Acquiring a startup: what to do AFTER the deal closes - with Dan Moore from FusionAuth

Acquisitions are hard. It doesn't matter what size of company it is. They are hard, and you should walk in it with eyes wide open. But in terms of why we did this, one, was it something that the customers in the market were demanding?

And that's not just the customers who talk to you because sometimes people won't even talk to you if they see that you don't have something that they need. In this episode, Dan Moore from Fusion North breaks down what actually happens after an acquisition closes. How do you handle the messaging, the pricing of their service coming into yours, migrations, team handoff, and all the other stuff beyond the big announcement, the stuff that actually matters in making an acquisition a success?

Hi, everyone. So this is gonna be a fun episode. I'm joined today by my friend Dan Moore from FusionUlf. And we're gonna be talking about what happens after you acquire a company and how you make sure that that goes well.

So Dan, do you wanna tell us a little bit about what this acquisition was? And then we'll start to go through this amazing document that you've shared with me that you're gonna Sure. Talk through and explain all the things that you kinda learned and how how you did it. Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks again for having me back, Jack. And I think I was kind of inspired to reach out to you because I heard your episode where you talked about your DevTool getting acquired and we this is a slightly kind of bigger organization. Basically, we, the company FusionAuth, in November purchased a startup that was out of Turkey and there were five employees I believe and we, FusionOff sells authentication software, so it's an identity provider, lets you add authentication to your application.

Permafy, which is the company that we acquired, sold authorization software. So, it is based on Google's Zanzibar and lets you easily build more complicated authorization structures. So you can think of things like Google Drive is a kind of the canonical example. And so we ended up purchasing this company because we had heard some customer demand and around the need for what we call fine grain authorization.

Furrify is not the only provider out there for sure, there's others and we had some partnerships, but this opportunity came across our plate to basically accelerate our roadmap and so that's why we purchased it and I was basically the reason why I'm on this call is because I was basically told, hey, Dan, the purchase happened, you know, now it's your job to help us integrate this into FusionOff's offerings. And I said, yes. And this was the first time I'd ever done anything like that.

And so I've learned a lot about what that simple yes actually means. And I'd love to share that with you and your audience. Yeah. That's awesome.

I guess it's like day one. What is what's the first point of business? Sure. There's a ton of stuff you have to do before you pull the trigger.

All kinds of due diligence which was done but wasn't really something that I was very deeply involved in so I'm not gonna even talk about that but about a couple days, maybe a week or two before the actual closing date, we started to think about our messaging. Well, that's not true, I should be careful. I started to think about our messaging. I think there are people who are thinking about it way before then, but the idea with messaging is you want to make sure that you are taking care of all the different communities.

And so this is your the community of the acquired company and that's the users and customers, that's Permafize community in this example and then FusionAuth's community as well, right? Which are people that use FusionAuth and then obviously different, you know, customers get a slightly different messaging than people that are just using your software for free. You wanna take this opportunity to reach out to press as well because an acquisition is an opportunity to make a splash.

This is something our CMO kind of emphasized is you don't get too many times when people will actually wanna write about your company. You know, no one cares about your product launch unless you're like a big company, but people do care about, you know, a dollar figure and acquisition. And then internal communications as well. So both on the Permafy side, on the team members who were coming over to help with the integration and also other team members and then obviously internal communications with InfusionOff.

We wanted to take care of that as well and basically make sure that all those people had the information they needed to understand one, this product is going to keep living, we're going to keep investing in this product, two, there's not going be any major changes day one, three, we care about you and four, like this makes sense for reasons X, Y and Z. And I didn't do most of that communication, it was other people that were kind of taking those on from those different perspectives like the community stuff was written by our head of DevRel, the sales, our CRO wrote a public blog post that was really kind of speaking to our customers and to some extent to Permafize customers and to some extent the press.

But you need to think about all those different communities and then you need to think about like decisions that need to be made beforehand because what the last thing you want to do is communicate something that turns out not to be true. So you need to kind of make sure you what are you doing with the product? Are there any major changes that are coming down the pike? Typically answer is going to be no, but it's possible there might be some changes like a relicensing.

We didn't do that in this case, but you could. What are existing users going to have to do to keep the service running? Like, is it nothing? Is it like accepts, you know, new terms of services, assign new contracts and what's the timeline for that?

And then crucially for us, Perma five is an open source project and we want to be very cognizant of that. So it's like, we're not, FusionOff is not open source and we have a free offering but it's not open source and so we want to be very clear, hey, you know, Permafy will always remain open source, right? There's integrations and there's obviously going be some things that we want to do to add value to the joint product, but we're gonna let you keep on the PermaVi open source and that was an important message that we had to decide on beforehand.

Right? That wasn't something that Dan, the owner of this project could just decide unilaterally. It was a it was an executive level decision for us to make that choice. Yeah.

Yeah. That's super cool. They were open source, but they were charging they they had a SaaS as well. Yeah.

So they had an open source. They charged for, I believe for some support and then they had a cloud offering where it was actually kind of similar to FusionAuth where it wasn't a normal SaaS where it was like upgraded all the time, It was more like a version SaaS. BS. Okay.

Like a so you pay like for the code that you run yourself, you mean? No. More like Permafy is at version 1.5.

Okay. I'm at version 1.5. And then there's like an upgrade path where you're not automatically upgraded to like version 1.

6. So that's what I mean by version SaaS. As opposed to, you know, you use Stripe and you don't know what really version you're on unless you specifically ask for a version because they just kinda upgrade you automatically. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense.

And so I guess it was like like you've got a whole section here on pricing and packaging. So I guess that was a big a big part of the consideration. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so we purchased this company and we knew what they were charging. We also had kind of an understanding of how successful or what the market uptake had been for them and and, you know, you can kinda get a sense for what their competitors are charging too, right? Like sometimes people don't put stuff entirely on the website, but you can get a kind of a sense by asking around. Like I mentioned, we'd had partnerships and so we'd introduce customers to some of the competitors.

And we were trying to find something that made sense for us, that was something that added value to the FusionOff offering and it also needed to be something that our customers wanted. And then we needed to kind of determine which customers wanted it. And, you know, after doing some research and talking to a number of customers, a number of customers who were working with Purify, a number of of people who had passed on FusionAuth, but might have mentioned, hey, we need this kind of fine grained authorization, talked to a bunch of people, and we really determined that it's in my mind, it's a very cool feature if you need the feature.

It's very much like something like SCIM or some of the more esoteric features that we have, like Kubernetes support, Right? Like, lots of people want FusionAuth not in Kubernetes, even though you can, and lots of people don't use SCIM at all because that's a certain type of customer. And we found fine grained authorization was similar to that. And so it's a great add on, but it's not gonna be necessary for every customer, which meant that we were able to bundle it with the enterprise offering, because that's the type of customer who's gonna make the investment to add fine grain authorization to their application.

And we also decided to kind of charge for hosting. That's the open question for me because of the deployment model. When you are putting an authorization server into application, you can imagine that latency is very important, that uptime and scalability and availability is very important. And one of the nice things PermaFi lets you do is it lets you deploy into your infrastructure.

And so a large number of people, especially with kind of mature DevOps teams are like, no, we don't want you to run PermaFi for us. We will run it ourselves. Thank you very much. They might be interested in support contract, but they're not interested in the hosting.

So they're more interested in having someone to bounce architectural questions off of, or if there's an outage, someone to get on the line. And so that, and then also some integration with the with Fusion Health product are kind of the areas that we leaned into, but that integration, you know, after doing some some investigation, you know, what competitors did and how people were using the product, that integration right now doesn't need to be super tight. I think that in the future will be more, but there's still value in just you stand up FusionAuth, you stand up Permafy, or frankly, you stand up not FusionAuth, and you stand up Permafy, and you have some other identity provider that is your user data source, and we're still happy for you to use Permafy, so we didn't need to wait around for the engineering resources or the people to be able to build out that tight integration to be able to start saying people, hey, we have the solution, we have the team to help build it, we can support you, we can host if you want, but we can help you get this new functionality into your application.

Sorry. That was a lot of that was a lot. I'm sorry, Jack. Yeah.

Well, I think it's just like the very specifics of like how people actually want to use it. That's a bit different to like the core product. So kind of just thinking through that. Yeah.

And I I will say, I think that like when you are involved in this kind of like integration process, kind of zoom out a bit and like move away from the specific details of this. Like you wanna think about like how your products are used together. And the best way to do that is to talk to customers or prospects and do integration do an integration yourself and figure this out. And I think that the pricing and packaging that I just outlined works well for our situation.

There could be situations where a you know, actually, I have a a friend who is part I wanna be careful here. He works for a company that sells consulting services for a particular product and that product got bought by a competitor and the competitor's whole goal is to transfer everybody from that product that they just bought to their own product, Right? So it was much more of a buy it to to turn it off and get all those customers over to the the original company's And that's another acquisition strategy.

Right? And in that case, it's a totally different kind of messaging. Right? You're like, hey, Product x is end of life, but product y over here has exactly the same functionality.

Come on over, and then you're gonna spend time building, like, migration paths and things like that. For us, they were it was an extension of functionality, which means it's an entirely different kind of messaging. Yeah. I also have a question that I know you can't there will be essentially, there's only one way that you can answer it.

So I think I'm not I'm gonna be careful how I say this because it's there's no way that you can answer it any other way. But you know, is it like having gone through this, there's no way I can ask you like is it was it worth buying a company rather than just building it in house? But I will ask you like how would you like make that determination as to whether it was like because it's something that presumably is not that far from, you know, your car your wheelhouse. Like you guys could have built this.

Right? Like maybe take you a while, but like how how would you think about that if someone was like it's kind of tangential question here, but I think it's kind of an important one as well. Yeah. I think it's a great great question.

And the answer, of course, is yes. We're we're thrilled that this you know, we we acquired this company, and it's been great, which is the only way you could possibly answer whether it was true or not. So we'll carry on. Yeah.

I mean, I I will say that, like, the people I've talked to around this, that just this particular situation, but, like, lots of people will say acquisitions are hard. Right? And you look at that. Yeah.

It doesn't matter what size of company it is. They are hard, and we'll talk about some of the other steps that that we took to help make it successful, but I think you should walk in with eyes wide open. But the things that I think about in terms of why we did this are, one, was it something that the customers in the market were demanding? And that's not just like the customers who talk to you because sometimes people won't even talk to you if they have something if they see that you don't have something that they need.

Right? Like, but we were still getting some people talking to us about that. Are competitors having this feature? Right?

Or are they not? And that's a useful piece of data too. And like how well is it supported? How how often do the do customers bring up the competitors options in conversations with you.

And then, you know, you you swag it. Right? You're like, okay, cool. This is something that the market's demanding from companies like us.

How long would it take for us to build this? And you cannot estimate any with any precision, but you can certainly say, would this be weeks, months, or years? And I will say building a Google Zanzibar highly performing authorization server is not a trivial undertaking. And so we made the estimate made estimation that the amount of time it would have taken was more than the cost of the dollars that we we spent to acquire.

Does that Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Was there any way to let's say, okay, it would cost us x to build it, x to buy it, like, plus there's a time to market factor. While there's pros and cons, if you build it in house, you could build it you know you're gonna build it the way that you think it should be built, that sort of stuff potentially. Downside and this is me talking out loud. Downsides, you might build it badly because it's something that you're new to.

Whereas these these guys have know the market, know that space really well, probably have, like, made all the mistakes, stuff like that. And then also have some recognition there, like, you know, is that were there other things that like were kind of key factors there as well that maybe people wouldn't think about as much? No. I think you kinda captured them.

I mean, I in a weird way, it's actually kinda the pitch that we make to customers that are buying us. Right? Like, we'll say stuff like, you shouldn't build it because we've been out in the wild. We've encountered all these weird SAML bugs.

We've scaled up. We have a dedicated team that understands this stuff. Like, that's the same argument for buying, you know, the company. Right?

They've been out in the wild. They've been deployed. You know, they had been breathing this thing. I think they were founded in '21 or '22, so for years.

And, obviously obviously, there's an opportunity cost that you need to think about as well as just kind of the monetary cost. And Yeah. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. Yeah.

I feel like the cultural one is a big part of it as well. Right? And so that's always a a big consideration if it's like these guys match your culture and stuff as well. So I'm sure that was a big part of it too.

But I interrupted you to take a very big side tangent. But you were just getting to the second phase of of this document that you put together on like Yeah. So yeah. So you've now communicated things out.

Right? And you've sent the emails to folks. You've published the blog posts. You have the FAQ.

All those things are done. And I will say that, like, you can't communicate things just kinda once, like, you have to communicate things again. And again, not that you need to send spam emails or anything like that, but, you just wanna be kinda clear, you know, hey, here's where we're going, here's what our plans are. The next thing to do is you want to do a full inventory of all kinds of accounts, And this could be stuff like your hyperscaler, like what cloud you have access to, customer data documentation.

Basically, you want to make sure that you have access to kind of everything that the the acquired company has. And especially if there's any in flight, like, deals that are happening, you wanna make sure that you're having a handoff from the acquirers team to the acquirers team. And it's not just enough to make sure you have access, you need to make sure you can do the thing, right? So for example, I made edits to a blog post, I made edits to the Permafy website, I did a release, these are all things because and it's not that they would intentionally forget to give you access, right?

It's just like you discover, oh, I need this when you go through the actual process or there were times when I was like, oh, what is this actual thing that I'm getting this report for? And if, you know, even a smaller company has like an astounding number of accounts, then the next thing to do is kind of like, once I had access to those things, I would basically identify who on the FusionAuth side needed access to those things. And obviously, there's some super admins on our side that need access to everything.

And then there are certain departments where I'm like, okay, guess who show them the marketing website. It's not Dan. It should be the marketing department of Fusionot who show the docs website. It should be the technical writers over here and so on and so forth.

Yeah. Yeah. Was there any like if you're buying a company that's in a like Turkish language, did they have it was that a factor at all? Like language?

Did it come into it at all or not really? All that I mean They're a problem. I I don't have I have not seen any documentation that wasn't in English. I have not taken a deep look through the code, but I'm pretty sure it was all in English.

The folks that I've all interacted with have been great English speakers. So Okay. So they were just they were operating in English anyway. So yeah.

That's a good question. I haven't actually asked them whether they sometimes when I hop on a call with them and they're just it's the two of them talking, they'll be talking in Turkish. And then when I come on, they're very polite. They start talking in English.

But I just would've assumed if you're like a startup that's in Turkey that you might end up with like lots of like Turkish accounts. But Yeah. So the the user base and the customer base that I've been talking to is worldwide. And I will say the community definitely leans a little more towards some of that area.

But in the Discord, the community, you know, all the all the conversations that I've seen have been in English. So lucky to be born in I'm here soon. I'll be in luck with you. So Okay.

What's the the third phase, Dan? Yeah. The next phase is basically building on the integration roadmap. And again, I think that some of this was done beforehand, and it was perhaps at like a little bit of a higher level, whereas I was really kind of in the weeds and like doing tactical stuff and like, again, like I had mentioned, talking to customers and determining kind of, yes, we have the software now, now what are the next steps to integrate it?

So there's like the long term vision that we had when we acquired it, and then there's the, what do we do this week? What do we do next week? What do we do this quarter? And the way that I think about it is you break integration into kind of simple quick wins, and this is stuff that is relatively easy to do, like blog posts, like documentation, like example apps.

And again, I do wanna make clear that this is kind of the integration journey that we went on. I use that example of the company that got that acquired that made an acquisition in order to deprecate the product, which is not us, you know, they are gonna have a different integration path. But for us, it was simple quick wins and then select things that are more complex but feasible that are got maybe a quarter or two quarters out. And then there's we got together with some of the engineering team and some of the sales team and just kinda like blue sky what an integration would look like.

And that is all on a list someplace. And like any product roadmap is going to change over time, and we're not committing to any of that. But that kind of first initial integration that shows, hey, here's how you use the two products together is required before you can kinda go out and say, hey, this actually is something that you can use together, right? Because many people will not wanna do the work for you, right?

Even though in October before the acquisition even happened, you could use Fusionauth and Permafy together, People aren't necessarily gonna wanna do that. Whereas if you got write some documentation, this is how you do it, then suddenly it becomes more real to everybody. I suddenly use this as a developer too. Right?

Like, when you see documentation, when you see an example, then you're like, oh, yes, of course, this can work together. But because I'm trying to solve problems in my world, I'm not gonna do that work for somebody else. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's I always do that with like Cloudflare workers or something. I was like, I wanna do this thing. Does it because we use a lot of like Cloudflare Workers.

It's like, does that is there documentation for it and you know you're not just gonna be the first one running into like all kinds of weird stuff? Totally. Totally. I will say the one thing that I found was useful, I think I've maybe said this before, but like going and talking to customers, going and talking to community members, like this really helped me learn how they used find your authorization, the problems they were solving, and that helped inform those other two roadmaps.

Right? And then one thing, excuse me, we had to worry about was, as you mentioned, Permafy did sell hosting. And so we had conversations with customers that were there, and we're kinda clear, like, we have a migration migration path for you from the cloud that Permafy ran into the cloud that FusionAuth runs. And, you know, the other option, of course, is because Permafy can be self hosted, they have the option to kinda take their data and move it down to and, you know, the jury's still out on exactly how that that turns out, but we wanna make sure that we gave them kind of both those choices.

And and I guess the takeaway from that is you will not your current environment is going away. You know? And you wanna be kind of polite and not rude about that. It was just like, hey, this is this is one of the changes that's happening.

Not tomorrow, not next month, but in a period of time, and we will help you make that transition as as smooth as possible. Do you have like views on how people should think about timeframes on that sort of thing? Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on what it's costing you to keep running things.

It depends on what the customer's desires are. To be totally blunt, if if we had customers who are like, we wanna stay on Permafide Cloud forever, we might have found a way to do that, but the customers we did talk to were flexible enough. Trying to think of what other ways to think about that. Yeah.

I mean, I think you need to talk to customers and, like, say, like, how much well, you can estimate how much work it would be, but they also can estimate how much work it would be, and it becomes kind of an open conversation. So you're kind of weighing the impact on a customer to when as compared to kind of the ongoing running costs of maintaining this other piece of software, not just dollars out the door, but operational complexity. Making that choice to shut down Cloud, we actually meant that we cut out a whole bunch of work, right?

We were like, great, you don't have to document how to do things, you don't have to like show us, you know, how to do make changes to Permafy Cloud, We were able to say just it's it's an entire class of work we didn't have to to deal with. So that is another cost that you have to kinda consider. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I felt like as soon as people no one wants to stay on the one that's not gonna be your focus anyway if you were planning. Yeah. I can imagine people want begging to stay on it.

Like I felt like most times, as soon as people hear that something might be shutting down or is gonna shut down at some point, they just wanna get off it fast. I felt like most of the time. Just doesn't feel good to be on the thing that's gonna get sunset soon. Yeah.

I think that's that's an interesting way to put it is like you actually wanna put the control in the hands of the customers. Right? And so you want to build the tooling or the documentation or even just the awareness that they can move off when they want to. And what you don't wanna do is force it.

Right? Like, you want them to be able to put it into their roadmap because it's unplanned work. Right? And it's unplanned work that doesn't really benefit them.

Right? That they're just like, you know, who hasn't I mean, it's like updating your n t m m your NPM modules. Right? Like, no one likes to do it.

You have to do it. Yeah. But unless you're not getting a new feature for it, you're just getting a little bit of security, etcetera, etcetera. But like, you gotta do it.

And so this is something where you have those conversations and you say, hey, this is coming months, year ish to me felt like the right thing for this particular integration. Like, if you can't move off of something in a year, then I'm I'm not really sure what kind of dev team you have, I guess. No. I think a year is very reasonable.

It's not it's not a month long project or probably this even. And so it's just a case of slotting it in. Yeah. But I think like a month saying it's gonna be a month is too short for almost any DevTool, I think.

Because it's like especially if it's in your business, like, you know, it's good to break things. It's stressful. Totally. And I will say one other thing is, like, is it a different kind of environment, but when you have a DevTool that has no drop in replacement versus something that does have a drop in replacement, right?

Like imagine if AWS said, hey, RDS is going away, right? That is a different world than if they said, hey, DynamoDB is going away, because RDS, yes, it'd be super painful, but I can stand up Postgres and it's the same version and you know, even down the same minor version, whereas DynamoDB, there's no ready replacements. And so, in this particular situation, Permafy, the replacement is you run Permafy locally. Whereas Yep.

Other SaaS tools or DevTools might not have a peer replacement, and that means that you need to extend the lifetime out more. Maybe even a year is not enough time if it's like a complex thing and they're they're a big company and yeah. God. Like imagine like Jira.

Right? Like if you were like take your not that I love Jira and we we don't use Jira, but if you were like take Jira Coke goes away, it's probably a multi year thing depending on the size of the company and their agility and how deeply they've customized that thing. Whereas Yeah. Again, RDS is an example where it's it would be more straightforward.

Still painful, but more straightforward. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

This makes sense. It's a good way to think about it. Okay. And then you also talked a bit about cross marketing.

Like I guess, like how you Yeah. Tell your customers, their customers. Yeah. So this is so cross marketing is kind of a dip.

You're like, Dan, didn't you already talk about communication? Well, before I was gonna say that. Initially which is great question. The initial communication is like, hey.

Things are going. We we we got we have some plans. And then cross marketing, in my mind, is when you've actually done big chunks of the integration and whatever that integration is. And you're like, now the sales team has a story.

The customer support team knows, you know, how to support the new software. The solution engineering team knows how to talk about it from a technical perspective. The marketing team even knows how to talk about it. And that's when you can so so you've done more integration into the the acquiring acquiring company, and done some education, done some training.

We actually had one of the team members come over to The US and did training across four or five different departments in person and on Zoom. And so it's hard to help Fujinoth feel more comfortable about how Permafy could help our customers and how they would be able to help our customers with Permafy. And so now you can be like, okay, cool. We're gonna tell people about this thing and, do a webinar, do some blog posts, do some email campaigns.

Okay. So Dan, I know we're actually getting close to time. So I just wanted to ask you because the thing I'm extremely interested in is you've written up, like, the biggest challenges. So it was actually really hard when it comes to, like, integrating this company that you just acquired into your business and making it, a successful acquisition.

Yeah. So I think I would pick like three challenges. And the first is kind of early stage ambiguity. There were a lot of decisions that need to be made with less than perfect information.

And, you know, that ranged from pricing packaging, we kind of arrived at by looking around to the level of integration that we want to offer kind of out of the gate. Then there was the accounting and branding complexity, that's just kind of keeping track of that inventory. And then like, a brand integration is something that especially when you have an open source project, you want to be very cautious about how to do that in a way that keeps the open source community happy, because that's a huge place of value for Permafy and for FusionAuth, but also, you know, makes it clear that if someone wants to pay us money, that we're here, right?

We're here, we're open for business too, right? So, we're still working through all the pieces of that, but that's something that we're very aware of. And then the last thing is, and I think this was one that surprised me is, you buy this company, there's a big splash externally and internally, and then lots of people go back to doing their jobs. Right?

And their jobs are not necessarily to like integrate Permafy. That was my job, and definitely there were other people on the team and and no one's not interested in in doing that, but they are focused on, you know, supporting and selling and and documenting and building FusionAuth. And so the way that we've helped keep this front of mind is every all hands, there's a Permafy slide. I mentioned the training earlier.

I worked with people to like help create enablement because it's one thing to know that you can mention Permafy on sales call, it's another thing to like have a sheet that says, this is the times when I'm going to mention it, right? If someone mentions x, y, and z, that's a good time to bring this this in. So there's supporting documentation. I guess this kind of goes back to what we're talking about in terms of documentation externally and how that enables developers to choose to use Permafy because it's like a proof point, well, you need those same kind of proof points inside the organization too.

And that's my job. Not I'm not doing the whole thing myself. I'm reaching out to all the different departments across FusionAuth where applicable to help create those proof points to help other people know when it's appropriate to bring them in. And so having it be a continuous thing where you start to like almost, I don't wanna say embed, intertwine.

You wanna intertwine the success of Permafy with the success of Fusion Oath so that it becomes part of people's jobs that they don't just think about fusion auth, think about purified, the same way they think about like SCIM, right? That's another I I gave that example way back when you want it to be just another feature or or core product that can help people achieve their their goals inside the organization. Yeah. And does that come like ambiguity as well?

Because like, I can imagine salespeople, they wanna obviously sell stuff, make commission. And it's like very, you know all salespeople are like very one track minded on that. Right? Fully.

Focused. And so I guess it's like if you've got this ambiguous thing as as you're integrating it, you don't necessarily have all the answers. Like, imagine it's quite hard to be like, they're like, wait, what am I selling? So how much am I char how much can I charge for it?

Like, what can it do? Like, when can I when can I say that it's ready? When can I and you're like, well, we're figuring out these things? And they're like, but you want me to talk about it?

But, like, we're not that like, I don't know. Just is that kind of one of the challenges maybe? Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. And honestly, I would say, well, you always want salespeople to be talking about what your product can offer. Like, you don't want them to do it in a way that gets egg on their face or hurts them in any way. Right?

So you almost wanna wait to, like, talk about to to equip them to talk about it until you have pricing and packing you figure out, until you have integration figured out, at least to the point where you can say, you know, some of the ambiguity has dissipated. Right? And then the other thing I think is it's a lot easier for you to tell a salesperson, hey, please mention Permafy when customers are asking for it anyway. Right?

And that was that again, that margin signal, which we talked about way back when, customers are asking for it and you give them a one sheeter that says, here's your answer, they're gonna be thrilled. Right? So that's actually better. Actually, yeah, I I see the framing.

It's actually better for salespeople will be happy about that because it's like another objection. You know. Oh, we were gonna go with okay. Cool.

Yeah. Oh, and and I I guess the last thing that keeps it up to date is I do a weekly kind of report to executive team here. So that is Mhmm. Kind of a here's what we've done, here's where we are.

And and I am actually going back to kinda way back when they tapped me and I said yes without knowing. I think that this has been a tremendous growth opportunity for me. And hopefully, if any of your listeners have this opportunity, it'll be growth opportunity for them because it makes me interact with all parts of the organization. Right?

Like there is not a single department inside Fusionot that I have interacted with in some way because I've needed to give them something or I've needed something from them. And that was a real, like, I always like to think that I'm friendly with everybody, but there's a real growth opportunity for me to be like, okay, cool. Now, how do I frame this product's integration for the support team, which is a totally different kind of set of questions than for the engineering team, or for the finance team, Which they don't really care about the details of Permafy, they care about like, what licenses get attached to, and how do we bill for that kind of thing.

So Interesting. So have you got a have you got a big desire to start doing tons of m and a stuff now? Let me let me let's let's talk to me in a year and Okay. And we'll see how things are.

And, you know, my guess is that every m and a is like every marriage. They're probably all really, really different. And I and I was in a particular place at a particular time to be the right person for this situation, but I can't imagine I guess sorry. Maybe take it back.

Maybe you need to find someone who does m and a. Anybody who does m and a around software tools, Jack wants to interview you because it'd interesting to know whether there'd be like patterns here. Right? Maybe that maybe I because this is n of one for me.

So Yeah. I actually I find it so interesting. I don't know what it is. It's like it's very interesting.

I did interview the guys from Polychrome who like buy businesses. And I actually just also interviewed Joel who's the founder of Browser List who's like one of the companies that they part own. And I yeah. It's fascinating.

I don't know. You should tag the Bending Spoons folks. You know them? Yeah.

I would like to. Vimeo and stuff today. Did they talk publicly about stuff? I don't I don't know.

It would still be interesting to hear about that business model and that whole approach. I would definitely listen to that episode for sure, Jack. Okay. Yeah.

That would be cool. Dan, thank you so much. That was great. Where can people learn more?

Yeah. So I'll send you some stuff to put in the show notes, but we definitely wrote a couple of blog posts about the acquisition, and you can learn more about Fusionauth at fusionauth.io, Permafy at Permafy .co.

Yeah. I'm on bluesky@moreds.com, and I'd love to connect with anybody about this kind of thing. So Amazing.

Well, thanks, Dan. And also, I should say thank you very much to Dan as well for just being such a helpful person. And you've, like, introduced me to so many guests, and you're always, like, really positive and supportive and trying to help, like, everyone. And I don't know.

It's it's really appreciated. Thank you as well. Yeah. Awesome.

And thanks, everyone, for listening.