Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> Speaker 1 00:03 <inaudible> Speaker 2 00:08 come 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 00:24 All right. In today's episode, we're going to be looking at templates by which is a SAS solution that targets enterprises and helps them drive consistency and compliance in their brand and, and all of the compliance messages that they would put out across the company. They were recently ranked as one of the fastest growing SAS businesses in Europe and the fastest growing in Denmark. So clearly they're doing something right, even if the category they're in may not be as exciting as some of the businesses that we're looking at. I am really interested to dig in and see what are they doing to drive all of this growth in an enterprise targeted SAS business. So I know they're fans of a growth hacking approach. So the, especially a Casper Rushman who's the marketing lead that we'll be speaking with. And uh, and then Oscar Constantine is going to be looking at things from the product perspective. Hopefully through the conversation to speaking with both of these guys that we'll get a pretty good understanding of what their overall growth engine looks like and how, how they're driving these great results. And then hopefully I can also give them some ideas and tips on how they can accelerate even further. So let's start it. Speaker 5 01:40 All right. Welcome to the breakout growth podcast guys. Thank you. Thank you. And it's great to be here. Yeah, it's really good having you guys on. So before we jump into how you're approaching growth, why don't we start with you Oscar and you can let us, uh, understand or maybe you can explain a bit about what template is and what problem it solves. Yes, for sure. So what simplified does is basically we help big enterprises make sure that employees are always on brand legally compliant and all the documents they're creating and presentations and emails, they always personalized with a safe time. So in a nutshell, we help employers be more productive, more efficient while being compliant with latest company standards. And, uh, we did this at this in a SAS solution basically. So no matter where you are, what you're doing, um, you have access to all the new stuff you need. Speaker 5 02:37 Yeah. And then, and then what about your kind of typical target customer profile? So both kind of the accompany size and then the, then the main buyer inside that company. So the, via talking very heavily on enterprise customers activity via targeting, um, it's brand managers, it profiles their, it CEO's mainly all the people that are responsible of making sure that eh, company and appliers are on brand and leading aligned, but at the same time making sure that when they're doing these digital transformations so we can actually help them make sure that their office environments at get onto the cloud. They usually come from all kind of on prem installations and the systems that help them create the documents. But as people would get more on, bring your own device and go on the cloud, it's simply not there and we are helping them get there. Speaker 5 03:35 Yeah. Yeah. Small point to add here is that it's definitely the people who care about the brand. Those people are the ones who find templates by a lot. Interesting. So typically we start off the ones that have the real need are the people who can really solve this today. So typically brand managers in large enterprises, just imagine this scenario in your head. Like you roll out a new email signature and you have to roll it out to 50,000 people. Like we've all been there where some email goes around and goes like, Hey, uh, can you, uh, can you apply this even a signature? And, or Hey, can you please promise to use this template whenever you do a PowerPoint presentation or do a word document and it's not happening. Uh, and that's essentially what we solve. Speaker 3 04:18 Yeah. And an email signature seems like a good example of both the compliance side and the brand side. So the brand side and email signature needs to look consistent and be on brand. But I also notice a lot of companies, uh, especially like if they're in the legal space or something where they've got some legal E's language attached to their, to their, uh, to their signature as well. So I, I assume you handle both of those. Speaker 5 04:42 Exactly. That's exactly what we do. And then expanding it even more so that you don't have to concentrate out in the email signature alone. But when you need to update your legal text, for instance, all you get a new local because you've got a new identity, then it needs to update in one place and then it ultimately updated in your email signature in your documents, in your presentations, basically whatever they create across their whole organization. Great, great. So, Speaker 3 05:06 uh, as you, as you said, Oscar, that it's, it's very enterprise targeted and uh, being enterprise targeted, your, your price point's going to be relatively relatively high compared to a consumer product or, or a pro-sumer. And so I think the approach when you've got that high price is gonna be quite different than if you've got a super high velocity consumer business. I wanted to dig in a bit there. Um, I know you don't publicly list your pricing, but I was able to, uh, get an indication of price through your, uh, drift chat bot on the site. And, uh, and I see that it's in the several thousands of dollars a year as a, as a starting price. And I assume the average goes way higher than that. So I'm assuming that that pretty much every sale requires some, some human touch to, to get the, Speaker 6 05:58 uh, to get the sale closed. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. So our sales process is quite substantial. Uh, so what we typically look at is that when we get someone in from the first first point of contact, the earliest deals we make are between four and six months. On average. We have some deals at close faster, but, but usually we look at four to six months, some deals and some deals are even closer to a year or two years. And the reason is quite simple. Like it's easy to understand, like if when you, once you hear it, is that these are big enterprise sister, 50,000 people, there's a lot of stakeholders. So brand, let's say the marketing department brand manager decides this is a great idea, then it needs it approval. It need to be in board and need to be helping rolling it out. And then you need approval sometimes from the board members, even from the top level management of these companies. Right? So, so there's a lot of approval that needs to happen across and it gets literally rolled out on every PC in like every working computer with your employees in their company. So. Wow, Speaker 3 07:02 definitely. I think I would hate to be part of a company where the board of directors needs to approve some sales, but I'm sure none of those companies, it's not even joking. It's like for real, like sometimes the, we mean board of approval, uh, and sometimes it's just a, when it's family owned businesses, this is one guy you need to convince. But that's definitely a multitouch sale. And one where you've got to you to navigate a whole bunch of stakeholders is, as you were saying. So that sounds very different again, from from what you would typically see in a consumer business that's trying to use a growth hacking approach of, of experimenting across kind of the, the full customer journey around product and around marketing and really all of those customer touch points. Speaker 6 07:45 Do you think this, this growth hacking approach applies in an enterprise targeted business? Or is, is it modified somehow? What's, what's the real difference here? I think you hit the nail here. Hit it's a great question cause uh, cause essentially the whole idea of rapid experimentation is it's not at all impossible, but it's harder. It's just harder because we'll let, let me give you a good example. So right now I'm testing multiple different channels and I'm testing different copy and stuff. I can measure it on how many leads we get in. I can measure it in how many opportunities he creates. But I won't know for a fact in between four to six months from now if this campaign or whatever I did activity actually generated a customer. Right? So I have to, so we have to backtrack everything we do. It is possible and we do it like we do it across the board, but this extreme rapid experimentation on the whole funnel, that's hard to achieve sometimes. Yeah. And I think especially when you've got the, the touch components, uh, where you've got sales and customer success and kind of all, all of these different areas, it's really hard to have exact consistency in, in those touch points to be able to run experiments and improvement. And Speaker 3 08:56 where if it's all online, it's very easy to say, okay, this is the page everybody hits and it's the same experience and I'm going to test and an alternate to that. And so, so clearly it's, it's different. We've established that. What do you think has been the, the things that you've done really well that have, have gotten you to this point, the, the success that you've had to date and why don't we start with you Casper and then Oscar, you can build on anything he says. Speaker 6 09:20 So my, my, my main thing I keep saying to people when they ask me a question like this is how do we replicate simplifies model. It's a bit hard cause I think the main thing we've done right is that we have a really good product. So we have, so currently it's a bit of a blue ocean. There's not a lot of people who do this. So it's essentially we're be presented a solution to two people that didn't exist before. And this sounds very radical, but that is essentially what we've done. Um, so the main reason we've had we, we are where we are is because of this. With that said, we have done a lot of things on, on, on the audio side, on the backend to make sure we actually get where we want to be. One of the things is we focus and we have a very distinctive focus on saying we don't want the vanity metrics across the board. Speaker 6 10:06 So, so, and this is the, I'm so I'm in marketing, so of course this is especially evident for us is that we're saying we don't care about managing metrics. We literally only care about the final numbers, right? And we try to optimize everything we do towards them. I think that has been one of the reasons we've been good. Um, I have a great culture. Uh, we've been really good at cultivating that and it's essentially on our onboarding flow or CEO is on, uh, on every single employee that gets hired. So he has to approve every single employee. So ensuring that we always have to write in please. So that, that's also been, that's also been a really big part of it. What do you think Oscar? Yeah, I totally agree. And then I also think that something that really made a deal for us is that we focus so hardly on enterprises. Speaker 6 10:54 We, in the beginning, we, uh, we had a product that was focusing solely on enterprise. We had the right SSL models, we had the right, eh, architecture that could scale to thousands and thousands of employers in companies and support the most crazy, uh, internal it infrastructure. But, uh, but also in the, in the sales presence, actually, like in the beginning we had to find out who we were. But as soon as we managed to find out we are enterprise SAS solution and then managed to focus, I'll sell on that. That is when the went red really kicked off in my, in my view. <inaudible> Speaker 3 11:34 and then so one of the things that uh, Casper that you, you said that that jumps out at me is you, you, you talked a bit about it being a, a blue ocean opportunity and something where, where a lot of people don't have this type of solution in place. But I did go through Capterra which I, which I was able to see through similar web was was one of your, Speaker 6 11:54 uh, one of your referring sites, uh, sends a lot of traffic to you guys. And I noticed that they had, uh, they had a ton of different companies listed, um, around things like, uh, asset management and brand management and, and, and so it feels like there's, there's pieces of your, your, your business touches pieces of a lot of other businesses. Um, so I guess part of, part of it is even the positioning that you're doing something really unique mean. I'm just curious how, how you feel like you fit into that competitive landscape. I'm always so happy when someone says they looked at similar web for our traffic. That just makes me on a deeply personal level happy. But on another, on another point. Uh, you're totally right. And the thing is we have a in template by today we have a bunch of different modules. So I brought up the idea of email signature management. Speaker 6 12:43 We have a library function, we have dynamic country. Like we can create dynamic contracts dynamically and all these things. I think the power of tempo fi is the distribution. So the thing is that we can distribute. We when we <inaudible> employed and in the whole organization it's the whole organization. So you can employ these different modules and no Audrey, like very few people, like very few companies can do something similar. We're talking we're in the ballpark of five to 10 companies that have remotely something similar. Um, cause there's a lot of asset management, dump systems, digital asset management systems. There's a bunch of them. And you can probably make one in a weekend, but, but, but, but essentially like the distribution part of templatize what makes it smart so people have access to it. Yeah, exactly. Like the a bunch of companies, the ones who also found Shawn, uh, that can do something similar to <inaudible> but in verticals and it's very Valley up. Speaker 6 13:39 We never have seen any companies that actually do what we do on a horizontal base, on subtle scale. And that like all the way from if I'm handing documents and you could class them, men take sides of management, but also the VXT are able to deploy to enterprises is get into these, uh, every single computer on the inter prices. That's something we don't really see other people do. It used to be working on a, on a more vertical scale. Perfect. Yeah, the productivity as well. Right. And I, and I definitely find if you, if you, if you kind of try to look at what's out there, almost every category touches a whole bunch of other categories and there's a lot of noise. But when you, when you dig into your customer base and you really ask them what else did they consider and why did you pick temple Phi versus the other products, uh, that, that a lot of times they'll, they'll hone in on the things that really are, uh, unique about your product and, and you realize that maybe the competitive landscape is a lot narrower. And it sounds like you've had a lot of those types of conversations that give you that perspective. Definitely. Definitely. Cool. So one of the things, a Casper that you had mentioned was that you don't Speaker 3 14:52 spend a lot of time focusing on vanity metrics and that you're really trying to, trying to look at the, the, the metrics that matter the most. Um, so are you familiar with the concept of a North star metric and, and do you feel like you've got one at template by, Speaker 6 15:06 ah, yes, yes, yes. Uh, so I'm, I'm very familiar with the concept. Um, read a lot about it and heard a lot about it. And I think it's, in essence, it's a, it's a great way of looking at, for having focus throughout a company. It is something we've asked actually recently debated, uh, highly. So it's like, it's very on and off. Cause I think both me and Oscar even between us have a little bit of a different perspective on this. But, but I think for me personally, at least like everything I do is, is grounded in this kind of sounds super boring, but it's Crohn's, this is grounded in monthly recurring revenue, MRR. So everything I do, I optimize towards that. So does the other part of it is that saying that that's, that's, that's on a like business side of it, but essentially we're focusing more on documents and I think Oscar will Testament more to that. Speaker 5 15:56 That is definitely the more salesy version of it. And me being a product guy, um, we, we operate a lot on, we want people to be efficient while still being compliant. So basically we want to them to be able to do more good work and spend more time doing what they're best at and not spend so much time on figuring out how to make a document, how to find the right colors, how to find the right content to put in it. So something people mission on is, um, is how little time they have to spend creating a document that is still compliant, uh, and has to break consent. So basically how many, how efficient can they be inside office and in the constantly produce while still being mine. Speaker 3 16:41 So, so I think in, in both those cases, if you guys don't mind me giving a little bit of context on what I think, um, works, like why North star metric can be important and one that might be good for your business. So one challenge with the monthly recurring revenue is that, especially if you have annual contracts, uh, you might have some customers that, that basically have already turned in month three, but they're in an annual contract. So they're going to be recognized as part of monthly recurring revenue. And so they're not necessarily, you're not necessarily driving value and impact for those customers. And so to me, the ideal North star metric is going to be one that is as a proxy of how much value you're delivering to your growing customer base. And ideally it's going to be something that's up and to the right over time or that you can build it up into the right. So it's not sort of average this or, or, or something like that. But it's instead, like one that I came up with that I think is, is similar, Oscar to what you had mentioned is, uh, maybe something like weekly documents created with templates or, or via templates. I'm not sure exactly how the, the wording that you guys would use, but it, it shows that you're, you're getting usage of your product and then that's going to be a good longterm predictor on growth of MRR. Speaker 6 17:57 Exactly. That's, that's, that's also our idea. Like with the added on that of course we don't want people to create more documents. We just wanted to actually be more efficient in them. Yeah. And, and if they're using typified, they're, they're going to be more efficient. Right, exactly. That's, that's the hope that that's what we're in. That's it. The product. I think it's important to add that in, in, in this conversation of how, how relevant MRR is for us. It's also a matter of churn and lifetime value. So when we look at these things, like it's important to say that one of the reasons temple is also very solid product and very solid business cases that we don't have a lot of churn. So, so we don't have the case. You described that that's happened maybe once in our history. So, um, so it's, it's, it actually is quite predictable. Um, but, but I, I totally agree that's a good SAS business. When you, when you don't have a lot of, that's usually a good, pretty good, right? It makes it very easy to do marketing, that's for sure. Yeah, and I, and I think we said, we said chalk that up Speaker 3 18:56 as one of the success factors because clearly, I mean, I think that's the death nail of most SAS businesses is that if you've got a high turn rate, you can grow to maybe, you know, 1 million ARR, 2 million ARR. But if you're, if you're churning 5% of your customers every month, then you have, you got a thousand customers, that means that if you don't add 50 customers in that month, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to actually shrink. And so a churn churn makes it really hard to grow over time. If you don't have a high turn rate, then you're in, you're in good shape. Speaker 6 19:31 So, um, and that probably relates back to the long sales cycle, right? It's not a try, try out product is you really figured through before you buy it. Speaker 3 19:41 Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and so I think this concept of one metric that matters is, is something that is, uh, often misunderstood. But I think as, as some people interpret it, uh, they're, they kind of conflate one metric that matters with the North star metric. And the North star metric is not the only metric that matters, but it's a single metric that can be a rallying metric for all groups in the business that everyone knows this. We're, we're increasing the impact we're making on customers over time. And when we do that, that metric is a function of, of having a low churn rate, having a lot more people coming in and signing up and using the product and, and having more usage from existing customers and all of those things can then move that metric in the right direction. But, uh, I want to dig in to the organization in a bit. And I, I think one of the challenges in an enterprise targeted business is that you have so many specialized groups in, in the business that it's really hard for everyone to look through the same lens at, at what success is. And so if you have a single metric that everyone can rally around and then they, the role that their department specifically plays in moving that metric, um, you can, you can get a lot more sort of organizational alignment and the power of everyone pulling in the same direction. Speaker 6 20:57 And, and it just to, just to reiterate like I think you're exactly right. Like, and I think that's actually just to be completely Frank here and honest is that a, that's one of the things we're struggling a little bit with sometimes is that we need to, we need to be better at this cause we are, we are growing. We are growing super fast. We went from, I think it was around in January last year we were 40 employees. Now we're closing in on 180 so it's going, it's going really fast. And one of the things where we need to keep us, we're like, that also means we make new departments and make new like hire a bunch of people all the time and, and aligning everything on what having this growth mindset across the organization sometimes is quite hard. Speaker 3 21:39 Yeah. And I think that's the, that's, that's part of the growth mindset is, is recognizing that you're not doing everything perfectly and looking for the areas where you can do things better and uh, and trying to focus on, on the areas that are going to have the biggest impact and, and just driving improvement there. And so I think that's, that's one of the things that, um, growth mindsets important in any, any company we talked about. There's big differences in an enterprise versus a, in an enterprise targeted business versus a consumer targeted business. But I think in both cases you want to have that, that desire to continuously try to drive improvement across all customer touch points. It's just that the process of driving that improvement is probably going to be pretty different between an enterprise targeted business and a consumer business. Absolutely. Absolutely. Like, let's, let's dig into a bit on, on what those customer touch points are that we're trying to drive improvement on. Um, but probably even before that, how much are you guys really thinking about trying to drive improvement across across the different touch points? Speaker 6 22:42 A lot. Uh, so, okay, you guys, you've probably got the guys like the thinks about the most about growth in the business here. So, so, uh, actually I literally before, before the today, here, before this, I literally had a call, uh, with, uh, a bunch of, we have a bunch of BDRs, we do a lot of, um, business development. And I, I remember I noticed, uh, joined a weekly call for them and to introduce a tool I wanted them to use. And then I noticed they had some issues with how they sourced accounts and stuff like that. And I was like, okay guys, we can definitely optimize this. This is not a typical thing where we go like, there's not a part of marketing, but let's make it a project and see how we can help them become better at what they should do. Right. And, and from that, we kind of spawned like a bunch of ideas and now Oscar and I have kind of joined forces to get it with 300 people to call, we call it, we call ourselves to crazy five, uh, where we do growth across the organization. So we, we, we brainstormed a bunch of ideas like, and then we scored them based on to brass or Speaker 3 23:46 to pine work framework admin said, Hey, uh, which, which ideas? And then we literally, we got a score for each idea and then we picked the one with high score and now we're across organization. We're making it happen. Uh, and stuff like this is, it's really hard to do what an enterprise, uh, cause cause the things take time and there's a lot of toast that you can't step on. But, but, but, but we're, we're, but we are thinking a lot like this. Um, so yeah. Perfect. Uh, I love that. That's really cool because I think that's, that's probably one of the things that I see us as a really big flaw in a lot of enterprise targeted businesses is that it is super siloed and specialized and no one is really thinking big picture. And the fact that, uh, Oscar, you're from product and Casper a year for marketing and that you've got this crazy five that you guys are a part of that's looking at that big picture. Speaker 3 24:39 That's, that's really powerful. And again, the process for driving that improvement's going to be different from a consumer business that might just be rapidly running testing. But just having a desire to find areas for improvement and then working to drive that improvement in whatever way you can I think is super powerful. I think also one of the latest initiatives we also touch was, it used to be the product for instance, was a pod inside a product if it popped off for engineering. Well what we've done recently is to be actively created a whole new product department that the whole part was set to, to, to span all the way having fruits in uh, development or engineering, but also having people got a pot of marketing people that are part of sales that all creating the whole product mission. So be kind of think commercial and tech into the same vision and not sit in silos. Speaker 3 25:36 That's awesome. And it's, and it's kind of the opposite direction that a lot of fast scaling companies go. Uh, I, I remember you got to my, my path from sort of 10 people to a hundred people to a thousand people in, in companies where, you know, it's, it's hard when you, when you're a kind of a senior guy in, in that really small company because you kidding more and more of your responsibilities carved out to a specialist in and you actually kind of get a narrowing of responsibility over time or in a lot of cases you have have companies that they, Oh, we're big enough now to go attract the real talent and then you get replaced, which is no more painful. I'll take the narrowing of responsibility over being replaced. But um, I think that's, that's super commendable. And you guys, the fact that, that you're going the opposite direction as you scale the organization and thinking more about how you can think big picture. I'm so glad you brought that up actually. Cause that's a sec. That's exactly how I've been feeling for, for quite a while. So I joined a little bit more than two years ago. And back in the two years ago, we were at the head of marketing me, traffic managers slash growth hacker, and then we had a head of communications and a student assistant Speaker 6 26:44 on seal. Now we're 15 people in marketing. So every time it would be like, I wouldn't do something like a drift bod. Like Hey, I was like, Hey guys, we need a chat service on our website. So I would do it, go run with it and prove that it works. Like does a good thing for our business. Let's continue with it. And then we would have, okay let's have someone take over and then we would hire someone. So we did account based marketing, we introduced and we found, okay, we need to hire a person to do that. Then we didn't campaign campaigns overall. Then we need to find every time we carved out a piece of what I do. So, so sometimes it's been like, okay, what, what do we want to want me to do now that we keep growing so fast? Right? So while you're still there. So I think it's a good thing. Somehow. I feel like I'm more busy than ever, but, but it is like these special specialized things are definitely disappearing sometimes, but it's a good thing. Speaker 3 27:39 I do love the fact though that you, you're teaming up with Oscar and a few other people to, uh, to start to think about big picture. And I think that's, uh, that's really cutting edge for an enterprise targeted business. So you're, you're taking the extra time from what you might've been doing and doing everything and, and uh, and making the right adjustments at least from, from what I can see from the outside. Um, so Oscar, why don't you take us through that, that customer journey. We're talking about trying to improve the different touch points and I, you know, I think a lot of times we can easily get lost in the weeds here. So I'll come back out for a second and remind people of the, you know, what template Phi is, is that you're really trying to take kind of a, I think what you call it is anarchy that you're, that you're solving. Speaker 3 28:22 And some of your marketing messaging where everybody's got different designs and noncompliant and what they're doing when they're creating PowerPoint decks or or email signatures and your giving them the ability to very easily have consistency and actually bringing efficiency so it's not a trade off between consistency and efficiency. You actually make it more efficient so they can easily access the assets as they're, as they're building branded materials so that the end picture is this, this beautiful picture of everybody being consistent in how they're approaching things and really and really efficient and how they're doing that, but going all the way back out to the beginning, especially that is blue ocean where people might not even know they need this. How do you go from, how do you take someone from consideration all the way to where they become that product champion that's really pushing templates by across the organization? Speaker 6 29:13 Yes, for sure. Yeah. The interesting thing about Tim of the fire thing is that we, all the organizations that we are targeting, basically all of them have people that have been doing something related to this far for years. Like we have brand managers and documents specialists and legal people where their whole job is about how do we push out new updates, how do we make stuff compliant across all 50,000 employees? So Speaker 5 29:42 it's not like they haven't been thinking about this space. They are thinking about this constantly. What we are providing is that we have made a tool where they can do it as easily. It used to be that they have to go to it to get it pushed out. They had to go through some designers to make the graphic and we simply make sure that they can do it all from one platform. So when we get the approach, any leads you are either if it's outbound or inbound, then they usually understand the problem quite quickly and it's not those people that we need to convince that to the, um, so our sales cycle is much more like a approaching management project management project where you have to help the person that is basically from the beginning saying, yes, I need that. I wanted, uh, because it can solve all my problems. Speaker 5 30:37 It's, it's helping that, uh, that person to convince the rest of the business that maybe don't think that compliance documents are, that they were right. Local is in the email is as important as getting a new ERP system. Right. Or, or even just, just let me just do my job. Who cares how, how consistent or compliant we are. Exactly. Like I have, one of our key key things is that we don't believe that anyone wants to be uncompliant. Everyone wants to have the right logo. Everyone wants to have the right legal disclaimer, but they basically do the E what is ECS? So what we try to do is make the easy solution, the right solution instead of just taking the presentation from desktop. Right. And, um, but it can be hard to see. So, uh, what we are doing is to be, we try to create all kinds of material to help this person convince the rest of the business. Speaker 5 31:29 Both get the part, you'd get this fruit procurement, get it, uh, get through it. All the different departments that and the stakeholders that needs to be involved in big decisions like this because they always get a rolled out company wide. And that, that includes like we, we have always a sales rep, uh, that day that takes him for the, uh, for the process. I through doing a technical POC, for instance, looking for the content, making sure that the, the procurement is done in the right time. Because even in big companies that is not even sure that, uh, that is always a, that everyone who knows how the process should be. So, but we have tried so many times that we kind of know what, when, what should be done by now. And that's a, that's often a lot of touch points we do. I guess it sounds like that the person who, who would be the initial product champion recognizes the need and, and it's really about helping them push the recognition of the need broader through the organization. But how, how do you connect with that initial person to, to help them even discover that template by exists? So one of the things most challenging Speaker 6 32:40 about our business is that we're creating a space that doesn't exist. So we template management was not a thing before us essentially. So. So most people and when you come in through organically or through AdWords or Bing or whatever platform you use for the search engine a day search for a solution they don't know exist. So they search for some things. So we have to deep dive and say like, yeah, it was so some, some people we even search, I like to search for PowerPoint template or whatever and we have to filter out the ones who just want a free PowerPoint template and wanted to looking for a solution. Of course there'll be someone out there who searches for template management solution. Great. We sell to dos, but that's like once a year. That doesn't happen that often. So some, most people find us through organic organic channels, through our content and through or paid advertising. In terms of AdWords, we do a lot of paid advertising on Facebook and then LinkedIn especially to, so that's also a channel, but typically dos are very high in the funnel and they don't understand template by before it takes a significant amount of time before they understand what we actually do. Once they do understand it, that's when the connection happens. I was like, okay, this is amazing. How do I get it? <inaudible> Speaker 3 33:52 I I find it so interesting that for it an enterprise targeted business that uh, that, that Facebook would be a channel. I think years ago people would just think of it as a consumer channel cause people are in kind of a consumer mindset when they use Facebook, but everybody uses it or so many people use it that you do have these enterprise buyers there. So it's, it's been interesting to watch the, the transition to, to have more enterprise targeted businesses using that as a channel to reach potential <inaudible> Speaker 6 34:19 yeah. Truth be told we haven't, like we haven't been good at Facebook in the past. It's only this year that we've been actually managing to positively prove that it's a good channel for us. LinkedIn has for referral quite awhile, been more substantially provable to be better. And that's despite the fact that it's 10 times more. Yes. But it's also 10 times more expensive. So you really got to nail it because everyone else knows that's a good place to read. Exactly. Uh, we've, we've been doing a lot of cool things there to actually get to the right people, but, but I think we definitely got a model now that works and when it comes to this. Speaker 3 34:54 That's great. And then I noticed that you have, I mean you've, you've talked about that you've got, uh, the drift chat bot as, as, as part of that conversion at top of funnel and uh, but also know that you guys do a lot with videos. So I saw a really good customer testimonial video and different, different videos of, of just kind of introducing the product and the problem that you're solving. How, how important are things like drift and videos and getting people to actually want to, to sign up and get a demo with <inaudible>? Speaker 6 35:25 Right. Great question. So let's, let's start with drift. So drift for us works. Uh, I wasn't, I almost want to say like a filtering tool. So we only liked the business cases only positive for template Phi if we sell it to you, if you have Morton, typically more than 500 to a thousand employees. We do sell sometimes to companies with 200 employees, but that's if they're management consulting legal firms and stuff like that where the core of their business is making assets like PowerPoint presentation diamonds. So here drift has the function of kind of saying if you are 50 employees, here's the price tech. If you can afford this then that is called the, you're welcome to do it. But the benefit is definitely much larger. The larger company we deal with, so drift serves a lot of that. I mean it really does a perfect job of automating these dis filtering cause we used to use Intercom, uh, originally I introduced Intercom and the problem back then for Intercom was it for, for me at least, I thought it was hard to filter out the people. Speaker 6 36:19 We had to almost manually respond to everyone. And with drift they can remove 80% of that. So that's the, that's the drift part when it comes to videos, video is huge for us. And this year is definitely a big year for video when it comes to us. So we've always, uh, so one of the big biggest things about videos for us is that I typically talk about the wow moment. The wow moment for us is when people watch our main explainer video, they literally go, wow, this is brilliant. Like a dig, Oh this is so smart. This is exactly what I'm looking for. So I literally, I track, we track out what are the things we do is we try a lot of activity on our side with Hotjar and all these different tools. And one thing that we can see is that when, when people go and just browse for a website day, it's gotten a lot better. We just changed our front page and all these things, but, but they still still don't know everything. But once they watch a video, then there's a very short timeframe before after seeing that video and signing up. So, so video plays a huge part. Uh, and now we rolled out, we literally got hired a full time videographer, so only producing video for us. Speaker 3 37:21 Well and, and I saw that only one of your kind of customer case studies included video. Um, but it was super compelling. It seems like, uh, that videographers should be all over all the other case studies that you have. Cause I think that's a, that's a great way of getting people to, Speaker 6 37:37 well, it's just a matter of convincing these enterprises. They're not always, they're a little bit shy sometimes. So. Speaker 3 37:42 Yeah. And it's also hard to, hard to get them to get on site with them, especially if you've got a very international customer base. But, um, I, I personally felt like it was pretty powerful even though I'm clearly outside your target audience because you had, you had mentioned, um, drift and I, and I just said in kind of playing around with the site, hopefully I didn't throw off your numbers to this, but uh, entered in kind of some fake company data just to sort of see how, how you were using drift. And I was surprised because you do hide the pricing and as you just touched on, um, when I, when I put in my company size as being an a less than 500 employees and literally said, it costs this much, are you sure you're still interested? If you are, you can talk to us. I thought that was a really good way of filtering out the leads that you don't want. Is that it? Was that what the intended exactly. Exactly. The intent. It sounds Speaker 6 38:36 awful, but that is exactly the intent and Speaker 3 38:39 no, but I think, I think that's, that's one of the hardest things in businesses is to be able to say, this is who we are. And, you know, I've actually seen HubSpot take the opposite direction where they, they specifically say, you're too big for us. We do not want an enterprise client like you using HubSpot. And so being, being really clear about who your target customer is, I think is, is hard to do. But, um, but, but important, Speaker 6 39:05 and we do have people who are very persistent like that go like we're 20 employees, we need Tempa fi. And I was like, yeah, would probably be great for you, but can you really afford it? Yes, yes, yes. Just give us templates by, okay, cool. But Speaker 3 39:18 yeah, and then I can just, she'll take their money, but you don't want to waste a salesperson and time just to just to, uh, put the price in front of them and then, and then have them disappear. So I think that's a great way of using it to qualify him. So I am just one of the things that I wasn't sure about, um, you indicate that you can try it and then it goes to a form where you would then get a demo of the software. Do you actually offer a free trial after that demo? Speaker 5 39:44 So what we do is that, yeah, you could contact with us if a sales rep that will take you through the process and day. We've seen reactive to try it out a long time ago. Eh, how we could make some kind of demo environment, how we could make it possible. You just like sell sign up and try it all out. But the problem about timber fire is that it makes the most sense when you have it set all up and you actually see how it works in context and not just an a on a demo environment and your D. and for that to work you often need to evolve it internal it, you need to involve your, your template consultancy firm or what you might be using. So what via what we're doing is that we, uh, say going through a couple of meetings where we actually about a date that they are pretty interested and then it goes to this technical proof of concept where they could get everything installed, they connected to trial documents off their own and uh, and have a full full-scale demo instead of just some, some demo environment, try it out. Speaker 3 40:48 And would you call that a pilot then? Is that, is that a paid kind of situation or, or do you, do you give them the ability to do that without paying? Speaker 5 40:57 What gives that the ability to do without paying? That's fine. Speaker 6 41:00 Yup. Yeah, the proof of concept is free. Yeah. And I think one thing we actually, the sales reps gets a lot of credit for and does, is implementation and support too, is that this proof of concept is very thorough. It's literally like when you, what would happen if you bought temper fi? So we literally roll it out almost exactly like it would be without maybe if you want a custom templates or something like that. But essentially we roll it out exactly. And then they get a feel for it. And typically what we also see is that once that happens, then people are like, okay, so I just need to sign this contract. Then we're rolling. Uh, okay, cool. So the buy in is very, very high. Once people have had the proof of concept, they're like, we see 80% of them close afterwards. Speaker 3 41:42 It seems like, and you've touched on this a bit, but it seems like one of the, one of the important things that you need to do well is once you have that product champion, that person, say for example, that's responsible for enforcing brand consistency or encouraging it, depending on what language they may be using, giving them the ability to very easily roll this out to the broader organization. I mean, one of the things that I think is, is really cool about what you do is that you, you actually inject yourself right into that workflow. So you become a part of PowerPoint or you become, uh, automatically added to the email. Um, but, but I assume that there's, there's some challenges going from, you know, getting to the point where it's actually deployed to everyone. How much experimentation or what have you done that that necessarily works well to, to drive that, that broader adoption? Speaker 6 42:33 Um, I can answer that. So, um, so we used to not have a customer success department we do now. So it was one of the things we do is definitely have customer access. The thing about buying template is that these organizations, especially quite big ones, they literally put down a team that's responsible for making sure templatize used. This sounds, it sounds very dramatic, but that's essentially the case. So some of these, uh, some of these really big clients, they S they make teams of like sometimes of the biggest teams I've heard of are 50 people that are responsible debt forward, uh, for the template, find a whole organization. So, so for on our site, like we literally give them all the tools but we don't do and we help them and we like we do some, we help customer success does like they do these different uh, webinars or like talks where it age show how to use template find and can roll it out. But essentially it's all up to the business to make sure that the employees also use the tool. We roll it out and everything like that. But, but, but, but everything else is on the client. Speaker 3 43:35 But as soon as the rollout basically that they email everyone in the company and say, sign up for this or download. Speaker 6 43:42 No. So what's, how does that actually work? So it's deployed, so it's literally installed in your computer. So when next time when we installed simplified, the next time you open your email signature, you'll have like, you can test them into this. Oscar pops out and say, Hey, Casper, Casper. Yes, I'm Casper. Are you still traffic manager? Yes. And then you have a, your email signature dynamically updated. Same with word and PowerPoint. Like temple Phi just appears in your word. And PowerPoint Speaker 5 44:09 exactly. Like one of the things we found out with enterprise customers and also the, one of the things that we have been focusing on very early on is that you cannot rely on the individual employee to, to do things. That's the same reason why they're not compliant. That's because it didn't download the newest logo or whatever. So, um, it's very key to us that the individual employer have to do nothing. So I went to Dartmouth for the POC. Um, they literally have to just say, sign the contract and then they can stop. They can just press the button and next day they all the employers will have their face. Speaker 3 44:44 And then it's just, it does sound like you've, you add so much convenience in terms of if they're using PowerPoint, for example, that you've got license images that are right there in PowerPoint and, and any other kind of templative, uh, maybe maybe giving them the ability to take, uh, some of the latest financial information if they're, if they're kind of reporting something internally. But all of those things seem like they actually provide benefit and not just not just brand consistency and compliance but actually make it easier for someone to put together a good looking presentation Speaker 5 45:18 except like our hope is that we are helping the end user and in the end like the the compliance and the like being on brand, being legally compliant, that that is a key benefit for simplify. But, but as a person to person of course won't do it, individual user to to be more efficient, be more having more control Speaker 6 45:39 work people, people who work in PowerPoints are very happy, especially like management consultants that have to do PowerPoints all day every day. They love templates because it just makes it so easy for them. It's like, it's like they literally can do all the cool functionalities. We add a bunch of bunch of extra productivity tools so that you can like take an align things and make sure to do entire document. Like we check, we have a checking function so it checks if it's on-brand, check if it's, they're using the right colors, right? Fond or older things. Speaker 5 46:07 So I remembered it's this test where they, uh, they looked at how, how much time they were saving. It was having to fire today where they, um, they tried with the old way where they had to go to this brand portal in a weapons, a face where they, I think they spent two minutes finding a photos to put into the PowerPoint and with simplify it took approximately 40 seconds and stuff like that. It's just Speaker 3 46:31 so they're not just like Googling images, which, which may or may not be freely available. That's anything that's going to show up in simplifies, already licensed. And so you don't need to have that fear that sometimes people who build PowerPoints, everything is cool. So I mean, to me what I'm, what I'm hearing here is that not only is it, Speaker 5 46:52 no Speaker 3 46:53 in terms of how you deploy it, but you're deploying it directly into their existing workflows. So you don't need to build necessarily radical habit changes with them. It's, it's just, it's inserted right into the habits anyway. So you don't need to focus as much on triggers and getting people to use it. It's, you just need to make it convenient for them to do the things that they're doing anyway and that you can start to really drive that engagement, which probably ties back to why you have fairly low turn rate across the whole business. Because if it's being used then there they're very unlikely to, uh, to cancel. Would you agree? Speaker 5 47:30 Yeah, totally. Let us when kids will talk Tableau fire from the very beginning that we cannot break people's pattern of habits because using boy, just, just one of the things that us, so incorporate it into your data workflow, so we need to tap it. It's high into that. I would definitely check that Speaker 3 47:46 that up is one of your, one of your key success factors as well. Um, which is, I think, I mean like I would say the same thing for my time at Dropbox, that there's a lot of really good execution things that I did and that the team did, but at the same time, the nature of the product made it possible to, to grow that business very quickly. And then it's all about how do you, how do you just go right on the edge of potential and continue to, uh, have it perform as best as it can within, within the reality that the product creates. But, um, it sounds like you've got a pretty good reality that you're dealing with. Speaker 5 48:18 Yeah. So I guess one last question. So I have one last question before we wrap up. Speaker 3 48:24 Um, is, is more on the revenue side? So, um, you, you mentioned that it's, it's kind of a company wide solution right out of the gate. And I know a lot of SAS businesses, kind of the formula for it's for SAS is if I can grow my new customers faster than I'm churning customers, then there's a good chance I'm going to be building a good business. But the one other part of the of the formula is if I can expand my existing customers, then I can even have negative churn. Um, do you have, uh, customer expansion opportunities in, in your pricing model? Speaker 6 49:00 Oh, that's a good question. That's a rough one. So, uh, I just want to stay that we've been talking about pricing for a long time and was one of the things that we keep bringing up again and again internally. And it's always like a, I worked in a bunch of other places where pricing was always the discussion of where you should list pricing or not. Uh, we decided not to because it's like, um, essentially there's so much complexity to what we can do. Uh, just let it example sometimes cause you can pick and choose. So one of the things we solve is font distribution. So we can, we can, if you have a custom fond, like maybe Coca Cola has a custom font, well then they can technically deploy it to their whole organization in the click of a button, right? No one else can do that. So that's really relevant. But if you don't have a custom font, it's not really relevant for you to have fun distribution. Right? So there's a lot of, we have a lot of different modules that does different things that we can't essentially like displaying that it's gonna make it is very complex. So that's kind of the decision making that's been behind it. If it's correct, I don't know, but, but, but that's what we're, that's where we are right now at least. Speaker 5 50:03 And I think that's very much in the nature of, of our sales process activity that we are dealing with. So complex enterprises meaning that every enterprise is different. I mean that they need different modules but it also that they are so huge organizations that it might be, they have companies within companies, within companies. And then there, those are the cases where we definitely have a lot of lapping span of which opportunities wherever you we might land, uh, uh, national, uh, part of the company. And then they plan on expanding to, uh, hope to expand to other nephrology. Speaker 3 50:36 And maybe even like I, I assume even like within department or like from one department to another department or do you generally cover all departments even? Speaker 5 50:44 It depends on case of tests, but in general we hope to be, we tend to cover the whole organization. One thing maybe to happen to keep in mind is that one thing that's convenient is that these future organizations, they always have a pretty heavy procurement process, both in terms of pricing but also in terms of it insulin meaning then as soon as we get into just a single department in a, in a company, usually approved to get rolled out to all the rest of the organization. That making it the barrier. Yep. Speaker 3 51:19 No, I, I definitely understand the procurement. I, I do some private workshops for some bigger enterprises and uh, I have one that I'm still trying to get into their procurement system about eight months after I did the workshop. I mean, I know they're gonna pay me, but it's every day I get something wrong, get to the end of the system. Yeah. I can't imagine a whole business of, of having to deal with that. Fortunately for me, those are the rare cases. Um, so I just wanted to share a few of my key takeaways and, and get your feedback. Make sure that, that, that they're consistent with what you are seeing here. So one touching on Oscar, what you just said about the complexity of enterprise and, and all of these pieces. It does feel like, um, you know, enterprise targeted, uh, growth is, is really different from a consumer business that you've got all of those moving parts and it's very easy to become more and more siloed in specialties and those silos don't necessarily communicate a lot together. Speaker 3 52:23 And uh, but if you can, if you can really step back and try to understand it and try to drive improvement, then, then that can be powerful. So, uh, commendable on you guys for, for being part of the, uh, the, the crazy five who's stepping back. And I tried to take that big picture look. Um, I do think one thing that can really help you guys with that is, uh, is if you can, and it's gonna probably not be you guys pushing the North star metric, but if you can come up with a value metric that your CEO strongly believes in and uh, and everyone in the company that basically says we're impacting brand compliance and consistency and efficiency because we're increasing the number of compliant documents that are created every day and are a number that we were creating six months ago was this per day and now we're up to this. Speaker 3 53:16 If you can have some kind of kind of value footprint that's growing over time and really tie that back to the overall company mission that can really good at, at, at driving that kind of cross functional alignment and getting everybody, everybody on the same page and pulling in the same direction. And I think that's, that's powerful. And it's in an enterprise you shouldn't be any less limited in your ability to do that. That, I mean, in an enterprise targeted business, you shouldn't be any less limited in your ability to do that versus a consumer targeted business. And then my final takeaway is that I, I do think you guys have really good product market fit. It's not just a product that resonates with the market, but it's a product that, uh, is because it sits in that workflow because it's something that the product champion really needs it and is able to deploy it pretty automatically and then it goes into the workflow of people. That's, that's a, a really good, uh, growth situation and, and that's, that's something that you, uh, probably should continue to, to dig in, to understand and leverage the heck out of that. Cause that's, that's really, it seems to be powerful. So any, any thoughts on, uh, uh, my key takeaways? Would you agree with this? Speaker 6 54:28 I think you're spot on and I think it is a, it is a challenge for us too, this North star metric. It's not something that's been talked a lot about before, like SIS a concept internally in temporal Pfizer. So it is something where we need to find something that we can all agree on and, and, and I think we're getting there and we will get there. Uh, but for now it's a little bit divided sometimes. Speaker 3 54:50 Yeah. And that's okay. I mean, I think that's normal in most businesses and I personally didn't understand the power of the North star metric until till I really studied Facebook and how they used it. And now I've, now I've brought it to a lot of other companies and seeing how, how much of a unifying force and an aligning force it can be that it's something that I think all companies should really try to tap into. So Oscar, did you have any feedback or thoughts? Speaker 5 55:15 No, that was, uh, I, I totally agree. Uh, and it's also the North star metric, like just doing today. We have been talking a lot about that. Exactly. Um, specifically where tried to define what do we actually see as is, and I think we do have, uh, some kind of unified opinion of where we want to go, but it would be so nice to actually make it everyone with their <inaudible> kind Speaker 3 55:39 of local KPI's for their, for their team or group can, can tie those back to the big picture then. Then you might have something where, uh, uh, the, the lead gen side is, has less conflict with the sales side because lead gens may be more focused on overall volume of leads. Even though I know you said that, that that's probably more of a vanity metric. And if you're gonna have this focus and then the sales team, but the sales team may have a, a KPI where it's, you know, average transaction size and uh, and lead to close rate. And those two can be pulling in different directions. But if, if the, the arbitrator of differences in opinion between two groups is how does this impact our overall North star metric, then it, then it's easier for everyone to kind of say, Oh well, you know what, these leads may be a little less quality, but they're all people who need this product and can contribute to our overall North star metrics. Speaker 3 56:35 So maybe they should be in, in the funnel. So for example, but uh, well guys, I, uh, I wish we could keep talking cause I think that that's interesting, but I want to make sure that we don't, uh, don't go too long here, but I would definitely like to thank both Oscar and Casper for sharing, giving us so many insights about how you're approaching growth and helping me personally to understand how an enterprise targeted company is different from a consumer targeted company and how you can use experimentation and improvement to, to drive better results. And, uh, I personally have found the conversation really fascinating. So thank you guys. Speaker 6 57:10 Now, thank you for having us. I know I have to learn more than desired, and I'd done a half a year maybe. So. No, that's exaggerating, but, but it was, it was definitely good. I know it did. It's give, it gives a lot of food for thought. I loved it. Thanks. Perfect. I'll take it. Thanks guys. Speaker 1 57:28 <inaudible> Speaker 2 57:33 thanks for listening to the freak 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.
