How SmartSuite Hit $1M ARR in Under 6 Weeks After Launch With $10 Per Seat Pricing (Interview with CEO Jon Darbyshire)

Event Introduction and Context

Nathan Latka

00:00Founders, what's going on? You guys know I love in person events and they are back. The recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together, share intimate details, templates, KPIs, OKRs about their business, and it was something special, something special. We'd love to meet you in person. If you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule. The link will be down

00:23below in the description. If you're listening on iTunes, check this out on YouTube, you'll see the links in the description. Or you can just Google Founderpath or Latka next event. We'd love to see you in person. In the meantime though, enjoy this recording. It's a good one.

Jon Darbyshire Introduces the Three-Part Story

Jon Darbyshire

00:37>> So we're gonna focus today really based on Nathan's request on on kind of a journey. And let me get this slide, figure this out real quick. Here we go. Kind of a three part story from being an operator, building a company, becoming a leader in the space, selling that company, kind of transitioning to an advisor investor, where I then invested through either directly or through some venture groups in about 400 companies. Set on the boards of

01:03>> lots of companies. Be honest, got bored with that and wanted to move back into the operator space, kind of with the next journey. Which is a pretty typical story for a lot of founders that are probably in this room that once you're an operator, it's hard not to be an operator. And I also found that I wasn't a great advisor. I was an okay advisor, but I always wanted to actually do the work and the founders

01:23>> don't like that. They want you to advise, stay out of their business, I wanted to actually get in and do some of the work that was there. So to kind of kick things off, we're going to start with the story of a company called Archer Technologies. Archer was a company that I founded in 2001. I'm going to share just some basics of the company with the products and the revenue to set the stage and then we'll

Archer Technologies: Revenue Growth and Product Overview

Jon Darbyshire

01:45>> jump into kind of lessons learned, things that we did right and then things we didn't do so good that I would would have changed that's there. So from a growth perspective, what's interesting about Archer was that we were profitable in the first year of doing business and I'll share with you how we did that in just a minute. It's a very different market back in two thousand two thousand and one. There wasn't a lot of funding

02:07>> that was available, 9/11 had just happened, things begin to kind of shut down. So we really had to focus on, we were bootstrapped as well through year eight, we really had to focus on customers and revenue and how we could hire employees. And you'll kind of see the growth rate here through the last year when we sold the company we're around 33,000,000 in revenue.

02:31>> As a company, we focused on

02:37>> seven core products. I'll share the idea in just a minute. But the overall idea was to help manage security and compliance processes in the same way that a business would manage accounts payable, accounts receivable, HR, those types of processes in organizations. We had seven core solutions that we eventually had in the company. Each of those solutions were priced at $50,000 a pop, an average customer for us was around $400,000 with some add ons that were there.

Archer's Origin: From Ernst and Young to First Customer

Jon Darbyshire

03:03>> And I'll tell you the story on how we sold that a minute, is interesting as well. So here's kind of the basics of the story. So my background prior to founding Archer was I had the opportunity to build the global cybersecurity practice at Ernst and Young. And I had the chance to travel the world, we had about 1,500 consultants in that practice. I'd meet with customers to understand how they're managing security in the organization, mainly from

03:30>> an aspect of things were going online. They had online stores, online banking was coming on and they needed us to help them understand how do we secure those systems so that we can stay online. So the opportunity was for Archer was to take that service that we've been providing at Ernst and Young and turn that back into a product that we could sell and manage as a process and organization.

03:55>> The challenge that we had was that it hadn't been done before and as a small startup with the big idea, how do you approach people with a new way of thinking about how to manage security in organization, right? At the same time, Archer was bootstrapped from day one.

04:15>> We didn't take funding until year eight, which I'll share some of that in just a minute from you. So we didn't have a lot of capital. I put in, I think, 750,000 to start the company to kind of get things kicked off. The market focus for the organization started with financial services, moved into telco, moved into healthcare, moved into technology. At the end of the day, I think we had 76 of the Fortune 100 were customers

04:38>> after like the first six years of the company. So mainly enterprise level accounts, an average customer would have 80 to 100,000 users of our product inside of the organization. Renewal rates were pretty interesting over nine years, 97.6% renewal rate. So we only lost three customers in nine years, two of those customers were because of acquisitions by another customer that had them, one of those was Lehman Brothers that went out of business that was there. So we

05:06>> found that things were very sticky that was there. We sold the product as a SaaS offering but SaaS wasn't really around in 2001. So we approached EDS which was our first customer with an idea and said, hey, we can come in and solve this problem for you. We're going to treat it as a process and oh by the way, you're going to pay us the same amount of money every year. And they said, how much money

05:33>> is that? And I said, $800,000 and

05:37>> they came back and said, we'll pay you $1,100,000 and I'll share why they said that in just a minute. So they became our very first customer before we ever wrote a line of code. So I went to EDS with a little three and a half inch diskette for those of you that remember diskettes. Had an HTML version that basically was a PowerPoint that showed all the different screens and how things would look. And at the end

05:58>> of that presentation, they stood up and said, we need your product. How soon could you have it developed if we move forward with you? And I'm like, oh my god, like I don't have a developer. We haven't written a line of code. So I just shared it with them. Was just up front and said, hey, here's where we're at. It's an idea. I've got everything documented. We need to go build that's there. And I'll share a

06:17>> little bit more in just a minute about that.

Year Eight Funding and the Path to Sale

Jon Darbyshire

06:21>> The next thing that we did, I told you in year eight, we raised capital for the first time in the organization. Not because we needed cash. You saw from the prior screen that we had a pretty good cash flow in the business. It allowed me to take some money off the table as a founder. And it really opened up to stop thinking about money every day. Every day I would come in the office and the first

06:42>> thing I would look at is the bank balance just to make sure that we were in a good position to pay everybody that was on the team. But freed me from that and it allowed us to really grow the business in the last nine months to twelve months after that investment from Bain. And if you go out into one of my breakout sessions after this, I'm happy to share more information about what was so valuable with

07:03>> the Bain relationship that we had.

07:07>> And then what happened after the Bain investment was that in year Bain came in in year eight and about seven months later we were started getting approached by outside organizations about partnerships acquisition. We weren't planning on selling the company at that time, but it just happened pretty quick. So we went from Bain came in and invested, I think it was a $70,000,000 pre. It allowed me to take some money off the table. They bought about 20%

07:36>> of the company. They allowed the employees to cash out a portion of their stock options at that time. So it was a good event for everybody. Looking back, it wasn't a great event because then we sold the company for $200,000,000 nine months later that was in there. I wish the employees would have hung on to those options, some of them.

07:58>> So as Nathan was saying, when we found out that we needed to start a process and people were looking at us, Bain Capital came in and said look, we need to hire an investment banker. We need to create a deck. We really need to go after this to make sure that we get the best price for the company. You have an offer in hand but minute that they know you have a deck, an investment banker, and

08:21>> that you hire the best of the best, they're not going to re trade that value with you. It's only going to go up from that point forward. So it allowed us to send this deck out, not to the world, we were pretty selective. I think we sent it out to about seven organizations that we thought would have interest back in this space. Three of them responded. Only one of them was super serious and that was EMC

08:45>> and they wanted to do the deal in four weeks, in one month, which was unheard of. EMC, I don't know if you EMC is eventually sold to Dell a couple of years ago, but they had 43,000 employees. I don't remember their revenue, but we were their fifty first acquisition. So they were a company that grew by acquisition. They had a team of 40 people on the acquisition team that's all they did was go from company to

09:11>> company analyzing and then onboarding companies that were acquired by the organization. So this deck, this memorandum that we put together allowed us to get an offer for 187,000,000 but what was key when we got to the LOI here is that we also got to keep the cash that was in the business. So the deal was really north of 200,000,000 because of that simple item. And the way we got to that point and it's key for a

09:43>> lot of founders that I work with is understand how much working capital the business needs, make sure that that is communicated in the memorandum so that you can negotiate through the LOI with hey, here's what I need. And in this particular case, the business generated enough free cash flow each month to more than pay for the business needs. So it allowed us to sweep about 15,000,000 additional money out of the company.

What Archer Did Right: Customer Focus and Sales Strategy

Jon Darbyshire

10:12>> So let's focus on here's what we did right. This is what I wanted to spend most of the time talking about. And I'm getting old, and it's hard to actually read the monitor in front of me with the items. But the first thing that we did right at Archer was we listened to the customer. And what that really meant was

10:34>> the first year and a half of the business, I spent my time not in the office. I was at customer sites. I was at EDS watching them and learning how they would use a product like this inside of an organization of 80,000 people. I thought I was a pretty big deal, CEO of a company. They put me in a phone closet. That's where I sat.

10:58>> All the tech was in there. I had my little chair and my desk, and I couldn't even do meetings in there. I had to walk out to meet with everybody. But I just sat there and watched and listened to how they would use it. I was on the phone back to our development team saying add this feature, add this other feature that's in here. And then I would quickly iterate back with the organization to say, hey,

11:18>> is this what you meant? And we did that then with Credit Suisse First Boston, with Lehman Brothers, with Goldman Sachs and that allowed us to really get the version one of our products to where it needed to be to sell to the remainder of the financial services companies.

11:37>> The second thing that we did right was we really thought about who we were trying to sell to. And for us it was the top 30 financial services companies in The US and the reason for that was that those companies, if we were in one of those companies, was easier for us to go to a tech company, a telco company or a healthcare company and say, Goldman Sachs is already using Archer. Shouldn't you take a look

12:04>> at that, right? So we decided to focus just on those top 30. We broke it down into groups of 10 and we would only sell into those ten one at a time. So the sales team, was my wife, would come back and say, I've got this other opportunity. I'm like, it in financial services? Is it one of those top 10? No. Forget about it. Marketing team would come in and say, hey, we have an RFP. Forget

12:25>> about it. We're only selling into these 10. And people were frustrated with me in the first year and a half, two years, but what happened was we sold 29 of those 30 companies. And that's what launched us to sell to everybody else, right? It was at the beginning, we were very focused on who we were selling to, why we were selling to them, and then it gave us the momentum to go to a Microsoft and to

12:49>> a Dell and to an eBay with some credentials to say, hey, here's Citi, Goldman, Lehman, who's using the product. With

13:02>> our product, what I didn't mention at the beginning was that we were one of the first no code platforms ever developed back in 2000. Anybody remember who the first sometimes I call them the second no code platform really was? Salesforce, right? Before that, there were things that were kind of in that space, but Salesforce and Archer were the first two products that really took a no code approach to solving a problem that related to a process.

13:30>> So every customer could go in and configure that process just a little bit differently, but it was one code base. So across our 100 plus customers that we had, every one of those were different. None of them had the same UI, look and feel, branding, but they were all on a single code base that was there. So that was a huge advantage for us.

13:53>> From a people perspective, we found that the best people for us to recruit were coming from some of the big x accounting firms and the reason for that was that, let's take Accenture as an example, when somebody would come out of school and go to an Accenture, they would spend two to three months at a boot camp learning about process automation and how to serve clients and that whole process. They kind of came out of that,

14:19>> it's like a mini MBA type program and if we could find those people in year three, so they've kind of they've had time at customers, they've been through the boot camp, we could bring them in, teach them our business, those people just excel. And what I didn't mention about Archer at the beginning was that we sold that company in 2009. But that company now does 700,000,000 a year in recurring revenue, 90 plus percent renewal rates going

14:47>> public this year. I don't know. I hear numbers anywhere between 5,000,000,000 and $12,000,000,000 but number. What's fun about that is a couple of those Accenture people that I hired in year three now run the company. Not the CEO, but they're the two main folks that are there. Of the folks that we had in the company, there's probably 50 people that have been there over fifteen years now. Since we exited, they stayed in, continue to run. All

15:16>> of them came from the IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG kind of background that was there. So the main theme there was understand who you want to hire and try to find people that are already trained to bring in back into your organization.

Nathan Latka

15:35If we go to the next slide, talk a little bit about because there's lot of people when you're building inside sales teams, which is your third lesson learned here. Talk to us a little bit about how you structure that inside sales team. How many reps, quota targets, things like that?

Lessons Learned: Inside Sales, Global Markets, and Architecture

Jon Darbyshire

15:47>> Sure. So one of the lessons learned was that we should have done inside sales earlier. Bain Capital came to us and said, hey, this is a growth engine, you really need to get going. We had four sales reps that made up the 2008 number that you see there. We had seven sales reps that made up the 2009 number, the 32,000,000 that we had. And I'm happy to share this kind of in the breakout in more detail.

16:11>> But Bain Capital came to us and said, hey, here's seven portfolio companies that we have that use inside sales. They use this process called a sales bus. Let's go visit them, talk with the sales team leads, understand how they're doing inside sales. Some of them were just getting started. Some of them were doing millions of dollars a month in revenue. A sales bus includes seven people that's on a bus that has a leader and six people

16:33>> around the bus around the outside. Each person is organized based on their sales in the last month from seat one to seat six that's in there. So everybody knows exactly where everybody else is at. What we learned and what they taught me from that is that, first off, always try to hire a full bus if you can, which is seven people. But if you can't, hire in threes. The reason for that is the best salespeople are

16:58>> competitive. You hire two, it's okay. One could always be better than the other one, and the other one's okay. You hire three, it's a little different dynamic that's in place. I was deadly against inside sales, to be honest, at the beginning. Didn't think that they could sell enterprise software. In the first months, we had one of our inside sales reps sell an enterprise deal in Germany over the phone. There was no Zoom, any of that, that

17:23>> was just over the phone sales call. An average rep for us did a million 2 to a million 5 per year. When EMC came in, they're a sales focused company. Those numbers doubled and in some cases tripled per sales rep. Like we had on our enterprise sales team, we had reps that had quotas of 6,000,000 a year. That was their inside sales reps 2,500,000. But for us when we first got started, a million and a half.

17:49>> Two other things that we learned very quickly that I wish I would have done different is that the global market is much bigger than The U. S. Market. So get your internationalization ready, multiple languages on day one. It's much harder to do that after the fact that's in place. We spent way too much time and attention trying to get ready to go to market globally in year six and seven. We should have just did that in

18:11>> year one that was there. The second one is architecture matters. We had the same problem. We should have focused on our first feature should have been scalability and speed. And we were focused on features first and that bit us in the butt in year six as we really started to grow. And again, it took we had to pause for about a year to kind of get to where we needed to be from an architecture perspective.

Nathan Latka

18:36So Jon, as you move into part two of your presentation, you're being super humble, so we're going to change this to interview style. Is that okay? Right. It's it's way easier. Trust me. So let's do interview style. Talk a little bit about why after you sold EMC, you decided to go into the adviser role. You I mean, did you know you're gonna be bored doing this?

Transition to Advisor and Investor Role

Jon Darbyshire

18:55>> I did not. And there's a couple of things. Off, I thought I knew everything because we were pretty successful that was there, which was I learned very quickly probably in year four or five of that, that there's a lot of different ways to do things. And the way we did it was just one way. I have friends that did it a very different way that were even more successful.

Nathan Latka

19:13So what was the style? You were taking equity in companies? Was it mainly b to b SaaS? Or how do you style the advisor shares you were going after? Was that part of your standard deal?

Jon Darbyshire

19:20>> Yeah. So I invested either directly through companies, mainly in SaaS companies that was there. So I would take in a lot of cases, put in two fifty was kind of the minimum number that we would put in. And then I would take an advisor role or a board seat inside of those companies. I found pretty quickly that it wasn't good for me to be the only person in a deal. That the companies that had other people

19:42>> like me or venture folks that were in the deal were more successful. So then I kind of pivoted to more venture investing. So I have about 11 venture companies that I work with that I've invested in their fund. They invest back into companies and then they reach out to me when they feel that I have expertise in a particular area that can help the entrepreneur. And that worked much better for us.

Nathan Latka

20:04And then going to the smartsuite story, and this is so fascinating because you ran EMC, you ran Archer profitably, you're growing like crazy. Did you guys see part of the Bain deck already? Think you already shared Yeah, that, incredible story. So how does your brain now switch to the thing of, Okay, I'm going be pre revenue for three years. I'm going spend $12,500,000 on MVP. I'm to hire over, I think, hundreds of contractors. How did you

20:26get your brain in that space? And why did it take so long and so much money, in your opinion?

The SmartSuite Story: Idea, Build, and Investment

Jon Darbyshire

20:30>> Sure. Well, let's talk about the idea first that was in place. So as I visited and worked with these 400 venture companies that I had, one of the first questions that comes up most of the time is, what's the infrastructure that we need to have in place as an organization just to get started? Right? We need sales and marketing and HR and IT and customer success products to do things. And I got really frustrated with always

20:51>> having that discussion. And the idea from smartsuite was to transform the way businesses get work done by providing a single platform that could manage any workflow process or project in the company. Right? So it's basically taking hundreds of point solutions that people have, building that into a framework where all of that can be in one core platform. So you don't need all these different sales tools, marketing tools, HR tools. You just you've got one product that

21:16>> provides 90% to 95% of those capabilities right from the beginning. So the lift was massive. Right? It's a big idea.

21:25>> We knew it was going to take about two years. It actually took two and a half years of development time, about 100 developers that were just working night and day to kind of if we go to the next slide to kind of build out all these core capabilities in this platform that would make that a reality. And once those capabilities are done flip to the next slide. Well, talk real quick.

Nathan Latka

21:44You did something here also interesting. I joke that we're not far away from somebody launching a SaaS company and taking it public, they're the only employee. You have remote.com. You have these things. You can just hire a bunch of contractors. I'm just someone's gonna do it one day. Talk to me about why you went this route. Mean, hired what are the numbers? You hired hundreds of contractors.

Contractor-First Team and Development Partners

Jon Darbyshire

22:01>> Yeah. So we we basically we have no employees in place. I have two co founders.

22:08>> We hired teams of people inside of companies. I think we have five different main companies that we work with from a development perspective. So we have a mobile team. We have a web team. We have

Nathan Latka

22:17And names on them. Because people aren't on computers. What's the mobile team you used?

Jon Darbyshire

22:20>> Yeah. So we use e creative out of Ukraine. I'll talk about Ukraine in just a minute. We use Gearhart out of Ukraine. Then we use a company called agency enterprise out of California that does a lot of work for SpaceX. So they're kind of our high end developers. We way overpay for them, but they're really, really good.

Nathan Latka

22:37Come on. What's way overpay?

Jon Darbyshire

22:39>> 12,500,000.

22:40>> Yeah. They they go for about 175 an hour for their for their core developers. Right? The Ukrainian folks are typically in the 50 to $75 an hour rate. That's a similar quality, but The US folks have a little more experience working with big data, some of the more complex architecture issues that we need to solve.

Nathan Latka

23:01So it's out now, Over 200 workflows, you've now launched. Talk to me about building up to the launch, what was going with your brain, how do set the initial price point?

Launch Results: MRR and Early Traction

Jon Darbyshire

23:10>> Yes, we launched six weeks ago, think the second week in January for the first time in that first six weeks we've had about six

Nathan Latka

23:16Wait, wait, on. Okay, before he tells you his numbers. So he launched the paywall six weeks ago. Okay, so what I'm going do is on the count of three, everyone just say how much monthly recurring revenue you think he's doing now sort of six weeks in after building three years. Okay, ready? Monthly recurring revenue. Ready? One, two, three. Okay, so the average is about 12.5 ks across the sample size of 118 people. Are you comfortable sharing

23:43what MRR is today?

Jon Darbyshire

23:44>> Yeah, share the range. So we're in the 85 to 90 ks per month range.

Nathan Latka

23:500 to $1,000,000 in ARR, this is why I'm like, you need to come in. Because I'm like, I'm going to grill this guy, spend so much money on MVP, but now the way you've built your tentacles into so many distribution things pre launch, you launch and go from $0 to $1,000,000 run rate in basically four point five weeks is incredible. So speak a little bit to the distribution tactics you set up pre launch, comparison

24:10sites, things of this nature.

Distribution Tactics: Review Sites and Affiliate Program

Jon Darbyshire

24:11>> Yeah. So I think the first thing we did was we've automated the process to come in with a trial account. So we make it super easy for someone to buy enterprise level software by clicking on your site and starting a trial. Our base pricing starts at $10 per user per month and then all the way up through our enterprise is $35 per month per user. Everything that we've done is organic. So we reached out to a

24:35>> lot of the comparison sites and filled out surveys for them to do or request for them to do reviews of our products.

Nathan Latka

24:41Just name a couple of those sites.

Jon Darbyshire

24:43>> Yeah, we started with Product Hunt, actually G2, Capterra, just that whole group of sites where they actually do product reviews and let people come and view your product. A lot of them have signed up as affiliates through our affiliate program as well.

Nathan Latka

24:58What's your kickback on the affiliate program?

Jon Darbyshire

25:00>> So we've had

25:01>> so far, think today we're like three twenty five affiliates that have signed up. We offer them 50% commission of the first year revenue. So that allows us to have a sales force that's kind of international from day one.

Nathan Latka

25:13And then it ends 50% year one?

Jon Darbyshire

25:15>> Ends at the end of year one. So basically we're overpaying for those customers in the first year, but those customers we wouldn't have without those affiliates. So So I don't feel like we're overpaying, we're breaking even. But in year two, we'll start making money on the deals the affiliates bring.

Nathan Latka

25:29And how many of the three twenty five affiliates have earned at least $1 already?

Jon Darbyshire

25:32>> I don't have an exact number, but I would say probably 35%.

Nathan Latka

25:35Interesting.

Jon Darbyshire

25:36>> A lot of them have accounts that are in trial right now that will convert after thirty days.

Nathan Latka

25:42And so the interface looks incredible, right? You can speak maybe a little bit to that here if you want before we move into other takeaways and wrap up.

Jon Darbyshire

25:51>> Sure. Yeah. So what we found when when I started meeting with customers was that the biggest single thing that they needed from a work management platform was the user interface that focused on the people that actually do the work, which are people ages 23 to 38 is what we found. So we I sought after and tried to find a person or a team that could help me with the UI that had done something different that I

26:12>> had never seen before. And I happened to find a guy of all places in Bulgaria, Sofia Bulgaria. I went and met with him. He's just interesting and different.

Nathan Latka

26:20How do you find these people?

Jon Darbyshire

26:21>> What do

Nathan Latka

26:22you do on Craigslist in Bulgaria?

Jon Darbyshire

26:24>> I just got online and used my network. I looked at Upwork, Fiverr. I just tried to find the top people and just looked at the style and the type of work that they've done. Storgen had never worked in this industry before, but he had that eye and that style that I liked that was there. So I met with him. We spent two or three days together. We just hit it off. I mean, he's just a super

26:45>> great guy. And he was just super excited. And I said, you need to leave all your other customers, and you need to work with me 100%, just me. And after the first end of the first three days, he said, deal.

Nathan Latka

26:56But you met him through Fiverr or Upwork?

Jon Darbyshire

26:58>> Met him through Upwork.

Nathan Latka

26:59Yeah. This is also a tactic that I see over and over, but very people will say it publicly. But this is a great way to find great talent. Because you put up the same project, so you have a design spec, to 30 people on Upwork. You pay them all their rate. You collect all the designs. Then you pick the best one. I don't know. I'd fly to Bulgaria. Fly and meet them, and then try and move

27:18them full time. So he's now is he basically now full time with you?

Jon Darbyshire

27:21>> He is. His team. So he's got a team of three or four people that work with him. Very reasonable rates for that team and they got rid of everything else about a year and a half ago. They that's basically our design team.

Nathan Latka

27:33Anything else you want to add in before you take it home?

Jon Darbyshire

27:35>> I just say

27:36>> we did the same thing on the dev side. We found our our core people in all places of the Ukraine. I'd never been to Ukraine before so I flew to Kyiv met with the first person that was there. I still remember after about an hour I am like oh my God I found the perfect person with the right team to actually build a product like this and I have been searching for like six months and found

27:54>> them there. Fast forward about six months after that I was searching for a mobile team.

Nathan Latka

27:58Well Jon hold on so obviously the sensitive you know there are things happening right now talk a little I mean how is your Ukraine team doing or I mean I don't even know the right question to ask how are you thinking about those guys?

Jon Darbyshire

28:08>> Yeah I wanted to mention that at the end it's They're in a difficult spot. And, you know, they're people just like us. They talk like us, work like us. I mean, they're just normal people. They wake up one day and they're getting bombed. And we have people in cities that don't have places to live anymore. They don't have gas, electric power. They're cooking outside with fire. They can't leave the cities that they're in. It's just incredible.

28:31>> Some people we can't communicate with for two, three days at a time until they get a mobile signal to just send a text to let us know that they're okay. From a business perspective it's been challenging with the work that we're doing but we've kind of got that worked out in the last week or so so it hasn't affected us but there's about 60 people there that are just outstanding people that are really struggling.

Nathan Latka

28:51And there is a lot I mean when you look at all of the speakers and everyone's FTE headcount or full contractor headcount about 35 to 40% of the speakers have team members in Ukraine. Don't Mikita is not here but you will hear from him tomorrow. Yeah I mean raise your hand if you have hired talent in Ukraine and they are phenomenal. I mean look at that. It's right? Phenomenal talent. So obviously sending the best thoughts, prayers, everything else.

Ukraine Team and Human Impact of the Conflict

Nathan Latka

29:17The best thing I think we can do is just feature their stories, talk about their talent and celebrate them and hope for the best.

Jon Darbyshire

29:23>> Exactly. To be honest, it's only going to get worse for them for a period of time. So it's not going get better. Anything you can do to support them, can go to our website, smartsuite.com. We have a little link at the bottom that you can click on that shows you different ways that you could support them either through money or clothes donations, just different ideas. And I would also ask the teams that are working with them,

29:42>> give them a break for a week or so. Let them recoup. They really want to work and they're super stressed out that they're not going to have jobs on top of everything else that's happening to them.

Nathan Latka

29:51Awesome. Switching back, let's go ahead and sort of wrap up with some of these key takeaways here.

Key Takeaways: MVP Spend, Ownership, and Co-Founders

Jon Darbyshire

29:59>> Okay. Yeah, I think that the first key takeaway is it's unusual to spend $12,500,000 on an MVP. But for the idea that we had here it was something that

30:08>> we needed to do. I personally put that money in today.

Nathan Latka

30:11You still own 100% then right?

30:13>> I do.

30:13Okay got it. So when you say you had two co founders you just pay them really well?

Jon Darbyshire

30:16>> Well I gave each co founder just a small percentage

30:20>> to date.

Nathan Latka

30:21Under 1% each?

Jon Darbyshire

30:22>> I don't want to say. No, it's more than 1%.

Nathan Latka

30:24More than five?

Jon Darbyshire

30:25>> It's two people that worked.

Closing Remarks and Competitive Landscape

Jon Darbyshire

30:29>> It's in that range, let's say. It's two people that I worked with at Archer. It was our CTO and our director of our Archer Labs. And I recruited them to kind of come back in and start this new venture with me. So it's like we've got the team back together again which is fun.

Nathan Latka

30:42It's funny to watch this evolution. Right? Monday and Roy Mann back in 2015 on the podcast, very confident, a lot of growth, IPO, doing well. Then Zeb comes along with ClickUp, eats their is eating their lunch. Ad spend wars everywhere. ClickUp on freaking urinals at the airport. You see these ads everywhere. The reason I wanted you to come is because I think your kind of story with this kind of focus, building it this way is sort

31:08of what Eats, ClickUp's lunch potentially if it works. So we're rooting for you. Guys, give it up for Jon Darbyshire, SmartSuite.