420: Goldcast: From Failed Cold Emails to Scaling Beyond $10M ARR - with Palash Soni

Summary

Episode 420: Goldcast – From Failed Cold Emails to Scaling Beyond $10M ARR with Palash Soni

Hosted by Omer Khan

In this insightful episode of The SaaS Podcast, host Omer Khan engages in an in-depth conversation with Palash Soni, the co-founder and CEO of Goldcast, a cutting-edge video campaign platform tailored for B2B marketers. Released on November 14, 2024, this episode explores Palash’s entrepreneurial journey, the challenges faced during Goldcast’s inception, pivotal strategies that fueled its growth, and the significant pivot that led the company to surpass $10 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

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1. Introduction to Goldcast

Palash Soni introduces Goldcast as a video campaign platform designed to help B2B marketers create, amplify, and distribute high-quality video content. The platform enables businesses to run events, webinars, podcasts, and repurpose content into various formats like short clips, blog posts, and emails, all while measuring performance across the customer journey.

Key Quote:

“Goldcast is a video campaign platform meant for B2B marketers to create, amplify and distribute content.”
[04:30]

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2. Founding Goldcast: Seizing the Pandemic Opportunity

In 2020, amidst the global shift to virtual interactions due to the pandemic, Palash and his co-founders identified a niche need for a digital events platform that could deliver measurable results for B2B marketers. While studying at Harvard Business School, they began building Goldcast to cater to this emerging demand.

Key Quote:

“We spotted an opportunity when everything went virtual during the pandemic... we started Goldcast as a digital events platform focusing on helping B2B marketers get more measurable results.”
[00:04:30]

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3. Early Challenges: Cold Emails and Low Traction

Initially, Goldcast struggled to gain traction. The team relied heavily on cold emailing to acquire customers, sending out approximately 200 emails targeting trade show organizers and field marketers. While field marketers showed interest, trade show organizers were less responsive, indicating a need to refine their target market.

Key Quote:

“We sent roughly like 200 emails, half to trade show organizers and half to field marketers... we got a good response rate from field marketers.”
[09:42]

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4. Identifying the UI as a Critical Barrier

A significant turning point came when the team realized that the user interface (UI) of their product was deterring potential customers. Despite investing time in building robust integrations and analytics, feedback consistently highlighted the need for a more polished and user-friendly UI.

Key Quote:

“People did not want their venue to look like what we looked like at that time.”
[15:39]

Palash admits initially underestimating the importance of UI, focusing instead on features. However, under mounting pressure from lack of traction, the team dedicated five intensive weeks to revamp the UI, which markedly improved customer interest and engagement.

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5. Breaking Through: Securing Drift as a Major Client

Post UI overhaul, Goldcast began to attract more significant clients. Their big break came when Drift, a prominent martech company, became a customer after witnessing Goldcast in action. This endorsement was instrumental in opening doors to other B2B marketers, significantly boosting Goldcast’s credibility and growth trajectory.

Key Quote:

“Once Drift did an event with us, they became a customer... and that helped fuel our growth.”
[21:17]

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6. Growth Strategies: Founder Sales and Thought Leadership

To achieve the first $1 million in ARR, Goldcast relied heavily on founder-led sales. Palash and his co-founder Kishore engaged in relentless cold emailing, outbound efforts, and securing introductions. This hands-on approach, combined with their genuine hustle, was pivotal in reaching the initial revenue milestone.

Key Quote:

“The first million was honestly just founder sales. It was me, my co-founder Kishore and one intern... a lot of cold emailing and outbounding.”
[28:54]

As Goldcast grew, they invested in thought leadership by running their own events, positioning themselves as experts in the digital events space. This strategy not only generated leads but also established a loyal community around their brand.

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7. Pivoting the Business Model: Expanding Beyond Events

At around $5 million ARR, Goldcast began encountering churn issues that threatened sustained growth. Palash observed that while growth was robust, the customer retention rate was inadequate to maintain momentum. This realization prompted a strategic pivot to transform Goldcast from solely an events platform into a comprehensive video content platform.

Key Quote:

“Churn was definitely there... I could see that the churn percentage probably will remain the same, but the new sales percentage is probably not going to keep up.”
[41:59]

The pivot involved expanding the product offering to include video content creation, editing, and hosting, thereby addressing a broader range of marketers' needs and enhancing customer stickiness.

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8. Managing Change: Aligning the Team and Product Evolution

Transitioning to a multi-product company required significant change management. Palash details the internal challenges, including team pushback and the complexity of integrating new features. Despite these hurdles, the decision to pivot proved beneficial as it aligned with market demands and improved customer retention.

Key Quote:

“It was a massive change and probably I underestimated that... we are still training our people how to talk about us.”
[44:38]

Goldcast introduced a free trial for their new content repurposing tool, adopting a product-led growth (PLG) strategy alongside their existing outbound sales efforts. This approach facilitated broader adoption and attracted a more diverse customer base.

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9. Enhancing Customer Support: Driving Retention and Referrals

Goldcast recognized the importance of exceptional customer support in driving retention and word-of-mouth referrals. They significantly invested in their support team, aiming to respond to customer inquiries within 30 seconds, thereby ensuring a seamless and supportive user experience.

Key Quote:

“We respond within 30 seconds... we treat it as like CAC investment that we have to do it just to get customers happy to then have them recommend us.”
[52:00]

This investment paid off as satisfied customers frequently cited Goldcast's responsive support as a key reason for their positive experiences and willingness to recommend the platform.

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10. Lightning Round: Quick Insights from Palash Soni

In the concluding segment, Palash shares rapid-fire insights on various topics:

• Best Business Advice Received:
  “The market ultimately matters more than anything else.”
  [53:50]

• Recommended Book:
  The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni – hailed as an excellent people management resource.
  [54:13]

• Attribute of a Successful Founder:
  Navigating the “idea maze” with deep market understanding and intuition.
  [54:32]

• Personal Productivity Habit:
  Staying off social media platforms except LinkedIn for business purposes.
  [55:07]

• Crazy Business Idea:
  Building a deep tech venture studio focused on solving real-world problems like reducing greenhouse gases.
  [55:20]

• Fun Fact:
  Palash is an avid amusement park enthusiast and considers himself a "bigger kid" at heart.
  [55:38]

• Passion Outside Work:
  Deeply curious about science, history, and evolutionary psychology, often reading while performing mundane tasks like washing dishes.
  [55:59]

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11. Conclusion: Lessons and Takeaways

Palash Soni’s journey with Goldcast offers valuable lessons for SaaS entrepreneurs:

• Listen to Customer Feedback: Realizing the importance of UI based on customer input was pivotal.
• Be Willing to Pivot: Adapting the business model in response to market signals can sustain growth.
• Invest in Support: Exceptional customer service drives retention and referrals.
• Thought Leadership: Positioning the company as an industry expert through events can generate leads and build community.

Palash emphasizes that market fit is paramount and that even the best teams and strategies can falter without a conducive market environment.

Final Quote:

“The market ultimately matters more than anything else. You can have a great team, an awesome strategy, but if the market is not great, I think people are going to turn around.”
[53:50]

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For more information about Goldcast, visit goldcast.io. To connect with Palash Soni, you can find him on LinkedIn.

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This summary captures the essence of Episode 420, highlighting the entrepreneurial challenges, strategic pivots, and growth strategies that propelled Goldcast to success. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or a SaaS veteran, Palash’s insights provide actionable strategies to navigate the competitive landscape and scale your business effectively.

Transcript

[Omar Khan]

Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I took to Palash Sony, the co founder and CEO of Goldcast, a video campaign platform that helps B2B marketers create, boost and share content. In 2020, while at Harvard Business School, Palash and his co founders spotted an opportunity when everything went virtual during the pandemic, they started Goldcast as a digital events platform focusing on helping B2B marketers get more measurable results. But getting those first customers wasn't easy. Cold emails and outreach efforts weren't working until they eventually realized it was their product's user interface that was holding them back. They spent a grueling five overhauling the user interface, which finally helped them to start getting some traction. Their big break came when Drift became a customer after seeing Goldcast in action, and this opened the doors to more B2B marketers and helped fuel their growth. But as the market evolved, Palash noticed signs that customer retention was becoming a potential issue, and he made the tough call to pivot the company's focus and expand beyond just events into a full video content platform. His team pushed back, but Palash was convinced it was the right move and it was a risk, but one that paid off. Today, Goldcast serves over 300 customers, generates more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue, and has raised $30 million in funding. In this episode, you'll learn how Palash and his team found their fit in the competitive virtual event space, why the product's user interface was crucial, and how improving it jumpstarted their growth. The challenging decision to change their business model and expand their product offering, how running their own events became their most effective marketing strategy, and why Palash thinks they might have overinvested in customer support and the unexpected benefits they got from that. So I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Attio, the next generation of CRM. Now imagine a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured, and deeply intuitive. Well, Atio makes that a reality. You can set it up in less than a minute and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all your relationships in one place, all enriched with valuable data. You can also build zapier style automations, get powerful reports and seamlessly handle any. Go to Market Motion From PLG to sales led, Attio is designed for the next era of companies like yours. So it's time to say goodbye to inflexible one size fits all CRMs and join industry leaders like 11 Labs, Replicate, Modal and more. To scale your startup to the next level, you can try Attio for [e-mail] that's attio.com. are you building a software product? Then you probably know how challenging it is to find competent engineers. You don't have to micromanage. And then you have all those worries. Will this app work correctly? Can it handle millions of users without crashing? Can I trust these developers when I don't know what they're doing? That's where Axle Hub comes in. With 10 years of software experience, they do things differently. You'll work directly with Phil, their CEO and technical leader. No middlemen, no managing multiple developers. Phil guides the entire process and personally oversees your product. Think of him as your technical co founder minus the equity stake. He brings his expert team to build your app right from day one. Ready to make quality software without the headaches, visit axlehub.com that's a x e l h u b com Balash, welcome to the show.

[Palash Sony]

Very glad to be here.

[Omar Khan]

Omar, do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[Palash Sony]

I do. I do. It's a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, which is like our odyssey in India. It's called Karmanye vadikaraste mashu kadachan, which roughly translates to you have the right to work, but you should not expect the fruits out of it, which is something that my grandfather used to use a lot in childhood and kind of contributed to making me a workaholic.

[Omar Khan]

So you have the right and duty to work, but should not expect the fruits of that work?

[Palash Sony]

Yes.

[Omar Khan]

That's kind of pretty deep.

[Palash Sony]

It is. That whole book is pretty deep.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah. Cool. So tell us about Goldcast. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah. So Goldcast is a video campaign platform meant for B2B marketers to create, amplify and distribute content. So we help marketers from companies all the way up to 200 people, startups all the way up to workday, into enterprises to run events, webinars, podcasts, and then turn that content into other types of content like short form clips, blog posts and emails, et cetera, and then distribute and measure that across the customer buying journey. So the problem we are solving is that we provide one Consolidated platform to help marketers do video at a very high scale and quality, which is generally a hard problem.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, yeah, it is. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, we are north of eight figures in ARR. So that's revenue. We have 125 employees. So that's 60% in India, 40% in the US and then 400 customers.

[Omar Khan]

Awesome. And you're based in Boston?

[Palash Sony]

I'm based in Boston.

[Omar Khan]

Other side of the country from me. And you've raised, I think, just around 40 million so far.

[Palash Sony]

Correct. That's over three dots.

[Omar Khan]

Great. And you guys founded this business in 2020. So it's been about four May of 2020. Yeah. You've been busy for the last four years or so?

[Palash Sony]

Oh, very busy.

[Omar Khan]

All right, so we're going to get into that. So why don't we. Let's start with like, you know, 2019. 2020. Like where did the idea come from? How did you get started with this business?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, so I'll go to 2019, which is when I decided that I want to become an entrepreneur. And that time I was working at my last company, which had the market in the US I was a PM based in India and I realized that kind of doesn't work because I'm too far from my market. So I decided to come to business school and use that as an area to explore ideas. So I was just. I just had a Google sheet of ideas that I wanted to explore in business school and I found my co founders here as well. So they were also people with the same mindset and there are not many people coming to business school to start up. So we found each other and started jamming. This idea was actually an opportunistic pet at that time. This was around, say April of 2020 when we started thinking about this. Covid had hit. It was apparent that digital events will become a thing. But we spent two months at the time and everyone was building to kind of hone in on what should the approach be so that this can become a big and sustainable business.

[Omar Khan]

Great. Okay, so did any of you have any experience building a startup or working in a startup prior to that?

[Palash Sony]

So I was working at, I would not say a startup, but a growth stage company. And I had put in one attempt before for eight, nine months and that absolutely bombed. So I had some learnings from that time. My other co founder, he [e-mail] when it was just started. So from that time up to the Time it got sold to Walmart, he spent time there. So he was a startup engineer. My third co founder, Kishore, he was a classic preschool guy, BCG and some strategy roles, and never did actual real work, but only in big companies. But he turned out to be very good at it.

[Omar Khan]

Awesome. Okay, so you've got this idea, you start sort of building it. And how did you validate the idea? Did you do, you know, go out and start finding customers and doing interviews or build a landing page and see if you could get people signing up? Like what was. How did you guys get started?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, so when we, when this opportunity opened up, this market had already become pretty hot and crowded because there was nothing much to do right. During the pandemic than to do digital events. So we realized that if we go like super horizontal, we'll get killed. And also that probably might not be sustainable because we. I kind of saw that in my last company where we were trying to do too much, a very broad swath of market and ended up not being like super good at anything. So we went in with a hypothesis that was a very simple to understand hypothesis that came from my own experience that marketing channels have to be inherently measurable for them to be sticky. And so we said, okay, let's make a digital events platform that has measurability built into what it's doing. And there are two Personas doing events that, that need that. One is B2B marketers and others is trade shows. So we built a hypothesis first and built a pitch as to what the product will do. And then we started cold emailing people. So that was out of necessity because we didn't have a network here in the US So we just cold emailed a lot of folks. We tried to find common connections. So any Harvard Business School alums or undergrad alums who are in the Bay Area, et cetera, and see who would bite and give us feedback.

[Omar Khan]

And what kind of response did you get? Like, how easy or hard was it to get a reply from people? I guess.

[Palash Sony]

So we kind of used that as an indicator for what market is resonating more. So I think we sent roughly like 200 emails, half to trade show organizers and, and parties in that and then other half to what were field marketers? Like people who were doing events already and were reliant on events and companies. And we got a good response rate from field marketers. So they would be like, okay, I'm interested in checking it out. This is a relevant thing that speaks to me. In trade shows, we did not get as much. And even on the calls, we were seeing that they were probably not in tune with what we were thinking. So that traction was some kind of an indicator for us too, that where the market actually could lie.

[Omar Khan]

And what was the offer in the email? Did you have anything to show them at the time?

[Palash Sony]

Yes. No, actually, no. We just had an offer which said, hey, this is. We are actually. We played the student card at that time. We had three students at Harvard Business School. We see this thing in the digital event space that we can build a product for you that can help you create measurability across your digital events and get a seat at the revenue table by showing that impact to your cmo. And that was also a message that I think after two or three conversations got refined. So early on it was very simple that we can help you throw events and measure it. And then when we started talking to people, we realized, oh, they actually want to show what the impact is, because it's very hard for event marketers to show that versus, say, digital marketers who are doing ads on LinkedIn. Very measurable. So we started anchoring on that and then that was. That was the thing we were asking feedback. We were not selling anything. We said, we have some early ideas, we want your feedback advice. And yeah, that. That was it.

[Omar Khan]

Actually, that's. That's quite smart. I mean, it wasn't a huge sample set of, you know, 200 emails, but there was clearly like one ICP or segment of the market that seemed more interested and one clearly wasn't at the time. So that was great. And then as you start to have these conversations, how long did it take for you to get to the point where you landed those first 10 customers? Like, and what was. What was that journey like?

[Palash Sony]

Oh, so from this point, it took us a lot of time, actually. We started doing this in May, and then we got our first customer end of January in 2021. Yeah. Which was a pretty long time given that there was an immediate need for something like this. And that was a whole process of struggle.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, yeah. So that was the first customer, the.

[Palash Sony]

First paying, first paying, like, big annual contract customer came in end of Jan.

[Omar Khan]

And like, number one, like, why do you think it took that long to land that customer? Was it because, you know, it was kind of a product issue, the product wasn't ready or something? Or was it more about finding the right type of customer? Like, you know, we find lots of people who look at a product or an idea and they think, you know, they'll tell you it's great and they love it and whatever. And then, you know, once you kind of ask them to buy, they ghost you.

[Palash Sony]

It was a mix of both Omar. So we started with this idea of measurability and we were like, okay, let's go hard on integrations and analytics. So we built a product that was out there. We took two, two and a half months to do that. And then we had a lot of emphasis on integrations and analytics and dashboards. We had some basic versions of that. And when we, and then we had some customers who were like, okay, yeah, we use it, when you have it, please bring it to us. And when we brought it to them, they would not buy it. They would either be a little non committal or not take it. And that time that the market we were going after was startups, so 50 people or less, like series A seed state startups. And we thought it's easier to get in with them, they are more innovative, have less barrier to use new things. And after not getting any traction, we started thinking maybe this is not a product that should be built because the market was already heating up at that time. There were multiple players with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding at that time and the fault lines were not clear. And we started at one point like very deeply thinking whether we should pivot out of building a full events platform and just to integrations that can plug into other events platforms. There was a very deep discussion in our team because not getting any traction was causing some kind of demoralization to us founders and to the three, four people we had. So we ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons, but that turned out to be a good call. What was actually inherently problematic in the product, which I discounted heavily early on, was that it's UI was not good. So I was in the classic camp of PMs who thought UI was always secondary. But in our product the UI was the space, right? The venue where events were happening. And people did not want their venue to look like what we looked like at that time. And I felt like people were always saying that, telling it to our face in some ways in nicer ways probably than they should have been, but I always discounted that. And at some point we made that decision saying, okay, let's change the ui. So we worked day and night and changed the UI completely in five weeks. And that sort of turned, turned something that had get some initial traction.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, I mean looking back at this in the way that you explained it makes a lot of sense, right? Because if you're giving a marketer, let's say some kind of tool and they're going to be using it, I don't know, some social media scheduling tool. Right. They don't really care how nice it looks as long as it makes their job easier. Right. But in this case, the product was going to be. Their customers would be seeing the product. Right. And so there's a higher expectation. But I'm curious, like you said, they were telling you in different ways that the UI was possibly the issue and you, you were discounting that at the time. How did you figure out that the UI really was the issue and then committed to the next five or six weeks to rehaul this thing? It wasn't just a hunch, right? Something happened that made you guys think, okay, this is really why we're having problems.

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, absolutely. So when we, when we decided to not just be an integrations product, we realized that there's something wrong. Right? Because the need for this is apparent. It's out there. Why are we not getting reaction? Why are people not using us? Why are they being non committal? And one other hack that we used at that time to get some early customers is to bring on some advisors. So we deliberately targeted people who were sort of mid level, so director, ish type people in good roles who have an idea of the landscape of the market and we gave them equity in the company saying, okay, you help us navigate this early phase and if we are successful then you'll make money. And the main thing I think that was motivating for them is that they wanted to be associated to startups and give that advice, which is not an option that was easily available to people in corporates at that time. I think it's probably more common now. So a lot of them started telling us. One of our advisors, she was in a large enterprise and she always used to belittle our ui and I always thought that maybe it's her personal preference. But then I started going and talking to people again and saying, okay, if not this, then why? What is causing this blocker? And they would always say, then I started listening that okay, it's probably the ui, it doesn't look great. And I could not probably empathize with that first. But I think the extreme push of not having traction made us take that call. Honestly, it wasn't actually while we were even overhauling TRIA to us that this will solve the problem. But now if I look back at everything that we know, even today we get feedback from customers in our NPS say, okay, this product looks great, and that's why I bought it.

[Omar Khan]

I think I love what you just said. That the extreme pressure of not getting traction made you pay more attention to what people were saying.

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, yeah, right. I was probably a little too. Little too dogmatic about what I thought the market should want than actually listening to what they wanted, which was a lot simpler, just about a ui.

[Omar Khan]

Okay, great. So you guys spent the next five, six weeks, you said you significantly improved the ui, and then what happened? Was there a immediate turnaround in terms of the way people were reacting?

[Palash Sony]

Yes. So we already had some people that. That initial set of people who responded to us. A lot of them were startup folks. And we started showing it to them and we could see that reaction. Right. That was different. And they were like, wow, yeah, I want to try it out. And so some marketers started trying it out. At that time, we did not have a backend. So trying it out meant like speaking to someone in the company and giving them an email of what their venture looked like, and then we'll build it for them. It was very manual, very cumbersome. But we did that for the first few customers. And then one thing that we realized was that within that set, there were a couple of companies that were bigger. And we did not anticipate that they will bite, but they started getting in touch with us. And one of them was actually pager duty. So that there was a lot of. And that deal did not come through because they had a lot of security stuff that we were not qualified to do. But that gave us a signal that, okay, this is probably something that bigger companies will want more than smaller startups because they have. They have to figure out their marketing first. Bigger companies have figured that out and they want to scale. So as a happenstance, what happened is one of our investors underscore they were using the product when the UI changed. And the founders of Drift, David Cancel, he was a speaker and he saw the platform. He was like, wow, this looks great. And we reached out to him, sent an email twice. He didn't respond. Third time he responded and said, okay, let me run it by our marketing team. And they're marketing because he sent the email. They took it seriously. And then one thing led to another. They actually tried us for a pilot, and that was like a turning corner, because once Drift did an event with us, they became a customer. And then a lot of marketers saw us in their event because it was a martech company. And then we started getting a lot of inbound after that.

[Omar Khan]

I want to go back to something you said earlier, that you didn't have a backend and customers had to talk to your team and then you were building basically a custom experience for every customer. Can you just explain exactly what was going on?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, because we were in so much rush to get something, we were almost desperate. We had what I would say like an API type of thing where we would write stuff up and then we make an API call. Well, my co founder was doing that in the backend and then an instance will pop up where you can log in, have speakers, talk something similar to Riverside. Right. So we were doing all of that setup in the backend manually. Like a customer could not go and do it themselves. And the only reason I pushed for that at that time was because I realized that a hypothesis I probably they are, they're not really correct and unless like the rubber hits the road, we are not getting the right signals and something is amiss. So I wanted to get the product out as soon as possible, just get people to use it. And I guess that was another signal that like who was willing to use it because bigger companies were like, yeah, this looks great. I already have an audience that wanted. That want to attend our events and I'm fine bearing with this get state for now a little bit. We built it eventually but that early part was like a deliberate trade off we made because we just wanted to get the product out.

[Omar Khan]

I wonder if that turned out to be a blessing in disguise because you were attracting some of these bigger customers and a lot of them, they don't want the self serve experience. Right. They want to be about talking to someone at the company and feel like they're getting some kind of custom solution and. And you guys were doing that anyway, but not by design.

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, I think so. There's some aspect of that also. And bear in mind those companies are also not like too big. These were companies with say 50 to 300 employees. That was the range that we were talking about. And yes, they were happy with some of the handholding. But I think what we also learned in that handholding time is that events are inherently stressful thing. If you're doing a live event, your reputation is at stake because if something goes down then you look bad in front of your CMO or whoever or your audience. And so people wanted that someone is there who can run the ship with them and make them successful in that like two, three, four hours when the event is happening. So that was also something that acted in our favor. But eventually we Built it because people were like, okay, now it's time.

[Omar Khan]

Now when we were chatting earlier, you were talking about some of the struggles that you had in terms of navigating the target market and figuring out exactly who your ICP was. Can you talk a little bit about that? What was the hardest part of where were you struggling with figuring out your icp?

[Palash Sony]

So we did this in multiple parts. The very first time we were trying to fish out where the initial interest is. It was clear that the initial interest is in B2B companies. And it was kind of a counterintuitive decision at that time when everything was a market, any kind of event was a market and it was easy to make money actually in this market. But we wanted to deliberately be focused because we knew that chickens will come to roost eventually, things will churn and we want to be in a corner which is going to be sustainable. So we knew it was B2B. But within that, whether it should be like early startups or should it be like late stage startups? Who exactly is in those companies? That was a process of constant discovery that I explained. So we started with small startups first. So we had a couple of customers who said, okay, we'll do pilots with you. And then when we brought the product to them, they were non committal and they were like, okay, whatever. And. And that led to a lot of realizations. And in this whole time we were always trying to push the product out in whatever way in the hands of customers and see who is actually more interested or rather like putting it out of our hands. And that is how we figured out. It's like slightly bigger companies, companies who have gotten some semblance of marketing already figured out. So yeah, that was, it was just like the initial founder hustle. I'm always trying to figure out how to put it better, but it was just like a lot of hustle from me and my co founder just trying to speak to as many people, show it to as many people and see how it works.

[Omar Khan]

So I want to try and figure out how you arrived at that conclusion. And that ICP was this. Were you systematically trying to talk to different groups of people? Like the example you gave earlier where you said we had 200 emails and we sort of basically did this split test or was it more about. It was a bit more random and all kinds of people were coming and you were just like, just looking for signals.

[Palash Sony]

Yes. So beyond the early exploration, it was sort of iterative. So once we had a section which seemed to be interested, we took the product out to them, they didn't like it. Then we changed the UI and then we went to them and there was still not that like extreme push. And I think what sort of was the signal at that time, like who is willing to pay us an annual contract? That was a signal because we wanted this to be a SaaS business, 100%. We, we were not interested in like one time that kind of stuff. And, and the payment was what, like the willingness to pay or enter a conversation where we can talk about this was a big signal for us because at that time it was, it was also hard to like figure out who was really had the intent. Right. Early customers. Everyone wanted to do events at that time. But who was willing to like bear with a half baked product without a backend and willing to give us an annual contract? That was the signal. So it was more iterative after that. I wish in hindsight that I had a systematic approach, but if one thing we got right was that we always had a hypothesis for wherever we were digging in. So early hypothesis was measurability. Then the second was that the product needs to be more engaging, better ui. And then the third was does someone have a repeatable events program? And that's how we arrived at the target market. We were tempted to go slightly randomly. So we were getting pulled by communities. For example, lots of communities doing events, they wanted a product and, and we just said no because we could not see that repeatability happening in the future.

[Omar Khan]

Let's talk about growth and how you grew the business. So you explained how you got some of the early customers and obviously landing a customer like Drift. Great. That gives you a lot of. You're basically getting in front of all your potential target customers by just letting them run their events. It's awesome. Beyond that, like how did you start to build some kind of, you know, customer acquisition engine and like what, what were the growth channels that have worked best? The best for you? Maybe? Let's talk about getting to the first million in ARR first. Like what were you, what did you do to get to that big milestone?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, so the first million was honestly just founder sales. It was me, my co founder Kishore and there was one intern who ended up staying us for three years. She was. The three of us were doing it and it was a lot of just cold emailing, outbounding, getting intros, finding people who are willing to be advisors and then making intros. It was a lot of hustle in the first 1 million. The other thing that was working in our favor was once drift start in universe. We started getting some inbound. So it was not, it was not all just outbound, but it was like a fair amount of outbound. Then once we started seeing repeatability, which was around like I would say 700, 800K in error is when we brought on our first growth marketer who ended up being the head of marketing.

[Omar Khan]

Okay, great. So, so founder sales hustle, cold email gets you to that gets you to seven figures in ARR. And then what about beyond that?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, beyond that we could see that this obviously is not scalable what Kishore is doing with outbound. So we brought in a marketer. And the great thing about her was that she discovered us through an event. So she was in an event and she was like, oh wow, this looks cool. And she applied for that role and that's how we got her in. So at that time we had no marketing team, so to speak of. It was just me and my co founder. And there were many ways in which we could spend the money. We could do a lot of things. Her thing was that we need to show the world how to do events very well because everyone is doing it, but it's not a thing that people have been doing forever. So we need to be the thought leaders on showing how to do it very well in the context of B2B marketers. Like what do B2B marketers need to do from the start to end? And so, and the way to do that is to do our own events and be the thought partner, thought leader. And we were like, okay, that kind of sounds good, but it sounds like a long, long term investment and something that will not work for us in the short term. But that ended up being our largest channel in many non intuitive ways. So for example, a lot of folks who attend our events, we see a recurring pattern of people attending our events and they are sort of like a community in many ways. And that group also was like the seeding of our event Marketers club community, which we established, but the event Marketers club and our own events, kind of our community channel that keeps that engagement high. And what it does is it keeps us top of mind. It keeps us in what we call the zeitgeist of marketers. And because we have done it so many times, we are kind of in front of people and we are doing it repeatedly. So that is our biggest channel. Actually. There's a clear correlation to how much attendees we get in an event and what pipeline we get in a quarter.

[Omar Khan]

So you were doing events about how.

[Palash Sony]

To do events, that was the big thing, right? How to do great digital events, webinars. And what are the different use cases? What should we do before, after. And then we started talking about more broader topics that are relevant to our Persona, which is a director of Demand Gen or a content marketer. But it was always like very specific to B2B marketers. That is relevant to them now.

[Omar Khan]

Got it. So when I think about this thing, you already had some concerns that this would not be a short term ROI. It would be maybe like people think about SEO. It's like, do I want to do SEO? I need leads now, not in 12 months time or something. So you had that concern then. When it comes to running events, there's always the concern about, you know, can I, can I do, Am I able to demonstrate what, what the return on investment, what the ROI was? You guys have got that covered, right? Because you're talking about measurability and all of that stuff. And then the other issue often is like just you, you promote these events and like nobody turns up or you have like one person on the other end or something. Right. So did you have those kinds of challenges? And also did it really take a long or how long did it take for you to get to a point where you were like, no, I think this thing is working, this thing is worth continuing to do?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, that's a great point, Omar. So we often had that challenge. We would do something and not a lot of people would show up. And it just happens. Today we throw an event or we do a webinar. Not many people show up. And what we realize the key is to like keep on, keep at it and also use that as a signal for what is working and what's not working. So what we ended up figuring out through all of this is that ultimately what works best for us is some kind of like a weekly or biweekly series that is talking to a Persona where we can bring great speakers in and allow people to interact with them. So that is a big draw for events where they can, they can actively re engaged with that person, ask questions and chat with them live on stage, which is something that you cannot do on a podcast. So that is one we bring in the top people, say in demand gen or events, and have people talk to them. The second thing that works for us is a lightning strike virtual summit. So if we are doing a product launch or there's some big team like AI or something, we do a lightning strike of sorts around it where we have lots of marketing going in to that conference. And that involves a lot of things like having our speakers mobilize and market that event, Us doing it, like us doing raffles and draws and things like that. And so there's a lot of ticks and track ticks that we figured out work. And it took probably, I would say, three quarters for us to have confidence that it works. So it was giving us engagement early on, and we were seeing some signals. But I think there were a couple of things that sort of made us continue investing. Was one that it. We were seeing some repeat people attend, which made us think that there's value in the content. And the second thing was that this itself gave us a lot of content that we could then use in other places. So we could put it on the website, generate blogs from it. It's a great source of content in general. So it made our lives easier on the content side.

[Omar Khan]

Okay, so you weren't just thinking about this as a live event. You were saying, okay, it's basically also a way to generate a bunch of content because once we've recorded this, we can repurpose it with a platform and video or do whatever else we want to do with it. Was, you said it took about 3/4 for it to. You felt confident about it working. What was the inflection point? Did something happen? Did you get to a place where it was like, okay, we've really nailed how to do these types of events, which is why we're now starting to see leads or customers coming through this channel. What happened around that time?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, so one of the turning points over was like figuring out this framework. Right? So once we had. Once we saw that there's increasing attendance, there's increasing engagement, what kind of topics resonate, what cadence resonates, we started seeing a correlation with the pipeline that we were generating. So that, like, when we started becoming more sophisticated, we had Salesforce by then and HubSpot and installed and everything. We saw that the attendees in the last quarter correlate to the pipeline that comes in the next quarter. So that's. That's when the second thing we started seeing, which is probably unique to us, but could work for any kind of startup, is that people who we were bringing on, they were our Persona ultimately. Right? So these were CMOs or head of events, folks like that. And they could see the product and they could see that we were a thoughtful thought leader in this space. And when the time was right, they started raising their hand to say, okay, you know, we want to evaluate Goldcast. We want to look at it we want to replace our current product or webinar platform with coldcast. And that started happening too. So that was a big driver for why we thought this is a good investment.

[Omar Khan]

So you mentioned a couple of times about customers coming and saying, okay, we want to switch to you using this from whatever we were using. You talked about the competitive landscape was pretty aggressive, right? Because there was a lot of investment, a lot of players, a lot of activity happening. How did you figure out how to position Goldcast in that space? So obviously you had the hypothesis about the measurability and doing that, but was it also about were you having to kind of persuade people why your platform was better than something that they were using already, or were they basically, through the conversations, you were already figuring out where the biggest gaps were. And I just. Because I often hear about. I had a conversation with a group of founders this morning who were in that situation saying, you know, they tell me they're using another product and I asked them about what problems they have and they go, no, it's fine.

[Palash Sony]

That's a great question, Omar. So the answer to this question has surprisingly changed a lot, and that has impacted a lot of our strategy. So when we started, our main use case was digital events, right? Large conferences. And at that time, that was some kind of a greenfield market. So for the first one year we enjoyed that success and we got to almost 2 million in revenue. And it was greenfield, always good. After one year, the market started settling. And the realization was at that time that a big use case for digital events platforms is webinars. Webinars had always been there, but now people were doing more of them. And that space had not seen any innovation of its own. So it was getting tucked in. And so now we were in this dilemma that if we have to build a sustainable scalable business and sticky customers, we have to replace a webinar platform. Because there's always one, right? No one is coming in and using Goldcast for the first time. It's like no one gets on the notion the first time they'll try something like Google Doc, right, First, and then try Notion or ClickUp or all those. So that became a challenge. And so our go to market from that time changed to saying, okay, let's go after companies that are already using Zoom, that are already using another incumbent in this space. There were two or three incumbents in the webinar space, including Zoom. And so we started going after them, and then it became a rip and replace motion. And our value prop at that time was that we can, we can do both side, we can do big events and we can do webinars also. So we have both in one platform. There's higher degree of measurability and the UI is great. So you get more engagement and hence more engagement makes more pipeline for you. This worked for us up to a certain time, but then we realized we will have the same problem. Right. There's not enough people in the market. Especially as the market started crashing and the priority shifted for marketers from doing things better because everything was like there was a lot of money out there to sort of in defense mode. Marketers started going in defense mode. The wallets were being crunched and people were fearing for their job all the time. So then they would not wake up and think, oh, I need to replace my webinar platform. And that led to the bigger sort of evolution pivot that we made last year because, yeah, it was not scalable to operate in a complete brownfield environment in this kind of market.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah. So let's talk about that. So I think it was last year, sometimes 2023, that you were around the 5 million ARR mark and you started to sense that there was an issue and that there was a churn problem.

[Palash Sony]

Yeah.

[Omar Khan]

Right. So just kind of lay that out for us. Like what was going on? What were some of the signs that you were seeing that was kind of raising a red flag for you?

[Palash Sony]

Yes. So churn was definitely there. Churn is always a signal of something. And we were still growing fast enough that the churn was not hitting us in a very bad way. So we were still growing. But I could see, I could do the math, that the churn percentage probably will remain the same, but the new sales percentage is probably not going to keep up. So we will hit a wall. And also we started getting this feeling that, okay, if a, it's taking a lot of money to sell. So our burn was pretty high at that time. Our cat payback was probably like 30 months plus. And that is justifiable if you are a cybersecurity company where retention is probably our database. But our retention was not there. And so even though we were growing, I could see that there's something off here and something is probably not working as well. And as a VC backed company, we have, we are committed to like 500, 150% growth every year. Right. So I could just not see how the math could work in that. So we started thinking about, okay, what is the next stage of the company? And that's something we had always thought about that this is a wedge into the greater martech stack. But we were like 5 million, right? We were still getting our feedback and, and that. And so we started looking at like what customers are the most successful. And then a lot of customers at that time were pulling us in two directions. One was like, okay, you become an events platform fully where you start doing in person conferences as well. But that had the same problem, right, where the churn would be high because you're doing a big conference once a year where you need the product, next year you've forgotten about it. And so we decided not to pursue that. We kind of tipped our feet there but didn't do much. But the customers who were very sticky and successful treated this as a content channel for them, digital events were content and they were always asking us about, okay, what can I do with the video that is already out there, how can I host it on my website, how can I get more views and qls? All of that. That led to the line of inquiry that we eventually pursued and became what we are today.

[Omar Khan]

I want to dig a little bit deeper into that. So you made this top down decision and you decided that you were going to kind of become this multi product company. What kind of change did that require you to make as a business and as a team?

[Palash Sony]

Oh, that's a great question, Omer. It's, it was a massive change and probably I underestimated that. So in the first quarter when we said, okay, this is something that we want to pursue, we want to at least look at, we sort of went back into the early like hassle moments. My co founder, cto, he built a prototype in like four or five weeks that was working and all it did was it took your recording, cut it up into clips. That's what it did. And we started showing it to people saying, okay, if you are worried about your on demand views, why not like make people watch clips instead of like a full video? Because that's what people are doing nowadays. And we could see that excitement and so that, that, that gave us confidence, okay, this can be a part of the product. So we initially built it as a, an add on. So it was very feature poor. It was a tab in the product and we put it out and then we started seeing some traction around it but it wasn't enough traction for us to make that decision completely. But I had this wall coming up which I could see that we will hit and we will crash because momentum will go and that is very hard to come off if you lose momentum. And we didn't have enough data points here to say that this is going to succeed or this is the right inquiry. But at that time I had started building this thesis that what if we started becoming an end to end video platform which does the whole thing, not just events, but events and then working with this content, editing it, which is the second product that we did, and then hosting it, which is something you do on a Vimeo or a Vistia or those kind of platforms. And you could also record like you do on a riverside and do it all in one platform. And that it sounded like a good thesis, but that meant huge amount of complexities because now we were like our whole team was talking about events before and now they have to talk about video content of which events is one part. And so that was one second thing is that we also, we thought that if we do this then we run into the same brownfield problem because a lot of aspects of this thing are already there, right? So there's a competitor in recording, there's people are using hosting tools for ages. And while the whole value prop is interesting, how are we going to wedge in? Because people are not going to replace four tools with us just normally. So we decided to build that content repurposing product out separately into a bottoms up free trial product. So that led to a full scale sort of go to market motion confusion because we were now plg. So early on we were like full top down. Now we had a free trial. And so people. So once we were. When we were pushing for these decisions, I was getting an immense amount of pushback from my team because they were probably not seeing the wall that I could see. We were hit. So things were going fine, not awesome. And there was just too much change, right? Too much change on what looked like a pretty risky kind of bet. So that change management is something that we are going through even today. We are still training our people how to talk about us. We are still figuring out what that whole product portfolio looks like. But we have a lot more confidence now and we are sure what direction we have to go in. But I had to almost like use the veto card once every quarter on a big decision in these times.

[Omar Khan]

So they're kind of like, are they like four standalone products? Like somebody can come along and just say, oh, can I use you guys for hosting? But not the other stuff.

[Palash Sony]

You technically can. But the idea now is, and this is also a process of early on the plan was to have four standard products. But now what we have come to is that you come in Use this content repurposing product for free and that will have some limited recording and hosting capabilities. And because events are high stakes, we still want them to be like sales gated, but you can use these things for free. And then when you like it, we wedge in with this and then we sell you the full platform.

[Omar Khan]

I mean, you said we're still figuring this out and kind of moving. But you know, you were 2023, you were hitting 5 million ARR, worrying about this problem. We're now October 2024 and you've doubled revenue. You're over 10 million ARR. So something worked from that. The you you talked about like the kind of figuring out how to talk to customers. Like just tell me a little bit about that because I'm guessing like, you know, even though, you know you had a decent customer base, it wasn't like you had hundreds of thousands of customers. Right. But you must have still been recognized as the events platform.

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, right.

[Omar Khan]

And then you have to now basically kind of retrain, re educate kind of, you know, there's a whole bunch of like changes that come from that.

[Palash Sony]

Oh yeah, absolutely. Omar, that's. So a couple of things. One is there's confidence in the thesis itself, which early on I had to just push for it because we were not small enough where we could just do some things as founders and put it in front. We had to like get the whole team aligned. And so I had to use my CEO card to do that in the early days. Then we actually had a pretty, pretty big quarter last quarter. And what we saw was that our win rates have doubled in some segments and like enterprises, et cetera. And that was largely because we have this like whole content thesis. So when people come in now, they, they see that it's, it's a different kind of product.

[Omar Khan]

Right.

[Palash Sony]

It's like a content video content product instead of just events. And that excites people. And we, and we have, I think trained ourselves doing this again and again to see what is real excitement from what is like not. Not real excitement. And it was real excitement. People were willing to go through that pain and look at and give us more time. So. And our wind rate trouble. So that, that was one. But yes, now the broader challenge we have is that we need to unseat our perception as a digital events platform and become a video platform. That's also a work in progress. But big learning there is that we can say whatever in the market, but ultimately our perception is when by what our customers say. So we are being annoying to Our customers right now to give us case studies and go on social media, post about us and do whatever we can for to have the customers talk about us. So that's a big push right now in the company.

[Omar Khan]

Got it. Great. Okay, we should wrap up and get onto the lightning round. But before we do that, I just got one more question. One of the other growth channels that has worked well for you guys has been word of mouth, which is great. But then when we were talking, you also said to me, well, I think we invested a bit too much in support and customer success and we were a bit too maniacal kind of focusing on nps. I was like, well, we got to talk about that. Because it's like, well, isn't that how you got the word of mouth and people happy and so on? So why do you feel like you overinvested?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, no, actually we used to think we overinvest there and that was because events are inherently stressful. So we wanted people to have that hands on support. And at one point when we were trying to validate whether events are the right investment, one other thing which we did was we started asking in our sales calls like, how did you hear about us? And people would give us some reasons. And a lot of that was like, oh, I attended this webinar or event that you did and really liked what you guys and then checked it out. People were talking about it somewhat of word of mouth at that point also. And I think people, what they repeatedly said in those conversations to other customers was that they have great support, they listen to us, they hear us, and there's always someone responding within 30 seconds. So I, we were like, okay, let's upscale this investment. So we, at that time we had a support team of four people, which was already high for a startup of our size. We now, we then doubled it to eight people. So we were, we were used to respond in two minutes. Now we respond in 30 seconds. That sounds almost, it sounds almost. Not. That sounds almost too much. But we treat it as like CAC investment that we have to do it just to get customers happy to then have them recommend us.

[Omar Khan]

Okay, got it, got it. Yeah, I misunderstood that. That makes a ton of sense. Now. It's like, yeah, I should try contacting your support and see how long it takes.

[Palash Sony]

Yes, please do and give me feedback.

[Omar Khan]

30 seconds. That was 35. Okay, great. Let's wrap up. So let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Ready?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Omar Khan]

What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received.

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, it's that the market ultimately matters more than anything else. You can have a great team, an awesome strategy, but if the market is not great, I think people are going to turn around. And I think I used to have the belief that great execution or like great founders can turn a market around, but I don't believe that anymore. I think that the market has to have good characteristics for success.

[Omar Khan]

What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, it's this book called the five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lenzione. It sounds like a gimmicky title, but it's one of the best books I've read. So it's like one hour, the best sort of people management book that's very specific to CEOs.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, it's this concept called idea maze that Balaji Srinivasan has coined. But great founders I think are able to navigate the IEM as they're able to. They know the history of the market, they understand the market, its landscape so well that their intuition kind of helps them think which way you know, there's treasure and which way there's that. It's very hard to like model that just come. It's just a thing that like great founders inculcate by just being like super deep with customers in the market.

[Omar Khan]

What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, being off social Media, I'm on LinkedIn because I have to be for business, but I'm off everything else and that's so good for my mental health.

[Omar Khan]

What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, if given time and money, I would love to build like a deep tech venture studio where I can work on multiple companies and like the very cutting edge science that solves real world problems. So like plastics or reduction of greenhouse gases or nation scale sea to water pipelines, those kind of things.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[Palash Sony]

Oh, I'm. I'm big into amusement parks. I. I just went to LA and spent like 12 hours there in Universal Studios. I think I'm the bigger kid than any other kid.

[Omar Khan]

And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[Palash Sony]

Yeah, I'm a very deeply curious person. So I read a lot. Read by doing dishes while coming to office whenever I get time. A lot of Science fiction, history, sorry, science history and evolution, all of that. And I want to sort of put everything to you. So I read a lot of evolutionary psychology. I try to, like, see everything in that lens. That's a big passion.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Great to unpack the story. I think we did a pretty good job to cover a lot of stuff in a relatively short amount of time to tell your story and hopefully give listeners some ideas, some inspiration, some actionable insights that they can take away and apply into their own startups. If people want to check out Goldcast, they can go to Goldcast IO. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[Palash Sony]

LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. Okay, we'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Great. Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[Palash Sony]

Awesome. Thanks so much. Very great to be here.

[Omar Khan]

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