How Uberflip More Than Doubled ACV by Building a True GTM Platform (Interview with Co-Founder Randy Frisch)

Introduction and What Uberflip Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey folks, my guest today is Randy Frisch. He's the Chief Evangelist for Content Experience and Co Founder at Uberflip, a marketing platform that empowers go to market teams to create content experiences at every stage of the buyer's journey. He's defined and led this movement prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and truly put their customers first by focusing on the experience. Randy, you ready to take us to the top?

Randy Frisch

00:18>> Let's do it. Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

00:20All right. I know I remember our chat from years ago and then you popped up my LinkedIn the other day and I reached back out and I'm glad to be reconnecting. So before we get into sort of how to market in a downturn, right? And this is really what you're thinking a lot about today. Help us understand for people not familiar with Uberflip. Do you guys do? What do people pay you for?

Randy Frisch

00:34>> Sure. So we work with companies who have invested in content and are trying to figure out how to justify its spend. And what I mean by that is we've all invested so much in creating content, We have this other problem now, which is how do I engage buyers? So we can help often more midsize to enterprise organizations take all the content they have, put the right content in front of

Nathan Latka

00:57the right buyer at the right time.

Randy Frisch

00:58>> So we actually power that end page that you send someone to. Maybe you're linking off an email, an ad, a social post, whatever it might be. We're often linking to a destination and we are that destination, but completely personalized and relevant to the buyer. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

01:15And is that so you're the technology that enables the brand that's paying you to customize that experience?

Randy Frisch

01:22>> Exactly. So we're a SaaS platform. We started this about ten years ago. And when we were doing it, you know, we saw people investing in all this content. But one of the things that we felt was that they didn't have the technical skills to build these landing pages of content. So we became that actual displacement for a CMS in this use case. Not suggesting you don't need a CMS. CMS is a great partner with a lot

01:47>> of them. Companies like WordPress VIP is one of our best partners in how we go to market. So a lot of people have a CMS, but the CMS was ultimately built for a different user, right? Your web developer, your IT team. The marketer needs to personalize these experiences every day in all the campaigns that they're sending out. So we provide a platform that the marketer can use with no code to jump in and build these destinations

Pricing and ACV Discussion

Randy Frisch

02:12>> completely. They'll host it on their own website.

Nathan Latka

02:15So Randy, one of big questions I'm getting, you know, both during COVID and now with the economy doing what it's doing is Nathan, should we change our pricing? You know, we're pretty expensive. Should we go down market? I believe when you last came on in 2019, we talked briefly about pricing and you mentioned sort of ACV ranges in the sort of $30,000-ish range. So I guess my question to you would be with, you know, let's

02:33skip COVID. Let's talk about like today, what the market's doing Are you hearing pushback from enterprise customers going, Randy, help a brother out, man. Or are you changing your pricing at all or no?

ACV Has More Than Doubled Since 2019

Randy Frisch

02:42>> Less so. No. And in fact, I mean, it's wild. Our ACV is a little bit more than double that today.

Nathan Latka

02:47So Wow.

Funding History

Randy Frisch

02:48>> You know, when we took our first round of funding was probably just after we connected Nathan, you know, four four years ago or so. That's the only round of funding we ever took. And That was the that was the six

Nathan Latka

02:59that was the 6,000,000 in 2019?

Randy Frisch

03:01>> No. That was maybe that was a debt round,

Nathan Latka

03:05But we Oh, you did 33 in 2018?

Randy Frisch

03:07>> Yeah. So that was the only round that we ever really think about because we never touched that debt round if that was six. I can't

03:12>> remember That number it is what it was.

Nathan Latka

03:13Yeah. But you had two and you had two small, smaller angel rounds before that a million dollar and a 3,000,000 angel round in 2015.

Randy Frisch

03:19>> Yeah. It was a SAFE that basically just rolled in and Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:23Yeah. Oh, 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

03:47connect your 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 to valuation 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

04:12gonna get 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

04:33is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder 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

04:59you're going 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. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second,

05:21but if you 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

How Uberflip Grew ACV: Platform Expansion

Nathan Latka

05:48interview. Go back to the ARPU expansion story. That's incredible, though. Many people not expect an ACV to double in your space during COVID and now with the economy doing what it's doing. Mean, was this just new products you were offering or how did you do that?

Randy Frisch

05:58>> I think it's a combination of things. You know, we always stood behind the idea that we weren't going be a point solution and that we continue to build that the solution to be a true platform. You know, early days, we probably called it a platform before it was one. But, you know, now we're really there. And what I mean by that is we'll power a lot of go to market strategies. Go to market is a term

06:18>> you're seeing splashed everywhere these days, that that GTM acronym. So we have people who use us for their inbound strategy, you know, kind of circa HubSpot, you know, ten years ago to account based marketing ABM strategies today and everything in between sales engagement, demand generation. So the fact that someone can use us across all these different use cases and not just different use cases, but different users inside that organization. So we have a, you know, we

06:44>> have companies where the marketers really take the lead and then we have a different product actually for sales users. And that also helped us increase ACV for

Nathan Latka

06:53when did that product launch?

Sales Assist Product and Its Origins

Randy Frisch

06:55>> The better version of that product, I'm going to say about eighteen months ago, we had kind of a poor man's MVP out of the gate, justified that there was a need for this. And remember what we do. We help put content in front of the right buyer at the right time. So as much as marketing is doing that is kind of air cover. You've also got sales reps who are ultimately needing to put content in every

07:17>> email they send out to chase a prospect at top of funnel or close a prospect lower near the bottom of the funnel. So adding some of those products is definitely one coming back to your question, how do we increase ACV, creating more of a platform? The other was figuring out who our actual market was. Now, that doesn't mean that we turn our way high growth kind of commercial accounts as we call them today. But those are

07:42>> more opportunistic for us, whereas early days we were trying to market and create leads and generate demand across all different parts of the market. Today, we're much more focused on enterprise accounts. And one of the things that's helped that ACV as well, when you work with an enterprise account, the way we we've kind of landed into doing is that we often find ourselves in one business unit. So we haven't I'll be honest, we haven't really had

08:09>> a lot of situations where we've sold the entire enterprise out of the gate, but we sell into a business unit. And because what we do is so

Nathan Latka

08:15what are those two units that you're selling into today? Marketing and sales?

Randy Frisch

08:19>> Marketing and sales. But when I'm when I'm saying business unit, I'm actually talking about some of the brands we work with taking a company like like Trimble or Hexagon. These are great customer of ours. Enterprises will often start with a business unit that's selling around a vertical or go to market motion or certain product within their portfolio.

Nathan Latka

08:39P and G is selling Dove soap and that Dove soap unit will buy you.

Randy Frisch

08:44>> Yeah. Typically we're a B2B buyer, but great analogy. Right?

Nathan Latka

08:48Okay.

Randy Frisch

08:48>> So if Dove, I don't know what else P and G sells, but say they also sell cookies or something like that. Then, you know, the group that sees what we've been able to do for their content. And remember, we are actually hosting that front facing experience. This isn't just behind the scenes management. This is actually the published web pages that go out to your customers. People see that and they'll say to their colleagues, how did you

09:14>> do that? How did you pull it off? How did you do it in such a timely manner? And when they see that, we get that inbound inquiry. So it's very much a viral referral based internal expansion. So back to your question on how do we increase ACV? We do it because we're able to really win over a specific business unit and then we expand. So one of the things that we've done is really cool that

Nathan Latka

09:40that's Randy, wait, hold on. Before you get more text, I have questions about what you've already described.

09:45Poor man's MVP. A lot of people are trying to get a poor man's MVP out and they just struggle. It never goes live. They can't get feedback. What what was that for you guys?

Randy Frisch

09:53>> So so it's interesting. For us, it was just not as savvy of a version of what we do today. And it was built, I'd say primarily with an internal idea versus the voice of the customer.

Nathan Latka

10:07But how did you get it out? So was it some product person, you know, mocking it up and Google's

Randy Frisch

10:10>> That was our VP of engineering who did the first version of that. It was kind of a side project for him. He felt it could be, it could solve a need.

Nathan Latka

10:19And he talked to the customers too, to get more feedback.

Randy Frisch

10:21>> Not tremendously. I mean, he had a line of communication, but he kind of went off and built it on his own. You know, it stuck around for a year or so and we had people using it, but it lacked a lot of the features that it needed. And I'll give credit to the kind of the more robust part of our platform, which we call Sales Assist, which is this add on that lives inside of your Gmail,

10:47>> your Outlook, or if you're using like a SalesLoft or Outreach, you know, from a nurture perspective as a seller, you know, this thing just follows along and allows you to gather and assemble the right assets and drop them into an email and then click through that and land on this page of handpicked content and personalized elements for you. So that piece, actually, even at our scale, you know, we were over 150 people at this point. It

Sales Assist Built by the CEO in 2020

Nathan Latka

11:14was what year was this?

Randy Frisch

11:17>> It was two Decembers ago, so 2020, my co founders, our CEO, kind of just closed closed himself off as he does from time to time and went away at hacking at this. The cool part about it is as much as he built a lot of this himself, he built it off our APIs that our engineering team had made possible. So it wasn't him necessarily going off and creating this skunk project. It was him building off the

11:46>> platform that we had enabled. So as much as he built this, one of our customers could have built this.

Customer Count and Enterprise Focus

Nathan Latka

11:50That was the coolest That's so cool. And so how, I guess, what does your ecosystem of customers and users look like today? Are you able to share sort of how many hexagons of the world you work with today?

Randy Frisch

12:00>> You know, I don't give exact numbers, but it's interesting to your, you would guess that our customer count just keeps going up. Our customer count actually doesn't really go up the count because we are comfortable in some cases losing some of the smaller customers that we had. We don't chase them away, but we know that we are building products for mid market enterprise organizations today and takes less of those customers.

Nathan Latka

12:26Know, the way you're expanding revenue, so that works nicely.

Randy Frisch

12:29>> We're expanding revenue. And the reality is that I think people sometimes have to remind themselves as much as it can be great to have a lot of customers, then you need a true product led growth approach. You need to really ensure that you're self serve. We want to get more and more there or back there, which is where we started because sometimes you don't want to lose that either. But when you are focused on onboarding and

12:51>> having customer success reps and things like that, you got to make sure you've got the ACV to justify that.

Nathan Latka

12:56And what does your split for your current reps look like today? How many folks are full on the team and how many like SDRs do you have?

Randy Frisch

13:04>> I don't actually know the numbers by heart.

Nathan Latka

13:08Must use your own tool, though, to go to market, right? That's why I asked.

Sales Team Structure and Compensation

Randy Frisch

13:11>> We do. We do. So so we have a smaller BDR team relative to our AE team. We've got a really long serving, tenured sales team of people who have been here five plus years. So the nice thing about them is they, you know, a lot of them were BDRs and they're not shy to, you know, roll up their sleeves and get to know their accounts. And again, because we're going for these bigger logos, bigger accounts, you

13:37>> know, it is very relationship based right from the beginning.

Nathan Latka

13:40Give me a takeaway, though, for my audience, right? So you've got 183 people total on the team today on LinkedIn. Like what percent team size are you dedicated to? Really your sales motion. Anything it's under 20 people?

Randy Frisch

13:49>> No, it's over 20 people. Includes sales consultants and, you know, we also divide new logo and expansion. So we actually have AEs who are doing new logo and then we have what we call account directors that are sales reps. In many cases, they've been sales reps with us for years who have moved on to work with some of these larger accounts that we were talking about earlier to be able to expand that ACV. Do you give

Nathan Latka

14:17them a net dollar retention or expansion target if they don't hit it, they don't make commission?

Randy Frisch

14:21>> Correct. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:22Oh, wow. So you treat them like a regular salesperson.

Randy Frisch

14:24>> It's just it's

Forum Days and Internal Account Expansion

Randy Frisch

14:25>> only in internal customers. But they're very relationship based and they're very much focused. You know, there's still a customer success rep on that account, but that success rep is working more so with the the existing install base, whereas that account director is looking to work with other business units, as I described earlier. And we do really cool things to support them in marketing too. Like one of the things that we've done, we call them forum days

14:53>> and I get to host them kind of as an emcee. So we'll take one of our accounts and we'll kind of invite a whole bunch of their other colleagues in other business units and we'll do a show and tell day. So part of that is the, you know, the principal account holder will demonstrate the things that they've done to their peers. We also bring some of our other customers to kind of speak as to things that

15:15>> they've done. It's very it's kind of like a full day lunch and learn of understanding how our platform, which is semi hosted, I said by me, but we think of it as really hosted by the account, the account themselves. Right. Our champion inside of there gets to say, look what I've done. If anyone else wants to learn about this, here's an opportunity. And for our larger accounts, we do that once a year. The account director, as

15:40>> I just described, is very involved in that and it really allows them to lead that account to some of these expansion opportunities.

How to Market in a Downturn

Nathan Latka

15:47So Randy, before we wrap up here with the famous five, if you had to sum up in a sense or two how to market a downturn, what's the answer?

Randy Frisch

15:54>> You know, it's a great question and I don't have all the answers. So what I did just to give credit is I was wrote to write a blog post about this and I was like, I don't know shit. So I went out and I asked four CMOs who were CMOs not recently, and they still are recently, but back in 2008, like the last real long bear market that we all had to go through. Megan Eisenberg, Brian

16:18>> Carden, Peter Isaacson, Alyssa Fink, who was the CMO at Tableau for twelve years. Mean, these are amazing people and they gave me about eight big takeaways. You can check those out, but I'll give you a couple of them. One that I think they all hit on is be a chief optimist. You know, that that becomes your new title change because you got to rally not just the marketing team, the sales team. You got to really adapt.

16:41>> The second one that they gave me, they'll highlight was, you know, focus on revenue generation. And what they meant by that is, yes, you got it. You know, you hear everyone say, keep keep on your brand, but you still got to bring leads in. You know, you may not be able to get as many leads, but you've got to find those channels. You've got to be able to look at your efficiency on a channel by channel

17:02>> basis. The last one, just because I know we're out of time, I'll give you is, you know, lean in on content now more than ever. They all agreed on this. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go create more content. Right. But it means you have to go and do an audit of the content you have to understand what's going to be important. What what are people looking for now? Because it's different, right? What

17:24>> they're looking for now is different, just as it was different when the pandemic hit. Right. When the pandemic hit, we all had to change our content, our messaging. Got to do that again. The good news is we've gotten better at it, but we have to lean in. We've got to do so in a way that's not obnoxious, where they're like, oh, they're just trying to like talk to me like I'm an idiot. Doesn't understand what a

17:42>> recession means, but more so talk to them in a way that's relevant to the way their team may have been restructured as of late, may have different budgets to work with, may have different goals that they need to accomplish as a result and show how your solution can help them navigate whatever problems may be ahead.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Personal Life

Nathan Latka

17:58As I'm creating content, Randy is creating content. If you wanna learn more from him, go check out his podcast called The Marketer's Journey. It's a good one. Randy, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Randy Frisch

18:09>> Still the hard thing about hard things.

Nathan Latka

18:13Number two, is there is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Randy Frisch

18:18>> Well, I guess I'll I'll lean on my on my other favorite book with Bob Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime. And I just find, you know, the way he approached all of his acquisitions just, you know, so fascinating.

Nathan Latka

18:31Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Uberflip besides your own?

Randy Frisch

18:35>> I live in Canva every day. Such a great solution, so easy to use. That same mindset behind Uberflip, you know, remove the friction to get shit done.

Nathan Latka

18:45Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Randy Frisch

18:48>> I have a terrible shoulder injury, so I'm lucky to sleep like three hours a night before I But, get you know, it's alright. You wake up in the morning and you get through it.

Nathan Latka

18:57A brutal rule.

Randy Frisch

18:58>> Alright. So, but three hours, wake up, go back to sleep for another three hours, something like that.

19:01>> I'll get six to seven hours a night.

Nathan Latka

19:03Alright. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Randy Frisch

19:06>> I'm married for sixteen years. I got three kids. My oldest is 15, a 13 year old and 11 year old.

Nathan Latka

19:13Wow. How cool. And how old are you?

Randy Frisch

19:16>> I'm 43.

Nathan Latka

19:1743. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Closing Advice and Wrap-Up

Randy Frisch

19:23>> Better to create something than expect something to be given to you.

Nathan Latka

19:26Oh, I love that. Guys, uberflip.com, they help you go to market by creating personalized experience, content experiences at scale, especially for those marketers that get frustrated waiting on engineering to customize stuff for you. They help you solve that. Back in 2019, when I last had Randy on, they were flirting with sort of $30,000 ACV. He shared that even during COVID and during the pandemic, they've almost doubled that ACV by moving and introducing more product features to

19:49these same set of customers. He shared back, Then they were floating with sort of 300, 400, 500 customers looking now at going deeper into those customers. They look to scale their team of 183, doubling down on marketing in a downturn with more content personalized at scale. Randy, thanks for taking us to the top.

Randy Frisch

20:03>> Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

20:06One 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

20:31Central. 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

20:54fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up

21:15for 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, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got

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