How Schematic ran a two-step validation to separate problem pain from build/buy intent | Fynn Glover

Summary

BUILDERS Podcast: How Schematic Ran a Two-Step Validation to Separate Problem Pain from Build/Buy Intent | Fynn Glover (July 10, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode of the BUILDERS podcast, host [B] from Front Lines Media interviews Fynn Glover [A], co-founder and CEO of Schematic. The discussion centers around Schematic’s path to product-market fit, specifically how Fynn and his team distinguished between “problem pain” and “build vs. buy intent” with a two-step validation process. The conversation covers Fynn’s entrepreneurial background, the importance of content marketing as an evangelism tool, insights into how SaaS billing/entitlements needs are changing, and the role of founder-led media in category creation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Fynn’s Journey: From Outdoor Media to SaaS Infrastructure

• Early Days in Media

  • Fynn’s first business in 2011 curated local outdoor info, competing (in structure, not directly) with crowdsourced platforms like AllTrails.
  • Sponsored content and content marketing for outdoor brands marked his entry into building content-driven businesses.
  • Pivoted to productizing content marketing and building software for ecommerce, leading to his transition from media to software.
  • Eventually moved into a cybersecurity company as head of growth and ops, handling pricing and infrastructure.

  Quote:
  “Everything that we've done at Schematic that has led to us raising money, winning customers, ... has come down to a willingness to evangelize the problem ... through nonstop continuous content marketing.” – Fynn [00:00/02:37]

Core Marketing Philosophy: Content Evangelism

• Fynn attributes Schematic’s early traction and credibility to relentless, content-first evangelism.

• Blogging and longform content drive ongoing audience building and industry education, not short-term transactional ROI.

• Podcasts allow for deep, nuanced conversations in ways short social content does not.

  Quote:
  “I used to have this phrase that like blogs build businesses. Like I'm still like, I'm a blog guy. I'm like pretty bullish on blogging.” – Fynn [06:16]

Understanding Schematic’s Product & the “Entitlements” Problem

• Elevator Pitch for Schematic:

  • Schematic helps software and AI companies solve complex billing issues, specifically around “entitlements” (mapping user actions to pricing/contracts/plans).
  • Traditional SaaS companies hard-code entitlements, creating tech debt and slowing pricing changes.
  • Schematic aims to create standardization around entitlements, similar to how Auth0 did for authentication.

  Quote:
  “I started to believe, hey, AI is going to make monetization and software way more interesting, way more dynamic. It's not going to be seat based, it's not going to be static… And if companies have these hard-coded entitlements infrastructure, they're going to be really rate limited from a commercial agility perspective.” – Fynn [08:15]

• Why Now?

  • Generative AI is fueling major changes in monetization models (hybrid/usage-based pricing), making flexible entitlements infrastructure urgent.
  • Market timing aligned; the team started building before AI-driven pricing shifts took off, allowing them to be ready as the trend accelerated.

Two-Step Validation: From Problem Discovery to “Buy” Intent

• Step 1: Validating the Problem

  • Fynn personally held ~100 interviews, starting with his story and probing for “root cause” articulation from others before feeding them his own diagnosis.
  • Learned that the critical “entitlements” pain is well-understood by product engineering teams, who often carry the burden silently.

  Quote:
  “I would try to get to a place where I could hear them articulating what the root cause constraint was before I had defined it for them.” – Fynn [10:20]

• Step 2: Build vs. Buy Intent

  • After problem consensus, the next step was to figure out—without leading the witness—whether teams preferred to own the solution or buy it.
  • Discovered most engineering groups didn’t want to maintain entitlement infrastructure once they realized it wasn’t core to their value.

  Quote:
  “...Is this core? Like, once there was consistency on this being a problem, it was like, well, do you want to build and maintain this ... or would you want to outsource this? And that's an actually kind of difficult question to figure out how to ask without creating a lot of bias.” – Fynn [11:46]

Category Creation and the Role of Content

• Schematic is “category-creating,” evangelizing “entitlements management” or “product monetization” as a new function (parallel to what Gainsight did with Customer Success).

• Fynn stresses the difficulty and timing sensitivity of category creation: The right messaging and market moment are essential.

  Quote:
  “If you don't want to create content, don't create categories. That is 100% true.” – Fynn [17:57]

• Ongoing process of refining the language for the problem and category, often validated and iterated through podcasting and transcript analysis.

  Quote:
  “One of the biggest changes in my workflow as an entrepreneur has been what you can do with transcripts... that's just an enormous goldmine of voice of the customer content.” – Fynn [19:25]

The Hidden ROI of Podcasting and Founder-led Content

• Relationships—not direct revenue—are the deepest payoff of hosting 60+ podcast episodes.

• Founder-led podcasting creates continuity with prospects, partners, and customers that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.

• Time spent here is justified as “company energy and credibility,” not direct payback.

  Quote:
  “My content strategy doesn't need to prove immediate or direct ROI. My content strategy needs to bring the company energy, bring the company reputation, … and if I feel like it's doing those things, we're good.” – Fynn [22:05]

• Attempts to turn team members (like the CTO) into evangelists—sometimes by recording and turning their insights into written/social content.

Pricing Revolution and Market Timing

• Fynn affirms there’s a real pricing revolution underway, moving from static, seat-based models to dynamic, hybrid models driven by AI/ML.

• Early insight and aggressive content education positioned Schematic well for this shift.

  Quote:
  “Pricing was this afterthought. It wasn't a function in a business, it wasn't a practice... What I told investors when we raised our pre-seed is I believe something could happen. Like, I believe AI will create a tailwind that will radically transform monetization...” – Fynn [15:00]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you don't want to create content, don't create categories. That is 100% true.” – Fynn [17:57]
• “Blogs build businesses… I’m still like, I’m a blog guy.” – Fynn [06:16]
• “It's such a cool exercise to take [messaging] seriously and revisit all the time.” – Fynn [20:46]
• “My content strategy doesn't need to prove immediate or direct ROI…” – Fynn [22:05]
• “I want to build the best entitlements management platform in the world.” – Fynn (on company vision) [25:09]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:56] Fynn’s Career and First Venture
• [02:37] Content Marketing as Schematic’s Foundation
• [06:38] Schematic’s Product, Billing, and Entitlements Deep Dive
• [10:20] Two-Step Validation Process: Customer Discovery & Buy Intent
• [12:53] Evangelizing the Market: The Challenge and Timing
• [15:00] "Pricing Revolution" and Industry Shifts
• [17:47] Category Creation and Content’s Role
• [19:25] Podcasting and Transcripts as Research Tools
• [21:11] Podcasting: ROI & Deep Relationships
• [22:42] Scaling Evangelism Internally
• [25:09] The 5-Year Vision for Schematic

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The Big Picture Vision

• Fynn’s North Star: Build “the best entitlements management platform in the world,” making monetization a best practice and standard for software companies ([25:09]).

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Where to Learn More

• Website: schematichq.com – Access the book, podcast, and schedule pricing therapy sessions ([25:51]).

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This episode provides a candid, tactical, and philosophy-rich exploration of how to validate hard technical pain points, build founder credibility, and leverage content as a long-game strategy to create and shape new SaaS infrastructure categories. For early-stage founders or marketers obsessed with go-to-market tactics, this is a must-listen.

Transcript

[A]

Everything that we've done at Schematic that has led to us raising money winning customers, like establishing credibility, has come down to a willingness to evangelize the problem that we're trying to solve through non stop continuous content marketing.

[B]

Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Today our guest is Finn Glover, co founder and CEO of Schematic. Finn, thanks for being here.

[A]

Thanks for having me.

[B]

Of course. Looking forward to the conversation. Let's talk about your first business. Tell us about the media business you built in 2011.

[A]

Yeah, that business ended up running it for about 10 years, and I kind of think about it as three different products over the course of that 10 years. The initial insight was in 2011, if you can kind of go back to like, what it was like to use a smartphone at that time, it was really difficult to find local information about where to go outdoors. So, like, you might come into San Francisco and Google on like a BlackBerry, like what's a good hiking trail near San Francisco? And you might get like, or, you know, a botanical garden as the result. And so I thought that there was an opportunity to create a curated media business. Curated in the sense that like, local experts would help curate the best places to go outdoors. And that was, you know, right around the same time that Alltrails, which has become a very popular company, was founded. And the approach they were taking was like crowdsourcing information. The approach I was taking was I was hiring writers in local cities and interviewing outdoor experts that I would source from local specialty outdoor retailers. And we ended up creating a lot of content. And ultimately the way the business evolved was outdoor brands like the North Face and Marmot and arc'. Teryx. They really wanted hyperlocal content about where to go outdoors. And so they started paying us. And so we ended up this kind of de facto media business where we were creating loads of sponsored content for outdoor brands for about five years.

[B]

And obviously the space you're in today is very different from that space. But what lessons and skills did you poured over? And you're specific kind of looking at from like a marketing perspective like you're a content creator. It sounds like before it was even a term to be a content creator, you built a content marketing machine. Is your marketing philosophy very rooted in content still?

[A]

Yeah, great question. That's definitely like a thread in my life. I came out of college and had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to play pro soccer. Explored that a bit, you know, liberal arts background. Didn't feel like I knew enough about the economy, so worked for a hedge fund for a year and then was like, I want to start a company. Like I could say that I wanted to do. And about a year into starting the company, like it wasn't working yet and I was kind of moonlighting, wanting to be a writer. So I think there's always been sort of a, you know, a thread in me that has wanted to just create written content. But anyway, the first business, yeah, about five years in, a lot of our customers who are commissioning custom content started to ask us to provide more of a content marketing service that we thought we could productize. So it ended up happening as we started productizing portions of our publishing stack, ended up selling content marketing software to e commerce businesses. And so I kind of became a software entrepreneur as opposed to a media entrepreneur. And so that business, we ran it for like about five years. We raised venture capital. It was acquired by an email marketing company. I didn't stay long at that company. I joined a cybersecurity company who a good friend of mine was the CEO of and kind of started to go down a very different path career wise, like deep into the belly of enterprise software. And for that company, I ran growth and ops and lots of stuff and pricing and packaging fell on my lap, which is how I got to running the company that I'm running to now. But your question was like, do I believe in content marketing? Like everything that we've done at Schematic that has led to us raising money winning customers, like establishing credibility has come down to a willingness to evangelize the problem that we're trying to solve through non stop continuous content marketing.

[B]

Would you say it was like a content first approach? Like, I think a lot of people I know who are addicted to content, like myself included, I oftentimes will say, okay, I'm going to take a content first approach. I know the audience that I'm going to serve. Product. I need to figure out exactly what the product's going to look like, but I can do that later. First is I need to build an audience and then I'll try to monetize that audience by selling the product. Was yours similar or was it a different approach?

[A]

That's a good, interesting question. So like, I think I had this lived problem and I went and interviewed a lot of people to validate that it was a real problem. I came to believe that it would be a very important problem to solve, but also very hard to solve for a variety of reasons. And so once I concluded that and was convicted that I still wanted to go after this, it was clear to me that it would take us several years to actually build a product that we could sell that would win the trust of real enterprises. And during that period while we built, what would I be doing if it weren't creating content that would evangelize the problem, evangelize our vision, attract people who cared about this problem to us. I mean, a big part of what I believe about startups is like, it's about trying to find the people who like believe in the problem as much as you do. And for me, finding those people has 100% been through content marketing.

[B]

What type of content did you used to do that worked really well, that sucks now or just doesn't perform well now?

[A]

You know, I don't know. Like, I kind of consider myself a little on the verbose side when it comes to just about, you know, everything. But like I've kind of been like more of a long form guy, like long form posts explaining things deeply. And podcast too, like where I can like go really deep conversationally with somebody who's like lived and breathed the problem. And I've kind of stuck to those two mediums. I haven't really kind of gone out and done like a bunch of my own short form social stuff. It's just like, that's not me. I'm not really good at it and I don't like feel like I'm in my domain and I'm doing that.

[B]

Makes sense. So you found a format that worked in 2011 and that format still working for you today?

[A]

I used to have this phrase that like blogs build businesses. Like I'm still like, I'm a blog guy. I'm like pretty bullish on blogging.

[B]

That's awesome. Let's talk a little bit about the business. You gave us a taste there of what it does, but I want to give you a chance to fully introduce the platform. So let's imagine that you're on a flight, Boulder to San Francisco, Denver to San Francisco, someone sits next to you and says, so what do you do? How do you answer that question?

[A]

It's hard to give an elevator pitch on what we do unless like you kind of figure out what the person knows about kind of the space we're in because it can get really technical. But for a general audience, like Schematic is, you know, kind of in the billing space. So we help companies, software and AI companies with billing problems. Well, it gets a lot more interesting to that if you really understand billing. And the kind of the story, the personal experience that led to me starting the company is I was running ops and pricing for this high growth cybersecurity company and I wanted to go change pricing. And it ended up taking me about six months to change pricing. And that was very curious to me. This is a startup, you know, our competitive differentiation is speed. Why is this so slow? And you know, the initial thought is like, well, is our billing system not flexible enough? Like, have we implemented our billing system incorrectly? And that was like the wrong diagnosis. And the more I dug into this, the more I realized the root complexity that was constraining our commercial agility was what is called entitlements. And a lot of people don't really know what entitlements are, but entitlement is what can someone do in a software application or with a software application based on their commercial context, so based on their contract or based on their subscription. And traditionally the way companies handled entitlements is they would hard code entitlements into their product and then tie them to plan IDs in the billing system. And this kicked off basically a life cycle of commercial and technical debt. Because anytime the business wanted to evolve pricing, you had to go into the code, make changes, redeploy the product. And that obviously would pull engineering off of core product development to go support the pricing and billing initiative. And so when I started to realize, oh, there's like this really interesting intersection between billing and the application that today is like not done well, I started to get super curious. So I interviewed a hundred companies and what I found is basically like there wasn't a standard for how to implement entitlements in the product. So developers were kind of reinventing the wheel. You know, early stage company hard code, it, figure it out later, it balloons into the shadow infrastructure product around the billing system. And what I started to kind of believe is, okay, this entitlement thing looks a lot like authentication did prior to Auth0, like prior to a company like Auth0, like everybody built and rolled their own auth and then at some point like compliance got too important for you to build a house, too specialized. And auth0 provided a standard for how to do this well. And so I started to believe, hey, AI is going to make monetization and software way more interesting, way more dynamic. It's not going to be seat based, it's not going to be static, it's going to be really hybrid, it's going to be continuous iteration. And if companies have these if hard coded entitlements infrastructure, they're going to be really rate limited from a commercial agility perspective. So this is the time and the opportune moment to build entitlements infrastructure. And I think the world at this point in time will pull this category into existence. And so that was the thesis when we started three years ago. And it feels like it's starting to happen.

[B]

Fortunately, this show is brought to you by Frontlines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. How did you approach those hundred conversations to make sure that they were valuable and that you're really extracting quality insights from those?

[A]

Very good question. You know, there's a lot written about, like early stage discovery, like books, like the Mom Test thing like that, like willingness to pay, stuff like that. The way I did it, as I said, I would kind of tell my story and I would say, hey, this is kind of what's going on in my company. Like, do you have any experience with this? And I would start to listen and I would ask them for their stories, you know, in a similar space. And I would try to get to a place where I could hear them articulating what the root cause constraint was before I had defined it for them. And so what I mean, like an example would be, hey, it's really hard for me to change pricing at my company. Like, I can't really figure out what it is. Is it our billing system? Is it something about our application? Like, have we architected this stack wrong? What's your experience with this? And then I would just let them talk and ultimately the more I would kind of peel Back the onion, the more I would start to hear people start to realize there was this intersection between the application and the billing system that was creating a lot of the complexity. Now, the interesting thing was all of this taught me who the ICP was, because finance, who I kind of thought would be my initial icp, really didn't understand the core technical complexity, nor did sales. The people who understood the complexity were product engineering, because as a business evolves from say, single product to multi product, from seed based pricing to hybrid pricing, from one sales motion to multiple sales motion, those are all inflections in a company's monetization journey. And all of those inflections create a lot of complexity that falls on product and engineering. And so they're the ones who are building the infrastructure and the code, building the glue between the billing system, the app and the CRM, the coordinate platform, all of that. And so that's sort of how I found, okay, this is a product and engineering problem. The product engineering team understands this problem. They have a language around this problem. They're the people who don't want to deal with this. And then the next question was like, is this core? Like, once there was consistency on this being a problem, it was like, well, do you want to build and maintain this problem or would you want to outsource this? And that's an actually kind of difficult question to figure out how to ask without creating a lot of bias. And so again, I don't know if I did this like, perfectly, but I would often try to, like, just get at the heart was like, anything about this that feels kind of core to like, what you're building? And the more I heard people say, no, none of this is related to like our product, the more I started to have conviction, okay, this is going to take a great product and good brand, but I think people will eventually want to buy this off the shelf rather than keep building and maintaining something that doesn't have good standards of protocols around.

[B]

At this point, as you started to evangelize this into the market, did people just get it right away and be like, oh my God, Finn, thank God for you? Like, this has been a problem that I've just been dealing with forever and it's killing me. Or was it more you had to evangelize it to get them to realize that their hair was on fire and like, this was a problem that they like urgently needed to solve?

[A]

It was like a little bit of both. But, like, it wasn't like overwhelming response. Like the first two years I was like worried Are we right or wrong here and now what's happening is like we're getting like significant inbound uptick. And I think what was going on is like we started the company in 2023, you know, AI, you know, had come out like what, late 2022? ChatGPT?

[B]

Yeah, Thanksgiving.

[A]

So I think like we founded the company at a pretty good time fortunately because it would take us two years to build a product that we could sell. And by that time the market around pricing and monetization had materially shifted from where it was in 2023 when things were still at pretty seat pace, pretty static. Like only a few kind of like people were talking about, look, the economics of software are going to change. Like value is going to accrue at runtime, costs will accrue at runtime. That will force businesses into a form of usage based billing. It will be hybrid and that's going to put a lot of pressure on how you architect monetization.

[B]

So it all went according to plan, I think, right, as most founders would say.

[A]

What I would say is like we're a seed stage company according to plan as we build a huge company. So I think right now we feel like there's a real shot at something, but an enormous amount of execution risk and timing is still a big deal. And it's a really rapidly changing market too.

[B]

Did you have any thought that there was going to be this pricing revolution that's currently underway? Because it seems like I was kind of joking when I said according to plan. I feel like founders always like, oh yeah, I saw this coming. It plotted it out perfectly and we just found the timing right or got the timing right. Like for you, did you have any thought that there was going to be like a pricing revolution? Is that even fair to say? Like is there a pricing revolution right now, would you say?

[A]

I think so. I really think there is. I mean like, you know, really great thought leader in the subject is a guy named Kyle Poyer. A lot of people know him but like, you know, he's said publicly like pricing for 10 years, he was like studying SaaS pricing and it was super boring because it didn't change much and nobody really talked about it. And like my experience like running pricing at that growth stage company was like, wow, this is a fascinating discipline that could really grow this business. But like nobody is talking about it in this company. And I think that that for a long time is true. Like pricing was this afterthought. It wasn't a function in a business, it wasn't A practice, it wasn't a discipline. And so did I think the revolution would happen. What I told investors when we raised our pre seed is I believe something could happen. Like I believe AI will create a tailwind that will radically transform monetization and it will push monetization from seed based toward hybrid. And if that happens, you're going to see companies like that have all this hard coded infrastructure have to re architect and at the same time, if you can create a standard that attracts the startup so they never get into that hard coded mess in the first place, you can imagine this being the standard that startups just start developing on and that could create a meaningful company.

[B]

One of the companies that I've really admired is Gainsight. And if you look at what they did, I think they really nailed identifying that there was this growing trend of customer success. They saw that there were more and More people on LinkedIn having the customer success job title and then they went out and evangelized the discipline. You know, really pushed very hard to make sure that companies had this as like an actual discipline and as an actual function in a program. Not this like little side thing that no one really talked about. Sounds like you found yourself in a similar position.

[A]

Similar position, yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think the dance had to like it. I kind of think of them as a category creator. I think that they really, I think category creation is really hard. I think we are to some extent doing some category creation which, you know, when I started the company I was kind of afraid of that. It's just like a hard and expensive road and it really comes down to timing. Like, do you hit the time? I have an investor and a guy I deeply respect who started a similar product two years before Schematic and folded it. And I think he just missed on the timing. But to your point, on, you know, kind of that, I've written a book. That book is like, really about like, you know, as a founder, how do you figure out willingness to pay? How do you, you know, as a, as an operator, how do you build a pricing practice that makes you money? How do you structure pricing architecture? Like these are topics that I like to think about and they've been important for us to attract customers and investors and partners. This show is brought to you by the global talent company, a marketing leader's best friend. In these times of budget cuts and efficient growth, we help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts to book a free consultation. Visit globaltalent.co.

[B]

i mean, category creation's hard, but at least if you have, like, the skill of being able to create content, that has to be pretty helpful. Because I think you're pretty doomed on creating a category if you don't know how to create content.

[A]

That is true. If you don't want to create content, don't create categories. That is 100% true.

[B]

I think with gainsight, too, it's interesting. If you look at. I don't even know what they identify themselves as today, and I know they got acquired and all that stuff, but it's almost like it's irrelevant. I think a lot of people debate, did they create a category? Did they not create a category? It's like they for sure kickstarted, like, the customer success movement. And I think that's the real story. There is, like, if you can start a movement, then who cares? Like, what Gartner eventually calls your category, or, like, whatever other people call it, like, doesn't really matter. I think if you're at the heart of this movement that transforms how organizations think about something, like, you're going to be in a good position no matter what.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's right. And we struggle with that. You know, kind of. This is where language, to me, is really fascinating. Like, is the category that we're working to pull into creation, entitlements management, Is it product monetization? Is it some subset of AI billing? I mean, there are lots of different words thrown around here, and that's kind of something I kind of regularly really try to think about and pressure test and see what the market is telling us. And a lot of my time, I feel like, has been evaluating language from the market.

[B]

How do you evaluate that? I always have struggled with that. My secret weapon that I've actually found has been, like, podcasting. Like, hosting a podcast is like a very good medium to test and see not just how your language works, but, like, the language that my customers end up using as well. Like, I know you have a podcast. We'll talk about that in a second. Is that part of the maybe hidden benefit of having a podcast?

[A]

I think it's definitely one of them. And then, yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest changes in my workflow as an entrepreneur has been what you can do with transcripts. Like, you're recording every call. And that's just an enormous goldmine of voice of the customer content. And you can mine that to hear. Like, how do people actually put language to both their initiatives and their bottlenecks and, you know, kind of where they want to be, who they see themselves as. Like, the before and after. Like, all of that is, like, really powerful when you can, like, dump hundreds of transcripts continuously into some type of learning machine with you and really then kind of go beyond, you know, really thoughtful and reflective around what you're picking up intuitively.

[B]

You know, it's like, even, like, almost embarrassing to admit now. But six months ago, you know, we were doing a big overhaul of our messaging, and I was like, you know what? Let me just upload the transcripts from, like, the customer success stories we just did or the interviews, like, the raw interviews. Let me upload that and then let me vet those, like, 10 interviews with our messaging. And it was completely wrong. Like, sitting there, like, talking about what we do was not at all how we were talking about it. And, like, I consider myself to be pretty good at messaging, and I was totally wrong. And that was, like, painful just to realize how wrong I was. But it was nice just to learn that from AI. I don't think that would have been possible. It would have been someone trying to convince me, but no one could have convinced me because they didn't have the data. It just would have been opinions. But the facts showed I was completely wrong about our messaging.

[A]

Messaging is such a. It's a humbling exercise, and it's such a cool exercise to take seriously and revisit all the time. I mean, similar to the willingness to pay, you know, I think one of the other things that I do and did is before starting the company, I wanted to see people would actually pay for what I thought would be the product. And after 10 or 15 conversations, I thought they would. And I revisit that conversation every six months with new prospects and existing customers.

[B]

On your podcast, and I mentioned that. How many episodes are you in?

[A]

About 60.

[B]

What would you say have been the top benefits you've seen?

[A]

Relationships. It's built, like, meaningful and deep relationships with a lot of people.

[B]

That's what I tell people I haven't figured out. Like, all of them are not. I don't want to say it that way, but, like, they're not monetizable relationships. But I know that I'm at 1200 episodes across my couple of podcasts. And, like, I know that that's good, and I know that, like, in Boulder, I'm gonna hit you up, we're gonna grab a coffee, and, like, I don't know what that means yet, but I know for sure. Meeting 1200 people in the last three years. Good things are gonna come from that in my life.

[A]

Yeah, I agree with you.

[B]

How do you justify that time, though? Cause I feel like it's, you know, relationships are nice, but, like, they don't, like, pay the bills or they don't pay the babysitter. I hear a baby crying in the background. Like, how. How do you justify the ROI of hosting a podcast? And more like the time, I would guess is probably the biggest thing for you to have to justify.

[A]

That's a good question. I don't overly think about it. Yeah, it's probably the simple answer. The way I look at it is like, it's just a part of my content strategy. And my content strategy doesn't need to prove immediate or direct roi. My content strategy needs to bring the company energy, bring the company reputation, bring the company credibility, create utility in the market. And if I feel like it's doing those things, we're good. And if I'm not seeing results, I'm kind of like, interested to know. Oh, okay. Like, are we not having conversations that are actually topical? If that's the case, like, let's look at that and let's adjust it. And that's useful too.

[B]

How have you approached having others on your team become evangelists as well?

[A]

Good question. It's hard. Like, take my cto, for example. Like, the product that we sell must create an enormous amount of trust with the CTO that's implementing it. It is in the hottest code paths of our customers applications. And so I believe deeply that if my CTO were talking publicly all the time about the decisions that he is making architecturally around this product, it would be good for our business. But he's heads down building, like, incredibly deep and important architecture and his infrastructure, and I can't get him up to go create content. I can't and I tried. And we're about to embark on our next effort on this front where I'm going to pull him aside for 30 minutes a week and I'm going to interview him and ask him questions, and I'm going to pull his expertise into the world. I'm going to put it in Claude, and I'm going to create content for him and get his quick approval to send it out over the following weeks. We'll see if it works.

[B]

What we've seen other clients do is they're doing more like an internal podcast for the same thing. Like, they'll have. Like, the CTO doesn't have any time to write. So they say, okay, let's just sit down, let's have a conversation, record it as a podcast. Podcast. We're never going to publish the full thing. We're just going to take the clips, the snippets, and just hammer social media with that. Like that's a strategy that I've seen work pretty well.

[A]

That actually was very successful. We've kind of taken a breath on it because we were going through a fundraise, but we used to do. The founders would get together and do pricing page teardowns and they were by far our most popular and watched episodes.

[B]

Did you ever follow? I'm sure you know that like Paddle.

[A]

I did, yeah. Oh yeah.

[B]

I was sad to see that Paddle Studios, they took it down. I don't know if you remember that. They had this like insane kind of like Netflix like experience where they had the documentary. They had, I think they had a pricing teardown page or they had all this stuff and it's gone now. And I was sad. I think they folded it all into like, just like a boring resource page which, like, I used to give that as like the example of like what the future of content was going to look like. And I went there. I was screen sharing with a client or a prospect and it's gone. It was very sad to see.

[A]

Yeah, that is sad to say. Was Patrick the founder that's.

[B]

So he got acquired. I think it was Paddle acquired his company. And I think he was the one who had that kind of big vision for like the content studio and all of that stuff.

[A]

I mean, he really was one of the original thought leaders on software monetization. I mean, for years he was doing the best content in the world on that subject.

[B]

Yeah. Now, final question. I know that we're up on time now, so maybe let's just talk about the future of the business and where you go from here. So we can go out however far you want to go. Like three years, five years, 10 years. What's the big picture vision?

[A]

When I started the company, what I said to myself is, I want to build the best entitlements management platform in the world. And that I think is still the case. And I don't really know how to describe it any differently. Like, is it thousands of customers using us? Is it revenue? I don't know. But like in five years, I want to be the best entitlements platform in the world, hands down, bar none. I don't want it to be a question and I want to be, you know, what does it mean to be the best entitlements platform in the world? It means monetization as a discipline is significantly easier to be excellent at within a company. And if we do that, I think we'll have achieve what we set out to achieve.

[B]

Amazing. Love it. Where should we send people if they want to follow along? You got a book, you got a podcast, obviously a website. Where should we send people?

[A]

I think schematichq.com is the right place to start. And from there you can jump into our book if you want our product or pricing therapy sessions with me. If you're working on your pricing and you want to talk about it.

[B]

Amazing. I love it. Finn, thanks so much for taking the time.

[A]

Thank you, bro. Thank you so much.

[B]

Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you, by the way, Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO, where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers, and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO podcast as a service. Mention that you listen. Mention you love the show, and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.

[A]

It.