259: How to Grow Your SaaS by Using the Proper Resources - with Sharekh Shaikh

Matt Wolach: 0:10

You know, it's so important to know how to grow your software company. But not many people tell you exactly what to do or how to do it. Fortunately, I had Sharekh Shaikh on the program. He's from CleverX. And they have been able to start and scale really quickly. In fact, in their second year, they grew 5.5 times. Okay, so huge, huge percentage growth, because they were able to do specific things that had been proven by others to work time and time again, he's a second time founder. So he knows what worked, what didn't work last time. And he applied all that he shares what he did here. So if you're trying to grow your company, if you're wanting to make sure that you can scale, definitely check this episode out.

Intro/ Outro: 0:48

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wallach.

Matt Wolach: 1:04

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS super glad to have you here. Thank you very much for coming. I am Matt, I am your host. And we are here to help you scale your SaaS. So let's find new leads. Let's grow some, some clients, let's make our clients better, let's make ourselves better. And let's get our company to scale to that point where you can reach your dreams. Super excited to have you here. And as you know, this is a show that we put out weekly information about how you can do these things. And we have amazing guests and I'm super excited about our guest today. But before we do that, I asked you guys for reviews. And I'm so grateful to have you guys listening to the show and soaking up this information. And I thought hey, why don't we just read a review this review came in recently, I wanted to make sure that you guys heard it because it really made the team over here feel really good. It's from envel Lascaux oh seven it's five stars. A must listen cannot thank Matt enough for putting out such an incredible podcast, engaging conversations, actionable tips and insights into the SAS industry abound. Super cool. Thank you very much for that review. And if you feel like you want to review, I'd really appreciate it. It helps our show and it helps me and the team feel great. Go ahead, just drop a review. You can do that anywhere you listen to the show. Today is something I've been looking forward to I am really excited. I have a fantastic guest you guys are all going to love Sharekh Shaikh is with me. He is the founder of CleverX. Sharekh, how're you doing?

Sharekh Shaikh: 2:23

I'm doing great, man. How are things with you?

Matt Wolach: 2:25

Good, good. Things are good. Stay in busy. Let me let me make sure I tell everybody about your Sharekh. So Sharekh. Like I mentioned he is the founder at CleverX and CleverX powers market research teams by giving them access to the tools and most hard to reach business audiences and an all in one platform. So world's world's leading research teams, they use clever acts to get access to hard to reach business audiences. And it gives them amazing research tools all in one single place. It's really really cool. Really glad to have him here to share his story once again, Shark thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, I

Sharekh Shaikh: 3:00

appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me.

Matt Wolach: 3:02

Absolutely. So tell me what's been up with what you're doing lately? And what do you have coming up in the future?

Sharekh Shaikh: 3:07

Yeah, you know, it's been a fantastic journey. It's almost two years for us, for the first time we launched the platform and being constantly iterating on the product based on the user feedback that you get. So I think we've found a place where you know, 1000s of users are have registered on the platform. Our customers are really excited about what we've built, because it changes the way they've been doing these things for the last 20 years completely. So a lot of new updates or new, you know, product features that are going to be launched in March. And hopefully we keep building the stuff that users care about. And you want to make the life as easy as possible. Yeah.

Matt Wolach: 3:51

I love that. And you mentioned, you're changing things that they've been doing for quite a while I've had software companies where we've done that. And it's been a little bit of a struggle to get them to change their ways. Of course, it's almost always when a software does it. It's a better way, it's a better process. But sometimes people kind of get ingrained into what they're used to. Did you encounter that and what did you do to overcome it? If so, yeah,

Sharekh Shaikh: 4:17

you know, give you a bit of a context, right. So before starting off clever X, I spent enough amount of time, you know, between technology and market research. So I used to work for Gartner research, which is one of the biggest and leading technology research companies in the world. And even working for such a large massive organization in the space. When it came to product research or market research. We used to struggle a lot. The reason is, the industry is structured in such a way that there's a lot of fraudulent data, almost 40% of research outcomes of fraud in b2b research. And that's that's not me saying it's like industry norm and And it's accepted as a status quo, which is, which is really, you know, not not the best, you know, number to look at when, when an industry is trying to grow. And to change that specific thing, you know, I realized that a couple of things that the industry needs to change from ground up. So that 40% becomes 0% fraud in terms of research. And you build clever X based on that premise. So we want help all the market researchers and product researchers to have a single place where they can bring their favorite tools to conduct online surveys, do you know product interviews, or even do like, you know, projects with these amazing people that are out there. So you have the audience and the tools come in one place, and you go from there in terms of solving those problems around or getting the research insights that you're looking for. But to to point out, I think what I've realized is the way traditional research has been done hasn't changed for the last two decades. Because yeah, it was easy. There not a lot of tech people in that industry. So the innovation was never taught so profoundly to change things from ground up. And it's a difficult problem to solve, right? People don't want to solve difficult problems. So someone has to take a lead. And we are trying to do that right now with this piece. But we're very excited because companies like you know, Microsoft, Gartner research is being powered through clever x these days. So which is which is really exciting to see. Yeah.

Matt Wolach: 6:27

Very cool. That's Those are some big feather in your cap for sure. How did you come up with the idea? I know that this was needed? Yeah. How did you guys say, Oh, yes, this is this is what I should do. Yeah.

Sharekh Shaikh: 6:38

So when I when I worked for God. Now, you know, I personally struggle with this problem a lot. And Gartner overall, as Gartner spends millions of dollars on research every year, the only way if you imagine like you being on LinkedIn, I'm sure you get like a lot of requests from people saying like, Hey, man, do you want to participate in the survey, I'm gonna pay you $100 for it. And people, even if they're interested or serious about participating in an online survey, it's very difficult for you to trust the other person on the other side of that message. Either you have to take the step of participating in that survey and waiting for them to pay you those $100. Or they have to pay you in advance to make sure that you trust them, and you're going to participate in the service. So there's a lot of issues around monetization mechanism, and having trust with each other on a platform like LinkedIn, so the market exist, right, that we realized, you know, long time ago, overall, if you look at the US, as a market, close to $15 billion is spent on product research and market research in the US alone, the overall industry, globally for market research is close to $70 billion. And just doing these things, like a service based organization where people are reaching out to each other, using channels like LinkedIn, I believe is not the best way to go about it. I think there has to be a platform that exists where all these audiences come together, they can interact, and collaborate on research projects with each other in a trusted way. And that's what clever X is doing. You're giving them this mechanism of trust, to work with each other on research projects, and go from there and help out each other. And at the same time you make money for spending the time on that research project with the customer.

Matt Wolach: 8:29

I think that's really interesting. And just hearing that that number, you said earlier that 40% is fraud. It's crazy. And it's just, you're right, it just creates this lack of trust out there. I think that that's, that's pretty scary. So are you are you educating your market? Are you kind of trying to share with them, Hey, watch out for bad stuff, make sure you get good stuff? Is that how you're doing it?

Sharekh Shaikh: 8:48

Yeah, we're definitely trying to educate the market. But I think the customer already knows that. So if you look at SMR, which is a standard or organization considered to be one of the leading like organization of community of researchers in the world, it's a number coming from them as well. So customers already know this problem exist. They also understand why it exists. Because there are a lot of panel providers who come into the value chain of research project. That's what the panel provider, panel, research panel providers, someone who has, you know, the claim to have millions of people in the panels who are going to participate in research projects, where it goes wrong or becomes unreliable is I pay $50,000 for a research project to conduct online surveys with hundreds of CXOs let's say, right, then I pay that money again, to research outcomes, but as a customer, I'm completely unaware of the respondents who have taken up the research. A lot of people don't know this, that this is how research as an industry operates that that's the status quo. And that's a pretty low bar in my view, because you're spending so much money Need, you have the right to know who your respondents are, but panel providers, unreliable panel providers, I should say, take a take a stance that, you know, affects privacy laws or GDPR for these respondents, but we haven't seen that, like users are okay to directly interact with customers as respondents, since they're participating in these projects, and that's what leverage is doing. We're making it 100% transparent to our customers, I guess. That's the reason we grew like 5x 5.5x In the last one year alone, because customers who care about that transparency of the respondent and the reliability of those insights, want to know who the respondents are, when I'm spending 1000s of dollars I shouldn't know about it keeps a good percentage of it. So I think the problem lies in the old ways of doing things. It can only be solved through a platform driven model, I believe. And that's where we're heading as a as a startup. Yeah.

Matt Wolach: 10:56

Super cool. I love it. You guys are chat tackling this head on? I think it's amazing. I want to go back to some of the early days. What were some of the things you did early that that helps your company get going? Sometimes people have that challenge right away of, you know, where do we find our first customers? How do we how do we get this thing rolling? What did you guys do that helps you become successful?

Sharekh Shaikh: 11:16

Yeah, so this is my second startup. Before this, I had expert network. So I understood this industry pretty well. So I've spent two years in this industry, one thing I would highly recommend to any new founder is taking the time to understand the problem, it's always very easy to you know, if you have a hammer, like Paul Graham's is, you know, from YC, you're gonna always look for a Neil, don't do that, you know, go ahead. And it's such a, you know, cliche advice, but it is the most important advice for anyone starting off early on is talking to as many people as you want, as you should do figure out the problem first, and then you touch a single line of code. To solve that problem. A lot of people just jump into like writing, you know, code and building a solution right? Off the gate, I think that's not a great way to start a company, it should be a problem where people care about care enough about, right, that problem to pay you the money that you expect them to pay. And it makes their life better, right, it either saves them time, or it makes them look better in front of their colleagues or it either you receive the money. So in either of those cases, that problem has to be big enough, hairy enough for the customer to really love your product and keep using it every month. I think you can only do that, once you understand how deep the problem is. And then going ahead and tackling it, you know, after understanding things.

Matt Wolach: 12:48

Yeah, I totally agree. It's, it's amazing to me how many people take an undertaking like starting a software company and wanting it to become big, but don't go out and do the work of learning the market and really talking, having those conversations and just getting to know where, where are people feeling the most pain? What are they struggling with? And, you know, what keeps them up at night? What are they so worried about? And then also, what are they trying to accomplish? What are they what are they trying to get to and really, I found those who go through that work and work to understand that actually, are the ones who get success and get success the quickest. So there's definitely not a step that you want to skip. And it's great that you had that background that you already kind of had some insight into the industry.

Sharekh Shaikh: 13:26

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's that's the first step anyone should take. And if you personally, like if you if you can convince yourself that this problem is like really that bad enough for anyone to use it, you should pursue something else. But it's a it's a phase of experimenting things around problems, not solutions. But I think that that would be the right way to put it. For most of the new founders. Yeah. Yeah, I

Matt Wolach: 13:53

love that. I think that's super cool. So you said earlier that I mean, that's amazing. 5.5x growth last year. That's phenomenal. Congrats on that. What do you think led to that? What were you guys doing to achieve that level of growth?

Sharekh Shaikh: 14:06

Yeah, I think we were, we were really obsessed in terms of like talking to our users. He's spoken to hundreds of people who use our platform on both the sides, people who participate in research, as well as people who are trying to conduct research. And talking to them lead us to understand, okay, this problem is more important to a particular user. And we need to fix that. I think that has given us the opportunity to evolve the product as we go along, rather than emotionally getting really connected to like, Oh, this is the only way to solve the problem. So we asked our customer, what do they care about? The one caveat here would be not to ask them for a solution because, you know, the old saying is like, if you ask people what you needed, people would say we always wanted faster horses, right? Like you don't want a car so they're not looking for a solution that way. So just focusing on the problems their daily, you know, routine or or workflows that at work is the way to figure out a solution for them. And then you put a solution out there and test it out as fast as possible. I guess those are the things that worked out really well for us, once a customer is happy referral programs worked really well for us. So it's your job as a founder to make sure that they are really excited and happy about your product. And they're getting the value that they you know, spend the money for. Once you figure that out, I guess, you know, it becomes easier for customers to refer to their friends and peers in the industry, which is what probably was the biggest reason for us to grow as a company because we haven't spent a single dollar on marketing in the last one year. And that is a testament to that, you know, people people care about what people building,

Matt Wolach: 15:52

no dollar spent in marketing, that's pretty phenomenal. Like, it's amazing.

Sharekh Shaikh: 15:57

It's not a good thing. But we weren't sure that I mean, to look at it in a different way, is finding product market fit was like the singular goal we had last year. And the only way to figure that out is by not buying a customer marketing is essentially in a way, like at least the first transaction is being bought out by, you know, asking a lot of people to use your product. But I think our singular goal last year was to make sure that we're not influencing any decisions. And people genuinely are using the product every week or every month. Because it's solving a specific pain point for them.

Matt Wolach: 16:40

Gotcha. So you spend time with your customers to really understand what was good was bad to learn it and make sure that product got better and then help them send it out and refer others. Is that how you did it?

Sharekh Shaikh: 16:51

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's that's the right way to? That would be a good way to put it. Yeah.

Matt Wolach: 16:56

Love it. You did some really good stuff. But if you had to look back, what would be some things that you would do differently? If you're like, oh, man, I wish we didn't do that. Anything you would change?

Sharekh Shaikh: 17:06

Yeah, I think one thing, which I always think about is, especially for a tech startup, the most important thing is not your product, not the code you've written is actually the team that you hire. It's basically a bunch of people doing an experiment on a particular problem, right? I think I should have been more. I should have believed in my gut more in terms of hiring people. We look at traits, you know, when when we want to hire someone, but there's this gut feeling like you know, this person's going to be the right fit for us. Every time I had like, some percentage of doubt, even like on paper, these people were like, amazing. I think that was not the best hire. I've realized every time you know, these people didn't look, you know, perfect on the paper. But your gut says like, Yeah, this is going to be like a great addition to the team. So I think it matters a lot. The second thing is like the culture fit, every startup is different, even if they like to exactly similar startups solving the same problem. The cultures are very different within within the teams. So finding those people who fit our resonate with the values of the founder, or the overall team is one of the most important things that I think founders should care about. I think I should have done that differently. But you're always trying to learn new things and improved, right. So hopefully, we don't make I don't make those mistakes in the future. Yeah.

Matt Wolach: 18:38

That's something I found as well. Once I started realizing I can hire for culture, it really kind of revolutionized our team and the team became much more cohesive bonded and really were much more effective. It was it was incredible what happened. And so it it's, it's amazing that that is something because I would have thought, oh, like, you know, where they go to school? How smart are they? And what's their experience? Those are all nice, but just just just making sure it fits within your group. And you're right. It's very different from team to team. But we've seen that that'd be very strong for us as well.

Sharekh Shaikh: 19:14

Yeah. And I think, to just flesh that out a little bit more. It's such a difficult thing to do. Because there is no science behind it. There are no numbers behind it. It's very much like an art thing. And I think that's why it becomes difficult for a founder to figure that out. Although this is my second startup, but you know, it was still something that I could have done.

Matt Wolach: 19:40

Yeah, I think I'm right there with ya. So just as we wrap up here, what advice would you have for other software founders who are getting started and want to achieve success like us shark?

Sharekh Shaikh: 19:50

I think I would say three things which are really, really important. One being be obsessive about the problem that you solve. When it's a long journey, do not look at, you know, short term, you know, wins that this is just going to be like a year or two years project, it's a long term journey, think of it like, it's going to be a 10 year journey, and you're going to, you have to be obsessive enough about that problem. To go through those 10 years, you know, and the second thing is finding the problem that you care about enough. And the customer or the market also cares about enough. That should be the second thing. The third thing would be, which, which I believe a lot of people don't talk about is building that muscle memory, muscle, in your mind around managing your emotions really well. I think if you can do that, and it can only be done with practice, and go through those motions of being a founder. I think things will be much more easier for for new founders, I think these three things would be really valuable for anyone to look at. I'm sure there are multiple other things. But personally, those three things have helped me a lot, you know, to grow the team, you know, talk to customers better build a product, which which makes sense for the market? Yeah.

Matt Wolach: 21:12

Yeah, I think those are three fantastic things. And if you can nail those, you're gonna have a very successful company. And while this has been it's gone, it's flown by for me, because it's been such great information. I really appreciate you coming in and sharing chart. How can people learn more about you and clever acts?

Sharekh Shaikh: 21:27

Yeah, I think the best thing for people will be done. Do not take my word with a pinch of salt, but sign up on the platform, that will be the best thing and share your feedback with us. I'm also on Twitter and on LinkedIn and active so you can reach out or connect with me there. If you have any questions around this space. I'm happy to answer it for anyone. I hope this conversation was helpful to some people while they think about their entrepreneurial journey.

Matt Wolach: 21:55

Yeah, I agree. I hope it was as well. We'll put all those links into the show notes so that if you're listening or watching, you can see all that shark this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this.

Sharekh Shaikh: 22:05

Yeah, I know. I appreciate it, man. And thank you so much for having me over. Yeah.

Matt Wolach: 22:10

Absolutely. And thank you for coming. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening, everybody out there. Really appreciate it. Like I mentioned before, if you want to review the show, we will be very grateful to that to you for doing that. Please go ahead and do that. And that will help us understand that we're taking good care of you. Thank you very much for coming, and we'll see you next time. Take care. Bye bye.

Intro/ Outro: 22:31

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS for more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com