Innovatemap Revenue (2023)

I appreciate you all um uh this this slide title I have I have problems with because it's a little bit misrepresentative of of how I think about uh SAS but it is true so it's a credibility Builder worked with a lot of companies to help them raise a billion in capital but um the way that I think about this is a bit different than it than it may seem from that perspective and the reason why is because my background is in design so I was a product designer at Autodesk and a Primo which is a marketing tech company built a design team there um I I worked with agencies on the side to help with design and I hated my experience with pretty much all of them so I did maybe the best thing or the worst thing that I could have done would just co-founded an agency ourselves so uh what I found when we were working in software is the way to win uh this is 2014. the way to win and was really going to be in product the cost of software was cheaper and then from a customer standpoint the cost of switching was was lower so spinning up companies got cheap switching got easier it changed the competitive landscape for software companies and we thought at that time product was a way to do it so when I say product you often think of product management but it's more than that from our perspective it's really anything around what makes software easier to buy and what makes it easier to use so on the buy side we think about product marketing messaging and brand and the logo visual identity how you speak to your customers and on the usability side that's where product management comes in in ux design which is my background so with those sort of four areas we sort of form fractional product teams for scaling startups for pre-see through series a or those that are that are that are bootstrapped maybe under 10 million ARR pretty much anytime you might need help before you bring these roles in-house so what I want to talk about today is going to be a little bit out of the numbers because numbers is not my expertise I'm a designer by trade I oversee sales and marketing now but that has really sort of given me an elevated perspective on how I see product helping companies because as I've tried to sell innovate map Services I work a lot more with Founders who are also Fish Out of Water selling their own product in ways they weren't ever experienced to do that as well and there's some common things that I find people miss so even if you are drinking the product Kool-Aid and you understand the value of product there's there's little mindset shifts that I'm going to try to give you some backdrop today that hopefully ends in something tangible you can go think about with your own product or your own company as you're working on it and the three things that I think about when when we the innovate map talk about a product first approach is thinking about product as an investment uh product is design centered and products should also be Vision leg so I'm going to break those down a little bit using an example of a couple companies that we've worked with over the past three years but first let's lay the groundwork this is an overly simplified graph but a lot of times I feel like founding teams or the founders have three main buckets of work if you're raising Capital if you're not pitching maybe it doesn't become an issue but you're really just focusing on building the product selling it and pitching it to get investment but then there's this sliver of product that you put in there and even if you believe in product the reason why I put it in here is it feels like a Time suck for you something that I've got to do to get my vision out in the world but the reality is that product from my perspective should be thought of as an investment and not an expense so if I were to shift this graph around I would put product at the core of it and it's not just this pie this slice of the pie that you're worried about but it's something that's going to scale everything else that you're going to do and I think that this is the thing that gets lost so if you're a CTO in here you're working with ctOS products should be making your job easier it should scale what you do if you're selling I was talking to some sales people this morning I one of the first experiences I had as a designer working with clients through innovatemap was working with sales team and watching them click through sales demos of horribly designed products and how they would just excuse away all the bugs or all the poor navigation flows and I it dawned on me that great sales people often don't realize how bad their product is because their Charisma and just sales skills help them sell anything but the reality is If the product is designed well you're designing the right features and they're workflow oriented it's a lot easier to sell and then of course from the pitching perspective we'll get to that in a little bit but I know there's a lot of people bootstrapping and I'm not here to make any claim on what's better uh fundraising or not doesn't really matter from my perspective but I think at some point you will be pitching it even if it's not for investment you may be pitching it to executive that you want to hire so product also helps there so that's the first core shift that I hoped people to make is product is expensive but it's an investment and I'll show you a little bit more that means when we look at this company Authentics it's I'm pressing the palm tree sorry there we go there's a palm tree logo I don't know what that means um okay Authentics an indie based company uh working in healthcare technology they help Healthcare leaders analyze customer interaction data they have ai that that reads and helps uh you know create models that helps them handle customer support so I think like insurance companies payers anything involved in healthcare so I use this I've sort of simplified the numbers here to just make the point that I want to make here when we started working with Authentics in 2019 they were right around 500k in ARR when they started working with our team on the product side we were revamping their products so it was a this like pseudo low code solution but they had brought on the CTO to start revamping it and build a legitimate product so we were designing the product they also had a visual identity that was just cobbled together and it wasn't telling the right story so when they hired us 500k ARR when you look at 100K costs of working to fix all those it feels like a lot that's 20 of what you're going to make in a year that you're about to spend on something that may not give you demonstrable results it's really hard to resist getting some sdrs or investing in anything that doesn't give you Revenue right away but when we look out we've worked with Authentics I guess it's been about three and a half years now so they were preceded when we started uh they're now just raised their series b um and I think all told in the roles that I've described with product there's been more costs that I'm not covering on the product side on the customer support side or on the product engineering Side sales and marketing and all that but just on the product brand product marketing ux and product management they spent about 500k but they're about 10 million in ARR so when you look at the the scale in terms of Revenue versus the scale in terms of cost you can start to see that it's more of an investment and I don't again not a numbers guy I don't think in terms of valuations but I think it's the best sort of Hallmark to show the value of that type of work now I'm not going to say that product was the only reason they're 50x their valuation but you can see how when you take these numbers together what starts out feeling like a really painful cost for something is not going to give you immediate return over the course of years it starts to compound in terms of the value of your company so what do we mean when we talk about investing in product so when we look at Authentics visually you can look at the logo on the left and the one on the right and see obviously well hopefully it's obvious it's an improvement through this process we did a lot of things we threw out names I think Archer was one of the names we threw out and ultimately realized that the founders value of authenticity was Paramount and actually the name made sense the CX the customer experience side it all sort of flowed and we don't have any ego about what we do we didn't get get upset that they didn't pick any of the creative names we had this fit we lowercase the C because that's what people do and it's really cool and we did a new logo but the brand is bigger than just the logo redesign for this this was more I would say a rallying cry for the company to say that they're entering this new space that they're going to play but when you think about the brand it's bigger than just that you start looking at where does the brands help you sell the product product and for something like this and maybe you have experience like this too we often get caught up thinking about brand and the SAS digital space so how is it represented on a website we've done their website as well and you can look at it as well and see the brand reflected there but in this space they're selling in a am I on the no sorry I keep pressing a different green button I'm sorry there we go that's the slide I meant to be on um so when when we when we look at uh the the niche sort of Industry oriented SAS trade shows things like that sort of play so you look at their sales people there on the left they're selling this brand that they buy into so on that side you say brand also is is not just to connect with the customers but it's eventually how you're going to scale your company when they started working with us was about 13 employees they're at about 85 today and the only way they compete in the market is to have a brand that people want to go work for and go post up at a trade show behind this booth and then right when you look at the CEO speaking you can see that the authenticity literally right behind her supporting her as she's speaking in these conferences so brand is bigger than just that and it may seem obvious to people but I bring up maybe more of the sort of extreme sort of trade show Lo-Fi situations to show you that it actually helps in different in a bunch of different ways you can't see in the early stages all right the other part of investing in products that's really around design my background investing in ux so what you're looking at is a mock-up that we did in figma but it's also been built so this is how it's working so uh when you look at something like this ux is really easy to see when there's a clean UI that the charts look really great and the colors look great but I want you to see how even the brand it feels like the brand has trickled down into the product itself and it's very workflow oriented so I was talking about charts a little bit earlier and you can see the charts are are more put into their position of how they're supporting a broader product this is a lot easier to demo because people can actually navigate it like a user would navigate the product itself but when we also think about investing in ux for long-term success this is a screenshot of the figma file that's that's that's supporting what you just saw so this is a click through on the mobile side but um when you look in figma the reason why I put this up here if you look on the right side you can see there's HTML there's CSS that the engineers are using to make sure that everything is consistent if you look on the left side there's a design system that's supporting everything with intuitive naming conventions these are things that we don't talk about a whole lot when we think about product and investment but as I've watched team scale over time this makes engineering's job a ton easier the consistency in UI reduces customer support tickets you know earlier we heard about usability and and the importance of that we just heard about you know you know customer support but when we think about that if you're designing things well and you're designing it in the right system and communicating it to engineering what feels like an investment up front pays off down the road because everything moves a lot faster down down the road the last main point that I want to that I want to give you when I think about what it means to invest in product is the idea that you never stop selling the vision now whether we have Founders in here or not this applies to everybody there's the original sort of we make division we're going to go sell this Vision either to Investments or to get people to join the team and then we just sort of move on from that this is a company barometer that we're working with on their podcasting ad spend platform and this is what it looks like in the build right now this is not what we design but this is what it looks like this is what they're demoing it's just engineering forward it's literally getting engineered and then just put up in a staging environment and then they're demoing that and they've lost the vision side of what they're doing to their customers because they're proving what the product can do but they've forgotten that people and customers themselves need to get excited and they need to see themselves in it so this is deliberately not a vast departure from what you just saw but it's more user centered there's design that's involved and in this redesign of the product and they're building this now but my point in bringing this up to you right now is they're not waiting for this to be built before they take it in front of customers and I think that's a really subtle mistake that a lot of people make is once you get the product built you start sharing the builds and products and you have a poor sales Engineers you know messing around with a staging environment that's down when they're on site somewhere and they're clicking around or something doesn't work it's not wired correctly use designs figma there's absolutely no excuse not to be using clickable prototypes when you're selling because you can also sell a more compelling Vision that way I think there's a negative connotation that we've had in the past of vaporware which was sort of you know kind of has a connotation to say that we're going to sell something we can't back up but that actually is a really useful tactic when you're selling the vision because you're actually selling ahead of what you can build you already know that you can build it you've committed to build it sell the vision to people instead of the actual product no I don't have okay all right so the last thing I want to leave you all with uh is how can you implement a product first approach there's a million ways and I'll put my LinkedIn on here and I'm happy to just chat more I'm always happy to talk to Founders um but there's a million ways that you can Implement a product first approach but I feel like with a group of product people it's always good to sort of have a a how might we uh sort of exercise there is supposed to be a video playing here but it's not but just imagine like a really compelling UI video there got it yeah that's what was there okay so how might we put brand to work inside the product I I showed this a little bit but I think there's this weird and not to get you know no two uh you know touchy feely about bran but it's the sort of thing that kind of exists as an asset to the team it's an asset to a sales team it's an asset to a product team and we see that a lot with product-led growth where you see personality that comes through in the product but I wish more people would actually think about if we have this top level brand that sets the expectation how do we make that work for us inside the product you know think about a restaurant where that has amazing food but has terrible service or has amazing food but has a really bad you know Decor inside the dining room when we talk about bran it's setting it with a really good restaurant name you've got a really good experience sitting there and the food's amazing all that should be tied together and you should be leveraging that in the customer experience second how might we utilize research to identify features to build for long-term success so a lot of times people just get really stuck on the roadmap that they set out to build and they don't abandon it fast enough I don't really ever work with a client Beyond three months on a roadmap because so many things can change there's an art to it there's also a science to it and you don't want to be the motorcycle you know jerking around you need to be you need to have the right vehicle and stay in your lane a little bit but you also need to be flexible enough to shift and you need to be doing ongoing research so a lot of times people do this initial research where they use it to inform the product and then they kind of stop doing it and you even see it in the market you don't see a lot of companies hiring user researchers or you see companies that hire product managers with no research background is understand that research itself should be constantly utilized every time you put something into the market you've changed the variables that's the most unscientific thing about product is that you have this scientific mind said that I I will make something work if I put it into the second your product is being used you've changed all the variables so you have to constantly get more input that's fed back into the product lastly how might we sell our vision based on our future product if you're not using a designer now you should be using a designer and when I say designer I say a product designer somebody that's more ux minded and less marketing design marketing design is usually pretty boxed into executing marketing campaigns and a lot of them will throw the title of UI designer on their title but when you're talking about designing workflow-oriented product we're talking about somebody that has a design background but they should be leveraged by the sales team just as much as the engineering team when I was at Autodesk I couldn't name a sales person we weren't in the same building we didn't work in the same zip code same area code and it drove me crazy as I realized that there are sales people out there that are selling product that's poorly designed and the designer doesn't know it and the Salesforce is not telling the designer that can be solved and I saw that towards the end of my time at Autodesk by starting to send my mock-ups to the sales team themselves so that they could sell off of that rather than waiting for the built product that they could go demo um so think about how can you continue to drive the vision forward with design and product resources that lives outside of the product development life cycle so those are some three takeaways uh you know for you all uh I know there's a lot to this mindset but hopefully some of these are some got you thinking about uh different ways that you can you know see how you can lead with product uh in in in in your world um and you can scan this I've got my badge on you can scan that as well later but I'm happy to talk to more people we have 33 seconds if there's a really fast question yeah prototype do you recommend building that to show to the clients quickly yeah or we're building just a real product yeah that screenshot that I showed with barometer they they increase their sales by 300 in a month by just switching over I mean literally just stop showing the product and show the screens that they're going to build no that's a great question in this case there's going to be a delay before they get implemented they've got to do a lot of data cleanup to get them on the platform so they have the time but I think it is a great tactical question if you are going to do that you have to have a really good dialogue with a customer to let them know like what's coming but yeah well I mean that's why you got to have them talk to the designers more often but yeah I mean the sales person is going to get that contract signed but I see people do it a lot I think there's ways that it can be handled I think sales people are sometimes going to make commitments that can't be backed up but that's not what we're saying here we're basically saying they're going to be they're going to be demoing things that there has been commitment the product manager is committed to it the designers and the engineers are building it there's just going to be maybe a 30 or 60 day lag so again not selling vaporware I'm not saying sales people should go get a designer on the side and have them design anything that they want that that would be bad but it's really having them mock up what is yet to come thank you all