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The SaaS Podcast - AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders
434: OnRamp: From No-Code MVP to 7-Figure B2B SaaS - with Paul Holder
00:51:51
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- [00:00]
Paul Holder
Foreign.
- [00:10]
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 talk to Paul Holder, the co founder and CEO of Onramp, a platform that automates and orchestrates customer onboarding for B2B companies. In 2019, while leading customer success at Troops, Paul and his co founder Ross kept reflecting on the challenges they'd faced with customer onboarding at their previous companies. They spent several months validating their idea by interviewing customer success leaders to ensure the problems they saw weren't unique to their experience. Both co founders were non technical, but that didn't stop them. They learned to use Bubbles, a no code platform and although their MVP was far from perfect, they still managed to get their first 15 customers using it. After raising a pre seed round, they hired their first engineer and began transitioning from their bubble prototype to a custom built solution. Initially focusing on startups, they discovered their solution was even more valuable for larger organizations where small efficiency improvements could drive million dollar impacts. But the duo faced significant challenges getting traction. They struggled with trying to build too many features simultaneously while watching their cold email outreach campaigns fall flat. Making the bold decision to move upmarket meant potentially losing some of their SMB customers, but the strategic shift proved to be a game changer. Today On Ramp serves nearly 100 customers, has raised over $14 million in funding and generates seven figures in ARR with a team of 25 people. In this episode you'll learn how Paul and Ross validated their idea before writing a single line of code and and got their first paying customers using just a no code tool. Why moving up market was crucial for their growth and how they executed this strategic pivot. How they built a powerful multi channel outbound strategy after cold email hit rock bottom, what made them realize they were building too many features and how they changed their product development approach. And we talk about how they successfully transitioned from a no code MVP to a custom built solution while continuing to grow their business. So so I hope you enjoy it. Building embedded analytics into your SaaS product shouldn't be this frustrating, but usually it is. It takes months of development, slows your roadmap and pulls your engineers away from your core product work. That's where Xsplo comes in. With fully customizable white labeled dashboards, you can embed real time self service analytics into your product in minutes without heavy development. Xsplo works with Your existing data integrates seamlessly and gives you full design control so your dashboards look and feel like part of your product. All with predictable pricing that scales as you grow. For a limited time, start your free trial and get $1,000 off your first year by going to Xplo Co Omer. That's Xplo Co omer. Is your SaaS product stuck? Slow development, bad UX or constant bugs holding you back with Impact Week By Designly, you get a free, no commitment deep dive into your product. Their senior engineers, designers, and product strategists will audit your ux, assess your code, and identify the technical roadblocks slowing you down. Most founders don't realize what's holding them back until they see it through an expert's eyes. Impact Week is completely free and you'll walk away with an actionable roadmap to move you forward. But spots are extremely limited. Designly only offers four impact weeks each month. Schedule your impact week today at sasclub IO designle. That's sasclub IO Design li. All right, Paul, welcome to the show.
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Paul Holder
Thanks so much. Glad to be here.
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Omar Khan
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
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Paul Holder
Yes, I do. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. If you want to know why, I could tell you why. I think, listen, starting a startup is all about, especially as a first time founder, doing things that you've never done before. And that's going to push you in many different ways. And I like to try to embrace some of that and say, hey, that's living, man. You do things you've never done. You push yourself. And so anyway, that quote's always just stuck with me and is relevant every single day in what I'm doing here.
- [04:25]
Omar Khan
Totally. I love that. Actually. I had to think about that for a split second. I never heard that one before. Okay, so let's talk about on ramp. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
- [04:38]
Paul Holder
Yeah, so onramp automates and orchestrates customer onboarding. And customer onboarding is that critical time from kind of when you sign a new customer to when they're getting value from your product or service. And we do this by giving our customers the tools to build, run and measure their onboarding programs as well as share those programs with their customers to complete them. We're a B2B SaaS business and our customers are from a variety of verticals and variety of industries, but it is a mix of both SaaS businesses and non SaaS businesses. So, yeah, we have a wide swath, a wide customer base, which is fun.
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Omar Khan
Cool. Give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
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Paul Holder
Yeah. So we're coming up on 100 customers. We have 25 employees, and we're doing seven figures today.
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Omar Khan
That's great. I think you have raised just a little over 14 million so far.
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Paul Holder
Great. That's right. Yep.
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Omar Khan
Yep. Okay, great. So the business was founded in 2020. Let's go back to maybe like 2019. What were you doing at the time? What was your co founder Ross doing? And where did this idea come from?
- [05:55]
Paul Holder
Yeah, so at the time, I was leading customer success for a company called Troops, which was acquired by Salesforce after a few months. After I left, my co founder Ross was at business school and so had all the time in the world to think about startup ideas. But actually where we met was a company called VTS, which is a SaaS business in the commercial real estate space. And I actually led customer onboarding there. And Ross was on my team for a little bit before doing operations, finance, accounting work. But that's really where the idea kind of seeded for us. And Ross and I had kept in touch over the years and realized that, hey, the problems we kind of asked ourselves is the problems we face kind of scaling and creating amazing customer onboarding experiences. Was that just a VTS problem? Was that just something we were dealing with, seemingly really critical to us, but not anybody else? And fortunately, we were able to take some time and really validate that that wasn't the case. And we heard the same thing over and over again from a bunch of interviews that we did with other customer success leaders. And obviously that made us feel like we were onto something at the time.
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Omar Khan
Okay, great. So you have this idea. A lot of people have ideas and do nothing with them. What was the case with you guys? How long was this just an idea you talked about, and how long did it take for you to say, okay, this is something that we're going to execute on?
- [07:17]
Paul Holder
Yeah, for us, that was a period of probably about three, four months back in 2019. And it was funny. Ross at the time, again, he was at business school. Fortunately, he was in a PM class and they needed to have an idea for something to work on and kind of validate an idea on. And him and I had been kind of in the background thinking of different businesses we could potentially work on together. And again, we kept coming back to this idea of customer onboarding, customer experiences. And what we were able to do is Ross, like, you know what, I'm going to use this in my PM101 class and see if we can get some validation on this and get some traction on it. And that, that honestly kind of kicked off. Hey, this just an idea on a whiteboard and the whole thing to like, oh, what does the actual use case look like? What are the pains that we're actually solving? How would you actually think about this? Is a software product the right way to solve this or is it something else? We were lucky at the time to be able to have those resources and him going through that experience to kind of help push us out the door, so to speak, at the time.
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Omar Khan
And as part of that process, did he create a prototype or was it just like a pitch deck or what was it?
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Paul Holder
Yeah, in the early days it was just a big PRD and a presentation to a class. But when him and I said, hey, this is actually something we think is worth pursuing and quote, quitting our jobs over, in his case, not finding another one, we said, hey, we're two people who are not technical. How do we go validate this in the market? And we ended up using a tool called Bubble, which is a no code platform, to build a prototype. We learned it as best we could, build a prototype and that led us to get in front of folks and say, like, would you actually pay money for the solution that we're bringing to you?
- [09:08]
Omar Khan
Love that you and I were talking about Bubble earlier and how, you know, I mean, there's a lot of AI tools around, but Bubble's been around for years and it's amazing how much you can get done even on a product like that without AI. If you have no technical skills now. So both of you non technical, you don't have a technical co founder, you want to build this product, so you're having to teach yourself how to use Bubble in order to be able to build the product. What did it actually do? Like, how sophisticated was it the version I built?
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Paul Holder
Not very sophisticated. And to make matters more interesting, right as I mentioned, we're not just a tool for our customers to use that can just be used internally. There's actually that component, but then there's what we call the customer portal or their customer facing component. So imagine trying to add that complexity to a tool like Bubble. I think for us, what we did initially was we realized that what really got people excited about the idea was this idea of, hey, hey, give me something amazing. I can put in front of my customers to take them step by step through our onboarding program. So with the first version of bubble, we basically just built that and a very, a very, very simple version. And you know, the question that we tried to ask, you know, answer at the time was a, will you pay money for this? But B, is this something you will actually put in front of your customers? Like is this good enough to, you know, where's that bar? Right. And I think we realized pretty quickly that there's really nothing in the market to solve this. And so despite it being super simple, despite it being bubble, like people were willing to, people were willing to use it and that I'll never forget the first couple customers who actually did that for us. That was a pretty watershed moment for us.
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Omar Khan
So you were able to actually sell the bubble product? It wasn't just a prototype.
- [11:03]
Paul Holder
Yeah. Now our customers at the time, I don't think they knew it was on bubble. It that was not widely advertised. But, but yeah. And I mean, I mean listen, early customers, right? You're talking like 100 bucks a month or something. I even forget at this point. But, but the point is less about the how much it's more will you actually, you know, pay for this? And, and so the answer for us was was yes, you know, and that was, that was obviously really exciting. Felt like we were onto something.
- [11:28]
Omar Khan
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. So that you kind of go through this process, you get like those first 10 customers or so. I think maybe one thing we should clarify before we go further is a lot of people listening to this would be familiar with, you know, kind of like onboarding for a SaaS product. Right. You maybe have some, some kind of guide to get people to go do a very simple product led growth type, you know, onboarding experience. Maybe give us an example of a non SaaS customer and how or what they would be using on ramp for. I think that might make it a little bit more real for people to understand.
- [12:08]
Paul Holder
Yeah, for sure. And I think there is a difference between PLG SaaS onboarding, like user level onboarding and what we do, which is kind of the overall orchestration of the onboarding and adoption kind of programs. And so I'll give you a SaaS example and I'll give you a non SaaS example. The SaaS example I like to use is Slack. Obviously you can go in, you can use slack and like you can share it with your friends and get super viral just from like you didn't need to talk to anybody at Slack or work with anybody. At Slack you just, you know, early days, right? You'd be like, this is cool, I'm going to invite somebody, right? But you know, when Slack looks at implementing Slack at a company like IBM, they can't just rely on oh, we're going to release this thing into the 100,000 person organization that is IBM and assume we're going to be successful. Right? They have a really, you know, organized, frankly complicated set of procedures and workflows that they need to work through. With IBM it's a massive project essentially and that is something that we would help facilitate on the non SaaS side. Here's an example. One of our customers, Cardinal Health, a huge healthcare distributor, when a pharmacy who's their customer signs a contract with Cardinal, there is a about 30 day process where they have to get set up on all of Cardinal's systems. They have to provide and exchange a bunch of data with Cardinal. And, and previously that was done all through email and literally in person meetings and now it's all done through on ramp. And so those like mom and pop pharmacies, right, are able to be onboarded about 50 to 100% faster than they used to be using our platform.
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Omar Khan
Now I know these days you're moved or moving more upmarket and targeting bigger customers. In the early days who was your icp, who were you focused on? I mean I know in many ways in this early days it's anybody who'll buy the product, right, but who were you trying to reach at that time?
- [14:12]
Paul Holder
Yeah, it was again this came out of that, of kind of Rosselmine's experience at VTS. And so we tried to find lookalike SaaS companies who had a, you know, white glove, you know, largely white glove onboarding process. Right. Somebody who was in our ICP was, yeah, this is a totally PLG product. You know, I'm going to use Appendo or some other tool to like onboard my users. Right? It was, hey, this thing takes three or four months to get our customers stood up. It's actually a pretty complicated orchestration. There's technical components involved, there's an integration, there's many team members involved like both on our side and our customer side. And so yeah, for us in the early days it was like classic but it works like other startups that fit that, other startups that fit that bill. And it had to be other startups because at that time we couldn't go to a Fortune 500 customer and say, hey, we're two people in a garage. Will you take this on?
- [15:09]
Omar Khan
We Just learned to use bubble and we got this product.
- [15:12]
Paul Holder
We just learned to use bubble. I think the thing about our tool that's interesting is this is something that is a key component of your customer journey. This isn't something that's just like, oh, hey, we're selling to an engineer. Go use this off to the side and tell us if it's interesting, if it is great, if it isn't cool, we're gonna learn. But no skin off anybody's back. This is like, you're gonna use this for your customer onboarding. That's a big, like, that's a big promise that we have to fulfill. And so for us going to those earlier stage companies that were willing to take more risks and be more entrepreneurial minded, that was really where we cut our teeth in the early days and learned a ton from.
- [15:54]
Omar Khan
I think you told me that outbound had been one of the biggest growth channels for you. Can you tell me about how things got started and maybe one of the bigger challenges you had in getting that working for you?
- [16:16]
Paul Holder
Yeah, I mean, outbound's hard, right? Like, it's, it's drumming up demand from nothing is, is not easy. You know, everyone wants to ideally just, you know, hit the, hit the, hit the ads button and just let be like, oh, we're just gonna have inbound, you know, inbound leads all day, come to us. And, you know, and for us in the beginning, you know, that, that worked for, that worked for a little while. And we had a heavy Google Ads presence. Right. And it was working from the perspective of it brought in folks, but they often were not our icp. They were often, for example, trying to figure out how to even set up their onboarding program. Right. And they were looking for a services business, not a SaaS business. And so what we realized was that the customers who we can best serve are those who are trying to scale and automate and grow their onboarding program programs. And those folks were not coming in from Google Ads was not a way to reach those folks. And so, yeah, we had to kind of pivot our strategy and really rely on various outbound channels, which I'm happy to kind of talk through to bring in the right type of customers. Right. Which is ultimately what we're trying to do.
- [17:29]
Omar Khan
Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. Maybe. Tell me about one of those outbound channels.
- [17:35]
Paul Holder
Yeah, we, you know, LinkedIn's a big. LinkedIn's a big presence for us and increasingly so. And you know, I am the first to admit I get annoyed by the some of the LinkedIn drivel and some of the, you know, some of the, what I would say is less than valuable posts. But I, but I'll tell you this, I think used to great effect, it can, it can work really, really well. And for us, you know, we really. It's where our buyers, it's where our buyers are, it's where they hang out, it's what they watch and listen to. And so like, for us, it's just a, you know, for us, I think it's twofold. One is it's driving awareness of our product category and who we are. And LinkedIn's huge for that. And I'd be happy to share some tactics that we've used for that. But two is like, yeah, we've also shifted our paid dollars there as well and that's been successful and is picking up. So for us, that channel has just made a lot more sense than, than, you know, a just purely Google Ads strategy.
- [18:34]
Omar Khan
So yeah, maybe talk a little bit about LinkedIn and maybe LinkedIn ads, how that works. So what kind of ads are you running? How are you getting in front of the right people? And then once they do raise their hand, what does that buyer journey typically look like?
- [18:52]
Paul Holder
The ads, we're testing them all the time. So we're testing content, you know, all types of content. But what I wouldn't say is, and that's true of any social site is videos, rich content far outpaces text for us a lot of times. And as far as who we're targeting, LinkedIn does a great job of giving you the tools to say, hey, I'm targeting. For us, it's SaaS with these specific Personas in these specific verticals. And we're able to test that. Right? So that's been fairly easy for us to set up and get going on. But I would say the content's really interesting, right? Like as a new product category, you don't necessarily have people searching or looking for customer onboarding software. It's kind of new. So what you have to do is really speak to the problems and speak to, you know, speak to, in our case, these customer success directors, VPs, managers, in a way that, you know, drives, you know, top of funnel awareness for your product category first and then convince them, hey, we're the right solution for this. But in many times it's a problem they didn't even know that they had and they know it once they hear it. But it's one of those, like they have to be told that they have this problem. First before actually finding a solution for it. So I say all that because a lot of our ads and a lot of our content is really driven towards those things. And so for us, that's what's been successful in driving the leads that we really want, the people that we want to bring in.
- [20:19]
Omar Khan
Yeah, I mean, this is not like selling a CRM where somebody's saying, I need a new CRM, I go in shopping and pick one. Here you're having to go much higher up in the funnel and educate people about the problem that they have, but don't fully realize that they need to solve or have just accepted that this is the way it has to be. I guess that's always a challenge when, when you, anytime you're kind of building a new category, what does the typical sales cycle look like? I mean, if there's like a lot of education going on and you know, is it like, you know, like how long does it take to close a deal?
- [21:05]
Paul Holder
Yeah, and certainly it depends if we're, you know, selling a 100 person, 200 person company compared to a Fortune 15, as I'm sure you can imagine. But yeah, typical. What's cool is there's a lot of education, but we're trying to get that education done upfront even before they come in and officially enter the sales cycle. And you know, you ask what happens when they actually raise their hand? Yeah, they get connected, you know, they get connected with a rep and we do, you know, I would describe as a fairly traditional process of, you know, they'll do a discovery call. We'll actually figure out like, okay, is the problems they're talking about is why they came to us, is that something we can actually solve? And we're very upfront with, if we can't, then it's not worth our time and not worth their time. But from then it's a series of what tends to be demos and getting the right people on board. And your product or solution is half the battle of selling. The other half is getting the customer, getting everyone aligned internally to again, selling upward, selling outward, getting as many champions as you can involved in the process. And what that culminates for us is about a 60 day sales cycle, end to end on average. But a bigger company can take six months. An enterprise can take six months where you're just driving it. You feel like you're having the same conversation eight or ten times. But it's all slowly chipping away at building that momentum and having your customer feel, feel comfortable with bringing a startup on board which is a big bet for them to make.
- [22:35]
Omar Khan
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- [24:30]
Paul Holder
Yeah, yeah, it was. We didn't get to six figures with it, but we did. I forget exactly where we got to, but we got our first, I think maybe our first like 15, you know, customers on it. And that was, you know, kind of me and my co founder building it at first. We then were able to, you know, with the validation that we had, we're able to raise a pre seed round which allowed us to actually bring on board an engineer, Sean, who's, who's shout out Sean. He's still with us today, which is, which is awesome. And he, he then built, you know, on ramp on our, you know, on Our own, on our own code base. And you know, for us, I think it was pretty clear that scaling, trying to scale bubble beyond that, you know, first 15, 20 customers and you know, trying to get to six figures, it wasn't going to, you know, we were running in at that point we were running into too many, like, okay, we can't quite do this with this tool, but we know that this is the thing that people want. Let's go for it. And for us, going for it meant actually hiring a real technical talent to build it out. Right?
- [25:28]
Omar Khan
And I guess also because this wasn't like a crud app that you've just like, it's a simple database and you just add records and update and delete and whatever. You had to build this thing to solve a problem and then you had to build it for your customers to be able to use with their customers, as you said earlier. And things start to get pretty meta and kind of complicated very quickly when you're trying to do something like that.
- [25:53]
Paul Holder
It does, and it's fun. When we obviously use On Ramp to onboard our own customers and so they're using On Ramp as that we call them end customers first and then they're using it to onboard their customers. It gets very meta. But yeah, to your point, you know, a bubble or some, some of these other tools, I think, you know, if it is just kind of a crud app and something that can be used internally, I think it would have legs to go further. But what we're talking about is, you know, onboarding is this like, you know, it's your customer, you know, your company's reputation is on the line, you know, when, when that sale is signed and now the rubber actually meets the road and you have to deliver on the promises that were made during the sales cycle. And so we take that responsibility really seriously. And, and it became clear to us that like, okay, to build an amazing portal and end customer experience, we're going to have to do it on our own code base and actually build our own IP around it and all of that stuff. So that's what really drove the decision making around that at the time. And yeah, there was months where we had to manage that transition and try to still sell and bring people into bubble. But they were, you know, we were transitioning. So that was an interesting time. But when we did it, you know, we haven't looked back from there.
- [27:10]
Omar Khan
Now the other thing you told me about the MVP was that you were like, hey, we built this MVP and we got the V, the viable and the product part. Right. But we weren't very good with the minimum piece. Tell us a little bit about what happened.
- [27:26]
Paul Holder
I think ultimately, and, you know, advice for anybody trying to start a business is, you know, it's funny, you hear all these things that are like, truly, like, scope down your MVP as much as possible. Right. Don't sell to fire bad customers. And then when you actually get into the pressures of, hey, we gotta grow at all costs, or like, hey, we're just trying to get people to use this. Hey, these customers are telling us things like, yeah, let's do it. It's funny, actually listening to those principles and actually doing it is harder. And so for us, what. You know, I think one of the. One of the mistakes we made was, you know, we tried to build too much too quickly. We went. We went really wide as opposed to finding a wedge and going deep and. And so to bring it to life for us. Right. We're kind of a. We're a task management. You know, we're a task management tool. We're a workflow tool. And then we have this end customer experience. Those are like three separate product categories in one.
- [28:25]
Omar Khan
And.
- [28:25]
Paul Holder
And we're trying to build all three, like, at the same time. And, you know, our customers came to us and said, hey, I've used task management before. Why don't you guys have dependencies? Why don't you have this? Why don't you have that? You know, it's, you know, they use all these great. These wonderful tools that do some of that stuff, and they're like, well, that's easy to build. It's like, no. Well, it took another company, 10 years of dedicated effort to go do that. And I think we got a little caught up in the, like, oh, let's just go, cool. Let's get some feature parody on some of those things, you know, that customers experience and reflecting back on it. I think what we would have been better served to do is to say, hey, let's take one part of the onboarding journey. And really, because onboarding, there's many steps and phases within this onboarding journey. Let's take one part. Let's take the highest kind of pain point part, really go deep on that, and then we can build out from there. And we didn't. And listen, I'm sitting here now, I'm glad we have the breadth that we do because it served us well today. But I think reflecting, we could have gone further, faster if we had taken maybe a different approach.
- [29:22]
Omar Khan
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's like, you went through that pain and eventually you came out the other end and you're like, yeah, okay, I'm kind of happy where we are now. But you probably wouldn't want to experience that pain again because now you can see that there was probably a less painful path to getting to where you are.
- [29:46]
Paul Holder
Yeah. And listen, I think that. I'd like to think we take those learnings into what we're doing today. So, like, as we make big, hairy, audacious product bets, right. Which we, we all love to do, we're not. You know, I think we got. And also now it's not just Ross and I. We have a bunch of great, great people on the team that can keep us honest on this. But, you know, we do ask ourselves like, hey, what is the problem the customer is actually trying to solve? And what's the, what's the shortest path to actually solve that? And we may have all these great ideas and all these, you know, ways to think about the future state of it and all of that. But like, let's start with step one. And again, you know, again, you'll, you'll. I'm not preaching anything new, but I think actually putting it into practice is, is. Is a skill. Is a skill that you have to learn and one that we've learned, you know, over the past couple years.
- [30:32]
Omar Khan
Yeah. Yeah, totally. What was in terms of getting to the first million in ARR. What was the most. Or was. Was there one growth strategy or channel that was the most effective in helping you to hit that milestone?
- [30:48]
Paul Holder
It was, you know, listen, like, and I think for any business, depends on your ticket size and all of that, but for us, like, really just pounding our networks was, was huge. And I think, you know, I think, you know, if you think about our, our kind of business and you think about five figure, you know, know, plus contracts, right? You don't, you ultimately don't need that many of them to get to a million dollars. Right. Which is why I personally like selling up market and it's more, more of my style. But, but I think like really, you know, our approach was. And it's always a balance, but it's the hey founder asking for advice on something, right? To start an intro call. And then you kind of get someone hooked on, you know, you hopefully bring that infectious energy to the problem you're solving and someone's like, you know what? I, I do kind of have that problem or I know someone who has that problem and you start, you know, you just kind of build that, you know, that muscle of like, hey, I'm just going to go talk to a bunch of people and try to drum up, drum up the business. You know, reflecting on when we, you know, going from those first 10 customers to the first like 50, it was honestly a lot of. It was a lot of that beyond any spend money, beyond any ads or anything. It was, hey, let's go. It's amazing. People just want to be helpful, which is awesome. And so if it's not the right fit for them at the time, they'll know someone who it could be. And for us, for Ross and I, we just pounded the pavement frankly doing that. And we're able to learn a ton along the way. Now that's not scalable. Right. Ultimately that network runs out or that whatever. But I think getting to your first million, um, that can be a really viable strategy again, assuming you have the ticket sizes to kind of be able to do that effectively.
- [32:31]
Omar Khan
Did you try cold email outreach?
- [32:33]
Paul Holder
We did. We've tried cold email outreach a lot and it is, it is dead in my opinion. Respectfully, I think, I think like we listen, you know, cold email without anybody having heard of you is just like the open rates have gone down significantly over the past five, 10 years. Now you have these flood of AI tools just crafting all of these personalized, but they're not. I frankly think we got a lot of work to do there messages and it's just this bombardment. I get how many a day and obviously now people have set up filters and tools are better at flagging that stuff. And so, you know, for us, I think it became pretty clear that while the right type of outbound can be a really good approach, that particular channel for us is, yeah, we don't spend a ton of time on it. Honestly, it just hasn't been successful for us.
- [33:31]
Omar Khan
Yeah, I mean, I know people doing cold email outreach who still believe in it and are having success with it. But I agree with you, I think it's big, become harder and there's so much, there's so much noise with these AI solutions now that I just think there's just too much noise and it's making everybody even more resistant. Like they're kind of training themselves to block it out more. I started using this product, what I realized was I was getting all of these kind of code emails and half the time they're not even relevant. And you can do some level of kind of protecting your inbox, but every one is a distraction. And for me, who always has somebody who always has problems focusing, it's A big ding to your productivity. And so I've been using this product called Clean Email for, for a few months now. And one of the things I like about it is that what it does is every time you get an email from somebody you've never received an email from, they just park it into a screened place and then you decide when you want to go and take a look. And you can just go to this page and you can just see a preview of them. And very quickly you can just tell, even without opening it or just the first line, oh, this is one of those. And with a one click you can just say, okay, I'm going to block that. Never get, never see it again. And I think people are going to have to do more of this stuff. I don't know why this stuff isn't built into Gmail and all that stuff.
- [35:09]
Paul Holder
But Ross uses a superhuman and they have some of that kind of stuff they're starting to build, as I'm sure you can imagine, starting to build. And admittedly I don't, but he does. So he showed me essentially a version of that. And I think you're right. And so I think the question you have to ask yourself as you're trying to reach people is do we want to try to navigate that? Are we equipped to solve that problem? And by that I mean reach those people effectively with all those barriers in the way, or is there a better way to reach the people we want to reach? And again, I think it absolutely depends on the business and who you're trying to target at 100% does. But I think for us, instead of wasting cycles and time trying to saying how do we best navigate that minefield that's super crowded, we're like, let's get out there, get in front of people, let's like go make that personal connection. Let's go find the person that will intro us to this next person. And for us it's like that hits 10 out of 10 times. And it's like we just think that's a lot more effective use of our time. But yeah, totally, totally dependent on the business is my opinion of it.
- [36:18]
Omar Khan
Yeah, so we talked a little bit about like LinkedIn ads, but you're doing more than just ads on LinkedIn. Just explain that a little bit. And I also want to kind of talk about where your AES fit in with this and what they're specifically doing to reach out to customers.
- [36:36]
Paul Holder
Yeah, we take like a bear hug approach to it. So, you know, it's yes, it's ads, but it's also driving, you know, through our, you know, we use a tool called dripify, for example, I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's essentially like, allows us to make a bunch of connections on LinkedIn and grow our network. And everyone in the company is involved in that. It's a full effort. But what we post and what we talk about is not just on ramp, it's not just always on ramp. It's about our industry. It's about sometimes it's. Of course our best performing post was about swag, which is absurd. But what. That has nothing to do with our business necessarily. But what it does is it drives eyeballs to us. And the next time someone we do publish a piece of content that is relevant to our space or again, more thought leadership type content and stuff like that, people have heard of us, we've proverbially warned them up. And so it's a lot about organic, trying to drive organic traffic as well for us. And again, content's a big name of the game there. And then our reps are, yeah, they're super active. They're super active on LinkedIn. They're also calling, you know, they're doing, they're doing, calling. And yeah, you can also say, well, Paul, that's crazy. Like you said, email is dead. Like, isn't calling even more dead? We all have filters and the truth is like, not, that's not what we're finding. And you know, yeah, a lot of people will hang up or a lot of people won't answer your call, but I think we find that by, you know, targeting someone on LinkedIn with really thoughtful, valuable content, them seeing an ad, them then getting a call. That's kind of this like holistic strategy that gets someone to take action and respond. I don't think it's a silver bullet, right? Like, you can't just sit there on the phone as an AE and be like, hey, I'm gonna just call a million people and like, I'm gonna get picked up from people who have never heard of me before. But I think our RAs take the approach of, hey, I have to warn, I have to, I have to do a lot of warming. And that's just a part of this game. And so for us, you know, it's kind of that, you know, that, that suite of things that is driving, you know, the right people to us at the, at the right time.
- [38:49]
Omar Khan
Sometime in the last year, you made the decision to move up market. What, what triggered that and what was the strategy that you decided to pursue.
- [39:02]
Paul Holder
The reason that we did it was as I mentioned, when we started the business, we were selling other startups. They're great, lovely people, people like us. We were selling other lookalikes and then we realized that the. And that's great again for your first $100,000 or whatever it is. We realize though that the problems we're solving are even more acute with bigger and more complex organizations. And in fact in particular with what we do, which is automate drive efficiency and create great customer experiences. Moving the needle, even 5 or 10% has potentially millions of dollars of impact with bigger customers. Compare that to a startup that's like, hey, I don't even know what my business is going to do next year, right next month, let alone next year. And for us then we had this dichotomy of we had these Fortune 15 customers that were really great customers of ours and then we had this really long tail of SMBs. And unfortunately, as nice as it'd be as a 20 person company or whatever, to serve all of them, you have to pick a lane because the product you're going to build for that long tail is fundamentally going to be different from the product you build for bigger customers. And there's a bunch of, I have a bunch of examples of that. But, but ultimately what drove that was we can't be everything to everybody and we in fact will kill ourselves trying to be everything to everybody. So let's make a hard decision here and actually go after the customers we think will drive the next 10 million of business rather than thinking of every little dollar that we can get from somebody just saying yes, right, great.
- [40:45]
Omar Khan
So that decision drives changes in your go to market motion, the kind of product features that you're going to invest money in. What did it mean for existing customers who, you know, the SMB type customers, Are they still around? Are they still using the product?
- [41:09]
Paul Holder
Yeah, you know, some of them are. And we've been okay with saying, you know, whereas our, our own CS team team used to like, we're going to fight for every single dollar and every single customer. In fact, you know, maybe, maybe, whatever to say, but like we aren't necessarily taking that approach anymore because again, with our limited resources we know that they are much better served serving, you know, our upmarket customers. Now we still give those folks support they write in, you know, we, you know, we have, we aren't trying to completely ignore them, but here's what it's doing that I think is great. It is frankly weeding out the Ones that weren't really good fits to begin with, and it's keeping the ones that actually will grow into a meaningful business for us in the future. I think without being intentional about that strategy, I think us and our whole team would be stressed out about every customer lost. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, maybe a small dollar customer, but it's another. Another customer that we lost. Whatever. By being intentional about this strategy, we're setting our goals in a different way. And so when those things happen, they're intentional. They're not necessarily cause for alarm or panic. And I think that's a really important thing because driving a strategy like this, not only have to, as a founder, get yourself behind it, but you have to get your whole team behind it. You have to get your board behind it, you have to get your investors behind it. And so by setting the right goals and really saying this is what we're going to do and putting a stake in the ground, it allows you to make all the decisions around that. And for us, that's been a process here, but one that we're seeing pay off, fortunately.
- [42:47]
Omar Khan
I'm curious, how do you disqualify.
- [42:53]
Paul Holder
The.
- [42:53]
Omar Khan
Wrong type of leads today? Because anybody can come to your website and request a demo. And, you know, different, different companies have different ways of dealing with that. What's. What's your approach?
- [43:06]
Paul Holder
Yeah, and every customer, every. If you're in business, if you're, if you're a business, you do onboarding. Presuming you have customers, you do onboarding. Right. And so, like, for us, it's also like, you know, people say, oh, customer onboarding. I'm going to go check this out. So it's, you know, we do get a wide swath of people at different stages of their, of their maturity journey. I think for us, there's a couple of things that we do. One is at this point, if you're under a certain size, we say thank you, but we literally say you're not a right fit. For us, at this point, we are literally saying no, which is really interesting. Gave me heartburn in the beginning, but I think now is good. And then if they do pass our criteria, screener for us, we are very intentional about if you're a customer, that's, again, you have a low volume of customers yourself, or you're trying to figure out your onboarding program, like, you know, maybe someday. But right now, we're not a fit for you. You know, we're not going to help you. And in fact, you're going to be frustrated. You know, you're, you're buying a Ferrari for like what you should be doing, you know, manually. So like don't do that. Right. And we're very intentional about that today. So, you know, we, we treat every, no matter who comes through the door, we treat them with respect and we treat them as like, hey, let's have a conversation if they do meet certain criteria. But if we realize it's not going to be a fit, much better to say no upfront and early than going through the process taking everybody's time, potentially them being a risk churn. I think as we grow the business, we're going to open that aperture further. Going back to SAP could be a really great business for us. I firmly believe that. But we need the resources to do it successfully today. Again, it's all about, you only have a certain number of resources to point in a certain direction. So where can we most effectively do that? Those are kind of, that's kind of how we think about it.
- [44:54]
Omar Khan
I mean, yeah, you're right, you have to pick a lane. Right. It would be in the ideal world, you'd serve all those customers and build the product that keeps all of them happy. And your marketing would work for, you know, all of that stuff. But it's a really difficult thing for anybody to pull off and I think having that level of focus is like, it's a question of survival. Right. And giving. Like, you can do a lame job trying to serve everybody or you can do a great job just focusing on a specific type of customer.
- [45:30]
Paul Holder
Yeah. And I mean, listen, for us, if you think about it, right, if you think about serving a much higher volume of lower paying customers, because that's what you're doing, you need to do, you need to think about product LED growth. You need to think about, you need to think about how do I create the best. Let's prioritize user experience over everything else. For us, yes, those things are important, of course, but for us, we're asking, okay, there's so much great value add product for us to build. I'd rather build game changing features and functionality and not worry so much about, oh, is this the perfect user journey? And we're going to go ab test this 100 times and have the perfect, perfect flow for it. For now, people are paying us high enough dollars. We can help them through that process and I think we can always revisit at some point. But to me it's about who can innovate and learn the fastest. And so anyway, that's how we think about those kind of decisions. But yeah, you got to pick a lane. You really do.
- [46:30]
Omar Khan
Cool. Okay, let's wrap up. We're out of time here, so let's go into the Lightning Round 7. Quick Fire Questions for you. Ready?
- [46:39]
Paul Holder
All right, let's do it.
- [46:40]
Omar Khan
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [46:43]
Paul Holder
Put yourself in a position to get lucky. Seems like the people that get lucky tend to you think like, oh, how fortunate were they? And the truth is like, what you don't realize is the months and years of work they did to put themselves in a position to get lucky. So I always try to remember that one.
- [47:00]
Omar Khan
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [47:02]
Paul Holder
There's a book, the Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge. He's a HubSpot alumni. We're from Boston, so we're big HubSpot fans here. Anyway, great book to help you really put math behind your funnel in a way that was eye opening for me starting out the business.
- [47:18]
Omar Khan
I agree. Great book. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [47:24]
Paul Holder
Being a truth seeker. You have to find the truth and you have to ask the right questions to get to the truth. And ultimately, if you can do that as a founder, you're going to be successful.
- [47:35]
Omar Khan
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [47:38]
Paul Holder
Yeah, I'm not. There's all these fancy tools and all and the Twittersphere goes nuts with all this stuff. For me, I do my best work in the morning, so I put my hardest tasks first and I block off my time in the morning first. To me, that's been the biggest thing is just recognizing that in myself. And so that my tip is to just, if you're that type of person, get the hardest stuff out of the way in the morning.
- [48:01]
Omar Khan
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [48:05]
Paul Holder
You know, I'm a consumer electronics nerd. I love all things consumer electronics. And so for me I think it would be some version of like create a business to bring like AI smart home solutions to the masses. I love, you know, I have a home here and I love making it smart and doing all that stuff. So I'd find some way to weave that passion into a new business idea.
- [48:28]
Omar Khan
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [48:31]
Paul Holder
I'm a twin and my co founder is also a twin. So I don't know what that says about us, but yeah, I think that's pretty rare. It's Got to be pretty rare. Co founder duos were both twins.
- [48:42]
Omar Khan
That's a weird coincidence. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [48:47]
Paul Holder
You know these days it's really being the best dad I can be to my 2 year old son and 3 month old daughter. They certainly take up my non working time and so for me just seeing them grow is a joy.
- [49:00]
Omar Khan
That has got to be pretty crazy having two kids in that age range right now.
- [49:06]
Paul Holder
Needless to say, yes it is.
- [49:08]
Omar Khan
And you're still smiling for now.
- [49:11]
Paul Holder
Maybe in 20 minutes we'll see.
- [49:13]
Omar Khan
But yeah, my, my, my kids, my kids are teens now but they, they were, there was, there was a, about a two year difference so almost the same as yours. And those, those years just seem like a blur right now and a lot of happy memories. But when you're in the middle of it, it's like you just. You lo. I don't know, it maybe, maybe what I meant was it was a blur back then, then. But yeah, look back at it with fun memories.
- [49:42]
Paul Holder
Totally. I'm trying to keep myself in the moment. You only get one chance to be a parent, right? You only have so many kids and so try to balance that blurriness with being there for them and being present as much as possible.
- [49:56]
Omar Khan
Paul, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Great to just unwrap that story of you guys sort of starting out with the idea, building on bubble and kind of getting to where you are today. It's awesome. Hopefully we gave people listening, some ideas, some insights, something that they can take away and apply in their own businesses. If they want to check out onramp, they can go to Onramp Us. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [50:29]
Paul Holder
PaulNRamp Usually I wish you and the.
- [50:31]
Omar Khan
Team the best of success.
- [50:33]
Paul Holder
Thanks so much.
- [50:34]
Omar Khan
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