Ep # 140: Scaling SaaS Success: Mastering Marketplaces with Johan Aussenac (CEO, WeTransact)

Adil Saleh 0:02 Hey again, greetings, everybody. This is a deal your host at hyper engage podcast. And I know that this has been going on for so long that we are thinking of onboarding more platforms, you know, the technologies that are specific to Google and Microsoft workspaces and how go to market plays, how AI plays a role into, you know, selling products onto these spaces. That's why we have Sean, who's the CEO of WeTransact, that's one of the one of the largest and, you know, emerging companies that are helping SaaS companies launch their products on market, Microsoft as like, just in quick seconds. And, you know, the experience is pretty seamless. We got this first off, WeTransact. I mean, you know, we got pretty noise, noisy products. So we our team, you know, we got, got, you know, to connect with, with Juan and his team. And we thought, like, let's, let's have him onto the hyper engage podcast. Thank you very much for taking the time. Johan Aussenac 0:59 Yeah, thank you for having me. It's going to be brilliant. Adil Saleh 1:03 Absolutely. Okay. So, apart from, your team has been diverse in like five different regions. You know, I know that, you know, it's not easy to, you know, to get the first to get to zero to one, and get the initial founding members alongside your co founders. You know, initial members that are going to be bought into the idea and dream of it, and then you develop a product. So could you tell us a little bit about your experience starting off, WeTransact and, you know, what was the thought process? How did you go about your hypothesis, how big of this problem is, and how hard was it to, you know, get the initial founding members, you know, to join the movement? Johan Aussenac 1:41 Sure, so I think it's important to to give, to give a bit of explanation of where I come from before WeTransact. So I used to be working for Microsoft. I stayed with Microsoft for almost five years as a full time employee. And in my last gig with Microsoft. I was in Microsoft engineering in a team that was called customer experience, and our goal was a bit broad within that team was to bring co innovation to software vendors and to compile is the best that Microsoft could offer in terms of technical support, meaning, when you want to develop an application on their cloud, which is named Azure, but also in terms of go to markets. Back in 2019 2020, Microsoft had these new things that they called Azure Marketplace. Microsoft marketplace, and it was a marketplace designed to help software vendors do B to B sales. At the beginning, it was very niche. You didn't have a lot of software vendors even interested with the opportunity. But in 2020 and the following year, 2021 within this team, we saw a huge spike in terms of demand coming from marketplace integration support. So our team was flooded with us coming from all Microsoft as Can you help me with my customers that is willing to sell on the marketplace? Can you help do the integration, because it's difficult. So my team, back in the day, was very busy helping software vendor get into this marketplace, so it felt like a natural move. There was a moment when you do the job 100 to 200 times. So you know exactly what are the hurdles a software company is going to face in the journey of publishing on the marketplace, and one not even speaking about selling, that I saw that there could be a better way to do that, so that's how I decided to quick to quit and launch. WeTransact first as a solo founder, but my teammates, respectively, Juan and dig Dijkstra, that was that were within the same team as I was, saw the opportunity as well and didn't take it. Didn't take long for them to say, I think is on top of something we should be joining now before it's too late, and they also quit their job to be part of the adventure. So that was very easy to get the co founders in, because the opportunity was huge, and we could see the demand during day after day, from the position we had at Microsoft. Adil Saleh 4:35 Interesting, and from that from that day on, like, how did you of course, a lot of these companies are adopting to Azure. That is a marketplace that they launched back in 2020, 2021, and you know, a lot of these companies, they are, of course, seeing it as a as a go to market strategy, seeing it as as a good opportunity for marketing and building their companies and all. And at the same time, you were also thinking, Okay, how we can enable them, how we can. You know, make, make them sell more, sell easily onto the marketplace. So how did you get the initial traction in terms of, like, validating like, did you have, like, any kind of partners that you worked in that, like, talk us through the that that phase? Johan Aussenac 5:16 Sure. So just to make things clear, we had two challenge. The first one is to provide a solution to effectively publish on this marketplace, which is, which is still today, very, very hard, if I'm being frank with you. And second, which is, know that you're on the marketplace. Know what, what do you need to be doing in order to be selling more? And we needed to package everything within one platform, because we're a software company. So here was a challenge at first, when we started back in March 2023, we were really sneaky, because we realized that Microsoft had ton of incentive to offer to companies that would consider the marketplace. There was an incentive that is still going on today, although it has a different format, which is called the transact and grow incentive. Transact and grow incentive, which rewards 10k for a new publisher on the marketplace. So what we were offering to our initial set of customer is come and get listed with us for free, earn 10k and out of this, 10k pays a we transact license, which was around 5k back in the days. So we really made sure that our platform was a no brainer. We delivered what we hope to be exceptional experience to these first publishers so we can collect business case, customer use case and make sure this was shining through, and we benefited from the awesome support from Microsoft, because we were the go to guys already for marketplace topics. So when we launch a business, it's not like we were far from Microsoft. Previous colleagues know that we were an option if a software company was open to work with a partner to get listed and selling on the marketplace. So we got the initial traction around 400k in sales by offering a model which was to pay WeTransact based on the incentives that you would collect with Microsoft, if you are not earning an incentive WeTransact would get no money and then pass a stage in June 2023 we establish our real sales models because we had enough funding to develop the features and the platform that we wanted to have. Adil Saleh 7:43 Okay, and the latest, at the latest stage, like, you helped them actually publish, and after that, like, what was the process and onboarding for for those customers that you had for the second, you know, the second problem that you explained? Johan Aussenac 7:58 So, yes, so at first it was really like sprinting towards the first problem. So we had a platform that really worked well. In that sense, it would do the job. When you come to publish on the marketplace, it wouldn't handle yet complex operation, but you could get most of the operation run through WeTransact in an automated fashion. So second topic, which is to sell on the marketplace, was always a bit more tricky, and we decided to adopt a services first approach as an immediate next step. So we wanted to develop features that were making sense. And in order to develop features that make sense, you need to speak to your customer. So we took customer one by one, and we design. We designed a specific go to market journey with each one of them. When you are in the Microsoft marketplace, you're running after one of the two scenarios, or the two scenarios at the same time that are either you want to co sell with Microsoft, meaning you want to join force with Microsoft sellers in order to do a joint selling over an account that they manage. It's very convenient when you want to tap enterprise or corporate accounts. And you can also rely from the marketplace on the reseller network of Microsoft. Today, you have more than 420k resellers of Microsoft that are individual company selling Microsoft products that can also resell product from the marketplace. So when you're live on the marketplace. So key question is, how do I start co selling with Microsoft, and how do I start a reselling channel with this partner from this ecosystem? And at first we were like, we don't really know ourself, like, how this whole thing is supposed to fly, so we're just going to be on demand for our customer, on the services fashion. And the more we sided with customer, we realized that the platform should be doing canonical things for customer. Scoring customer list, for instance, is one of them, making sure that you know which account managed by Microsoft have the higher, highest intent to be purchasing on the marketplace and developing a plug and play reseller network so the moment you're live on the marketplace where WeTransact in two clicks, you can connect with the right reseller and develop a partnership. Adil Saleh 10:23 Interesting. And of course, I wanted to also talk about, like, what, what actually drives the most success for your customers? Like, are you measuring any kind of success metrics? What are those powerful actions that didn't you want them to take? You know, inability, you know, indicate that this account is good in the health and we're able to, you know, retain them. I was looking at your pricing, and not specifically the numbers, but also the packaging, the way you have designed for smaller scale to enterprise. So how you're ensuring the success of the customers? In a nutshell, as as a SaaS product, I would say, specifically for, for the Microsoft Works workspaces? Johan Aussenac 11:01 Yes. So we have a North Star metrics. We've actually got two North Star metrics. The first one is what we call the marketplace build cells, which is a very big acronym coming from Microsoft. It means the volume or why customer have transacted through the marketplace, so the total sales have made for the channel. So second is a time to first transaction. So if we want to develop an healthy business, not only we need to provide return of investment that is solid enough, but we need to provide it fast. So when it comes to an account joining with WeTransact, we look at two things in terms of action, and both are depending on the outcomes that they are pursuing. If you want to co sell with Microsoft, the first step that you take is to complete your partnership criteria. Within WeTransact. There's a bit of admin to be done, but the platform handles it for you. Second is to train. We've got training community and training quarterly sessions, and we want you to come with better together story, to have a good understanding of the play. So when you meet Microsoft Account Executive, you're not speaking nonsense. You're able to link your product to what they're going to sell, and you're able to establish a collaboration, because the major fallback that you see from a software vendor is entitlement. My product is great. I want everybody to sell it, but I don't want to invest in people pushing my product. So they go through that stage of training, and then we do something that is unique to WeTransact in regard to the competition, is we give them the tool to launch a marketing campaign, very similar to an outreach campaign that they are doing against Microsoft Account Executive, meaning, when they want to penetrate an account, instead of going direct, they go through the Microsoft account Executive so a customer every two weeks, they connect around with around 50 to 100 Microsoft Account Executive and that's how they generate pipeline to generate pipeline that is ought to be converted on the marketplace. These are the actions that they want, that we want them to take on CO selling with Microsoft, and of course, they can also surface existing deal where they would like support from Microsoft. So two immediate action, one is partnership training, plus outreaching to Microsoft Account Executive. Second one is surface a pipeline that you would like to work with Microsoft immediately. Second topic is developing a reseller channel, and the first step is you connect with the big players, the indirect provider directly from more transaction platforms are going to take a while, so it's better to do the admin now, because you will have the discussion in two months regardless, and you're going to go to the training same way as we do for Microsoft sellers, but for resellers these times, and you're going to do a recruitment campaigns to attract and to build your partner program. The idea is, everything is done within six weeks. That's how we measure healthiness of the score. Yes. Adil Saleh 14:19 Okay. And then the time to value that you mentioned that your job is to make sure you deliver the value faster, and that's why you're making sure that you're whatever it takes to be able to them to make their first transaction is super important to you. So you're tracking within the app, or you're tracking like any third party tools that get like, tell us more about your tech stack. Yeah. Johan Aussenac 14:42 So it was a, it was a major pain point. So what we did was to use a customer success tool that connects with our platform. We use a tool that is called vitally, or vitally, I'm not sure how we pronounce that, and this tool has a one convenience is. You can connect plenty of data source to it and link it to one customer. The setup is pretty complex, but once you have a training, you're able to see why your customer is, as in, have they taken the right action as they configure this part of your product? Are they actively attending the training? And of course, what is a revenue to date? Okay? Adil Saleh 15:23 So that is bringing all of those, those triggers, all of those data. So what kind of data sources you have for like, such as platform, a CSP platform, such as widely and any like, using any kind of product analytics like you, like mix panels and segments and amplitudes. Johan Aussenac 15:43 So we'reon the process of doing that. At the moment, we took a walk around, if I'm very honest with you, we we store most of the data in a MySQL database for each of our customer so we're able to suffice that, vitally, in a very automated way, as in, it gets refreshed every 24 hours. But in the future, and given the plurality of where we're going in terms of data source and tooling, we'll need either a segment or a mix panel, and we're very aware of that, just like the pressing need is not now. Now, yeah, absolutely, Adil Saleh 16:18 because you need to make sure you're prepared for that too. You know, you need to make sure you're creating, you know, those events you're creating those custom fields to be able to use Mixpanel and then pipe those feeds using segment or any of the tool across different like CRM and these CSP platforms. And even you can use CO pilots for either, you know, all an AI is need. AI needs is data, and so it can get better, it can learn, and then it can have a specialized capabilities for your use cases. That's what AI is, in Nutshell. And for every company, every B to B SAS company that we get to meet, I've met, like more than 140, of them here on the podcast. They all try to be a data company, but a lot of them, they do it at the wrong time. You know when, when there is a stage when they need to grow the customers and learn the customers and speak to the customers to understand those customers, they try to be a data company. So, you know, it's it's good to track, but it's also good, you know, understand the customers and have some sort of white glove service, as you mentioned in the beginning, like you had those, like you went on and you talked to the customers. You really understood their customers, took the feedback and then try to implement something that matters to them, that is super important. So knowing, as a founder, knowing when to say no is super important too, because there's so much of noise of AI, everybody's building agents. Everybody's using agents. We are building, you know, agents for CS to check back with you in about five, six months and see how we can help you. Even with all the CSP and all the, you know, mix panels and all the CRMs that you're using, we'll still be able to see what how we can deliver the value. But again, the time needs to be well, like you have to very much meaningful of the right time, which you pretty much are. So I'm glad we brought this, this conversation up regarding data and how to be a data first company. Now, talking about your team, I know that you, you told me, pre record like it's, it's pretty diverse. And you know, may I know the specific reason for it, like how you're sourcing talent, how is it working? What were the challenges you had when you started two years back? And you know, where you're you guys are at as a team. Johan Aussenac 18:36 So first thing, first, they have to be a pretty honest, is, I think we, we got crazy lucky on many aspects. So I will, I will give you a methodology, right? But I just want to say that I think most of the talents that come with us is, is an alignment of planets. Maybe we, we push, you know, and we triggered that, but I will explain. But first, like, regarding the first hires that we made, some things that not a lot of people know, is that Portuguese Portugal is a fantastic place for talents. You've got an unfair advantage in Portugal is young students. When they graduate from universities. They don't get a rich employment market. Very few opportunities in Portugal, and the salaries are very, very low. So if you tend to take the total opposite, which is to offer an extremely attractive salary, which is not even matching like what you would have in a Silicon Valley or London, and you offer to young people the opportunity to stay within the countries that they love. Within a linked job posting, you get ton of talents, and you would like to hire way more than you can, because the quality of application is stunning. Yeah. That's something that we discovered almost by mistake, but we did release our first internship position back in May 2023, this was, these were the first hires that we made, and we made a job post that was paid like 1.5k a month on internship position. So it's very correct, and it's very high for Portugal, but it's not like crazy money if you compare to other markets. And we had something around like 450 applicants. So we could see that there was a huge demand. And out of that, we had so many talents that we couldn't resist but hire two people, Julia and Joe, who were the first WeTransactor, if you will, and that are still with us today, because are bringing like four national work to WeTransact so this is how we started growing the team benefiting from a market that is quite low in terms of opportunity and taking advantage of being able to offer way more in terms of salary And in terms of perks, then what the market can to attract more talents? Adil Saleh 21:04 Yeah, a lot of times, a lot of times, because since the the the evolution of AI, even in the in the countries where there's that are not so tech enabled some Asian countries, Middle Eastern countries, even though the Tech has not at that level, you know, nationwide, but the skill set of people, because they're learning like these young people under the age of 25 they're learning new skills. It's so much online available, so they're improving and enhancing their skills. And that's where you need to capitalize, as a founder, as a bootstrap, a self funded founder, you need to make sure you find right headed, the places where the cost is not that much, and you need to optimize the cost in the initial years. Of course, you need a players. Everybody needed players. But it's, it's more of the it's more of an art than it's science. You know, more than ever, to be very honest. You know it's just about hunting the right people, having the right intent, having the right intuition for people, and then, of course, get them in numbers, just like you did. And, you know, talk to them and see how you can find the best talent. It's just not about the talent, it's about the motivation. It's about the passion. It's about, you know, all their career goals, how it all ties up, and everything. So, so you got like two last year by that, and how, how big is the team now? Johan Aussenac 22:26 So we, we are a bit above 42 if I'm correct, 4243 we've been hiring a lot lately. Adil Saleh 22:34 So if you have any open rules, you can speak it up, and a lot of these folks listening. Johan Aussenac 22:40 Yes, I mean, I have to follow up with you, because I'm not owning recruitment like I use to do before. So now I'm very happy that, like, for instance, I mentioned Joe Julia, but there's also KJ, that was the third the hire of the company. They really grew their own team. So now they invite me sometimes to the interview process, but most of the time, I'm not needed, like they put me to to rest, which is, which is fun to see. But the rest of the diversity was brought by two other main character, respectively, Alex and Sylvia. So Alex is was a good friend of mine. He used to work with me in Microsoft France. We started our career around the same time, and he had a dream to go to Canada, and he was going to Canada anyway. He decided to leave Microsoft. So when I learned that he was on the move, I obviously called him, because he's a he's a go to market geek like I've never seen somebody with such a geekness about how to go to market, like the guy's passion is literally go to market. So we had to fight very hard for him to accept to join us, but we did. And then we had Sylvia, who's from Australia in Sydney, and we were working in a in the same team, but a while back, like in 2019 and we kept in touch, and I called her out of the blue, and I told her, Listen, there's this massive opportunity. And I was really not expecting her to accept but she was like, Yeah, let's do it. Okay, let's go for it. And that's it. So plenty of luck because and Alex and Sylvia grew their own team on their specific territories. Alex from Canada for America, and Sylvia for ANZ plus APAC, and that was pretty much it. That's how we started as a as a SWAT team, and that's how we grew. Adil Saleh 24:41 Amazing, amazing. And that's, that's one of the reasons that you have, like, your team pretty much divided into, you know, all these different region. You said that you have major majority of your team in Lisbon, Portugal, and some in Canada, some in Australia. There was another country that you mentioned. So. Was, yeah, go ahead. How it's like to have some sort of like diverse culture. What are the pros and cons that you have seen as a founder, tell us more about that, because there it's very rare on our podcast, I think I remember only three or four companies with that diverse culture and people experiences. Johan Aussenac 25:21 So the pros are quite obvious. You get more geo coverage. So if you look at outside of the US markets, you will find that market are very culturally specific, and you need to meet them where they are, and you realize that very early on when you're European, but that's not so obvious for people living in the US, but not everything is us like and you need to adapt to the different cultures. So bringing people from different backgrounds as an advantage, both in a time zone perspective, because sales can be working 24 and 24 and meeting every customer, but also on the cultural perspective, echoing what one market need versus the other, and being able to adopt a more local approach, which often tend to be more effective than just a brute force global approach that are adopted most of the time by startups. You also get a diversity of profile, which is beautiful to see. And because people come from different perspective, different path and different culture, you get very unique ideas that comes from the interaction from different team, which would have not be possible if we were all coming from the same background. So that's a definitely a pro, and the con is definitely, communication is becoming way more complex. You're not working in the same time shift, so you need to meet some time, very late. You need to communicate very effectively in a written fashion. And sometimes information get lost in translation and not you don't have the same level of information at the same place. That was a very tough feedback that Alex gave us back in the early days. He was telling me, from Canada, I'm very far and I don't see the thing that you're seeing. We need to communicate more. We need to get way more involved, because we're building a bubble around us, and we didn't even notice. So you need to expand that bubble and include everyone. And it's easy to say, but very hard to do. Adil Saleh 27:27 Yeah, it's easily said than done. Yeah, I can absolutely understand, because the time zones are so different. You know, with Australia and and Canada, it's, it's so different the time zone. So you have to almost work in the midnight Okay, so now the last segment I was more dedicated towards, like, how you're going about penetrating into the edges and markets, especially the US. You know, what is? What is that you're, that you're so excited about when it comes to having some sort of market position out in the North America, apart from Canada, like the US, the bigger market. What are the plans? And secondly, I know there's your marketplace is good enough, big enough for you guys to only focus on, and laser focus on what kind of other opportunities are using in their adjacent areas, such as some other competitions. They're coming outside of these, these marketplaces and for, for, for your end consumer, you know, keeping that competition, how do you see about, you know, pen trading, of course, as a chief executive officer, you're going to set their, you know, vision and everything. So tell us more about it. Because there's, there's going to be more to learn. You know, people you know to learn from this. Johan Aussenac 28:44 Sure. So in terms of of market, we're very excited to be penetrating the US. I think we're doing fantastic these days on on that front. So we have a go to market that is quite counter intuitive for many, many people, meaning that when you build a partnership with a company such as Microsoft or with reseller everything, expect Microsoft and also reseller to be bringing you leads for you to sell your products. And we do quite the opposite. We are always built a better together play where we actually bring leads to Microsoft, or we bring leads to a reseller for them to sell their services. And therefore we become very attractive for them, like they rely on us as way as we rely on them. So you really come to build in practice a joint selling motions that get adopted by more and more and more sellers, to the point where it becomes canonical for WeTransact and for Microsoft. I will give you an example. For instance, at the moment, we are running campaign with Microsoft, so campaigns are owned and designed by WeTransact while we hand. What we call dark to Azure. Software vendors, meanings are built on AWS, or GCP, and we bring a value WeTransact, plus Microsoft that we call the better together to bring them to Azure and to Azure Marketplace. Microsoft reps are delighted because we bring them to Azure through that motion. And more delighted because, thanks to Microsoft, it's very easy for us to pitch a partnership and to get them on the marketplace. So that's what we've been piloting in the US, and this is scaling worldwide now. So we're very happy with this approach, and we repeat the same with resellers. And you had a second questions on, what do I see? Where do I see the opportunity? Because Microsoft is big enough, but you could be looking at more like AWS or GCP. I think when we speak about Microsoft, we don't speak enough about the reseller network of Microsoft. And that's some things that I'm I'm killing myself in repeating that, but you've got like four 420k resellers living in the Microsoft ecosystem. And the play for an ISV is not for software vendor, is not to partner with Microsoft, is to partner with resellers. So for us, the vision of the product is the ultimate partner tool within that ecosystem that helps you co sell with Microsoft and to scale seamlessly with resellers directly from one UI. That is, WeTransact that is a vision, or what competitors, they really believe, into a multi cloud approach, which is to say, you don't put your eggs in the same basket. You go with AWS on one side, with Microsoft on the other side, and with GCP on the last side, meaning you partner with all of them for some company. It's valid, but it's, let's say, 90% of the case. We don't believe in this way, if you want to partner with one cloud provider in its ecosystem, you need to commit and to spend time. And it's very rare that a startup, if not a unicorn and global, ISV, like a unicorn or global ISVs, they can maybe develop partnership with the three of them, because they've got ton of fundings are valued at billions, and they've got the go to market to do that, but for the majority of the brands, they need to focus on one to scale, and we bring that focus and that level of granularity In all the Microsoft layers that is Ahmed by competition and why we're aiming to continue this way. Adil Saleh 32:27 Okay, so you mentioned the reseller thing like that means, but it's fair to say that you're building all of this platform for the resellers, and you know, to make this experience seamless for resellers, to be able to sell Microsoft services faster at scale, and that's the North Star for your success. Johan Aussenac 32:45 To be more explicit, it's for reseller to be selling software vendor from the marketplace. So the marketplace brings a connecting dots in between resellers selling Microsoft product and software vendors. So same way your resellers sell Microsoft products they can resell from Asia marketplace a software solution that is not Microsoft first party. So this is where you've got like the biggest. Adil Saleh 33:10 That’s where the opportunity is, that's why they were they will look who partnered up with WeTransact. Johan Aussenac 33:15 Yes, exactly. And we see that ourselves, because if you look at 30 to 40% of our turnover now is channel led, so it's a reseller coming and reselling from Azure marketplace with transaction to the end customer, and we want our customer to adopt the same path. And today, you've got a big opportunity, because reseller, it's new for them as well. They don't really know about the marketplace, and software vendors are really looking to develop a channel. So there's also connecting. Adil Saleh 33:48 There is a pin for both parties. So it is going to be a win win for both parties. So yeah, I get your point out. How is it? Let me ask question that is more relatable to, you know, also for B to B, C s companies. So how A, B to B, C, S companies, let's say, you know, companies in the first two years with pre product market fit, self funded, just like with, with a bunch of 1520, folks building a product, working with hand of hand, handful of customers, like 7080, customers, to be able to get inside as your marketplace, and to be able to do and partner up with, like, with the same strategy and all of the strategy and all of that. How do you see it? Johan Aussenac 34:25 So the answer is, it depends. In your question, you mentioned pre product market fit. So there's one thing about marketplace that is very important to know. It's not a good place to pivot, and it's not a good place to be building a partnership with Microsoft or maybe the other cloud provider as well, if your product is pivoting all of the time. So maybe it's simply not the right step for you to get into this marketplace if you're not able to scale on one value proposition, because the marketplace is really. Be a scaling mechanism. It's not a place to find your business model. Your business model must be real. You must have already opportunities, and you must be looking to accelerate. You could go to the marketplace for many other reasons that could be a PR related saying that you're in a partnership with Microsoft, or simply caching incentive, but you should be really looking at marketplace the moment you have met, or you feel you have met product market fit, because the moment you start pitching your solution, you will take, sometimes to get Microsoft reps, the resellers, to get on on your pitch. So if you pivot every three months, it's not going like to to bring the same level of stickiness, and you're going to fail in execution. So product market fit is the right moment. You have a value proposition that you're looking to scale, and you're looking to de multiplicate your outreach. This is the right moment to go. You've got two options, either you do a complex integration in yourself, and you you complain a lot, and you take six months to before you can actually go to market. Or you use a tool like WeTransact. Adil Saleh 36:07 Or you use a tool like your WeTransact, love that pitch. Okay, so Juan one, one thing that makes me really curious, like how these agentic workflows and AIS, these co pilots and these AI powered tools go about as there's your marketplace. How do you see the future, or even how they presently? The potential of, you know, having to partner up, like for an AI powered company, SaaS company, to be able to partner up with, with Microsoft and that marketplace. What's the potential? Johan Aussenac 36:44 The potential is, is huge, being honest with you, and was still figuring out exact ROI what I can say is Microsoft is going all in about AI solution. They really want to partner as the most that they can with AI software companies. There are multiple reasons why. First, because in this partnership, they make sure that AI solution are built on Azure open AI so they are very Excel fish, in a sense, because they make sure that they get revenue along the way. So they provide a fantastic platform, fantastic credit and fantastic co selling opportunity for AI software companies. Because if you're building AI, and I'm sure you do this is a cost driver that costs an arm and a leg the moment you want to develop your own workload on AI. So they say, if you're a software company developing on AI, move to Azure, build with us, and we're going to help you sell your solution. And once in the process of helping to sell the solution, they make sure that you keep on building on their stack, and therefore they get revenue from the software vendor, and they bring stickiness to the end. Customers are selling the software vendor too, because they buy from one marketplace where they receive the old so this is a very virtuous cycle and very well played in term of business. Adil Saleh 38:12 In terms of business, because that's why, that's why it's called marketplace, because they already know the pains and problems of you know, all these, you know, vendors, and also on the other side of the resellers that are actually, you know, collaborating with vendors. Good job. So now, thinking about you like your only focus, laser. Focus on how to, you know, tap on that 400 440,000 resellers. How long do you think you can you can you going to take? I know that you're, you have a small, known, equity based fund. How are you thinking about and feeling about getting funded? You know, a lot of these companies that that we meet, they say that we are absolutely profitable. We don't need funds. We want to have a freedom on what we are trying to build, who we are trying to build it for. We need mentorship. We may have advisors, but, you know, we don't need, like, VC funds. We don't need x, you know, some sort of angel investors. We don't need, like, all of this. So how you're thinking about, number one, thinking about, you know, you know, going about this, like, profit wise, commercial standpoint, like growth and all of that. And second, how you're thinking about getting funded, whether or not to get funds. Johan Aussenac 39:23 So as of today, we were completely Bootstrap. So profitability was one of our way key requirements, and it's it's always been the case. So we are built on a profitable design. So to say, it's very counterintuitive for us to think about going unprofitable, to accelerate. I believe this is one of the European bias, like, if you speak to my parents, if you speak to my grandparents, you don't spend money that you don't have. So even though I'm very familiar with the startup world as of today, it's it's very hard for me to think like I'm going to. Spend more money that we're actually going to get. So that doesn't make the map for me. First of all, we are not opposed to getting funding, and that's why we always take some time to speak a bit with VC approaching us to see and to assess if there is an opportunity for us. We don't know what we don't know, so we are still open to discussion. But so far, we haven't felt, or we haven't had the discussions that made us consider funding or private equity or all these kind of things. But as we accelerate and as the vision gets bigger and bigger, because it only only go one way right, maybe one day it will make sense. I don't think for No, it makes sense. And I hope it will never make sense, because we love our freedom, and I have a sense that whatever VC says at one point to take equity in your company, so they have a saying into the direction that you should take. So let's see. It's open question in the air. Adil Saleh 41:00 Yeah, that that makes sense. That absolutely makes sense. Because a lot of this that you cannot foresee and you don't have visibility into, maybe you can, you can track a really good deal that can help you elevate, or maybe do things in six months. And, you know, you know, you could have done it like two years. So it's, it's always about, you know, if this stated time to value for your business, how fast you can ship, how fast you can penetrate, how fast you can acquire the customer, how fast you can maybe, let's say, five years from now, if you get a good deal like Microsoft, has just really good habit, you know, so acquiring so you get a good exit, you can, you know, have good exit, and then you can Build something maybe similar to this for the similar market, something different, just a regular founder journey. So no one knows what the future holds. So one last thing, what makes you so excited about the project? Product only, product like, not industry or use cases or product wise, whether it's like one functionality, capability, feature that is going to break the market, that you're thinking of, any vision that you have, then you want to get in line this year, going into this 2025. Johan Aussenac 42:10 Yes. So we've got so we made the somewhat of an acquisition of ourselves, which is we made a deal with with a company where we decided not to buy the existing base of customer, but we decided to buy an exact loan of their technology with a license where we can do whatever we want with the technology. And this is an outreach tool, so I'm pretty sure you're familiar with tool like lamely human linker, reply.io and we made an acquisition of early stage tools that does exactly the same thing, and now we want to bring that level of execution within our platform. What we want to say is, you get listed in the marketplace. That's fine. That's something that we covered, but in the next two clicks, you can get in touch with already designed campaigns that are generated by somewhat of AI. What would generate the best proof points and best value proposition for your solution based on what you publish Adil Saleh 43:13 You try to enable the resellers more with the outcreation everything? Johan Aussenac 43:17 Yes, exactly. So you in two clicks, you will be able to get in touch with 420k resellers like directly, you know, from a campaign with high conversion rates, and same with Microsoft Account Executive. So it's really the idea of telling, like, we generate a pipeline on day one with minimum effort on your sites, because that's one of the major fallbacks that we have in our customer base, is they actually need to work with our products. But people don't want to walk anymore. They want to pay and that's it, and we don't speak anymore. That's why you see so much problem in adoption of CRM, in CSM tools. It's because you need to put the work in to get profits. And we realize that very, very early on. So we need to shrink the steps that they need to take to get value. Adil Saleh 43:59 Wonderful, wonderful. I absolutely love that the way you're thinking about, you know, you know solving their problems firsthand to deliver the value the soonest that is that is so critical for any software, especially in in your you know, your ecosystem, where you're you, you're as hungry as as the resetter wants to set the sell the product, and you want to make sure that they get served as as soon as possible. Perfect. You know, it was, it was really informative, you know, having, you know, conversation with someone like you. And, you know, getting to know the ecosystems, you know, the what, what kind of the real pains of these resellers, and, you know, these Microsoft internal teams that are trying to elevate processes and operations for for resellers and vendors. You know, I wish you good luck, and I'm sure, of course, I'm going to be following your journey. I'm sure there is some point that we're going to be talking about, and, you know, seeing how we can collaborate. And wow, you know, I'm super excited for that time too. Johan Aussenac 45:04 Yes, that's brilliant. Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to connecting again. Adil Saleh 45:08 Absolutely. Take good care of yourself. Have a good rest of your day. Johan Aussenac 45:13 Cheers.