Metadata Revenue & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, sasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording. [00:18] >> The bank account went down and down and down. How do you compete with a giant that has like 400,000,000, if I'm not mistaken, in funding? How do you compete with someone like that? Now how did we make it? And that's the majority of this presentation. [00:33] Hey folks, if we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. Launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and one went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with b to b software founders. [00:59] So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling a $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer. Alright. Let's jump into the interview. [01:18] >> From 2,000,000 to 12,000,000 in ARR and what particular playbooks we use to get there. Some of them are not very sexy, but they've been tried over and over and over and are guaranteed to produce pipeline. So focus on that. A little bit about myself, I'm a software engineer, a robotics software engineer in my background. I turned into a marketer at some point, did a good job because because I have a technical background and today b to [01:41] >> b marketing is a very technical job. So I've done well as a VP of marketing and at some point I saw the gap between what is available to a VP of marketing in terms of data and technology and what is possible in terms of data technology for a b to b marketer. And I made a choice to take the leap and start a company that if you're our customer you essentially don't have you don't have to [02:03] >> hope for pipeline. You don't have to you know be a rocket scientist to generate pipeline because you use experimentation and data as a means to an end to guarantee that you have predictable pipeline with economies of scale. [02:18] >> A little bit about our revenue because that's that's the proof that you should listen. We had a very interesting path where it took us years to find product market fit. For years we built this piece of software and did a lot of customer development. And in 2020 we found what we thought was product market fit. I was so happy after years finally a meaningful revenue number, meaningful ARR, but unfortunately this also happened at the same time. [02:50] >> Have you ever been in a situation as a founder where you're worried about your runway? I couldn't sleep during that time we had less and less money in the bank and although we had product market fit you know we had a repeatable sales cycle the same kind of customer the same kind of pitch roughly the same amount of revenue but the bank account went down and down and down and investors wouldn't take my money not a [03:17] >> good investor I had a bunch of sharks who saw that were bleeding and would give us terrible term sheets, but no good investors want to put their investment on the table. And so in one day I've decided that instead of trying the same thing and trying to raise money with the same story that I have for that market fit, etcetera, I have to take ownership on the future of the company. And so we decided to cut [03:41] >> enough of the spending and I'll show you exactly what tactics we did. What we took such aggressive measures to make sure that next time we go fundraising we don't need the fundraise. And when you don't need the money, when you go to an investor and you tell them this is happening anyway, you are invited to join us for this journey. The conversation is very, different. You talk to different people, much kinder people, and you get term [04:07] >> sheets that you're proud of, not something that you're ashamed to go to your board with. So what did we do? First things first, the decision that many people don't like to do, cut expenses. We, I went through every line item in QuickBooks, every line item in my American Express credit card, and whatever was not necessary to keep the lights on, I didn't pay. Just like that. My credit score went down to about 300 at some point [04:33] >> with American Express. They didn't like that. And they would call me every day, pay your bill. I was like, I'm not paying anything out of the bill until I have money, I'm paying all of it. And you know that happened eventually, but they didn't like the the the path in between. I have some derogatory remarks and I'm proud of it because it saved the company. I also went to my sales team who were doing great and [04:52] >> told them look I can't really pay you but you're doing a good job. Can I convert some of your commissions into stocks? And surprisingly more than 50% said yes. The best salespeople in fact said yes and now they are majority stakeholders in the company. A bunch of other hacks we did. We launched, I talked to all of the customers. I decided that moment that I'm going to meet every customer that I have. We only had like [05:15] >> what 50 or 40, but I met all of them and learned that for some of them that were about to churn a piece of the product was still relevant to them. So we launched a mini version of the product and we're able to maintain some of the of the GRR, some of the retention. We did a bunch of other measures for example, every campaign that I had, every marketing competitor had, had all the way to revenue [05:37] >> ROI, return on investment. I made sure that every campaign that we have generates revenue, not just pipeline, not just leads, but actually goes all the way to revenue. And so we were able to focus and then quadruple down on what was working. [05:51] >> And so that was kind of the measures we took. From here I can tell you we got into break even if you don't see it here, that was the previous presentation, but I got we got all the way to I think $25 in the bank. It's like not a lot of money in the bank. Almost going under and then slowly going up. From that moment I was able to get 200 ks in accounts receivable debt. From [06:12] >> that I was able to get 300 ks in convertible note and then $2,000,000 raise and then a 4,500,000 right after that. So being sustainable company chills out investor. They're like alright there's one less risk. I know you're not gonna run out of money. I know this is happening anyway. Looks like you have product market fit. Now I'm going to give you a shot. [06:35] >> And that year was a special year because after we raised that money, suddenly the survival was like we didn't have to survive. We didn't wake up every morning, okay how am I making it one more day? And from that mindset when you're not have, I still get cash updates by the way twice a week. So I still have a little bit of PTSD. But I don't wake up every morning thinking I'm running out of cash. And [06:54] >> that gives you a little bit of okay, now let's think about the vision. What do I want? And when things started working out the product market fit was really there. And so once we started investing in sales in marketing, we're a little bit more more spendful than before. We started focusing on what is repeatable that can take us to the next level. And we actually negotiated if the year before I negotiated with the board to cut [07:19] >> the growth by half because I didn't have the money to support that growth. This year we're like hey how much more can we grow? This may not last forever, which it didn't right the economy tanked. So how do we take advantage of a market that is growing and so we we renegotiated with my leadership team three times and we almost made it to the third goal. So instead of growing to five, instead instead of going to [07:39] >> seven and a half which was the new goal, we decided 12 and a half is the third goal and we almost made it. Now how did we make it? And that's the majority of this presentation. There are four cool playbooks. Some of them came from us, metadata and some of them came from our customers. Because we run demand generation for our b to b companies, b to b SaaS companies, mid markets, then we have a lot [08:01] >> of proof, a lot of quantitative proof on what works. When I say works, again I don't talk about vanity metrics. I don't care about leads, don't care about impressions, click through rates, all of those cool KPIs that growth hackers talk about, I really don't understand much about. I dive all the way into board level KPIs, revenue, CAC, pipeline. Comparison guides. So we were poor still even with an A round we're competing with giants that were creating [08:29] >> categories, spending lots of money on SEO and SEM, owning all the display inventory. So how do you compete with a giant that has like 400,000,000 if I'm not mistaken in funding? How do you compete with someone like that? One hack is called comparison guides. We were able to parachute into deals in the last minute and steal it away. How does it go? So most companies invest advertising and marketing money in the entire funnel. Everything from what [08:58] >> is this category about? What's problem are we solving? Who's the best vendor? What are the features? Why is our pricing the best? Well, this is cool. If you have the money to do it, that's amazing. If you don't we didn't. We said hey we're going to focus on one area only. When they get to the place where they're already qualified they already know they want to purchase something and they're just comparing vendors, comparing features based on [09:19] >> the problems that they have. I want them to know about us. In fact when they do the comparison, I want to be the one that gives them the comparison guide. And so what did we do? [09:31] >> First thing is review sites. Just like there is Yelp for consumer, there is G2, there is Trust, URadius and a bunch of other websites to help consumers of SAS determine which vendor they should go with. Right? This exists. We started paying the biggest check I paid was for G2. I pay them for two things. One to have lots of reviews so that our profile looks good. Our customers loved us. I want to make sure it's very [10:00] >> public. So we had one of the best g two profiles. If you go there, you're already half in. The second one is how do I know that the deal is being cooked? Right, if my competitor is talking he's not telling me hey I'm talking to this to this prospect you should join in. I need to figure out that the deals are in the making. So I purchased the buyer intent signal. It's a very fancy name to [10:19] >> pay for a web log data. G2 would send me their web log data. It's like a bunch of IPs and URLs. And what I did with that is reverse IP so I understand which company it is, which location it is, I know who is my customer so I will go and find the contacts of that customer and I would start bombarding them with emails and ads to tell them hey I think you're in a buying cycle [10:40] >> for this particular product. Right? Here's a comparison guide. It's a generic comparison, it's objective comparison guide. And the comparison guide was not created by us, was created by G2. So there is credibility to it. But as the author, as the one who is, sorry as the vendor, I can determine which features I'm sorting the guide by. And I can sort it by the features that I'm best at. For example we're best at ROI, the best vendor [11:06] >> in our category. And so I would go and sort the buyer guide based on this feature. And when the customer if they care about ROI or ease of implementation or customer service, boom we come up first. Even if you don't come up first, it's still worthwhile to do it because if you're in the top three or top four, it's very likely that the person is going to give you a shot. They're to give you half an [11:27] >> hour on the phone to maybe convince them. Even if they use it as a negotiating tactic, they're going to give you the time of day to at least compare you to someone else. So person guide from review sites, you don't brand it, don't brand it with your logo, make sure the person who is buying understand this is an objective as much as possible objective comparison and you'll get a shot at the table. [11:55] >> This is how to do it. It's not very complicated. I do the step by step by the end of this presentation you have my email. I think Nathan will also send you these slides, but this is a very easy to implement within I would say a month you can have this up and running. [12:12] >> Second one, Convo ads. Many times CEOs of SaaS companies or VP of marketing for SaaS companies ask me, how can I generate pipeline quickly? I am told that there is no silver bullet. It's wrong. There are some silver bullets out there. You can apply tactics. It's your sum game of time and money and the audience you're going after. Right? Like you have there are some restrictions, but there are particular playbooks that can generate pipeline quickly. I'm [12:38] >> not talking about e book leads, webinar attendees. No, I'm talking about people who will hop on a call knowing they're going to be sold to is the person you want to sell to and you have half an hour to try to sell them. I can't guarantee you'll sell them, but you'll have half an hour to try and do it. How do you do it? LinkedIn has this ad type called conversational ad. It's basically a promoted email, [13:00] >> right? You get emails all the time on your email, you don't open them, they're in the promotions tab. But on LinkedIn you get emails and if you pay for it as a vendor you can be on top of the list. So you'll be the first person that they see on their email. And it's a chat bot that you can create, it's a workflow that basically ask them and the workflow that we use is either giving a [13:18] >> gift card, a donation, or an audit, a marketing audit for your company. So something of value. You get something of value for free, in return you give us your time. Half an hour twenty five minutes for a demo. This tactic we've been using it maybe for four years now. It hasn't been exhausted. All of my customers use it. It hasn't been exhausted. The arbitrage is not there. You can't get it for really cheap anymore because many [13:45] >> people know about it. But this works and within weeks, within maybe two weeks of executing this campaign you would be able to start seeing a flow of demo request. As simple as that. It's not rocket science, the steps are here. You can determine exactly which buyer, which influencer, which message you want to get them. You pay for the email, you pay for the targeting, you also pay usually for some sort of a value add where it's [14:13] >> a gift card or an audit or whatever it is that you want. In return you get a shot in selling to your prospect. And if even if you don't sell at the very least you get objections and you can learn and iterate. [14:26] >> Next one, close loss campaign. This didn't used to be like nicely packaged in a slide like that, but I started using this tactic many years ago. It used to be me and my VP of sales sitting in a bar doing shots, two of our laptops open, and as time goes by we're less worried the typos and the type of emails that we send and how many emails and is it perfect? No. But basically the tactic is [14:49] >> you lost many deals sometimes to price, sometimes to a competitor, sometimes due to timing and so you go back to the same company and you go back to the same buyers, two different avenues. Same buyer, different company, things change. Same company, different buyer, different point of view. You go and you use whatever reason you lost that deal, It if was budget, maybe now there is budget. If it was timing, maybe now is the right time. If [15:12] >> it was a competitor, maybe that competitor sucks. So you go and you have that message, start that conversation with that person. And the other avenue is we want a huge deal just by going to the same person who liked us, but she couldn't bring us into that company. She later joined ThoughtSpot, big ass logo that we still have and we were able to win that just because we woke up. It's like hey you remember us, you [15:31] >> liked us, you work in a new company now. And so this is very simple here where you need to gather the data from your Salesforce. You can add on top of that information from user gems. User gems are very unique data source that tells you which people switched which jobs. Another thing that you can put there is the reason why you lost that deal because that's how you personalize the message. You you the opener for the [15:55] >> conversation. That simple tactic always gets you pipeline back, always. This is the email that we send. It's not very sexy, it's long, but you can notice two things or maybe you can or you cannot, I'll tell you. First, this is not HubSpot. This is Apollo. We have HubSpot, but we don't send this email from HubSpot because this is not a marketing email. It's a sales email. Also the email doesn't come from a marketing at metadata or [16:20] >> my my AE or my VP of sales. No. This comes from the same ICP. I find the same person that I sell to and I find the same person in my company with equal and I send that email from them because there is much more credibility. There's camaraderie between a marketer and a marketer versus a salesperson and a marketer. Those two things very high very high open rates and reply rates. And you can see below, oh [16:42] >> no you cannot see. Now you can see below the bunch of opportunities within less than a week. It's a healthy open rate you know. 30% of the people open the email, Some of them reply a bunch of new opportunities. Some of you don't even see here conversations that happen over text. Oh I saw that email. Yeah I'm ready to hop on another call. Oh it wasn't right before let's hop on a call now. So not very [17:06] >> sexy tactic. I do it every quarter guaranteed to wake up some buyers and get you some some deals back on the table. It's very important to add new contacts to the companies that the champion move to another one. So, you add more and more people into that contact so that one of them will give you a shot. [17:32] >> Last but not least, B2C social. How many times have you heard the sentence Facebook doesn't work for b to b? They say it all the fucking time. All kinds of sacred cows out there. Go and massacre them because you'll be the one who breaks the status quo. You'll be one of the only marketers out there who goes and bid on people on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Reddit, on TikTok. People are everywhere all the time. [17:57] >> And if you target them, if you like, if you target them properly, meaning if you don't use the channels native targeting, sometimes doesn't make any sense for b2b, right? Facebook doesn't care about b2b. They make 90% of their revenue from political and consumer campaigns. So they don't have any job title or company name on seniority, but we do. We're not the only vendor, but we're one of the layers of targeting for a company like Facebook. If [18:20] >> you target exactly the same people using the same email, the same PIIs, now you have a whole new channel. And first of all, it's interesting because you'll be able to distract them. They're so accustomed to the usual content of Facebook, some see a b2b ad for them you're going to get their attention. Two, you're going to be doing crazy arbitrage. In our platform we constantly clone automatically campaigns exactly the way they are. One campaign type to [18:48] >> the other because the CAC goes down significantly you're competing against many many less people so it gives you the opportunity to target more people with the same budget so take a look every channel gives you different types of targeting capabilities on Quora on Reddit you can target based on questions on tags. People are asking questions about what problems are you solving? Whatever problems that you're solving put them in a long sentence now you'll start targeting based [19:14] >> on that tag. It's very very powerful, but you have to experiment. You have to experiment constantly and see what works for you. Just by trying, just by trying you'll be outside of the 99% of the marketers who only go after LinkedIn and Google and that's it. [19:29] >> That's it. I'm one and a half minute before my end. Thank you for your time.

all right one more session for lunch nice to meet you all my name is I'm the founder and CEO of metadata we're the B2B marketing operating system in the next 20 minutes or maybe a little bit less we want to talk about a few things how we moved from almost dying almost cash death to hyper growth and then how we moved from hyper growth to survival mode in a recession very relevant for where we are these days I'm going to finish with a bunch of hacks uh for the wartime CEO and we're currently in Wartime so just a little bit about myself I'm a software engineer I have robotics background I spend about 10 years as a VP of marketing post my graduate school and every lesson uh that I talk about here is Written in Blood and sweat and tears nothing about this is theoretical so I'll start with the revenue growth because that's how founder path slash SAS open likes to put it so this is how the revenue growth looks like there's a nice peak in the middle that was our hyper growth mode 21 2021 250 it was amazing but I didn't start that way and so in 2020 we finally hate product Market fit it took us three years to build a product sell it and figure out who do we sell it to successfully so we were very happy about the product Market fit but we were not happy about the fact that I had about half a million dollar left burning about 200 000 every month so we're at about two two months of of life um I would not sleep well during that time uh a lot of a lot of uh a lot of heartbreak during that time and so we had to and I remember at some point you know we had a bunch of um term sheets from kind of shark VCS uh completely changing the company diluting diluting so and so forth but we didn't we didn't do those uh we wanted to make sure that we have enough Runway to survive this this time so the first stage that I'm going to talk about is that survival phase that I think every one of us here experiences at some point whether the market is good or bad in order to to get through uh that that first initial uh stage we had to first and foremost remove a lot of burn we had to cut our company significantly so right in there we had about third of our employee uh we also stopped uh paying every essential vendor I know this is not very popular to say but I went through each and every spend with my CFO every spend from a consultant to uh to any software vendor really anything and if I couldn't afford it or it was not critical we didn't pay which means a lot of people were pissed especially American Express credit card and a bunch of other a bunch of other vendors but we had to do it it was either paying it and being at Cash zero or or postponing it essentially we eventually paid all of them but postponing it also the entire management team took a 20 cut and all the sales people converted their commissions to equity and they wouldn't have done it if we didn't ask them to do it and so we said here's an option you're going to get more options than than this commission is worth and it's going to get you closer it's going to get us closer because you're essentially investing in a company and it saves us a lot of cash and we had all of our sales people um and many of our VP of sales uh committing to doing that and then finally we took that uh essentially anyone who would give me cash at that point I would took I think I think I almost signed a 35 interest rate uh I didn't end up signing it eventually because I got a better a better one but I was ready to do it um at that stage you really want to save your company now when you have a situation like that a survival situation you don't only want to take defensive mode you also want to take offensive moves because when everyone is panicking and and hunkering down it's kind of an opportunity for you to make bold move and so first of all we open the convertible note we couldn't raise an equity around at that moment because we didn't have enough time and going into a VC when your cashless is a bad idea and so the first thing we did is erase the convertible note for our tribe and what I mean tribe is customers friends uh existing investors advisors and even employees and we end up raising a nice convertible note and with that cache we had much more confidence to go and raise an actual series A the second one is we invested in sales we hired sales team for for Salesforce that already worked together with one another great culture was very strong and they just we spived them on cash deals essentially if they got paid up front boom they got an additional bonus that's what we optimize towards and then finally we found a piece in our product that was very well suited for a terrible time it's called metal Mash to date it has a free trial you can you can go to our website and start with it but we found out that that piece of software is very relevant for recession and so we made that a bigger deal and called every customer and offered them that deal now I like to talk about drastic results because people sometimes don't understand on the on the left hand side you see what convertible that means you know um or some of the Venture that sorry so we essentially sold our accounts receivables we went and said hey look we we just closed the hundred thousand dollars in mrr give us that hundred thousand dollars because we're only going to get paid at the end of the year so any cash that can take ahead of time boom a success second one I maxed out all of my credit cards American Express would call me daily I would pick up your phone and tell them I'm not paying you anything when I have money I'm paying all of it right now you can keep calling me not paying you any of that and third one I would keep getting these notifications on my mint because my credit score went from about 750 to about 250 300 was not great a bunch of derogatory marks I don't care my company survived and I knew it's gonna it's gonna Thrive eventually and so look at that adjustment that line that small line going very close to zero you can imagine I didn't sleep pretty well during those times Hardwoods were very high I think I smoked a lot of weight during that period of time and uh we cross corrected and so we almost almost got to zero but then we course corrected and once we course corrected guess what happened I got a lot of options for VC suddenly they were very excited of investing in the company and they put our series a and we did not we did not start spending a lot of money after that we actually kept the optimization phase and then got additional funding and so what was impossible a few months before Sunday was was our reality if if we didn't do those things um and just repeated it I wouldn't be here studying and talking about this today and so one of the lessons learned that I had and one of my advisors told me that because I was like hey I can't make those changes we're already going on this on this trajectory and he told me you can change your entire business tomorrow there is nothing stopping you besides your own limiting thoughts and so that's something that I think is very important for us to remember especially when we need to Pivot so survival is important but this is not the reason we signed up for this for this role and so travel is really what we're here for growth and and the and the Victory and so moving from that stage with rival uh was a very interesting experience so in 2021 we had money in the bank and I had to completely change the culture because if until then it was we can't spend anything on on anything now it's you have to invest you have to invest not only in the short term you also have to invest in the long term and so uh we really had to make a big shift and I can tell you something cool that happened is that we grew a lot more than we plan to if in survival mode we cut our goal by 33 40 in the thrival mode I went back to my VPS to my to my skill levels and we increased the goal three times that year we're supposed to grow from two to five then we said hey we're doing well let's do it to seven and a half then 10.4 then 12 and a half and we ended up at 12.2 so pretty cool to be able to adapt both ways when you're doing well you don't know if it's going to always continue so max it and when you're not doing well you know pull back very important adaptability um with the AE is one of the things that we did is we actually spit them this time for higher ACV and narr cash was not a problem we raised the series b in a great Market great valuation nothing as great as chili Piper but pretty good still and we were able to use that money to invest in our growth in content in a conference with 8 000 registrants in a community in a brand in a bunch of things that we didn't have money for before and then we made that transition you know cultural shift from survival and PTSD to thrival and growth it was a good time to to trust yourself and build the go to market motion not being afraid of actually seeing what repeatability do we have and we found out that we have pretty great repeatability um one of the lessons that I learned in in those times and I had to shift the entire culture is to not make decision out of fear every time I was panicking I was having a hard time we were struggling I would not make a decision I would I would take a break I would go to the beach I would take a walk in the tenderloin I would again I would smoke one or I was just taking meditation whatever it is that I need to do to relax when I'm in a relaxed mode I make much better decision not to say that you have a week to wait but figure out your psych and then fix it and then make a decision and so the most interesting part in this presentation I think is how to adapt back from hyper growth and adapt to where we are today because right now the market is not the best and you have to adapt to it uh I don't know if it's affecting your business it's definitely affecting mine and so what did we do to to adapt to the recession that we are today and so the situation arise that we thought everything is going to continue that hyper growth in 2021 is just going to continue it's going to be amazing we're going to keep doubling maybe even more every year it did not happen this is what happened in reality q1 was amazing we grew exactly as we planned Q2 we flattened and so then what do you do you know investors actually called me it was fun in q1 my new investor called me and told me Gail between the spectrum of CEOs who spend too much and CEOs spend too too little you're definitely on the spend too little spectrum and fast forward three weeks into that conversation into that phone call he told me hey what's your budget cut plan for the year because then every the Shopify by then went down the crypto went down and so you know we uh be cognizant of of the advice you get you're gonna get a lot of advice you have to distill it on your own and so what do you do what do you do when you have a reality check like that uh when the situation outside in the market is crashing there's Wars this is more recent with Silicon Valley Bank Armani was in Silicon Valley Bank uh the stock market is going down and Meanwhile your business is exactly the opposite trajectory our number of employees going up the burn rate was going up and giving me a heartburn and so the most important thing is if you see something that is not working just make sure not to repeat it many times that's that's it you always have the opportunity to change and so it was funny I was quoted in Dave gerhart's book about the seriously trap and although I didn't fall completely and die into the series B draft I definitely stumble upon it myself and so after we raise the series V there is this story that you didn't figure out everything about the business you keep investing and actually you don't get the growth and if you full fully fall into the Trap you run out of money and then you have a fire sale and so we found out about that very quickly okay we're flattening let's change trajectory so how did we adapt what did we do first thing first get the runway we want to make sure at any point of time we have at least one and a half years maybe two years of Runway and be on a trajectory to break even It's always important once you're a master of your own domain you can make good decisions you have confidence you can make decisions when you don't need money you can get money the second thing is cutting earlier um you know every time you get a lot of advice again you have to distill it as a CEO as a Founder I got a lot of advice I think we not to fire before the holidays not to fire now this is not a good time to to let to do the layoffs and the truth is it's never a good time to do layoffs no one ever wants to get that phone call to get that Zoom to get that that meeting but guess what if I waited two months like I was advised to by pretty much everyone then I would have had to lay off eight more people seven to eight more people because that's how the burn works right you have two more people you know you have to fire them do it earlier you have to you know you have to cut costs do it earlier because you're gonna have you're gonna have to do less if you save that time Oscar of course we negotiated the the board kpis suddenly 100 growth was not necessary no one was expecting it even 50 growth is above and beyond expectations for boards even for a hybrid Growth Company and then we focus more on retention it's much it's much lower cost to increase revenues from existing customers versus from new customers and so we shifted we shifted there because that's the thing we had to learn during this stage um another part that I I think many people live don't put enough attention on is optimization when you grow you bring in inefficiencies for sure every company that grows brings in B players C players workflows inefficiency bottlenecks and you don't get a chance to fix it until you have to or until you get Acquired and a PE makes you do that and so if you can do those things earlier the better and it's very hard to do it internally without help from external people because when someone builds a workflow even if that workflow sucks they are emotionally attached to it and so you have to bring in someone else who is not emotionally attached to it and can have a beginner's mind and show you that you have a problem here so that's something we're doing across across the board in marketing in sales in product bringing in those outside people they help us identify the bottlenecks help us identify efficiencies because once you increase for example the marketing to SDR or SDR to sales hand off five percent 10 million dollar pipeline just comes out of nowhere that you don't have to buy and then finally just like with every other defense offense you have to make offensive move down Market when people are panicking is a great situation to make some bold move and so we use the equity that we uh and the valuation that we benefited in in a good market and use it to acquire a company and use it to make some strategic moves and so don't take all the runway that you're saving just to kind of you know hide and wait for things to get better no change your own situation make some strategic moves with the money that you now saved most important lesson here by far is to cut earlier I learned that when you make that when you make that ball choice on your own it's never going to be popular it's always going to be the right thing uh it's better to let go of 10 people 15 people than the entire company and so we definitely got the the AR goal uh we shifted the HR from hiring to maintaining and culture and Improvement of the culture we cut every marketing program that didn't have a positive Roi and by positive Roi I mean revenues money in Money out it's profitable and then of course optimizing the acquisition funnel we also made the vehicle strategic bets so we made our first acquisition in October last year which already is panning out which I'm very happy about we hired a customer success and the encounter management team for the first time we had an account management team we didn't even think about that before and then we launched a plg motion product that growth motion that is starting to pan out as an amazing bet not all the bets we made panned out I'm not showing you that like seven eight bets that were a shijo but I'm showing you the three that were very successful uh because that's how it goes with bets and it was 100 a good idea to do those so a few hacks just to show it's it's really not rocket science but to show you examples just like with the reality check of a drastic move what does it mean to do a budget cut so we were supposed to grow to about 200 people and we're at about 110 and so we really had to make hiring freeze completely so about 30 people that were about to hire we're not hiring and then we had to let go of a lot of people some contractors some full-time people um used I had a number because I knew how much runway I want so I had a number I was conservative and panned out to be a good idea you don't want to cut too much and you don't want to cut many times but most important is to make the right decision timing and popularity is secondary marketing programs as you can see everything that is revenue positive stays everything that is not Revenue positive goes out the door product like growth this was expected to bring us about five to six trials we're already at about a hundred uh after a month and a half this is something that is revolutionary without cash restrictions without a market that is problematic we wouldn't make this move and so you can take challenges and and convert them to opportunities this without getting into the details is how we're optimizing our workflow and so you can see we're really analyzing every area from the website from the chatbot to the forms to the SDR all of those and see where can we make efficiencies and then finally but but uh but very happy move is to acquire a company I didn't realize we'll be at a position but when the market crashes and companies are struggling there are opportunities to actually make strategic moves strategic Acquisitions so we made our first one and we're integrating it really nicely into the company providing sticky value uh for the customer and uh and it's just a nice win so making bold moves in a in a tough Market is highly encouraged most people don't do it you'll be the five percent that is gaining market share in a tough Market highly recommended and then the convertible nodes look we were raised just before the series B in order to gain confidence I raised I think a five million I plan to raise 2 million ended up raising 5 million over a period of one month with convertible notes it's super super easy especially when the market is hot but even if it's not super easy to raise on convertible note I highly recommend it that's it these are the lessons it was a pleasure presenting to you thank you very much thank you