Ep #156: The Fast-Fashion Era of SaaS ft. Joseph Lee (CEO, Supademo)

Joseph Lee [00:00:02] Having a bigger team doesn't actually ne necessitate that you're gonna, grow faster or you're more successful, or it's gonna help you. Oftentimes it actually slows you down because you have more layers, more bureaucracy, more people to manage, more people to tell what to do. Taylor Kenerson: [00:00:17] Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearthed the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh  [00:00:35] hey, morning everybody. This is, Adil from Hyperengage Podcast. I know that it's, it's been long going with some of the. Or like SaaS, startups that are serving the marketing, operators and, customer success, full sales, even, even the revenue teams, a lot. and this has been like quite some months that we, we are yet to, bring some, some product that is, emerging big time and they're, making a huge impact in the ray succession. So today we're gonna be talking about how, Platforms like these are enabling, the onboarding teams and, filling the right, making sure that they're filling the right gaps to deliver the, time, time to value mitigate this, this time. And how they can, of course, overall increase the lifetime value of the customer, heading the, net dollar retention.So that is the biggest, biggest, thing I wanted to explore with the, with the founder of Supademo, Joseph. Joseph, thank you very much for taking the time. Joseph Lee [00:01:37] Cool. Yeah, no, thank you for having me, Adil. Adil Saleh [00:01:39] love that. So now I know that, you have a. Pretty decent background. Like you spent close to a decade at Freshline that is more like an commerce platform for food suppliers out of Vancouver now, Toronto. Sorry. that is pretty much big at that time. It started, to boom, out of Canada. Toronto was the first, and Vancouver followed up. when it comes to tech enablement into the consumer, a market, which is like retail is, a big enough. So could you share us like a little bit of your experience? Contributed to, you building supademo, taking on Fresh Line and you know how this all shaped you, as a founder? Joseph Lee [00:02:18] Yeah, I think like most founders, I don't think I went into it thinking I wanted to be an entrepreneur, wanting to be a founder specifically. it was more By my very nature and characteristics, always building and looking to, create things, and ideating and, creative destruction that kinda led me to both those companies. and my founding story for Supademo is very much. a matter of scratching my own itch.So when I was building Fresh Line, having gone through multiple pivots, some due to our own accord, some due to market dynamics like COVID, what I realized was, it was really hard to demonstrate, the value of your product, what it did, and why it mattered to customers, especially in esoteric. More traditional industries that weren't tech native. So such was the case with Fresh Line where we were selling to owners and managers of distributors, wholesalers, food companies, and try to, trying to explain what we did and why it mattered with marketing language, with decks that people didn't wanna read, or even videos that. seldom would get watched if it was more than, a minute or two and it would take forever to script and create and rerecord as our product changed. So that was a point of real pain for me. having built a B2B SaaS company, in kind of a, an esoteric space. but what I did notice was that aha moment of when people understood the product often happened in, a, one-on-one call, not on like this, where I would share my screen. We would go back and forth, it would be more of an interactive, engaging session. And I would oftentimes even get them to share their screen and sign up and click through the magic of our product. and when they did, they understood the value, they understood the product by doing it and learning by doing and seeing it in action. It was so much easier to drive growth, drive adoption, close the deal. so yeah, it was just a space that I understood, hey, it's painful using tools today that to try to demonstrate our product, to communicate workflows, there has to be a better way. yeah, and I kept it in the back of my pocket and two years later, when I left that company, I was ideating with multiple concepts, multiple ideas in multiple industries, and this was one that really rose to the top. And, the rest is history. Adil Saleh [00:05:06] Absolutely. It is history. I, love the way that you are, you've impacted in a very short time, talking about like few years. it's, not a lot of time and, validating, by a lot of, a lot of people that we are reading up on G two, more than 50,000 founders already using it, for the, so what makes it like, I know that AI can make it really interactive and smart and personalized and all of those demos, and I know that, it is essential for, let's say, talking about, the customer facing teams, during the onboarding stage. Like they want, people to quickly adopt the platform. A lot of these platforms are pretty complex, a lot of, customers, they perceive value differently out of the product, and they have to make, sure that they. Make the smart tool with that, particular, customer segment. So how you are able to mitigate that experience, and make it, it more personalized as well as interactive for, let's say I, would talk about like more onboarding teams that are the first to, receive the customer after, sales. Joseph Lee [00:06:12] So I, would say, a lot of people see, AI as the sole reason or the sole factor that is going to amplify value or make it easy or personalize the aspects of the product. But how I think about it is like you're. Especially in our space, the product has to be standalone and be functional and beautiful and efficient and fast and easy by itself. And for us, we leverage ai, whether it be through ai, voiceover, personalizing data with ai, personalizing the contextual hotspot with ai, or translating it into multiple languages. We have multiple AI features. we use AI as a conduit to amplify the ease of use and the value that we. Already have, within the core platform. ultimately we, talked about this earlier, but it's all about how do we build tooling in a platform that, sure has a lot of bells and whistles, but can blend in seamlessly into the creator or the user's workflow. And gets out of their way and them achieving their goal and doing what they need to do. and the only way you do that is building like an exceptional, easy, fast, intuitive platform that people are gonna want to adopt and want to use as part of their workflow. Because it's easy, because it's simple, because it, aligns it with the workflow, not because it has. The fastest output or the most technologically advanced models or some sort of bell and whistle that it's nice to put on a website. It doesn't actually materially impact their day-to-day experience. Adil Saleh [00:08:02] and, the critical part becomes like when, these teams have different KPIs, they want to hit, like they have, like they want to use it for different purposes. Let's say talking about, marketing teams, they want like more like videos in the email, like personalizing. I was looking at some platform and I think Sense Spark or something. It was a platform. They were doing some really cool Interactive, personalized videos for the emails so we could, get more response rates and all of those. And then second teams, like mostly, these customer success teams, they are, working through customers in the first three to four weeks in SMB and like three to four months in the, mid-market or enterprise side to, help them adopt to the platform, work through the integrations and all of those. keeping on this, I see that this is pretty much product led side of, product led. Say that, you can quickly without any credit card sign up to, the Supademo and start using it as an individual, but as an organization, what kind of friction points have you guys, overcame in the beginning when you talk about mid-market and actually success or, support teams actually using as, as a business use case? Joseph Lee [00:09:10] YI think this ties back into what I said. I think, Habits are very difficult to change, right? workflows and, the way people work, they're ingrained into like their day-to-day in a sense that even if your tooling is better, even if. All of the qualitative and quantitative metrics point to you being the better solution or you helping them actually save time, be more efficient, close more deals. Oftentimes that inertia of them doing something a certain way for a decade, if maybe five years or if not a decade, very difficult to, change. and that is especially apt and paramount in. Like an enterprise, right? An enterprise changes much, less frequently than a startup that is willing to rip and replace tools all the time. All the time. this hearkens back and, circles back to our earlier point. Closing the deal is the first challenge, and that's what we've learned. Actually getting them to value and getting them the champion to spread it, but also you getting into the team and spreading it within the organizations and getting other members of the team that may not be fully bought into the tool to embrace it, adopt it. And then finally finding value, finding ROI on it. That's on you as a company, right? That's not on your champion. That's not on the person decision maker who bought the tool. Ultimately, you need to make that extra step. and that's not a, like a one-time milestone that you pass, right? It's a continual cycle where you're gonna have to monitor the health and, continue to push, and build bigger and bigger inroads into the company in, in terms of adoption. If not, then they're just gonna churn, right? They're not gonna find value, they're not gonna use it as much. And inev, inevitably, someone's gonna look at it and say, no one's using it. What is this tool? Let's not use it. Adil Saleh [00:11:23] Absolutely. And, a gain, all the communication needs to be personalized as well. analyzing all these success matters. All these data points coming from like qualitative, quantitative, all of these. And it, has to come down to you how you analyze them, how you basically engaged, maybe using, platforms super analytic, maybe can, basically. Make an interactive, communication layer with that and you can do it at scale. we are here. There's a lot like customer success burnout that a lot of these folks, they have 50, 60 customers on their books, to manage and to prioritize the high value customers and within, they need retention and all of this as has become the hardest. and, as you mentioned it, it's pretty much inside their workflow, be it like CRM, be it any, analytics tool that they're using, they can get all those data points and, create these interactive, meaningful, AI native, interactions, via video. So are you also thinking about serving within like email engagements, or newsletters and all these, Joseph Lee [00:12:29] sponsoring them or do you mean using, like embedding the videos? Adil Saleh [00:12:33] Yes. Oh, embedding videos inside newsletters from marketing teams and all. Joseph Lee [00:12:36] Yeah, I, think a lot of people already do that. And, change logs, product updates, new feature releases. People do add supademo in line. obviously there are some like technological, limitations when it comes to how interactive is the content. Obviously you can export a supademo as a gif or a video and put it in line. But, even with YouTube videos, you can't play the YouTube video in line in the email, right? You gotta click the link and it opens up. Of course you can support that. But our, goal is, has always been, let's build a product that can naturally and organically flow in and embed into. All of the different channels that people use. And that's one of my, for example, gripes with, an onboarding team or an adoption team, only or solely relying on, say, product tours, for example. Product tours are, good in certain aspects. they're limited to the in-app experience, right? They're oftentimes a one-time thing they open at once pops up. It pops up at the wrong time, first of all, or it pops up when the user doesn't even wanna see it. It, it, makes a guess as to when you think the user wants to see it, not when they actually need it. So it pops up. People don't want to go through, they X out, you've lost it, you don't know how to use the product, or you don't know how to use the feature. versus we wanna build something that. Can be, popped up or opened up inside of the app programmatically, unlike, just like a product tour. But when a customer needs it and needs to reference a link through the support chat or one of your AI chats, or in your documentation, in your onboarding flow, in an email sequence, you can actually drop that same supademo across all of those channels, whether you have it embedded or you have it shared as a link or you have it exported. All without creating it multiple times. You just create it once and boom. You have five renditions, five channels that you've covered, and now you're being more malleable to meeting the customer where they are and where they want to interface with your product, not where you perceive they wanna see it. Adil Saleh [00:14:52] Totally. Interesting. And it's, just human psychology. You've gotta understand as a, product and, understanding the patterns, some exceptional behaviors that, that needs to understand. and instead of just annoying them with videos and app videos that come like during the onboarding. Unprecedented and, a lot of, customers, getting on now, thinking about go to market, we'll delve in detail into like how you are basically, expanding because which is the biggest con component of yours? how you were able to expand this customer base, grow with them, like a notion model. first off, I was thinking that a lot of these CRMs, big categories, talk about Salesforce first movers category leader. Lots of others in the category, especially gong and the skills, intelligence. All of these, they're trying to serve the JSN market as well. After this, evolution of ai, like building agents, like loads of agents like coming every month, and they're trying to serve, A lot of adjacent use cases and, categories. I'm thinking around some in your case as well, let's say talking about knowledge base, like a platform that can analyze your new feature, new product, layout, ui, everything, and writes a document in just two minutes, something like this. So as a founder, are you also thinking about, making sure, let's say customer success teams, they're using supademo for these kind of use cases. They have other problems as well. They might be using other tools, integrated, same. What about expanding in a, having a longer term view on serving the adjacent use cases, in different other categories? Joseph Lee [00:16:23] Yeah, we're already doing that to a certain extent and we're like digging deeper into, that topic and, building, as I, as you had mentioned, adjacent use cases, a adjacent products, adjacent features that, naturally flow, within our ecosystem, I think challenge there is, yes, you can go multi-product way more easily nowadays with ai, with the tooling that's out there and the time, that it takes to actually build and deploy software. but you also need to realize what has made you successful, right? For us, it has always been. Focus, it has been on the user experience, the simplicity, the delightfulness, the ease of the platform. And if you don't. layer in new use cases and features and products the right way, you dilute that value add, right? It suddenly becomes more con clunky. It becomes more complex. It becomes harder to figure out, how to set up onboarding when you have multiple products, multiple workflows, right? What do you show? What is the aha moment, that you, give people when there's multiple aha moments in multiple products? we are going down that path and inevitably I think, that is going to be the factor that often creates stickiness. How do you cover more and more use cases? But for us, it's all about doing it in a way where every product, every feature we ship out is delightful. It's easy, it's simple, and has still has the same magical effect that a lot of people experience with super demo, but in periphery areas as well. Adil Saleh [00:18:13] Love that because you go, you are going to be integrated with, with all the GTM tooling, like analytics, customer success tooling, CRMs, chat support, all of these. and it becomes like, why I'm asking this because I get, I hang around with a lot of these CS leaders and they, now, these days, in the past six months, I hire a lot that a lot of downsizing within the team, and they're trying to do more with less. They want to cut down on tooling, not just because to save, optimize the cost, but they want let's say. The AI can do things 70, 80% faster than ever before, and they want to cut down on resources while they do it. They don't want to use a lot more tools with limited resources. They want to, they're trying to evaluate like what kind of CRM that can be a CSP platform for us as well. Yeah you get my point. So what kind of, let's say a tool that can help us with support can be some, tool that can help, helps us with, with, with email support, like chats, everything like that. Support. So there's so many clears coming in, and this, there's a great opportunity. And for products like you that has like a huge adoption and a very quick time, it's a good opportunity for you to validate with, lot, lots of these customers that are on a Freeman model, maybe smaller, scale ticket, and they're using like, 30, 40, 50 bucks or up to 80 bucks, per month tooling, serving the, serving the same use cases, and you have to do the same job. Integrating with the same workflow. Perfect. So now thinking about your GTM, Joseph, I know that, a lot of these folks listening to this episode, once it's gonna go out, they'll definitely be interested. what actually made, you win at scale and what actually work for us, how you're actually serving. I know that it's. It's resilience, it's perseverance. A lot of that traits that, not a lot of founders have. They quit of course, in the middle. But, when it comes to operational details, what kind of smart moves have you have guys made, what did, what kind of organizations have you, have you initiatives, some of the initiatives Have you taken, during this time to, have this kind of, adoption? Joseph Lee [00:20:13] first I think it's important to not downplay luck as a factor, right? Timing of the market, luck, but. For you to actually grasp luck and, run with it. You have to be, like you mentioned, have perseverance, have grit, and be in the market long enough, a good market, long enough to catch, the right tailwinds and, move forward. But, tactically, it's never one thing. It's never one thing or two things. It's a microcosm of a million different things that you're doing every day, in and day out. so I can rattle off like what comes to mind when I immediately think of what has made us successful in terms of growth. Number one, I think it's product velocity, right? I think I read the other day, how about how, one of the VCs said, I think we're entering a fast fashion era of, SaaS. If you're not shipping new styles, new features quickly and iterating and getting it out to market, you're gonna die. So for us, we've embodied that mindset Well before Lovable and Bolt and these companies were popping up left and right, and we've always emphasized. Speed and quality of shipping. So how do we ship the fastest we can and iterate so that, and, share it publicly, whether it's through like a launch week, change, log, email, just making sure everyone knows about the momentum and progress that we're making so that. When you have an enterprise that chooses an incumbent over us because maybe they think we don't have feature A, or we think they think we're a little small, they're actually following along and within four months they're like, holy crap, look how much progress they made. We should go with them because imagine what they're gonna be like and six months, eight months, 12 months from now. So I think showing that momentum, velocity, and Historical evidence that you're willing to and able to move quickly, I think is a big factor to our growth. obviously we've made some good decisions when it comes to the product, when it comes to freemium, reverse trial, letting everyone like. Without opting in, going into our highest tier plan, experiencing all the benefits upfront, getting them to the aha moment, we force them to record a, supademo in the onboarding flow, to force them to get to value. 'cause there's a perception that creating product demos can be arduous, take a lot of time, be difficult, because that's the way it's been, in the past and for us. It made sense to add a little bit of friction in the onboarding flow to force people to understand how easy it is to create a supademo, creating it in a minute or two minutes, to help increase activation. That aha moment. that's, SEO was a big one. Up and down the funnel, top of funnel, SEO, middle of funnel, SEO, a lot of comparison and, bottom of funnel, SEO articles have been, foundational to our growth. As similarly, we've shipped out a lot of free tools. instead of building new free tools, we just repurpose parts of our product and make it ungated and let people interact with it without signing up. Yeah. So those are some of, there's so many. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot. So many Adil Saleh [00:23:37] things contribute, every bit contributed, towards success and it's not possible. You cannot go and really, hey, this is one thing you gotta do, and all that, all of that might be possible. Back in the years, maybe when I spoke to, Iran, CCO of Gong, he said there is one thing that we do today when, as the same as we did, like when we were six. People, all that is b data first. whatever we do, we take data, analyze data, and then make data driven decisions. So now clicking on this, how you're measuring success for your customers, let's say talking about, not just as product, that sales or product, that growth motion that you have. Talking about some of the mid-size customers, like how you're measuring success, what kind of success metrics you have from onboarding, using any tooling, any kind of, let's say analytic tooling for your customer facing team. What kind of. Information you have there? Joseph Lee [00:24:30] we, use just like internal metrics, gathered through retool. We use Intercom. we use Mixpanel. We use a variety of different tools, but we try not to overindex on measuring too much. 'cause when you start tracking everything. you get into, or you fall into the trap of like just measuring and analyzing and tracking and dashboarding, and that doesn't actually move the needle forward for the company most of the value you create is gonna become from action, right? So what you wanna do is how do I get to some sort of. High level proof point or proxy, that's gonna give me an approximation of whether a company is healthy or not. I don't need to know exact percentages, exact things. So we, proxy that using things like are they adding and inviting other team members? Are they coming in and actually creating a demo every single month? what is that threshold? And it's different for each company. What is that threshold of number of demos that we want them to create? For we, for us to feel confident that they're gonna come back and, over and over again because it takes time to build up those habits, that we talked about earlier. Adil Saleh [00:25:43] So you track all of those in Mixpanel? we, do that in retool right now. Yeah, retool. Okay. Yeah. Perfect. Because that gives you an indication like, hey, this is the utilization of the product that is setting that threshold that we can call this customer as healthy, or there's a risk of churn that we need to engage. Yeah, maybe we can, we can give them, some sort of a guide or maybe do some cadences or anything, Perfect. So you have a customer success, like typical customers, like digital customer success motion, or do you have some sort of like account managers and high touch motion as well? Joseph Lee [00:26:13] Yeah, we're a pure like PLG play. we don't do outbound, we don't have account managers, but we do have a customer success team that is more so focused on education, and creating content that is quick illustrative and are going to let people. obviously find value in all the features and tooling that they use within supademo. And we do have, like a customer success manager and head of Cs, they'll sit down with teams and onboard them and train them like, as it's needed, obviously for an enterprise customer that's paying, 10,000 a month or, 8,000 a month. that's an expectation and we want them to find value so it's case by case. Adil Saleh [00:27:03] Facebook. Perfect. Interesting. And now thinking about also I know that this, is talking to town for a lot of, these founders that, okay, we are cutting out the team. We have, we, we think that we have smart people, but when we are hiring, we are making so much, so many bad decisions because everybody can use ai. People are smart enough to use ai. To give you this, perception that they're good enough, but when it comes to understanding your landscape, your industry, the ecosystem that you're serving in, it has become the challenge. So how do you see the A player thing, in this age of ai when during interviewing, 3, 5, 6, 7 years of, experience of let's say somebody on the GTM team, how do you analyze what kind of factors that you're analyzing apart from the personal traits like. Some other soft skills that you're analyzing, has it become harder for you or has it become easier for you? Joseph Lee [00:27:59] I think it depends on the scope of work, right? And let's, we gotta be realistic that some junior roles that, it doesn't matter. Like we're gonna have enough guardrails in place where. Sure they can use AI and the system is in place so they, it is very hard for them to fail, for more strategic senior roles, I think really what matters and what it boils down to is, character and their ability to like, make, decisions under high doses of ambiguity and make the right trade-offs in lieu of that, right? As long as they are a high character, high moral person that we can fully trust, We're gonna give them full latitude to figure it out, right? Whether they learn about our industry using AI or other research or tooling or customer, calls, that's their prerogative, right? What we care about is what is the ultimate output, right? what are we running towards? Everyone has their own way of doing work. I work very differently than my co-founder, for example. but. Trust should be given by default. If you're like hiring people. and, you need to have all the checks and balances, obviously, like reference checks and multiple rounds of interviews ensure they actually know what they're talking about. But once they're hired, you gotta give them full trust, right? Adil Saleh [00:29:32] Yeah, once you make a decision, you gotta go full swing with them and, trust their ability. And, as you mentioned, like making sure that they're of a grid corrector. And that is something that, that's also way to find because a lot of noise, a lot of other offerings. People, leave things on the table. so much is going on, especially in the, the New York City n sf. A lot of switching going on, people are basically getting, trying to get best people out of other companies competitors. A lot of this going on and founder. 20 people. That's, also rare to find with some company that's, that has a decent amount of seed prese funding. So now what's your biggest reason of keeping it really lean? The team wise. And second, what kind of four printing principles have you tried to instill in some years that you are starting? That if somebody knows, what is that one thing they know you guys for? Joseph Lee [00:30:40] yeah. I think number one, everyone on our team is scrappy and I've instilled that kind of mindset and, that, that skill, within the team, Once you lose scrappiness, I think you can get lazy. You can become complacent, not move quickly, not focus on shipping, not adding value. So I think being scrappy and treating every week as if it's, make or break, I think that's, that's something that we've done a really good job of living day to day at Supademo. I'm sorry, what was your first question? Adil Saleh [00:31:23] what kind of operation operating principles that you guys have, like internally, I know that might change team to team, but, overall as a group of people, like what kind of operating principles like DNA that you have set for, like the kind of instill with people Oh. Joseph Lee [00:31:41] it's all, yeah. Like I think it's the same thing. Yeah. Just shipping quickly, moving quickly, treating every week as if it's, our last. and trying to make a difference in our customer's lives, day in and day out. and I, now, I remember in terms of, why we've kept it lean, it, it's not a methodical decision of we want, we are keeping it lean by principle. It's more Tooling and AI has unlocked greater capabilities in all of us. And, we're able to ship quickly. We're able to achieve more, we're able to grow rapidly without necessarily having a bigger team. obviously I think publicly oftentimes on TechCrunch and everywhere else, one of the first questions people ask is, how big is your team? And they use that as a proxy for success. But having a bigger team doesn't actually ne necessitate that you're gonna, grow faster or you're more successful, or it's gonna help you. Oftentimes it actually slows you down because you have more layers, more bureaucracy, more people to manage, more people to tell what to do. if you don't bring in the right people, obviously the right people are able to answer a lot of those questions themselves and autonomously. But those are very hard people to find. to find them, you're gonna have to dedicate a lot of your time, a lot of your time and resource and effort. And that takes away from product building and customer building, right? So if I, could have an exceptional, a person executing every single day, I would've hired them like across many functions, right? It's not like I'm not trying to hire them, right? It's, but it's a fine balance, between. yeah. Hiring and finding and searching for these types of people and me, the heads down, executing myself and, pushing the product forward. Adil Saleh [00:33:33] Love it and everything. if you make the top, good decisions, the top line, bottom line follows, in, in a company as lean, as less than 20 people look after you every single day. And, I can hear you're one of the, most information people. I read a lot of your content and post across the team and all, I love the way that you're building these folks up, the mindset and, this, never settling mindset this is what, takes you forward. Perfect. So now Joseph, one last thing, like what makes you excited? we are pretty much done with this year, this year, like three, four months left. I know that a lot has happened in 2025. In terms of ai, large language models, some Chinese came in the middle and then they disappear all of a sudden. but, how you are seeing this, technological evolution? In my case, I'm just 31, so it's once in lifetime for me. I know my dad, my mind seeing like Apple and early, early days evolution and Microsoft's, but, and for, our guys like nineties skis. It is the biggest evolution in tech. So how do you see this? what makes you excited in terms of, your business from a commercial standpoint? anything that you're excited for or you're thinking, of, doing? Yeah. Joseph Lee [00:34:51] I, love the fact that we are lowering the barriers for people to build. Really anything, if they put their mind to it and, they, have the grit and perseverance, and the vision, we're making it easier and easier for people to build anything. Now, I think that comes with downsides across society. and there are. Guardrails that potentially and politically we were gonna have to think about making, to potentially, avoid a situation where we have like crazy polarization and wealth and the haves and haves not have nots, which we already see in tech. and it's gonna become even more amplified. So I think, I'm excited for myself because we can move faster, we can do more things, we can impact more people. It's hard to know what the future is gonna be in a year from now. In two years. Things are just moving as you see so quickly and changing so fast. it's hard to even e even fathom. So what we try to do is, hey, yes, it's exciting, but let's focus on what we can control and execute and do the best we can day in and day out. Because who knows what tomorrow's gonna be at six months is gonna be, a year from now is gonna be, a lot of that is outside of our zone of control. Right? Adil Saleh [00:36:17] You haven't, you guys haven't raised capital as of now. I know that you got enough, enough Levi for the coming years and little burnout burn, every, quarter, every year. Is that a good news or are you just. Thinking of making sure that on the marketing side, customer acquisition has become hotter and hotter. I was just reading a case study for, some company. They spend like around 8 million only in this year on, on, on marketing. Wow. And customer acquisition on all of that. So how you're thinking around that as well, is that gonna give you a shift if you get a really good, like maybe the same investors, VCs, or raise your next Joseph Lee [00:36:53] I mean, we, have plenty of investor interest and sure. We can raise around large, round, the next week if we wanted to. But for us, as long as we are growing, at the rate and the pace that we think we're capable of, and, we are, and we're doing that in a profitable cash flow efficient way, we, are profitable. We have essentially all of the money we've raised still in the bank account. there's no reason for us to raise. we're. We control more of our destiny. we can control how fast, low, and what markets we enter. I think without any barriers or restrictions. Not to say we're not gonna raise, but I think it would have to come, at the right time from the right strategic partner. 'cause just like the funding, the hiring example that we talked about, just because you raised more money doesn't mean you grow faster. it can actually complicate things as well. So it, it has to come from a strategic side of things. and for a company like ours, we actually benefit from, As we scale and become bigger and more people adopt our, product, our visibility increases, our brand durability increases. So CAC actually decreases rather than increasing. and we've seen that for us, play out 'cause we don't have sales teams, right? And we have, more users signing up every single day compared to last month. We have more enterprises and more distinguished companies finding us and seeing us in the market and saying, Hey, like I've seen you pop up over and over again. How do we get started? How do we go to compliance? I think, for us it's more of a snowball effect. Adil Saleh [00:38:39] Yeah, I was also, reading up about you like you got recently got so compliant as well, and that is how big of a challenge was. was it in the beginning? Like I know that a lot of these, startups in the valley, they're thinking, not thinking too much, they just have this GDP document on their website and they think that they can close a mid-market or enterprise, logo. what do you suggest to them? is it essential to have so soc type one, type two in the beginning if you want to go off market? Joseph Lee [00:39:07] Yeah, we got it. We've, I think we got it in 2023, like, a while back. So it's been, a little bit of time and we invested in it early and I think it's important, because we knew We needed to go, mid-market and, to enterprises. But I would say is, Y yes, it's, a requirement and a prerequisite for a lot of these companies. So you're gonna have a hard time, but you should also think about doing it for yourself, for compliance, because don't think of it as a check mark and think of it as like a actual security posture of you safeguarding your information, your customer's information, your product, your technology. and the earlier you do it, the easier it is to. Build those habits into your company, right? So if you've been doing things a certain way at a startup for a long time, and then you suddenly start trying to change things through SOC two, compliance and protocols, it becomes much harder, Adil Saleh [00:40:03] right? Oh, love that. nobody has brought this, perspective because a lot of people, they think Hey, we want to close this deal. there's some enterprise customers within talks there in the pipeline, need to get soft pipeline in two months to get into the sales cycle with them. but there's another perspective that you gotta make sure that in a longer term view, you need to secure, your databases as well as, your new customer databases. And a lot of these GTM tooling that are capturing customer data, like CRMs, it's, essential. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Joseph. It was really very nice, meeting you. I loved the energy. It was infectious. There was so much that I, got to learn about you guys. I just, al always read it up on the internet and, about you as well as, person. Thank you very much, for taking the time. Joseph Lee [00:40:52] Cool. Thanks for having me, Adil. Adil Saleh [00:40:54] Love that. Have a good day. Adil Saleh [00:40:56] Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please hear your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io We definitely need it. we will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower engagements with some building, some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.