Minna Technologies CMO, Christoffer Pettersson, Explains the Advantages of Starting B2C and then Pivoting to B2B

Episode 18 March 05, 2020 00:42:58
Minna Technologies CMO, Christoffer Pettersson, Explains the Advantages of Starting B2C and then Pivoting to B2B
The Breakout Growth Podcast
Minna Technologies CMO, Christoffer Pettersson, Explains the Advantages of Starting B2C and then Pivoting to B2B

Mar 05 2020 | 00:42:58

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Show Notes

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Christoffer Pettersson, CMO of Minna Technologies, a SaaS product for banks. The product empowers banks to make recommendations to their customers of ways to save on recurring subscription fees.  

Initially, Minna Technologies focused on offering this functionality directly to consumers but over time realized the best way to monetize was via banks.  However, because of their early B2C efforts, Minna Technologies was able to really refine their user experience based on a deep understanding of consumer behavior. They continue to maintain a direct to consumer user base as a “sandbox” for driving improvements in both the product and the way customers engage with the product.  

This direct to consumer sandbox overcomes one of the largest challenges of working in a B2B banking environment, which is understandably a low risk tolerance.  By the time a bank wants to consider rolling out an improvement, Minna Technologies can present data showing that it really is an improvement.  

In the conversation, Sean and Christoffer also discussed the typical communication challenges of growing a team from 5 people to 55 people. They explored how to use both a North Star Metric and OKRs to help drive alignment and coordinate execution cross-functionally.  

Learn more about CMO Christoffer Pettersson at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christofferpetterssongbg/

Learn more about Sean Ellis at www.SeanEllis.me

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> Speaker 1 00:03 <inaudible> Speaker 2 00:08 grim to the breakout growth podcast where Sean Ellis interviews leaders from the world's fastest growing companies to get to the heart of what's really driving their growth. And now here's your host, Sean Ellis. Speaker 3 00:23 All right. In this episode we'll look at Nina technologies, a SAS product that aims to help banks save you money. So I'm speaking with the COO, Christopher Peterson, and he explains that the business was initially built as a B to C company serving consumers directly and then later pivoted to a B2B business. Uh, so it's actually the same thing that we saw in my recent interview with Mike Volpi, the CEO of lola.com. They had also pivoted from a B to C travel platform to a B to B travel platform. And I'm thinking that this might just be a great new playbook for how to build B2B SAS businesses. So you're able to cuss dev directly with the end users, make sure that you really nail in that end user experience. Right. And then in the case of Mina, they actually maintain an end user customer base of about 150,000 customers who they then can use as a sandbox and continue to iterate and drive improvements in the product. Also how they grow the product and the, in their case, they're going to have pretty risk averse banks that they're working with. So they can get a lot of that learning without having to do it via the bank and then use that data to roll out those improvements and to the bank's customers. But they're doing it in a way that it's already been vetted and proven in a low risk way. So I think there's a lot here. So let's go ahead and get started. Speaker 5 01:50 Hey Christopher, welcome to the breakout growth podcast. Thank you Sean. So really excited to have you on. Um, so before we dig into, uh, how you're approaching growth, can you give us a quick explanation of what Mina technologies is all about? Sure. Uh, may not technologies. We're a B to B tech scale up and we have offices in Sweden and London and uh, yeah. Basically what we do is we help retail banks to build better customer experiences by adding subscription management functionality to their mobile banking applications. And, uh, yeah, through this, the banking customer can get an overview of what subscription stay pay for as such as they can see, you know, review of, you know, the pay for the Netflix, um, digital streaming services in general telco product, gym memberships, and you name it. Uh, and then they get, uh, they can then choose to either counselor's subscription or switch to a better one with a click of a button and it's perfect. And, um, for the, um, uh, by offering subscription management, the banks will always look at happier customers. So we're, uh, we're a B to B to C company. If you could phrase it right like that. Speaker 5 03:02 Is there something that the bank customer ops in for or do they automatically get it when they, when they sign up for the banking services? So, um, when, when we implement our product into a bank, uh, the bank will put us in as a feature in their mobile banking app. And so, but it's an optional feature or they automatically get it. Are they, in most cases, they automatically get it much like you have your transactions or you have any other services. So it's in the value adding service to the kind of the core functional audit functionality that you normally find in a bank. Okay. And then how, I don't need to know exactly how much, but how, how do you charge for your services? So yeah, we, we shard, uh, licenses a yearly, so it depends on the bank. You know, obviously if they have 2 million customers, the license will be higher, but, but we sell licenses. Speaker 5 03:54 Okay. So that's, but it's, it's somewhat based on the number of customers that they have is where the w is what sets that price. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's mainly driven by that. Okay. And then, um, I know before we, before we decided to do this interview that you had touched on a little bit of what your journey was to product market fit the company. So it'd be great if you could share that with the listeners of how, where you started and how you ended up what you're doing now. Yeah, sure. So our product market fit is really the journey from, you know, going from a B to C application and going into B2B. So to explain this really, I think we need to, to go back four years ago when we started as a B to C standalone application here in Sweden. Uh, and, uh, we're offering an app on, on app store and Google play. Speaker 5 04:46 And already from the start we were pretty, pretty good at meeting users, uh, in person and asking them about what frustrated, frustrated them most about managing their subscriptions. And based on that, we then developed, uh, what is today our main features, which is, uh, one feature called identity identify counsel and improve. So, yeah, and so for us within a year from start within scale, our user base pretty quickly from 5,000 to 150,000 users. So we, we asked users questions, uh, like how disappointed would you be if we removed the, for instance, our council council feature improved feature from yap tomorrow and then we pretty pretty quickly could figure out what, what features they liked and didn't like around subscription management. Um, and, uh, we, uh, we added period, we also integrated a, uh, a growth team where we focused on high time for AB testing. So then we learned a lot about, you know, what correlated what user behavior correlated with high retention for instance, and stuff like that. Speaker 5 05:50 But long story short, when we hit about 150,000 users, we got approached by one of the biggest banks in who said that, you know, they like what they do and they could see this value being part of their mobile banking app. And, uh, yeah, we hadn't really thought about being a B to B company, but when we looked at the business case, uh, it made more sense for us to go B to B actually and partner up with a bank. And that way we could scale faster through the bank rather than, uh, you know, bootstrapping it from, from start and, and acquiring all of these users from, from, from ads for instance. Yeah. Speaker 3 06:26 Yeah. I mean, the fact that you went from, you know, or went to about 150,000 users in a relatively short period of time, it must have been hard to step back from that B to C business. Speaker 5 06:38 I mean, it, it does, uh, it, it was, but we're still kind of having it as our sandbox. So we're, we're playing around with that when it comes to new innovation. And so we're constantly levering our standalone application, uh, and the KPIs we produce there in our sales conversations. So it's great to prove our value proposition. So that's actually one of the, you know, it's one of the biggest USPS to have that going into a conversation with a bank. Speaker 3 07:06 Yeah. I think especially because I'm sure that the banks are not gonna want you to be experimenting on their customers. And so I think that's, that's one of the benefits of you're able to still maintain some, some part of the BDC business. So you, you have it, you're just not trying to grow it Speaker 5 07:22 or what, how does that work? Yeah, well, so we have it still. Uh, so it's, uh, it's actually growing quite quickly, organically, which is, uh, it's actually quite funny to see. But really the love we put in is in the banking product we sell to the banks. So, uh, we, we can't really motivate given that we have limited amount of time. We can't really motivate spending time on the stand alone. But I think internally it's a passion project. And whenever we have hackathons or, or similar time when we can free up time on other products, people jump in there and have fun, you know? Speaker 3 07:55 Uh huh. So what would you say then that the really the BTB is just the primary channel that you're focused on, but you're, but you are both B to B and B to C. it's just that kind of the longterm you're looking to double down and just keep focusing on the B2B. Speaker 5 08:11 Yeah, exactly. We're, we're a hundred percent focused on the B2B and we, when we go out to investors and pitch our business, it's all about B2B. That's, that's how we make money. And the kind of, the reason why we went from <inaudible> to C to B to B was that, um, monetizing our app and scaling the company, uh, you know, in line with our dreams and what we want to do. That that was kind of hard to be, to be, uh, it was, it was a better choice actually. Speaker 3 08:38 So it's interesting is because I interviewed the CEO of lola.com pretty recently and they have also gone the, the approach where they launched a B to C travel platform and then, and then realized quickly that the opportunity was more B2B. But the, the initial, uh, I think approach on the Bita seaside meant that they, they really understood the end user needs well. And that became one of the big values that they had in, in approaching their B to B customers is that they, they could really serve those end users well. Would you say that's, that's probably a big advantage for you guys? Speaker 5 09:16 Well, yeah. Well exactly. You know, the, the benefit of being, being a small, a smaller company coming from B is that you're so fast in innovating and figuring out what works and what doesn't work. And when you go to an incumbent, you know, an incumbent bank and or any big company, they, they're not really organized to be fast and innovative in that way. So having that in your back, having the knowledge, you know, more of, you know, it's also a matter of, I think we speak a lot to the end users that that's what we like to do. Um, if you look at the people working for us, we're all passionate about really the end user. Of course we care about our bank partners, but everyone working for us is really passionate about making a difference for the, for the end consumer. Yeah. So yeah, having that we do and being fast and really agile, I think that that helps a lot in the B2B context. Speaker 3 10:11 Finding product market fit is a, is a challenge for any business. How, how confident are you that you actually have product market fit now? And what makes you think so? Speaker 5 10:21 Yeah, so I mean, uh, we're super confident in our business case of course, but, but it's, it's, um, it's, it's, uh, you can never really know for sure, but, but we're quite confident in that subscription management is something that banks wants for the future. So if you look at the subscription economy and that more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon to going from having a more of a physical product to a subscription based offering. We're pretty, pretty certain in that that's a mega trend, a mega macro trend that's gonna continue and just grow, grow more and more. So, and, and with that, we see that more banks are putting in subscription management in their roadmaps. And so we're really in this, you know, perfect scenario where we started many, many years ago before this was maybe a topic and, and, and now everyone's talking about it. And we have a track record with data and a lot of products that can actually satisfy the end user's problem. So we had been obsessing a lot about, you know, what problems do people experience around subscriptions. Yeah. And then you're able to, Speaker 3 11:25 you're able to see that they remain engaged after, after they use the functionality in the, in the bank's app. You're able to see that they keep using it or how do you, you know, if it were a direct consumer business, you would, you'd really be able to track that. I know sometimes the, um, just even European, uh, privacy laws and other things make it, make it hard to kind of see what's happening inside the app. Um, are, are you able to optimize to, to make sure that, that it's not just sort of dead functionality, their app. Exactly. Speaker 5 11:54 So, you know, that's a really interesting question. And, and what we do, we're pretty, we're pretty, um, we're pretty clear with the banks we work with in that we're going to keep working as a B to C company. So we, we bring tools like mixed panel, Google optimize the whole kit, pretty much for us to the same, the same setup we have to, to, to uh, to run a B to C a app, a standalone app. And we put it all in there because, you know, a bank is a closed environment and, and one banks, customers might not be exactly similar to another bank's customer. So whatever drives for attention might be slightly different. But I gotta tell you so far it's pretty, it's pretty homogeneous in what's, you know, what type of, uh, user value drives retention. Interesting. Yeah. And then I also assume that from a company perspective, I mean, we've touched on that having that B to C background in, in the business means that you're probably more in tune with those end user needs. Speaker 5 12:52 But serving B2B customers does require a bit of a cultural and process shift. What's that been like if you guys been able to make that transition pretty well? Yeah. I mean, we also picked, we didn't just pick any B2B customers. We think the Laura has companies in the world, right? Yeah. So I mean, for us, uh, I would lie if it, if it would've been an easy transition, you know, the, the requirements banks put on us when it comes to, to security and compliance and regulations and all of that. I think that's been tough, but it feels also like we have that now. So we, for us, it was like a threshold where we needed to, everyone needed to focus on that. Like, let's get all the licenses we need. And from that we can just, you know, continue leveraging the BDC, uh, uh, uh, you know, insights and the knowledge and how to really build a product. Speaker 5 13:46 So, yeah, obviously it's selling to large organizations. Uh, it's a new thing. Uh, but yeah, and we can maybe come back to that when it comes to sales later, but that's, that's also, you know, uh, some, something different. Right, right. So, so I think that is a, a pretty good transition to, to looking at, I mean, you showed some of the growth numbers with me earlier. Um, you're definitely on a very fast growth pace. What do you think has been the key to driving that growth up to this point? I think that banks really are, they have understood that banks have understood that they need to be more innovative and they're, they're making a lot of focus on, uh, you know, upgrading their digital customer experience. And so we find it pretty easy to actually get meetings with banks and, and, and initiate conversations about what we can do. Speaker 5 14:39 And we have some good traction from our first partnership, which, you know, generated a great, uh, success case you can say. And that, that really, um, that really made it, uh, easy for us, continue conversations with more banks and, and generally it's just a momentum going in the, in the banking industry right now to, to, to get to upgrade the customer experience, if that makes sense. Yep. And so I mean that w as you say that it sounds to me that's kind of that at least value proposition, market fit, whether it's product market fit on the back end, which sounds like it also is, but just just the fact that what their priorities are right now in terms of, uh, innovation and, and better customer service, uh, B being able to have a solution that really aligns with what what they care about right now at least get you on the door with, is that a good, good explanation? Speaker 5 15:31 Yeah, for sure. Exactly. And then, and then for us, I mean for them, for them allowing partners into their platform is something new. So for us it's mostly about showing, showing we understand them and then once they feel that they can trust us, uh, they're very open actually to initiating. Many banks are very open to initiating FinTech partnerships. So it's super exciting actually. Yeah. But I have to assume that at the end of the day they're still banks. And so there's probably a pretty long sales cycle. What, how have you dealt with that? Uh, yeah, it is longer sales cycles. So, I mean, we, we have adapting to the, to, to the, uh, to whatever it is. Yeah. So it's probably a six to 12 month sales cycle with, uh, depending on the, the, uh, how big the bank is. <inaudible> yeah. So that's compared to the consumer world of, of rapid AB testing and, and moving on a dime, six to 12 months, sales cycles are going to be probably quite a bit. Speaker 5 16:30 Uh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, you know, in six minutes if it works right, if they never come back, but, but bags is something different. But the good thing about working with banks is they're very loyal to the partnerships and once you initiate a partnership, it's, it's pretty stable usually. Um, Oh, that's good. From what I know. Yeah. That's good. And then what, what would you say are, are some of the biggest growth challenges that you faced and what have you done to overcome those? And scaling a company from five to 55 people is pretty, uh, that's pretty tough. Uh, in terms of, uh, you know, being five people around the table talking about what we're going to do to being 55 people and be, you know, staying efficient and productive, that that has been, that's one of the challenges we've had. Uh, you can say. Speaker 5 17:18 Yup. Yup. No, that makes sense. And so let's, let's talk about some of the organization then and just how, how you guys are organized, um, and really starting with you. So as CMO, what would, what is the scope of your responsibility? Yeah, so, uh, my role has, over the years it has, um, it has shifted from being, initially I was the head of growth, uh, focusing a lot about on the product and driving. I actually managed the growth team, but today my main responsibilities are to oversee our external communication and make life easier for sales a lot of the time. So basically making sure we're targeting the right stakeholders, um, in banks with the relevant content and really driving the leads and helping the sales team to, to, uh, uh, yeah, just succeed. Yep. Speaker 3 18:08 And so, so why do you no longer have a growth team then as it really just, just that, that marketing function and sales, Speaker 5 18:16 uh, much, much like a lot of the, uh, companies that once had a growth team, so it has moved out to the product teams. Uh, so the, it's the, it's the product owners who manage the experiments right now, uh, and experimentation. So th so they're doing that in parallel with, you know, other work that might not be, uh, growth related, if you could say it like that. Speaker 3 18:39 Yeah. So, so actually on that note, something that you touched on earlier, because you still have the, the B to C kind of sandbox, as you called it. Um, when you figure out something that works better to, to say drive engagement in the product, are you able to just roll it out to all of your, your, uh, partner interfaces or do you kind of use that data to explain this is why it's going to be better for your end users? And then once they sign off, you'd be, you push the update? How does that generally work? Speaker 5 19:09 So, yeah, we, we, we're not, we're not rolling it out per default to all the, to all the customers, but, but what we do as a part of a partnership, uh, where we are having this, you know, weekly conversations about the product and how it performs. And so it becomes this really interesting meeting where we bring them into a room and we actually just present the data. Like, look, this is what we have found during last month. We tested 30 experiments and this is really the learnings. And then we ask if they're prepared to, you know, upgrade or, or I just, um, add that new experience to their customers, to their current experience, uh, to apply it. Or if they, for whatever reason, would, would want to wait a little bit. So it kind of depends what we, what we test obviously. Right. And depending on the bank, they might have different, they might have different perspectives on, uh, on a branding perspective. Some of them are less reluctant to go away from, you know, the ideal journey they have. Uh, and so, but some of them are really, I've said most of them are really, uh, they really listening and look into the data and appreciating that we can prove something with data. Speaker 3 20:19 Yeah. I kept, well I can imagine that for them they really don't have that sandbox opportunity as much. So being able to have at least a part of their product experience, being able to have, uh, an area where you can keep driving that improvement in, in an environment that's a little more flexible than you would have in a, Speaker 5 20:35 you know, kind of banking app. Exactly. And exactly. And what, and what we do also for them, because if they initiate experiments in their own environment, they're taking a little bit of a risk. They're taking a brand risk and take a risk in. It can be many different risks. So, so us doing the experiment is sort of a controlled environment and packaging it and calming your window on a silver platter that, that allows them to reduce the risk they take, but still get the, they can sort of, uh, eat the cake and still have it. Speaker 3 21:05 Right. Right. For sure. So you mentioned that, that you've been, uh, that, that the company has grown from five to 55 people and uh, you know, in the big picture, obviously someday you want to be a thousand or 10,000 person company, um, or at least most startups and scale ups do. Uh, but I have found in my own experience that that transition from, you know, that that kind of early growth transition is where you're figuring out the most stuff and it's a, it can definitely be challenging. Your, your, like you mentioned you've got five people sitting around a table, it's pretty easy to make decisions and stay on the same page. How, how important and how challenging has it been to, to kind of stay aligned cross-functionally as the organization has grown? Speaker 5 21:50 Well, I mean it's always a challenge when you're growing a think either way. Uh, I think, you know, partly is just informing people about what's going on becomes a challenge. Like everyone this having the same information. Uh, that was something when I, so I was the, I was the fifth person in admin and there was never a problem in the beginning. And I never thought the information sharing would, would be the one of the largest problems that we all have the same picture of the world. So, but, but I think we have done a really great job to align the company around. So we have, we've taken a approach where we have autonomous teams and, and um, we have aligned ourselves around Oak, yours, and we have this, we have this set up now where we can be super efficient since each teams has their own, uh, key results they're hunting for. But still we find a lot of opportunities for cross team collaboration and talking about, you know, our mission and connecting to our mission and aligning around what we're doing. Um, sort of, uh, so, but, but I think for, I know that you like the North star metric, uh, having that as an approach. Um, but for us, really, Oak ERs have been super successful. Um, Speaker 3 23:05 yeah. And then so, so, but you're familiar with the North star metrics? So has that been a specific decision that the we, we don't want to have one ongoing persistent metric. It's always going to be okay. Ours. Speaker 5 23:17 Uh, so I think that when we were a B to C we had more of a North star thinking because now we can align all the product teams around one metric, but it's hard to get sales to be motivated I think by a product metric and vice versa. Having the, having the product teams, uh, motivated by a sales metrics. So we have ended up in a situation where the product, the product part of the company sort of aligned around one, one metric really. But then you have the sales organization, obviously a customer service organization that I'm more focusing on. Like customer service is more focused on SLS, keeping up, you know, service level agreement while sales is more focused on, you know, uh, signing deals, getting ARR. Yep. Yep. Speaker 3 24:04 But at the end of the day, wouldn't you say, I mean, you did touch on the mission and <inaudible>. How would you describe the mission for <inaudible>? Speaker 5 24:11 Yeah. We, our mission is to bring power to the modern consumer. Um, so it's a pretty short mission. Um, and everyone, again, as I said initially, everyone is super focused about the end user and really passionate about, you know, creating a change in the world rather than a few of us are motivated to, you know, earn money and make an exit. That's not really what we're in it for. Speaker 3 24:35 Yeah. So, but so I have read some of the press on, on the business and one of the, uh, the, the things that I saw was, was numbers around money saved by your customers, by the end user, customers of the bank or, or the people who are actually using the functionality that you're building. And that feels really aligned with what the mission when you agree. Speaker 5 24:56 Exactly. Yeah. It's a really good value to keep tracking and people get motivated about that internally. But that's also something that the banks feel that they can align around and say, Hey, this is closely connected to our mission as well, which makes it, it makes it really clear that we should be B to B, uh, with, with banks when we, when we see look at that number and it obviously being in an environment where they have a lot of users, that number becomes pretty quickly. It accumulates quite much. Speaker 3 25:27 Absolutely. And so why wouldn't, why wouldn't something like that be a good North star metric that essentially gets everyone, gets everyone kind of gives more meaning in the day to day work and then the, okay, ours are essentially serving that function and so is and all the other, all the other kind of uh, siloed goals should, should all serve that purpose of saving customers money and being able to better manage those subscriptions. Speaker 5 25:53 Yeah. Right. So I completely agree with you and maybe I can explain a little bit more how we work. So we have a, we have a company company key result on driving actions and actions internally is defined by the number of customers who either cancel a subscription but, but also customers who improve a subscription, who switched from maybe, um, one telco product to, to a better telco product or, and by doing that, they're saving money. So that's an important part of our value offering as well. And that's, that's how we can come with a, uh, say to the banks that we can help them get a new revenue stream as well. So we're combining both of them into soften, we call actions internally. Uh, and then, and then when we look in mixed panel, you can see that the people who actually perform an action, it doesn't really matter what they are way more likely to return within 30 days. Right. Speaker 3 26:49 And that makes sense. And I think also the, just the idea of, as, as you said, like the banks in saving their customers money. I mean that's most people when they think about my, my bank, they're, they're thinking, okay, how do I minimize my transaction costs and and have a safe place to keep my money? But they're not really thinking now the banks actually going to help me optimize my spending and actually save. So I can see how that can be a pretty valuable value proposition. So again, I'm not going to necessarily try to sell the value of the North star metric but I'll do it anyway. I guess I am going to try to, I just fit, to me it feels like maybe it's not as big a deal when you're at 50 employees, but when you're at 500 or 5,000 employees having each individual in the business having context to their day to day work that we're really working to help individuals be smarter about where they could be wasting money right now. Speaker 3 27:46 And we're measuring progress against that. And then everything else that we're doing in the business are the sort of short term opportunities to to boost that. And so that, that's where the OKR is maybe on a, on a quarterly basis or, or longer. But these are the levers that I personally control, that help us bring in more customers who can save more money and we do that via the banks. But to me, I do think a North star metric that aligns with mission is just so powerful and bringing day to day context to the work and, and helping people align around driving real progress against that, that company mission that, uh, I would highly recommend considering it anyway. Speaker 5 28:24 Yeah. I mean I, I get motivated by just hearing you saying that and I think we will need to, I think we, I, I wasn't going to bring that back to my organization and talk about it, but it feels like kind of we're doing it. Um, maybe, maybe you don't like this way of expressing the North star metric, but it feels like we're doing it without talking about it maybe, which is kind of, yeah, Speaker 3 28:43 I think it's us. It's that depersonalization. When you say actions, just like I work my butt off to drive actions, actions just doesn't have any emotional appeal to it even though it's almost the same thing to me. Something that that re relates more directly to the mission. I think there's just so much power in, in getting the team motivated and aligned and pulling in the same direction and that's where, that's where real real, uh, I think, um, progress and, and, and momentum starts to build in the business. Speaker 5 29:13 I like what you're saying. I'm going to pitch that internally and I can add to that. We have a, we have a Slack channel, which, uh, which we call, I think we call it testimonials and it's only where we place a user end user feedback about, you know, them praising our app and saying, you know, I saved this amount of money and you helped me discover this subscription. I didn't know I had, now I could cancel it, but just a click of a button instead of actually calling to the service provider and like people thanking us. And I think that's, I know people get their inspiration and energy from that channel. It's like magical. Yeah. Speaker 3 29:49 And I think especially like younger people in the workforce more and more, they're just looking for meaning in the work where, you know, maybe maybe people have been working for 20 years, they're, they're okay just with a job. And you know, I think probably people who have been working for a long time would like to have meaning in their work as well. But it's becoming more of a, uh, more of a requirement for, for the next generation of workers to, to really feel like they're doing something important. And um, you know, the more that you can keep tying back to mission, the more that, that people feel excited about what they're doing day to day in the, in the business. We talked about that when you were, when you were B to C, you were doing probably a lot more kind of the AB testing and learning that kind of test learn process that uh, B to C companies are pretty well known for. How, how do you discover new ways in, in your business as it is today to, um, to accelerate growth? What's the, what's that process look like? Speaker 5 30:47 We have never stopped experimenting. So it doesn't really matter what part of the business you look at. We constantly experiment, constantly challenge ourselves with hypothesis and trying to take whatever we do to the next level. So for me, it's just the normal thing we do to continue challenging growth and, and, and really, if you're not growing, you're dying, right? So I, I don't think there's a middle ground where we ever will be satisfied by saying, Oh, now we have proven, you know, product market fit, uh, you know, we made it, now we're just going to sell this, sell this exact product over and over again. So, I mean, we have, we have a tough competition. And innovation is just, you know, the speed of innovation in banking now with a lot of investment money going in is just ramping up. So, I mean, it's just innovator die pretty much. So, yeah, it could be any part of our business. And we're innovating, you know, if you were to look at my day to day, you're right now working with a lot of ads and doing a lot of account based marketing. I'm constantly experimenting with messages, with different experiences and noting how people react and seeing how that affects this and that and the other. Speaker 3 31:59 Yeah. So I'm interested in how like account based marketing fits in. So you mentioned that you're, you're doing a lot of kind of content development and so the marketing has shifted more to like, uh, like content and lead gen. and then how does, how does account based marketing fit in with that? Speaker 5 32:19 Yeah, so I mean, uh, when it comes to to, uh, account based marketing where we're kind of, we're looking at rather than than collecting leads from any type of bank in the world, we're trying to flip it around and saying what banks have key initiatives that align with ours. And we tried to invest in, in targeting that account. Uh, so we, so we, we, uh, I mean we have long sales cycles and if you really look at how deal is done in banking, it's in a large bank, you might have 20 stakeholders that's gonna put there just to a decision before it becomes a deal. And so, so we really need to target those stakeholders with relevant content that fits their KPIs. So it's basically 20 different KPIs. We need to make sure we're taking off boxes. And any one of these people really in theory have a veto, like a, a, it's an in a bank is everything from people working with compliance really want to make sure that our product is compliant with the regulations, their help, uh, upon against. Speaker 5 33:25 So, so we really need to understand the bank. We really need to show them that, you know, we understand how you work and make them, make them trust us. Uh, when we started, we thought that we're gonna just going to go in and prove the, the, the, the user value and they're going to be excited. But then they, you know, we learned a lot from our first bank partnership with them saying, you know, giving us basically a laundry list of stuff we haven't thought about, which we obviously today know a lot about. I would say we're pretty good at this today. Um, but, but it was way more complex than, than we thought it was initially. Speaker 3 33:59 Yeah. So, so when I was looking on the site, I noticed that, um, you, you offer kind of free access to the API in a test environment, um, at what stage do they generally start kind of playing around with the product to see, see how they might integrate with it? Yeah, I think it's, Speaker 5 34:19 I think it depends on the bank. Um, but, but normally, normally we, we actually, I mean, we like to open up our API for them to, to as early as possible to see what tech we have and what they're dealing with. Because usually a bank have technical, um, they have, they have technical limitations depending on the bank. And, and larger bank will typically have older tech and they're very eager to see like how, how would our APIs actually work with their API, uh, and such as, as soon as possible really. But normally, normally we don't talk to maybe the technical people in the beginning, not the, not the dev people. So whenever it's time for a developer from their side coming in and looking in our solution to evaluate, you know, do we have an, have a technical fit there. So that's where we want to open up. So, so yeah, we're experimenting with actually letting people into our APIs. Speaker 3 35:15 Yeah. And then so, so it's a good point that like maybe the, the technical people are later in the process. So what, what would be the role where, where, where the initial contact would normally be made? Speaker 5 35:27 Um, so the initial contact, I think banks have people who are working with scouting FinTech partnerships. And so we're trying to, we're trying to initially talk to the people who are responsible for bringing in new technology and evaluating, you know, FinTech partnerships and trying, so that, that will be people who are either innovation leads or people who are product leads, trying to see what fits with our product roadmap. And so for us, it's super exciting to bring a completely new value go. We're basically coming with something they've never heard about and uh, and, and them evaluating whether that would fit with the, you know, their product roadmap. So yeah, product people, innovation people in the beginning. Speaker 3 36:12 And then once, let's say you, okay, you've closed the deal. You're, you're in the door on the, on the bank and you, you mentioned that generally it's, uh, the end users aren't, aren't kind of signing up for this, it's just sort of automatically added there. But how does, how does the bank get the word out to the end users? Speaker 5 36:32 This new functionality has been added. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I say they leverage their marketing department quite much. And, uh, as part of the partnership and we go in and work with a bank, we, we give them all the, basically all the learnings we have from a B to C context. So we can be as granular as giving them a set here, here's 20, 20 ads that works and they can put their branding on it and uh, you know, tweak it to their preferences. But mostly they will be able to replicate a lot of the communication to the, to the end users that we already have used. So, so they could pretty much sell a feature much like you would sell an app on the app store within the realm back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3 37:16 So I'd say, again, it comes back to that test environment that you have where you can bring some data to the table and saying you could go through your own testing and optimizing how to get the word out. But here's, here's the headstart, here's, here's what we already know. Works pretty well. Speaker 5 37:30 Exactly. And, and, and, and also for us building really a niche feature in their, in their bank where we know that we are not their main focus, they have a lot of multiple focuses. So us helping them to do research and presenting, you know, giving them good material that can pretty cool that they could pretty quickly apply that makes their job, you know, much more easy. Speaker 3 37:52 Yeah. And then have you found much, uh, much sort of bank to bank? You know, so one bank sees another bank doing this and they, they say, you know, that you get kind of inbound from that or innovation people from one bank move to another bank. Has there been much a much sort of adoption driven that way? Speaker 5 38:12 Um, yes. Uh, I would say yes and no. I say banks are pretty good too, you know, uh, they're pretty good to figure out what their competitors are up to. Um, they, they pay close attention to each other. But sometimes when we go with a bank in a market, we might have, um, uh, we might have exclusivity or rather the bank might have exclusivity on our services. So I don't think it's their interest to have referrals that way. Speaker 3 38:37 Right. I wondered about that. If it's kind of a differentiating set of functionality, then uh, then once everybody has it, it's not so differentiating anymore. Speaker 5 38:46 Do you know me as CMO, I would love that if they referred us to others, but it hasn't really worked out that way yet. Speaker 3 38:53 Okay. But some of them are even pushing for exclusivity. So I guess that would be the opposite of that. Yeah, I kind of, yeah, probably I assume they have to pay heavy for that though. They do. Yeah. Okay. So, um, this has been great. This is, um, I, I feel like I've got a really good handle on how you guys are approaching growth and, um, but I am curious when you, when you look at, um, that, that journey from five people in the company to, to 55 today, what, what do you feel like you understand about growth now that maybe you didn't understand nearly as well a couple of years ago? Speaker 5 39:28 Um, so I think I, as you know, that's a really good question. I have thought about that. I mean, I mean mainly for us, looking at our journey, I learned that, you know, you can really take, again, coming back to this B2B concept, uh, you know, taking whatever works in a BDC contact and apply it in, in BTBY. And for me it's, um, yeah, it's like Brophy is a universal thing. And you know, I daily find inspiration from other companies, from other BDC companies I could look at Spotify or could look at Klarna. I could look at any company who is quite similar in the way they organize themselves in their mindset. And I can see ideas, I can immediately apply in my B2B account based marketing approach. So yeah, I don't know, so much of what I, what I learned, I didn't know, but I'm just, you know, I'm falling in love with growth more and more. Speaker 3 40:24 Yeah. Maybe it's just say there's that reminder that um, whatever context is in, people are still consumers and making decisions based on based on needs and emotions and fears and, and uh, B to C is kind of a, a more pure way of being able to test around that. So being able to look to it for some inspiration. Yeah. Spot on, Sean. Cool. Well, so yeah, I mean probably my biggest takeaway as I look at all of this is that you guys are at that transition point now where it's great that you've, that you've found the B to B as as kind of the real channel to be able to get this out quickly through through banks. And um, but I think as that organization grows, particularly given the complexity around B2B, um, meaning that generally there's more departments in a B2B kind of kind of, uh, business just cause you've got things like customer success and implementation and sales and things that you might not have in a, in a B-to-C environment that keeping that alignment over time and, and making it so that people just aren't mechanically executing their jobs. Speaker 3 41:33 Uh, B being able to, to bring meaning on the mission side, but sounds like you're doing really well, but being, if you can, if you can have sort of a shared metric that goes beyond the functional siloed metric goals that, um, people are, are typically pursuing, which are still really important. But those can be looked at in context to a broader shared metric that can be super powerful and keeping the team aligned when you move from 50 to 500 people. And beyond that. So that, that, that seems to be um, that the, the kind of where I see things ideally going from here, but the, you know, in the short term I can totally see how the, how the banks want to be able to provide this service. Uh, it's, it's not just we, we hold your money, but we help you, we help you better track how you spend your money and optimize how you spend your money. I think that's a really powerful value proposition for banks and it makes a ton of sense what you guys are doing. So congrats on all the success and looking forward to see where you take it from here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Speaker 1 42:36 <inaudible> Speaker 2 42:41 thanks for listening to the breakout growth podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform and while you're at it, subscribe. So you never miss a show until next week. Speaker 1 42:53 <inaudible>.

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