How SmartSuite Signed About 400 Paying Customers Just Four Weeks After Launch (Interview with CEO Jon Darbyshire)

Introduction and SmartSuite's Market Position

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Jon Darbyshire. In 2021, his team launched SmartSuite, the work management platform that manages any process from any industry on one platform. In 2000, he founded Archer Technologies, an enterprise governance, risk, and compliance software, giving business users the ability to adapt software to their unique business requirements. Again, SmartSuite today is the work management platform. Jon, you ready to take us to the top?

Jon Darbyshire

00:22>> I am. Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:23Okay. I have to ask, what on earth prompts you to jump into this space? You've got Monday that's now public, trading at a ridiculous ratio, throwing gobs of money at PPC. You've got Zeb Evans at ClickUp raising gobs of money, throwing money at the space. What's your niche? How do you win here?

Jon Darbyshire

00:37>> Yeah. We're we're one level above those organizations. Our goal is to help organizations manage any process or project inside of a single platform, but it has more enterprise features than you'll find from a Monday, a ClickUp, and Airtable type. So if you you have workflows and you wanna manage your business in a single platform, we provide those capabilities that allow you to keep keep everything in a single platform.

Nathan Latka

01:00When you say a process or a workflow, I mean, is this effectively like if you take MuleSoft, you know, the enterprise version of Zapier, plus, like, you, the enterprise version of ClickUp, and and you put those two things together, that's sort of where you're playing?

Jon Darbyshire

01:13>> Yeah. I I had a good analogy this week from a reporter that talked to me that said if you took Airtable, Notion, and ClickUp and put them in a blender, out came SmartSuite. We're taking the capabilities of those three different segments of products, putting them together into a single platform.

Nathan Latka

01:28I see. Okay. So so those on those platforms, you're talking ARPUs $20.30, $40 a seat. I imagine you're more expensive and more in the enterprise. What's the average company pay you per month to use the technology?

Pricing Model: Team, Professional, and Enterprise Tiers

Jon Darbyshire

01:38>> Yep. No. Our pricing model starts at $10 per user per month. For our team edition, moves to 25 for our professional, and our enterprise is 35. The the the really, the vision of SmartSuite is to bring enterprise level features for work management to the masses at a price point that's not been seen before. So we're really passionate about providing SMBs with enterprise level features at a price point they can afford to be able to help grow

02:04>> their business.

Nathan Latka

02:05So what I don't know how many seats the average customer has. What does the average customer pay you per month?

Jon Darbyshire

02:09>> Yeah. Average average seats are 10 to 12, right now, and it we're about fifty fifty between, our team and our, professional edition.

Nathan Latka

02:17Okay. Got it. So 10 to 12 seats at 10 to $35 a month. Your average customers are paying $200 to $300 bucks a month on average. Exactly. Something like that for 10 seats.

Jon Darbyshire

02:26>> Correct. But we go all the way for our enterprise accounts, we support all the way up to 5,000 seats per account.

Nathan Latka

02:32Do you have someone paying for 5,000 seats already?

Jon Darbyshire

02:34>> We're in discussions, but we don't have have someone paying currently.

Nathan Latka

02:38Well, hey. Congrats. That's extremely exciting. Nice work there. What what's the largest number of seats on the platform right now in one company?

Jon Darbyshire

02:44>> Yep. About one fifty.

Nathan Latka

02:46Okay. That I mean, that's that's getting up there. That's great.

400 Paying Customers in Four Weeks

Jon Darbyshire

02:48>> Yeah. We've launched no. We've only launched for four weeks, so we've got a lot of stuff in the hopper. We've had about

Nathan Latka

02:54You've only been selling for four weeks?

Jon Darbyshire

02:56>> Correct. Yeah. We have about 400 accounts that are on the platform in the last four weeks.

Nathan Latka

03:00400 paying?

Jon Darbyshire

03:02>> Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

03:03Okay. I mean, how did you

03:04go from zero to 400 paying customers in four weeks? You must have built a big wait list or something.

Jon Darbyshire

03:08>> No. We, well, we we had a small wait list, but we, in the second week, we just kinda started seeing lots of volumes of customers coming to the website. We have a free trial, and then they can convert directly from the trial.

Nathan Latka

03:20Wait. But, I mean, how do they find you, Jon? This is incredible. Four weeks. I mean, am I doing this math correctly? If you have 400 customers paying on average $250 a month, you went from zero to a $100 a month in revenue in four weeks?

Top Growth Channels: LinkedIn, Product Hunt, and Review Sites

Jon Darbyshire

03:30>> Yeah. So we're we did a big push on LinkedIn, which we had a pretty big network of folks that were there. We were up on product hunt, and then we started going to the comparison site. So the majority of that is organic traffic that's coming back to us. We just started our first paid search campaign for, like, $10 last month. So everything's been primarily organic up until this point.

Nathan Latka

03:52Jon, this isn't if I'm understanding you correctly, you do understand this is incredible what you've done.

Jon Darbyshire

03:58>> I I think we're we're looking for bigger numbers, but but, yeah, I think we're we're we're going after a lot.

Nathan Latka

04:02My numbers are right. Right? You're doing about a $100,000 a month today in revenue and five weeks ago, you were doing nothing.

Jon Darbyshire

04:07>> Correct. Yes.

Nathan Latka

04:09Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:32your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:57get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

05:18not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired, the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

05:44going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:06you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the

Product Hunt Launch Details and Discount Strategy

Nathan Latka

06:32interview. I mean, this is great. Okay. I wanna dive into this. Right? So Product Hunt launch, you have 251 upvotes. About how many signups did you get from there?

Jon Darbyshire

06:40>> I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but it it's pretty small. Probably twenty twenty five probably came from Product Hunt with the the discount code that we provided.

Nathan Latka

06:49Oh, those are actual paid sign ups came from Product

06:51Hunt?

Jon Darbyshire

06:52>> Correct.

Nathan Latka

06:53Okay. Do you know how do have a free option? How many free users came from Product Hunt? Do you know?

Jon Darbyshire

06:57>> No. We we do not have a free option currently. It's something that we're considering, though.

Nathan Latka

07:01Interesting. For someone else looking to launch on Product Hunt today, what should they give in terms of discount code? So you charge $20 a seat usually. What discount do give Product Hunt users?

Jon Darbyshire

07:08>> Yeah. We give them a 25% discount for the first three months.

Nathan Latka

07:12And that worked. It sounds like fairly nice. Let's go to the the next tactic you just mentioned, LinkedIn. When you say you pushed it on LinkedIn, what does it actually mean?

Jon Darbyshire

07:20>> Yeah. So we we set up a company profile on LinkedIn, and then we used our personal accounts. I think between me and the co founders, we probably have about 8,000 connections that were there, so we pushed back out into that community, and then it's just been word-of-mouth.

LinkedIn Organic Posting Strategy

Nathan Latka

07:34Interesting. But what did you post on your personal profile?

Jon Darbyshire

07:37>> Hey. Like, hey.

Nathan Latka

07:38We're launching, or what was the strategy We

Jon Darbyshire

07:40>> do two or three posts per week, that's been coming in. So we first did the announcement that we're launching, and then we started focusing on the types of things and ways we could help customers, kind of starting with project management and then showing the different categories of solutions that we can help people with.

Nathan Latka

07:55Yep. Yep. Okay. And I see nine employees on the LinkedIn profile, 213 followers. Is that right? Nine folks full time?

Team Structure: 9 Full-Time and 110 Total Across 9 Countries

Jon Darbyshire

08:02>> No. It's a little deceiving. So we have a little unique company here in that we're in nine different countries around the world. We have about a 110 people that are part of the company. We have a lot of contractor and contractor firms that we've hired for specialty areas, feeling that we do not need direct employees just to start a a traditional company. So, obviously, we've had about 90 developers working for almost three years to build the

08:26>> core platform that was released last month. So the core of the company is on the development side, And then we're just beginning to bring in sales, marketing, PR, product support, those types of folks.

Nathan Latka

08:39I love the idea of keeping fixed expenses really low in the early years as you're building. You sound like you've done that to a T. It's part of your blood. Tell me, I mean, so you say 90 developers, are you using firms like KodiTOS or Simform or what kind of outsourced dev shops are you using?

Outsourced Development Shops in Ukraine and California

Jon Darbyshire

08:53>> Yeah. So, you know, when we started SmartSuite, we wanted to kind of find that development community that really understood what we were trying to accomplish and had some experience in that area. Of all places, we found a great firm in Kyiv, Ukraine. Went over and visited with them, never expecting to be outside of The US, to be honest. Met them and just walked away just blown away with the capabilities of the organization. So they were kind

09:15>> of our core team that we brought on. We probably have 35 people with that organization. We did the same thing on the

Nathan Latka

09:22Can I ask what that organization is? Do have a website?

Jon Darbyshire

09:24>> Yeah. Their name is Gearhart. It's gearhart. Gear,gear,heart.io.

Nathan Latka

09:31Wow. And and how did you know? I mean, it's you know, picking up from beautiful California and going over to Kiev to do diligence on this firm is a lot of your time and energy. How did you know it was gonna be worth your time or energy? Like, how did you find these guys?

Jon Darbyshire

09:45>> Of all places, found them on the Internet. Just searching for, development shops, I probably looked at 50 or 60. And I started in The US, I just couldn't find what I needed, or people were too busy to bring on a project like this, so I turned it more international. I looked on posted some stuff on Upwork to try to get sources coming in, so I probably narrowed it down to five folks, and I just kept coming

10:08>> back to this one gentleman in Kyiv, and I finally decided I just need to go spend two or three days with them, get to know them, get to know the people, see if we had a connection. And the connection was immediate. Like, I I just enjoyed them as people, and then technically they were as good or better than anyone I've worked with before.

Nathan Latka

10:26This is amazing. Okay. You mentioned you have over 100 firms you've sort of contracted with. I imagine Gearhart, in terms of money spent, is probably up there at the top, right? Your dev shop?

Jon Darbyshire

10:35>> It is. So we have two other firms just like Gearhart. So we have a mobile firm that, of all places, was in The Ukraine as well. I met them in The US, had no idea that they were based in The Ukraine. They came highly recommended from a friend of mine. And then we have a third organization.

Nathan Latka

10:52Who were they? They have a website, the second one?

Jon Darbyshire

10:54>> Yeah. Yeah. It's ecreative.com, and it's k with creative.

Nathan Latka

10:59Okay. And who's the third?

Jon Darbyshire

11:02>> The the the third is Agency Enterprise in Venice, California. They do really high end development work. I'm not sure if I can say all the names that they work with, but they work with Elon Musk as SpaceX and do some work there, and that's how I kind of made the connection to them. They're just an amazing group of very talented people.

Nathan Latka

11:23So how do these all work together? So so, I mean, is Gearhart everything that's desktop? ECreative, is everything mobile? And Agency Enterprise looks over everything? Or how do they function?

Jon Darbyshire

11:32>> Yep. So the mobile part is just e creative. We also have a team at e creative that does web along with the agency enterprise team. So we have three different development shops, plus one of my cofounders is a CTO. The benefit that that gives us is we have CTOs at each of those organizations and internally. So the level of expertise that we kinda bring to the project is a lot a lot more enhanced than you would

11:53>> typically find in a startup environment. And we do daily stand ups with those for about an hour and a half each morning. We go across each team individually, and then twice a week, we have all the teams together, myself and the CTO. So a lot of coordination, but it works well for us, especially for the international folks. We have meetings with them in the morning our time, which is at night their time. We wake up in

12:16>> the morning. They've implemented all the stuff we talked about the day before or they had questions about, and we move on to the next topic. So it allows our development to be very efficient.

Nathan Latka

12:26It's incredible. It's very incredible. But just to be clear, are only nine full time people that manage all this coordination across all these contractors.

Jon Darbyshire

12:34>> Yes. Currently. We've got we're growing really fast. We've got lots of opportunities for new folks to join.

Nathan Latka

12:40I wanna go to the comparison site strategy here in a second. We talked about LinkedIn. We talked about Product Hunt. We're gonna save comparison sites here for a second. You mentioned you've been building this for three years. When did you guys write the first line of code for this?

Jon Darbyshire

12:50>> It was three years ago in January.

Nathan Latka

12:54Yeah. The '20 what?

Jon Darbyshire

12:55>> 2019 or '18? '19.

Nathan Latka

12:562019. Okay. And you were basically at no revenue for three years. Dev shops and a 100 contracting firms is not cheap. How did you fund the business?

Self-Funding with Personal Capital

Jon Darbyshire

13:05>> Yep. I funded it myself. We put in about 12,500,000 to date to kinda get to where we're at. The the thought process was we didn't wanna be another startup company that that launched and said we have all these features that are coming and kinda bring on a typical MVP. We felt like to compete in the space, we needed to have a fully functional, you know, platform that had feature sets that our competitors didn't have. So that's

13:28>> why we waited so long. We're also very quiet. We didn't update our LinkedIn profiles until last month. We didn't tell anybody what we were doing until the announcement actually happened.

Nathan Latka

13:36That's amazing. Okay. Now when you say you guys put in 12.5, is that you, your personal money, or all the cofounders together?

Jon Darbyshire

13:42>> Nope. That's that's my personal money.

Background: Archer Technologies and Prior Exit

Nathan Latka

13:43Okay. I mean, Jon, everyone's gonna be wondering, is this guy how to get so freaking rich? Right? Did you sell a company before this or what?

Jon Darbyshire

13:49>> Yeah. I founded a company in the tech space called Archer Technologies. We sold that to EMC, and then it got packaged up and sold to Dell. It's a company that's just killing it. They're gonna go public this year. I I don't know their exact numbers, but I would imagine they're in $650,000,000 recurring revenue range per year right now.

Nathan Latka

14:08Where were they when you sold them to EMC?

Jon Darbyshire

14:11>> Revenue wise, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. We were at 40,000,000 at that time.

Nathan Latka

14:15And what year was that?

Jon Darbyshire

14:17>> It was in 2010.

Nathan Latka

14:182010. Okay. Well, okay. Not not that long ago. Okay. And I mean, can I ask you, did the EMC put out what was the which was the purchase price?

Jon Darbyshire

14:24>> Yeah. It was 200.

Nathan Latka

14:26200,000,000. Okay. So interesting. And was that a that's pure software?

Jon Darbyshire

14:30>> Yeah. SaaS based software.

Nathan Latka

14:32Okay. And you own the majority of that business, more than 50%?

Jon Darbyshire

14:34>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:35Wow. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. Now the story starts to come together. So this is your sec and by the way, I always like founders, you take one dip, you take a second dip, you take a third dip. Did you hold on to some equities? So when the Dell sale happened, you got another bite at the apple and we get another bite when

14:49they go public?

Jon Darbyshire

14:50>> I didn't. In that particular instance, it was an all cash purchase price, no stock at all, which was great for us. That allowed myself, my wife, my mom, which was the founder of that company, to then start what we call the Archer Foundation, which is a family foundation. We focused on entrepreneurial programs, women's initiatives, and youth programs. Wow. And through that, in our own personal investing, we invested in about 400 companies over the last ten years. Startups

15:15>> either through venture firms or direct. And really the genesis of SmartSuite was that when we would work with these companies, one of the first questions that was asked is, how do we manage all the processes internally to build the business that we need to build? And we were always trying to cobble together all these different systems. It typically was four to five different things they needed to do. And I got frustrated with that and finally just

15:36>> said, we're just going to build what those organizations need to manage work in a single place. And that's what kind of started this journey.

Nathan Latka

15:43That's amazing. Okay, so do you own a 100% of the business today?

Jon Darbyshire

15:46>> I do, yes.

Conviction Behind Building SmartSuite

Nathan Latka

15:47That's amazing. Okay, so what gave I mean, the question still here, I'm trying to think if I was in your shoes and I sold something for $200,000,000 all cash and I had a 100,000,000 to play around spending 10 percent of that for three years, I'd have to have a lot of conviction about that thing I'm spending $12,500,000 on. What gave you this conviction? Was it just your own use case? You needed this thing?

Jon Darbyshire

16:05>> Yeah. I think it was my own use case, but it was also, you know, I built one of the first no code platforms back in 2000, which was Archer Technologies. The other big player in the space that started at the same time was salesforce.com with Benioff. So I have experience in that space, and what's changed over the years is the technology platforms now allow us to build the features that we really wanna offer in a platform

16:26>> like this. You can bring together, you know, the the communication, the collaboration, the file management, you know, the spreadsheets, the doc capabilities all into one place with a really rich UI so that people really don't have to jump between tabs and go to other products to get stuff done. They can really do the work in a single platform. And that's where the conviction came from, was how do we pull all of those elements together into a

16:49>> single platform? But then it was also based on the UI, and that the UI that we built is built for people ages 23 to 38 who are who we feel actually does the work in an organization. Now we see reports and dashboards and other things happen for people older than that, but we spend a lot of time understanding that particular genre, you know, millennials and Gen Zers, how they like to work, how they like to be

17:11>> social at work, how they like Facebook type components and sharing and collaboration built in. So that's the audience specifically that we're going after.

Nathan Latka

17:20Yeah. Well, you look like just before the interview, my research team, when you view the website, you look like a tool that could be doing $50 to $100,000,000 bucks a year in revenue. So with the three years of investment to me, it makes sense. The story makes complete sense here. Now, have you spent that full 12,500,000 already over the past three years or is there still some in the bank?

Jon Darbyshire

17:36>> No, that's the I just funded each month as we need to fund it.

Nathan Latka

17:39It's invested.

Jon Darbyshire

17:40>> Yep. So all that's currently invested. We'll be looking at a series A here in the next month or two. But the intent was to put all the capital in to get us to the point where we needed so we could be very quiet about what we were doing.

Nathan Latka

17:53Well, again, this now why you went from zero to 1,200,000 run rate in four weeks makes a lot of sense here. So when you say you wanna go out and look at a series a, about how much do you wanna try and raise and at what valuation? You don't need to sell equity. You're you're personally wealthy. Right?

Jon Darbyshire

18:06>> So why do it? No. I think that the connections that would come through the venture community and the value add that they bring in certain areas is what we're looking for. It's not just the cash. It's the relationship that's there. Most likely to be a series of two to three venture firms that would be involved, not just a single firm that was there. On the raise side, we're all over the place right now on how much

18:26>> we need to raise over the next, twelve months to really get to an interesting series b. And in some cases, people are pitching us on just adding on to the series a I mean, excuse me, to the seed round that we've already done and positioning the series a

Nathan Latka

18:41When was the seed?

Jon Darbyshire

18:43>> Well, the the seed, I considered the money that I put Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:47Now did you loan the business the 12.5 or is that an equity investment?

Jon Darbyshire

18:50>> No.

Nathan Latka

18:51That's equity investment.

Jon Darbyshire

18:52>> Okay. Interesting. Got it. Interesting.

Nathan Latka

18:53So so do you don't have really a target? Do you have a valuation target? You can get a $50, $60, $100,000,000 valuation?

Jon Darbyshire

18:58>> We're in that 100 range is what we're talking about right now.

Nathan Latka

19:02Yeah. It's hard because, I mean, there's a bunch of things you have that no one else has. One, a successful exit, right? So you can argue you're sort of a proven commodity. The second is, you know, your money's where your mouth is at. You put up, you know, a lot of your net worth into this thing, and you went from 0 to $100,000 a month very quickly. So question is, how much growth can you keep driving over the

Sales Motion and Role of Co-Founders

Nathan Latka

19:16next twelve months? You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. Well, it'd be interesting to watch what happens. Talk to me about how you've done sales. All no touch to date or or do you have a sales team?

Jon Darbyshire

19:27>> We have just a small sales team. So my wife, Tara, who helped me found our last company, Archer Technologies, she jumped in about four weeks ago to kinda get the sales kicked off for us. I don't know that she's here for the long term, but she's kinda getting things going right now. And what we found to date is that a a lot of our customers just want somebody to contact them,

19:47>> have a quick conversation, do a quick demo, and she helps coordinate all that activity between me and the three there's three founders, myself and two cofounders.

Nathan Latka

19:56But you just pay them a lot. Right? They don't own any equity?

Jon Darbyshire

19:59>> They each own yeah. They each have a small piece of

Nathan Latka

20:02Oh, okay. Like, five under 5%?

Jon Darbyshire

20:05>> Correct. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:05Okay. Got it. So you own, like, 90%. Two co founders own maybe another 10%. You didn't cut your wife, Tara, in at all?

Jon Darbyshire

20:11>> Well, she's in the 90 Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:14Yeah. She gets 45% of the 90. Right? That's how that works.

Jon Darbyshire

20:17>> Yeah. She gets 60% of that 90, I think.

Comparison Sites Strategy and Capterra Reviews

Nathan Latka

20:20That's amazing. Talk to me real quick. You mentioned comparison sites. How are they working for you? How are which one's the most giving you the most leads per month?

Jon Darbyshire

20:26>> You know, Capterra is is probably you know, Product Hunt did a pretty good job. We we just get a lot of bandwidth from them, and I kinda consider them to be a comparison site because people come in to just find out about new software and then look, you know, against the current players. But, you know, the Capterras of the world are where the real comparisons happen. And we've really just kind of dived into that in the

20:46>> last couple of weeks, but it allows us to show potential customers that are coming in the comparisons of how we compare against competitors. Even if the site's not sending us leads, we can send our clients there to kind of understand that.

Nathan Latka

20:59Paying for premium placement on Capterra yet or no?

Jon Darbyshire

21:02>> We are not. We're just in the free version on all those. So we're on about nine sites today. I think there's 30 that are on our list that we're trying to get.

Nathan Latka

21:10John, can you name a couple of those? Smart, Capterra. Which other ones?

Jon Darbyshire

21:13>> It's I'm drawing a blank. It's the Gartner based sites. There's sites. Three of them that fall under Gartner.

Nathan Latka

21:19GetApp. Yeah.

Jon Darbyshire

21:21>> Yep. Yep.

Nathan Latka

21:23Which other ones though? Just the Gartner ones?

Jon Darbyshire

21:25>> No. I I just don't have that list in front of me, and I'm drawing a blank.

Nathan Latka

21:29Can I follow-up with you? Can I follow-up with you afterwards?

Jon Darbyshire

21:31>> I can shoot that to you as soon as we get done.

Nathan Latka

21:34Okay. I'd love to see that. Yeah. Because these are great sites for leads and traffic if you can sort of play the game the right way. The first step is driving a bunch of reviews. You already have 23 on Capterra. So if you wanna move to pay it on Capterra, eventually you'll be in a nice position to do that.

Jon Darbyshire

21:47>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

21:48Fascinating. Okay. Gosh, you know, you're the closest interview I've come up to almost 3,200 of these where I'm I'm looking for a founder that's gonna take somebody public with only one full time employee because they use contractors. You're like the closest version to that that I've found so far.

Distributed Remote Company Model

Jon Darbyshire

22:01>> Yeah. I think, you know, we were going down that model before COVID hit. Right? We wanted to have more of an international company. We didn't want the employees in one location. I'm the only person other than my wife that's based in Newport Beach, California. We're all remote. And now that's not such a big deal, but that was kind of the genesis of the company was let's find the best people wherever they're at worldwide, and let's build

22:22>> the company around that as opposed to geographic location and 30 miles around that location for people to come to work each day. So we expect to continue to grow our company in this distributed model.

Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

22:33Very cool. Jon, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Jon Darbyshire

22:38>> I

22:43>> don't know if it's a business book, but, you know, the Bush Family Dynasty is just a great book that kinda teaches you about, you know, how that that family was put together and it was planned what happened, and it was planned that the, you know, that the a president or two presidents would come out of that journey, but it talks about their financial background. So I I enjoyed that quite a bit.

Nathan Latka

23:04Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Jon Darbyshire

23:07>> You know, Steve Jobs was was someone that I followed quite often and just the approach that he took to building Apple, which was different. And I I think about that quite often that he went against the grain of what was happening and built the company the way he thought it should be built to reach the customers that he wanted to reach, and we're trying to take the same a very similar tack with SmartSuite.

Nathan Latka

23:27Number three, what's your favorite online tool besides your own for building SmartSuite?

Jon Darbyshire

23:32>> Online tool. You know, we use Intercom. I don't know if you're familiar with Intercom that much. We use the heck out of that product. It's an amazing product.

Nathan Latka

23:41Number four, Jon, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Jon Darbyshire

23:45>> I would say maybe seven.

Nathan Latka

23:47Okay. And you're married to Tara. You guys have any kids?

Jon Darbyshire

23:50>> We do. We have, two children.

Nathan Latka

23:52Two kids. Okay. And how old are you, Jon?

Jon Darbyshire

23:55>> 57.

Nathan Latka

23:56Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Jon Darbyshire

24:00>> Wish I knew when was 20. You know what? Don't don't rush success. You know? I I think you just chug it along and it's gonna happen, but don't worry about it when you're that young.

Nathan Latka

24:08Guys, there you have it, smartsuite.com. Taking Notion plus Airtable plus ClickUp, putting it in a blender, and that's what you get. They've gone from nothing to a $100,000 a month in revenue in four weeks. The question is, how did they do that? You're going learn that in the interview. Got going about three years ago. Jon had a successful exit, used that cash, put in $12,500,000 of his own money into this new platform with a lot of

24:27contractors, very, very small fixed expenses in terms of full time employees. It's the model of the future, I think. Watch out for these guys. Growing quickly. Potential Series A coming up later this year. We will see what happens. Again, two fifty Sorry, 400 customers paying about $250 a month right now on average as they get going. Jon, thanks for taking us to the top.

Jon Darbyshire

24:43>> All right. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

24:45One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

25:11Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

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25:55for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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