278: Your New Growth Mantra: Follow the Customer - with Jon Darbyshire

Growing software, sometimes we have all kinds of decisions to make sure we do this. Should we do that? Where do we do this? How do we do this? What should we build next? How should we market these decisions get us very frustrated and flustered and we oftentimes make the wrong decision. What if we were able to make the right decision each time something that helped us get the right product out something that helped us sell that product even better, Jon Darbyshire stopped it. And he's from SmartSuite Great tool. And he shared his mantra called Follow the customer. And he shared exactly how they've been able to grow quickly because of what they've done following what their market needs and what they look for. He walks through his process of how he understands exactly what the market needs exactly what they will love and what's going to sell. So check this episode out, I think you're gonna get a lot out of it.

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 Wolach.

and welcome to Scale Your SaaS very happy to have you here. Thank you very much. I am really excited for today's show. I've got John darbishire. With me, John, how you doing?

I'm doing great, man. It's pleasure to be here.

And it's a pleasure to have you Jon. Now, let me make sure everybody out there. If this is your first time here, we are here to help you Scale Your SaaS so you can learn how to grow your company and get that amazing exit you're looking for. And Jon's gonna help us do that sharing his story as well. If you're new, definitely subscribe to the show, hit that subscribe button. That way, you're gonna get notified of all our future shows where we have other awesome guests like John sharing their story and helping you out John, let me make sure everybody knows who you are. So Jon, he's the co founder and CEO at smart, sweet smart suite helps coordinate people and work across all levels of an organization to ensure that team members have the information they need to accomplish the work that matters most Jon has been dedicated to automating every day essential business tasks to create smarter, more efficient organizations, no matter what the industry, this guy knows his stuff. Absolutely. You're going to enjoy this. Jon, thanks for being here.

Oh, it's a pleasure looking forward to digging into this conversation.

Likewise. So tell me what's been going on with you lately? And what's coming up?

Yeah, you know, we're, I'm passionate about all things, no code. So smartsuite is in the no code space. So we're we I spend most of my time each day interacting with customers and partners, just understanding the types of business processes they have in their organization, and the ways that smartsuite can help support them both currently, but more so in the future. So I'm interested in understanding what features and functionality that we need to add that will help better serve our customer base that's there. And we do that in quite a number of ways. But the most effective way is to have direct conversations like we're doing now, mainly over video. So we can record those we use AI to kind of transcribe the information that we heard, just makes the whole process very easy. And then I have the ability to very quickly go back through conversations that we've had and kind of pull out topics across maybe five or six different conversations to kind of see themes that we're saying.

I love it. So a couple of things to hit on that. So first, you mentioned no code. Do you have a tech background yourself?

Yeah, I've been in the no code space for about 25 years

I built allow, you know,

the first company that I did, Archer Technologies was one of the first one of the very first traditional second generation no code platforms, Marc Benioff started Salesforce Ed. Within about two months of us starting Archer, Archer today was just sold again and a couple of months ago, for 1.4 billion they own kind of the governance Risk and Compliance space, which is helping organizations really manage risk inside of the business. That was an interesting story with that company in that we targeted the top 30 financial services companies in the US as our first customers and sold into groups of 10. And after three years, we had 29 of the top 30 Before we went out to any other industry that was there. So that was my first entree into no code with large enterprise customers. And it's kind of taken lots of different different paths in that journey over the last 1012 years.

Very, very cool. Yeah, it's definitely a hot button topic. You also mentioned that you like having a lot of conversations and conversations with your market. How did you learn that? That's important?

Yeah, actually, I learned that in my days at Archer when things were pretty lean. And I didn't know anything else to do other than talk with customers, right? When those early days that were there, and I came up with this mantra of follow the customer. And I've kind of done that throughout my career ever since and that no matter what I had in my, in my business strategy about what I thought the product that companies should do when I talk with customers, and if that's different from the needs that they have. I've learned that that's the time to pivot and to make sure that I'm solving Those problems for that group of customers that I'm working with. And that's certainly really well, and that it gets brought me into new markets with new things that I haven't thought about maybe in that initial strategy that was there. But it also helped the customers become very sticky. At smart orient Archer, the first 10 years of that company, we had a 97.6% renewal rate, right across, I can't tell you how many hundreds and hundreds of renewals and our base price point was about 350,000 give you an ID. So those are, these aren't small accounts. These are big ones across that. So I found that, you know, follow the customer had a direct correlation to us back to how happy they were in the renewals that we have.

That's amazing. I love that. So how did the whole idea of smartsuite come about?

Yeah, you know, I sold Archer in 2010, and thought I had officially retired forever. And started a family foundation and started investing in startups. I've invested in about 400, startups kind of through that journey, had the chance to just meet and interact with lots of founders. And some common themes kind of came up after years of doing that. The first one was, they would get a lot of questions around what types of products should they have in their own business to help them manage and run their business? And with those products that were selected, be able to scale with him as the business scaled over time was kind of the next question. So I kept coming back to I wanted to build a platform that could help manage any business process in an organization that came with templates. In the case of smartsuite, we have 200 templates that cover 35 different categories of business processes. So if somebody doesn't know how to manage sales, or marketing, or HR, or what a best in class process looks like, that template, lets them know that just in seconds, they can download that and see that information. So the idea behind smartsuite was to work with companies from to users up to the fortune 100, to help manage any type of process inside of that organization in a way that allows the infant the data to be connected, so that you don't duplicate the data, you just have one place to log in, your employees don't have five different products that they work with each day, you could have one core product typically.

So I really love this idea. I think it's something super important. But my guess is and I don't know for sure, because we didn't talk about this beforehand. But my guess is that that would have been really hard to get your market to understand exactly what that does for them. When you say like automation and process is kind of like big, like open ended words? And did was it hard to convince them or get them to understand exactly how the product can help them?

Yeah, so I think for us, the biggest marketing effort that we put forth is around education. And what we found is the best way to educate is through video. And that people can sense in the first, you know, 30 to 60 seconds, what the product does, and begin to kind of make up their own mind, if it's something that would be a value to them in their organization, because business process Atomy automation is a mouthful. Not everybody understands that I come from a consulting background early in my career at Ernst and Young. So that's just kind of baked into who I am as a person understanding that that piece, but not everybody understands that. So once organizations begin to realize that they can have their sales, their marketing their it their product processes in one place and connected, they start to get excited when they see okay, now that the data is there, how can I pull data analytics, you know, charts and dashboards on top of that, to really understand what's happening inside of the business and make sure that I've got my people focused on the right things that are that.

A lot of so your market super competitive. There's other companies doing this as well. What are you guys doing right now to separate yourselves from those competitors?

Yeah, I think part of that goes back to my early days at Archer when we worked with large enterprise organization. So we understand that governance and security are very important in a product, meaning that as I grow as a company, not everybody should see all the information that's inside of even a particular process. So I need to be able to access control that which we call permissions at different levels to different users at different times that are involved in that workflow. Then there's certain pieces of information that they shouldn't see at all. Maybe if you're in an HR process, and you're letting employees look at some of the information that's there, but you don't want them to see the compensation for everybody. So that particular field can be hidden. It's there. So it's the little subtle things like that, that help organizations really build the type of process that is specific to what they need. That's there. And then the big piece that we've added that's different about smartsuite is we spent a large amount of time at the very beginning of the company to focus on the user interface. And we directed that at millennials and Gen Zers. Who are the people that we feel do work in most organizations. And what we learned from that exercise is that those two generations are very different than the generations before them on how they want to work, how they want to view work on a screen how collaborative they want to be. how they want to see what other co workers are working on and be able to comment on that at times. So all those things kind of came together in our UI. And you'll see what smartsuite Compared to a lot of products, it's more visual, there's more vivid colors, it's meant to help keep their attention as they're working. It also allows them to work both from their mobile and from their computer, from their tablet all at the same time, we found many of the millennials that we spoke with, as they were talking to us, and I would even talk with him about interfaces, I'd see they would be on their mobile phone. And at first, I would get annoyed, I'm like, What are you doing, like we're having a conversation. And then I realize now they're looking at the product on the mobile, at the same time that we're having the conversation on the screen. And that's just normal for them. So we tried to build in, you know, take all of that input and build that into the core UI. So that we can help keep millennials and Gen Z ears engaged and motivated and build more of a collaborative culture inside the organization.

I mean, another perfect example of you following your your mantra of follow the customer right there. I mean, the fact that you looked at who was the the actual end users, you talked to them, you sat down, you saw the interaction that they had with the product, I think that's, that's so smart. And for everybody out there, this is so critical to make sure that you are addressing your market and learning from your market, understanding what they need, so you can build into the product, exactly what's going to fit for them. That sounds like you guys did that really well, Jon.

that's the My favorite part of every day is I spent a couple of hours just meeting with, with customers and partners to do just that. And one of the favorite things that I like to do is use a video, like we're kind of using now in our discussion, where I can demo the product and show them things. But they're not just looking at the product, I can see their facial expressions, because not everybody communicates great back to be as the CEO with what they like and don't like in a product. But I can tell from those visual cues at times that I nailed it, or we did not nail it at all, like we need to keep working even though they didn't say that it just didn't resonate. And I could see from that expression is there. So I think that video and having the ability to look back at those videos at certain points at times as you're demoing certain screens in your product are super important. And I hope that we can get to a position in AI, where I can take those recordings. And I could document the sentiment from the facial expressions that are being shown at the same level of is I could do from the words that they're actually speaking.

Yeah, that's a that's a good point. That would be pretty slick, if it can help us figure some of that out. And I do recommend a lot of people who follow the show know that I recommend recording your demos, you can go back and kind of see hey, what what happened here? How did this interaction go? How did that go? And especially if things don't go well, you can kind of go back and find what did I say? What did I do that? Maybe lost them. And having that recording is very critical to be able to do that. So I'm glad you guys are doing that.

You know, there's products that that add the AI on top of those recordings that just make things so easy. And we just started this maybe six months ago. But at the you know, we just when we log into a meeting, we just log in with our recording software that has AI as well, it records the entire meeting transcribes it, but then it summarizes it automatically for you, it tells you who was in attendance. Here's a summary of everything that was talked about, here's the action items that came out of it. And I've been amazed at how good it is. And it also then allows us to search back through conversations with large groups of people looking for key topics just to see like, what am I talking about over the last two weeks? Like are there any themes that are popping up across these hundreds of discussions that we've had with our company back with customers and partners?

Yeah, it's pretty cool. Some of the technology we have at our fingertips right now is quite amazing. For sure, for sure. So tell me you guys have seen some good success. What were some of the things you guys did early on, it helped you get to this point that helped you grow and and take that next step?

Yeah, probably the best thing that we did was, you know, this, the overall space that we're in, like you kind of said is a little crowded, there's a quite a number of players that are in that space. When you talk about business process automation, we had to find a way to set ourselves apart. So people really understood what we did. And what we did at first was we found the biggest influencers on YouTube for our top three competitors. And we wanted to go after we reached out to each of them. And we said, hey, we're a new product in the category. We know you're an expert on this other product that's there, and you're producing a lot of content around that. We'd like for you to you know, start a free trial of our product and then share your your thoughts good or bad back to your audience on how we compare against the product that you were there. Behind the Scenes what we were hoping what happened was that we would grab their attention enough that they asked more questions and said we'd like to start working with you. And that's what happened with the first three influencers across the first three competitor that we went after. So now Those three are some of our biggest partners, they produce content weekly, we now have over 300 videos that have been created on our product. But it then goes back out into their channels at the same time that we promote on our channels. And I would say that, excuse me, about 65 to 70% of the lead volume that comes into our website to start a free trial with us is because of video content that people have seen, and that, again, is because of our focus on people that actually get work done, which is millennials and Gen Zers. tend to consume video more so than a lot of the print type media that we've done in the past, like cold, cold emails, blogs, those types of things.

I love it. It's such a smart play that not a lot of people do. So you found these people on YouTube, essentially, right, who are already talking about products in the space and basically convinced them to talk about yours.

We did and then we did a couple of things. So the first was, we didn't pay him anything, we just said, Hey, would you just you know, try us out and just share your thoughts back good or bad. And two of them came out and said, Hey, this product is better than the other product that we're promoting right now. They still promote the other those other products, but now we're kind of in their toolkit of, of, of products that they, you know, talk about each week. So as a new feature comes out, they'll promote those new features and talk back to their audience, that many of those also have consulting organizations that are kind of a part of that. So they provide consulting services around the products that they support, and kind of in that ecosystem as well. And the second thing that we did is we reached out to some and said, Hey, we would like to have regular content every week about these types of topics, would you be interested in having a relationship with us where we paid you to generate content as well. So we get both, we get the free? And then we also do some of the paid video content.

Super smart setup. I love it. So looking at the other side of the coin, what were some of the things you guys did that you're like, Oh, I wish we didn't do that. That was that was a pretty tough time.

Yeah, you know, we we focus mainly, well, how we were reaching customers was two ways through the videos and through word of mouth. No marketing until this day, we don't have a marketing department, it's hard to believe everything happens through those channels and, and some social media awareness that we do that's there, I wish we would have started doing more social media awareness sooner, we've just found. It's just such a big market. And such an easy way to tap into, I give you an example. We're I just started a 30 day blog series. And I think I'm on day seven, where I'm talking about all things, no code, and just educating people around what no code means and the players that are in the space that's there. In the first six blogs that we did, we had, I think, as of today, like 83,000 impressions, those are free. Any of that, that's just on LinkedIn. That's not any of the other channels where we're cutting the content up. Now internally and pacing that back back out, I'm just finding that that is so effective to reach the audience that we have, for us specifically without needing to do paid ads, in that case, to go after those same people. And then we'll follow that up with them, once we kind of get them kind of in our ecosystem will have different ways that will follow up. But it's been a great way just to bring people into the ecosystem, and not just customers, partners and integration partners, as well. I've started reaching out to us saying, Hey, we would love to integrate with your product, here's what we could do and the joint value that we could have for our joint customers that are there. And that just expands our network and our partners network at the same time. So we find a lot of value in that as well.

We love that. It's fantastic. So if you think about your company, looking ahead, what are some of the areas of innovation and growth that you're envisioning for smartsuite in the coming years?

Yeah, I can tell you everybody's talking about this. But AI has just exploded within our customer base in a couple of different ways. The primary aspect is around content creation. So thank you, if you're a marketing agency, and you're using our product to manage the creation of content around marketing and interaction with your customers, you'd go in and write the blogs inside of our or their articles inside of our product, you know that you share with your customers? Well now we built AI into that to make it super easy. So now you can use AI to help do that based on keywords or longtail keywords and audience and tone and you know even the language, maybe I want this in four different languages that are a little different when I send it out. So our customers have went just crazy with understanding how to use chat. GBT type prompts inside of a product like smartsuite to generate content across every aspect. So we have product managers and product teams that are writing requirements for new features. A lot of the time those features have been created and other products and ChatGPT could help you do the research help you actually write the initial spec can even come up with a list of action items to Start with to start the planning process. That's there. Some cases that could take days, Chet GPT could help you do that sometimes in 10 minutes, like it's a tremendous time savings. The second part that we're seeing is people that have data and smartsuite are saying now, can you help me understand what I'm seeing in this data, so maybe I have 1000 records on the sales side. And I just have all kinds of different accounts all over the world, different sizes of companies, and it made me say, Hey, I just want to break this up and look at the cohorts. And help me understand where my most profitable customers are coming from. Maybe it shows you the list. Now, you could say, Okay, what's the most effective way to market to this particular segment of people? Maybe that I'm going after? If you have other data on the marketing side, you could do the same thing? Like, where am I seeing the biggest bang for the buck on my marketing spend right now, so maybe I want to put the pedal down on that. But hold back and another area that's there. So two ways content creation, and then data analytics. As far as AI?

I love that genius stuff. What advice would you have for other early stage software leaders who are looking to grow and scale and get to a good level?

Yeah, that's kind of a, I think we could spend a day on that particular topic. But I probably go back to what I said first, which is, you know, follow the customer. You know, my first customer had Archer, you know, I was the CEO of a company and I went to their location for about two months and work with him every day to see how just to see how they were going to use our product. They put me in a closet with two interns. And I'm not joking, it was a closet, they turned into a little office. And I'll never forget the interns looking at me saying, now tell me what you do. Again, I'm like, I'm the CEO of this company. But what I learned from Paul, was that I gained so much information, being with the customer for a period of time, that allowed me to go back and say, This is exactly what we're building and why like, I'm not, this isn't something I just thought of that we need to test out. I've been there, I understand what they need. I've seen it firsthand, I know what to build. So I encourage every entrepreneur to find those early customers. And it doesn't mean you have to be on site with him for two months. You know, in today's world, you don't do that as much, but you need to be connected with them as frequently as you can through through video.

I love it. Well, Jon, this has been great. I really appreciate you coming in and sharing all this information. I love your your follow the customer mantra. How can our audience learn more about you and SmartSuite?

Yeah, we'd love for you to come to our website, SmartSuite.com, we have a free 14 day trial. So you can just click go through the process, we'll ask you what areas of interest that you might have, meaning what types of processes we could help you with. And then we'll load some sample processes. So you can just click and start playing like there, you don't have to build anything, it's just right there. After two weeks, if you're if you're not ready, that you would want to purchase the product that that automatically moves you to our free plan. So it's just free forever. Until you determine that maybe you find value, then you can move into one of our paid plans. If you wanted to talk with me directly. Probably LinkedIn is probably the easiest way if you would just send me you know, connect with me and then send me a DM.

Okay, perfect. And we'll put all that into the show notes. So if you're watching or listen, and you'll be able to see that there. But Jon, this is awesome. Thanks so much for coming in.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks, man.

Absolutely. And thank you guys out there for watching. I really appreciate it. Hope you enjoy this. Hope you got a lot of value out of it. Again, make sure you're subscribed to the show so you do not miss anything that we have coming up. That's it for this time, and we'll see you next time. Take care.

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