How Pendo CEO Todd Olson grew Pendo to $300M revenue and 13K customers in 2025.

the full story of pendo what he's doing now today please help me welcome to the stage Eric bodok from [Applause] [Music] pendo you almost missed that shot iass the trash shot in the corner he almost Miss left hand was my off hand well we're thrilled you're here because we had your partner in crime Todd I guess two years ago and got a great story from him and I said Todd I got to meet the other half let me meet Eric just kick us off really quick when was the first dollar of Revenue at pendo and then tell me how you and Todd got together first dollar of Revenue I I think it was what 2014 15 15 M uh or there was a little bit at the end of 14 mhm uh very very little and then 15 was really when the revenue started you guys can see the revenue graph here on stage again this goes through 2021 uh I got permission to share this just last night they are now today over $200 million of Revenue so they've more than doubled what this green graph is at which is really incredible um go back to how you and Todd met was it Research Triangle related or how did you guys get together in the beginning we met at College college okay so we we both uh Computer Engineering which really was computer science with chip design as opposed to math uh for me it was like all computer science classes so we met to college and I actually hired him I was doing a startup right out of college it was it was really webbased Consulting you know building websites for people always starts as Consulting he was my first uh hire my first real hire we we had some other uh students doing part-time work with us but yeah the most deluded moment and all of you guys know this the most deluded moment in any software companies's history is what the most delive moment most delive moment I'm gonna let it stay silent until someone says it can I say it you know the answer maybe okay go what is it co-founders co-founders exactly no one talks enough about this usually what happens is people get lazy they want to start they say let's just do 50/50 usually terrible strategy how' you how' you and Todd do it uh the first company I I uh well I had started it and kind of brought him in first as an employee and then we're like he was really a co-founder so we just we we normalized things not quite equalized but normalized I gave up a huge chunk of equity to make him a co-founder y uh because he deserved it can we can we kind of 30 to 40% uh 20 to 40% I I think it was it was 20 to 30% so meaty big hugely meaty and I didn't need to yeah right I mean I kind would have needed to to probably to keep him but um and you were the it was just fair it was the fair you know you want to do the fair thing for for your co-founders and your entrepreneurs and everyone too it was the fair thing to do the matter and it's worked out obviously so were you the only other shareholder at that time or do you have other Angel Investors uh at the time we normalized him I think we had some Angel Investors yeah so maybe he had raised I don't know half a million dollars y y um to Kickstart the the Consulting business um but it was a it was a small amount of money and then we pivoted into product y real quick show hands how many of you guys are on the SE Suite or CEO of a company uh of SAS company and your post Revenue raise your hand post Revenue least a dollar raise your hand High hi hi okay hands down and then this is vulnerability we all start obviously you got to go to Company 2 three four how how many of you are in here pre-revenue co-founder pre-revenue searching for first customer this is good we love this okay this is good so obviously you're in you're in a good room right it's a bunch of it's a bunch of post- Revenue Founders but for those folks looking for their first dollar Revenue this is so cool we have this this is like an artifact this is like a SAS museum look at this it's the first check first customer F CR of Applause for first check at pendo we blacked out the customer name out of respect but do you remember this first check coming in you know I looked at because you added the slide I didn't even I saw it in the deck a couple days ago because I did go back and peek at uh any changes um and I was trying to think of who it is and I'm not entirely sure can I say it yeah site capture or sight sight sightseer sight something sight something okay but you don't okay you don't remember so it must not be a big $2 million year client I was thinking it was show Clicks actually oh it was sorry it was show click oh so I was right you right it was show click so what were they paying for what did you give them for this 5.97 this is how you started wo uh you know I our entry point pricing was $99 a month way back in the day I mean the product was like you know 1% of what we offer today um so what what's what does that work out to it's probably they probably paid for six months not a year that's my guess January 9th 2015 and half do deals like that half room is going what is that thing on the screen that's not a stripe check out that's a check uh for that's a that you were collecting they were mailing checks in 2015 people used to do that evidently the funny thing is like Pittsburgh I mean it's it's it's a great Tech town but it's not known for like a huge number of SAS companies U I happen to live there I was a remote founder for a while they were our biggest market for a period of time and that quickly changed but it was like you know it's just funny how that starts like where you get those first customers um and then righ pass them and then uh you know soon Boston New York and then San Francisco and it all kind of started to look like SAS distribution but Pittsburgh was a big market for us huge and now look I don't want to spend the next n9ine minutes grilling Eric on how he's going to grow from 200 million to 300 million of Revenue because it's inspirational but less relevant for you guys what I did instead is I said hey take us back to that 2017 number because you guys much many of you guys are right around this right 5 to 10 he's at 13.4 million right now and I say show me something that that drove your thinking at that moment in time and this is what you showed me what is this yeah so this is uh marketing results for Q4 of 2017 this is real this is I went back and grabbed a random deck that I still had and and sadly I didn't download a lot of my decks from pendo though they're probably not sad about that uh but I I I grabbed one and I think uh you know looking at this from uh a perspective it it was really interesting to go back and think about how how I talked about our our marketing programs and also the results we got out of it mhm did any of the surprise you mean you called out a couple leads let's talk about the the webinar strategy 1,272 leads from a webinar you did with user voice I think that was one of the ones that drove a lot of it I I got to the point my there was certain advisers and board members that thought I was nuts for still doing webinars because they're like oh they're you know they're not cool anymore you know blah blah blah I don't know what you think but you do you guys know what I think we love webinars and my answer with them is look at my numbers and they're like well they're you know and there's like that's not no no no no I was like when they stop working we'll stop doing them they're really cheap to do you guys see that you see that you see the cost for webinar lead versus the cost for all the other leads you see the $5 versus super crazy uh some of like we would do the user voice one I can't remember the actual numbers but I I remember a few that we did there were well over a thousand leads that cost us next to nothing to run just put in a sense for everyone just to follow again they spent 6,500 bucks to promote this webinar they were expecting in the Pro for a 300 leads you got 1,200 at 5 bucks a lead opportunities converted to 13 and then dollars this is actual converted well pipeline 249 now you see the pipeline was low we were getting a lot of small deals like often webinars would give us the smaller size deals um you know at least at that time so we were getting smaller deals out of the webinars but it was still it was still a good bang for the buck when you look at dollars per opportunity which is probably the better metric to look at anyways you know then it starts to normalize with everything else uh but the number of leads helped us build a great mailing list helped us build community helped us with brand so there was a lot of secondary functions to driving a lot of leads I you know I leads is such a variable function sales qualified marketing qualified what does that even mean you know I always challenge people's like well show me what pipeline comes out of it you know leads is a great early indicator but it doesn't necessarily mean anything um if you have only two leads you know you're not going to get more...