right? We're in AI age and it's all usage based. So is that more of a, okay, let's, let's leave it for AI companies. It's more of a hype or does it actually make sense for, for SaaS companies doing a few million dollars in revenue? So again, it really depends on what your business is like, you know, if you're, if you're, let's first of all recognize that there are very, very, very few pure usage based companies. And there's two reasons for that. One is that generally speaking there are other things that wrap the usage based products that people will want on a more reliable basis. You know, you know, and everything could be usage, but they generally aren't bought as usage. So for example, you know, there's certain tiers of platform subscription you need to have to get access to certain types of products. And that's just a way of, of the company backstopping the level of commitment. And if you even think of the major AI companies, you can buy pure usage based products, committed spend based products, prepaid committed spend products, subscription products, and you can services and actually application products that feel a lot like regular software from those companies. And those companies and those products are not sold separately. Increasingly they're not sold separately. They have completely different pricing models. Some are subscriptions, some are usage, some are one time, some are milestone build. But they may be all running under the new emerging committed spend contracts which are what new is world class ad is figuring out, okay, how much did somebody commit? How much have they actually used of all these different inputs? What's allowed to be credited or charged against that commitment, how much is left over? And that's, and so those, those new contracts make the world very, very complicated very, very quickly. Even though they're simple to describe how much you can spend with me $10 million. Great. Then the question becomes what if they don't spend $10 million, right? What if they spend 9 or 8? And now you got to, now you got to deal with the seaside issue. Send them $2 million for nothing. And where did they get the estimate of $10 million? Was that your estimate or their estimate? That's the, that becomes the, the, the emerging seaside issue around these, around these contracts and being able to manage those through something like new helps you deal with the how do you fix it? But not the human part of, of whether or who takes the pain of fixing it. Think of it that way. So so it's a really interesting time. So I would say for young companies, young, I wouldn't overcomplicate things. I would initially, to the extent it makes sense, offer people blends of subscription, maybe even subscription embedded with usage credits, subscription plus usage. Unless it doesn't make sense for your business, for example, it doesn't make sense to have a subscription, for example for the qualification certification system because like there's no such thing as a subscription for it. It might make sense though to offer a subscription level that includes a certain base amount of those certifications. Even though it's a usage based product. You might say, well when you actually, when you buy it at this level, the price point is higher. But you also get these additional services around this to help you adopt it and embrace it. Think that going all the way to committed spend contracts is probably a lot for a 2 million or $3 million ARR company. So the biggest mistake founders can make is basically just look at the competitors, say oh, we can do it cheaper and just slap a 999 on the product without really thinking where the quality comes, the value comes from. I would say that's about the worst thing you could do. You're right. I think that's about the worst thing you could do. It's basically if you think that you're, if you think that you're advantage. Well, there are things where the advantage of being cheaper really matters and where that really matters is when it's infrastructural. So in other words, if you're processing data for telcos and you're doing billions of lines of data. Yeah, cheaper probably is the most important thing. And then you're probably architecturally cheaper and that is your main advantage or one of them, then it makes sense. Right? But for most products that's not actually what the thing is, is it's not cheaper, it's better. And if it's not better, you're going to go bankrupt. Like, like if you don't think your product's actually better, you're going to lose because you already have the distribution disadvantage of being a startup. You know this other people you're competing with have a distribution advantage. Now obviously if it's completely sui generis new, you're better because there isn't anything. But that's very rare. That's incredibly rare. Like the only thing you can really think of that's like that is chatgpt. The only thing in the recent history that the people literally had no budget for that at all. Most people are enter you should be entering a market where they're existing buyers, in which case cheaper may be part of what you need to do. But I wouldn't go out saying I'm cheaper. I would let them beat me up. All right. Okay, thank you. So I wanted to ask about one of the things that you use a lot, you talk a lot as a company, and it's revenue leakage. And for those who don't know what it is, maybe you could explain the concept and how to, you know, maybe there is a piece of advice on how to avoid that. This episode is sponsored by Reworkful. Looking for new ways to find customers for your SaaS business? Consider building an affiliate program. Rewardful is the easiest affiliate tracking platform to set up, manage, and scale. For SaaS companies, building a successful affiliate program can be a little bit intimidating at first. And that's why Rewardful has taken what they've observed from their most successful customers, affiliate programs and distilled that into an exclusive online course. The exciting part, their affiliate marketing course is absolutely free. Start the course at academy.rewardful.com academy.rewardful.com and turn your biggest fans into your best marketers. Right? Revenue leakage is, is a major problem. So, so what revenue leakage is, is the difference between what you could have build or should have built. Those are not exactly the same thing and what you actually build. And I suppose actually you can go take it one further and collect it. Right? So I give it, there's two different sources of it and I'll give you two different versions of it. Version number one is that where you, you contracted for a certain price and, and volume and on terms that allowed you to measure what the person was doing. And you, you either didn't bill exactly what the contract said you could bill or you didn't bill. You didn't adjust the billing to reflect what actually was going on. So for example, in one of our contract, one of our contracts says, our contracts say that if you're, if you're on a usage based, a seat based system and you actually roll out more seats because we don't really want the pain in the butt of, of recontracting just to sell somebody two seats, right? So you can add seats whenever you want, but you're supposed to be telling us and, and, and we will bill you, we'll just, we'll just bill you for the difference, right? And if you miss that, if you don't, if you don't put the right measurement in there to do that, then you will miss that. Revenue. Right. And getting it later isn't as good as getting it now because it'll affect your NRR and affect your, your growth rate to affect the value of your company. So that's one form of revenue leakage. The other form of revenue leakage is the way in which the two systems describe it. So you've got a quoting system over here and describes it one way. And this is the more common one, by the way, and the way the billing system. It's an imperfect translation. And so you have no. The source of truth of what you were supposed to bill is maybe in the cpq, but the source of truth of what you actually did bill is in the billing system. And, and they don't agree. This is such a big problem that MGI, the analyst firm, pointed out that it's somewhere between 1 and a half and 5%. And it gets worse as companies adopt usage because the translation gets more complicated. We have found use. We found revenue leakage in almost every single company we've implemented. Many times they knew about it, that's why they were moving to a unified system. But in some cases they didn't know about it. And the worst one is that at one company we found $2 million of unbilled error, Right? And fortunately, the team that found it was not the team that lost it. So that was a pretty surprising result. And of course, it's the customer success story you can Never tell. Unbilled $2 million in ARR. Yeah. So I finished it off. But basically what happened was that the, the contracting system had not been properly translated into the billing system, and they didn't know that. And when we went to go live and we're doing our final testing, they said, your calculations are wrong. And we said, no, your data may be wrong, but our calculations are fine. And so we did an audit with them. It wasn't quite that cheeky. We're like, okay, let's dig into this. And we discovered that our calculations were fine and their data was fine. It was just the, this, the, the old data that the old billing system had was not right. And the reason why new doesn't get screwed up like this is in new, you don't implement a CPQ and a billing system. You implement a CPQ and then just turn on billing. Right? It's a totally different paradigm. So there can't be any daylight between the CPQ and the billing system. And so that's. But that often happens in. When people build things out of like, oh, I, I decide to use this little system Here and then this little system here and that the stock translate over, particularly if you're hand bombing it. But even if you do, unless you're very, very, very good at building these integrations, revenue leakage can be the result and incredibly expensive. Just think about that you have $2 million of missing ARR is somewhere between 20 and $40 million of value and possibly even more because that missing ARR would have been seen as churn or seen as lack of growth which would have driven the multiple. So in other words, it could be even more expensive than that. It could have been more, it could be affecting the entire era. It's, it's great that you, that you mentioned multiples and I mean we're, we're, as an acquirer. This is one of the things that, that we promise to companies that we buy is that we will take over the finance and you know, your P and LS and everything. And for, for the longest time I was like, but there are systems for that and it's probably not that difficult. And, and then I started digging and obviously opened up this whole world of, you know, every, every discount, every price change, every offer, every customer that is bigger or smaller or that is a little bit different. And what a nightmare it is actually to account for all of it. And then it was like, okay, that's a great promise. Yeah, look, it's, that's the fundamentally the problem that New was created to solve, right. Is that this is already very hard. But you know, things that old systems presume that New doesn't presume. Or let's put it this way, NEW doesn't think that every contract is going to be the same. New doesn't think that every contract will have the same, even for the same stuff will have the same price model. New doesn't necessarily think that people who are doing self service would only ever get the self service pricing, not the contracted pricing. New doesn't think that everybody gets billed on the same day of the month or that everybody has the same payment terms or that everybody has and all this complexity. New is designed by a bunch of people who came out of the major companies, out of Salesforce, out of Zora and said, you know what? The world is getting more complicated, not less complicated. Your pricing model and the flexibility of it is one of the strategic levers you have. You know, it's really kind of like your product, how you price it and how you sell it. Those three, those are the three big levers. This middle lever is stuck. You can't, it's hard to change it. The product part, that's engineering and product, how you sell it, that's go to market and, and marketing. This thing in the middle is stuck because either is the CFO team or the finance team will go, sorry, we have no idea how to bill that. You can't sell that that way because we have no idea how to bill it. Or even worse, they sold it anyway and then you didn't bill it correctly. That's the revenue leakage problem. And so, so that's, that's what we were set out to do. But you're right, it shouldn't be that hard. It should basically be, you know, you sell stuff and the system tells you what your ARR is and it tells. And if you want to find out where the discount came from, you can basically, you know, you can learn in five minutes how to figure that as that stuff out. Yeah, that would be a better world. But I want to ask you also, because you mentioned the acquisitions, and I know you've been through a few, and we mentioned already that this is not the first company that, that you're running. So I wonder, you know, after all those acquisitions and exits that you've been through, what have you learned that you're applying to? Growing a company that maybe potentially will never sell. But, you know, there is still something that, you know is important, good and bad. Right. The good thing is, is that if you're going to be acquired, pay a lot of attention to the personal behavior of the people on the executive team that being acquired, in other words, how they treat you in the deal, is kind of like the high point of what they'll be like to work with. Right? So, you know, even though they're stressed and all this sort of stu, if you don't like them during the deal, you'll hate them afterwards. And I had a great experience. My last company, we sold to Netrix, a division of TA or a unit of ta. The TA team was amazing. The Netrix team was amazing. At one point I actually said to them, we're negotiating how long I have to stick around. And I said, look, how about we do it six months? And at the end of six months, either I'll hate you or you'll hate me, or we won't hate each other, and then we'll figure out what the next mission is. I end up staying for 13 months and writing myself out of the budget as we completed the succession and was able to leave with like, a really great, you know, you know, departure from that company with, with, you know, with, with goodwill on all sides. But I wasn't surprised because the team that we did deal with were, you know, completely normal people that you'd like to hang out with. Right? By way of, and I think frankly, you know, we've done a couple of acquisitions and know we're kind of on that, on that. You know, we care about the people we've acquired things from and, and, and tried to make sure that they were successful. In fact, I'm in negotiating one right now and I'm really paying a lot of attention to what's important to that team going forward in their, in their personal image of themselves. Like in other words, what, how to motivate them, how to make them feel, feel really confident that they have made a good life decision in joining our company. And it may happen, it may not happen. You want to really focus on that. On the negative side, integrating businesses together is really hard. So when we bought Approvals Pro, that was a pretty simple integration because we sell a cpq. Approvals Pro is an amazing approval system. Not that complicated, but if you're sort of adjacent products, you really have to make sure you have cultural fit. Like everyone could be nice, but everybody could be different. And certainly in the Netrix case, everyone realized the companies were quite different and ran strongpoint, my company, as an independent unit for quite some time because of the difference in the customer base, in the company cultures. And then slowly they identified some of the amazingly talented people at strongpoint and those people started being crossed, fertilized into different parts of the business. And that's how they brought everything together. If they tried to jam them together right away and say, hey, you got to be part of our culture, that would have broken. And we had a conversation about that during the transaction. I just said like, you know, like, we're, we're from over here, Salesforce, net 3D World. You're from like the old school Microsoft world. You know, what, how we, how even explaining these products to different people is going to be complicated. And they agreed. And so a good conversation about culture can lead to a good outcome. If you have the wrong conversation, then leads to a mess. 100% support that. And we also pay so much attention to it. And I always talk to one of the founders that stayed with us and I tell him, peter, you're our poster child. He walked in saying, hey, you know what? Half a year max. And I want to go back because I just had a kid and I want to spend my time with my family. It's been four years and he's with us. And he found this perfect nook where he is absolutely happy still with his company running it. But yeah, he was like, this is great fun. So I decided to stay. So it's, it's. Yeah, I mean, I mean I, I left, I left Netrix. Not because I disliked the company or, or strong points or anything like that, but because me being there was hampering the, the career movement of some really talented people. Because everyone would turn around and go, mark, what, what are we going to do? And I'm like, what do you think we should do? And so at some point you have to base. At some point I got, I got them to the point where I just turned around to Metrics and said, look, they're not. They're running the company now. There's really no reason for me to be here. And I think, I think and I, as the CEO or the, I guess general manager at that point was my title in that, in that division, said I'm going to write myself out of the budget because I think you're just wasting EBITDA on me and I can go off and do something amazing. And of course within three months I end up at new. So that was a good move. So what has been, you know, we're coming closer to an end of this episode and there are usually two questions, one of which is what do you think? You know, all those stories, all those companies. For you personally as a founder and CEO, what do you think has been the biggest win and the biggest failure? Biggest failure. That one's easy to come up with. I'll do biggest failure first. So we end on the high note. So biggest failure was the end of my, my first startup ended because we got too embedded with one very large partner. Right. So be very, very careful. Distribution is going to become a massive war. I think intellectual property is effectively dead. Like in, in software, it's distribution and data are the real moats. And so if you have an application that stores a lot of data, that's going to be a bit, that's going to be difficult to displace. Distribution is going to be a huge thing. What distribution means will be different for different companies. But really being good at taking market share or having the existing position to have market share, that'll be really important. So getting, in my case, I got too close to ca. It helped us really penetrate customers we never would have penetrated before. But then at one point the CEO of CA went to prison for having 37 day months and the next person who came in basically just didn't understand what we were doing together and was busy fighting fires. And basically that ended. And when it ended, we were stuck with a product that we had really no practical way of selling. Right. That had been optimized. So don't do that. In other words, if you can get it, it's okay to tweak your product a little bit to work closely with a larger partner. That's not a bad idea. It would be a better answer if you actually thought about an ecosystem of partners and built those relationships. I would say the lesson, the bad thing, the great thing, frankly, has not been money is how we keep score in tech. But. And I'm very fortunate, but. But actually the best thing is the people like you get to work with, people like our people, the startup people. Right. And I refer to everybody who's not started people as civilians, like, because, like, they have no idea. Right. Well, we were saying it new. What we do is too hard not to love it. Right? And so if you don't love it, you probably shouldn't do it. And so I think the biggest, when I look back on my career, at some point, it'll be moments when we crashed the entirety of Apple coverage at Scribble Live. That seems like a terrible thing, but the esprit de corps of recovering from that and actually it'd be like many of the hard times would be the best things to look back on. But hey, making money is good too. So there's always that. That's beautiful. That's a great high note. But yeah, the last one is always about a ha. And it can be anything. Something that works for the product, for building a great team, or something that works for you as a CEO to just run this in quoting ChatGPT, never, never stopping or what is it ever, ever Changing world of sauce. Yeah. What's a hack? The number one hack that I've learned that I've used over and over and over again, I learned from a guy named Ray Tetlow, who was my partner in a company called Skytech back in the early 2000s. And he taught me that customers aren't coming to you to find out why they should buy your product. They're actually coming to you to try to find out why they shouldn't buy your product. And if you can engage with them and acknowledge that that's what's going on and engage with them and help them through that journey, you'll build rapport and trust that's meaningful and true and real incredibly quickly. As opposed to going, do you want to see my baby. Look how beautiful my baby is. They don't want to see your baby. What they want to find out is if your baby's got like smallpox. That's what they want to find out. Right. They're very concerned that there's something deeply, deeply wrong with this, with this situation. And, and that attitude is a huge part of why new is being able to win these massive customers. Because we literally go, you're probably worried about our size. You're probably worried, you're probably worried that's not an issue for us anymore now. Because of course, given the customers we have and the speed we're moving at, people are quite comfortable with us. But back in the day, rather than avoid the problem, just talk about it first thing. I, you know, there's many great reasons to buy new. You know, are you all, you all concerned about this, this, this and this, or frankly, these are all the things we don't do. Well, let's make sure that you don't need anything we don't do. And the person's like, no, we don't, we don't need any of those things. And they're like, great, great, then you should probably buy new then, as opposed to, let me tell you all the reasons why you should buy new. And in the back of their mind they're thinking, okay, what are we not talking about that we should be talking about, right? And so that's the biggest, the biggest hack. And I think it's applicable, honestly applicable to selling anything. And, and frankly, I think if you approach your, your relationships that way, also in thinking about what the other person is worried about, it's just not even a tech hack, it's actually a life hack. You can basically go in and go, what is this person really worried about? What, how can I make address what they really care about as opposed to what I care about? Yeah, it's like finding a restaurant with a five star review and you're like, what are you not telling me? When did you overcook your steak? So. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or you know, when you go, the waiter, like, think about it. If you're, if you're a restaurant and you ask the waiter, you know, what do you recommend? And they just say, everything's amazing. You're like. And they go, they've never tried it. Yeah, they probably never tried it. And even if they are, everything can't be amazing, right? Maybe it's a Michelin three star. Maybe you don't ask the question, but whatever. If they however, say, well, what do you like, right. And you're like, oh, this sort of thing. Well, you know, I think based on that I think you'd prefer the, I don't know, the soul over the salmon or whatever the recommendation is. People are looking for you to make a differentiation based on, on information you have about them and not just go buy it all. Buy it all, basically. So for example, in our business we partner with Metronome and Metronome by stripe. By stripe. And to some extent we compete with Stripe. Right, right. So it's a, it's a weird situation, but it's an amazing freaking product. Like it's really, really, really good. Right. And so our sales teams are trained to ask people the questions, would discern whether or not our usage based billing without Metronome is a good solution or if they need Metronome and not just now in the future. And guess what? Having that conversation was so jarringly not like most salespeople that people really appreciate our sales team honesty about that and frankly, they're going to get there anyway. You're not going to stand up millions and millions and millions of customers on news usage billing, at least not right now. And we don't even want you to. But it's a great way to get started. But Metronome is a proven fantastic product. The team over there are amazing and pretending that that's not the case would be silly. So that's an example of saying, by the way, I will help you understand this. And this also applies to other products as well. You know, Sphere versus Avalara. Like, you know, there's all sorts of different things where we're basically just being straightforward with about it is what the customer wants. The bigger the company, the more the name is like, sounds like a spell I found, but. All right, well thank you so much for the story. I feel like that has been super interesting for whoever's listening, not only for the big companies and I think there were so many ways to apply that. So thank you for the hack. Obviously love that one. And yeah, looking forward to seeing what you guys are up to this year. It's going to be an exciting year. You know, essentially 100% of SaaS, 100% maybe like 90% of SAS needs to replatform in the next two years to basically get ready to deliver the new pricing models and they're sure not going to do it on Salesforce CPQ at a disconnected billing system. So right now we are definitely in the right place at the right time. Yeah. All right, well thanks so much for the conversation and take care. Thanks Anna. Bye bye. Thanks for listening. SaaS Unbound is brought to you by SaaS Group. We're a long term home for a great B2B SaaS. We buy, keep the team and brand DNA and help with the boring stuff like hiring and finance so founders can truly focus on building great products. If you're a founder who'd like to be featured or explore an acquisition, reach out through the form on our website or email me at Anasas Group.