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The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
441: Exacaster: 18 Months of Zero Sales to Multi-Million SaaS - with Egidijus Pilypas
00:59:26
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- [00:00]
Omar Khan
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Egidus Pilipas
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 Egidius Pilipas, the co founder of Exacaster, a SaaS company that helps subscription based businesses grow revenue by turning customer data into actionable insights. As a student studying statistics, Egidias worked part time as a product marketing manager at a telecom company where he saw firsthand the challenges of managing and growing a large customer base. At the same time, he began working with a university lecturer who introduced him to cutting edge machine learning research. Together they built trading algorithms to test those models in the financial markets. Eventually he left the telecoms world to pursue algorithmic trading full time, but the experiment failed and he lost pretty much all his money. That setback forced a major reset. He called his former boss and pitched a new idea using machine learning to predict customer churn. The first company he approached liked the idea but couldn't afford to pay. The second said yes, and with no product or coding experience, Egidius and his co founder taught themselves to build a working platform in just three months. What looked like early traction, though, soon turned into years of painful lessons. Each new enterprise customer brought a flood of custom demands that buried their tiny team in delivery work and for nearly a decade sales and marketing were neglected while they tried just to stay afloat. And when they did finally hire a salesperson and invested heavily in outbound sales, they spent 18 months burning cash and didn't close a single deal. That failure was a turning point. They realized they weren't selling software, they were selling trust. So they shifted to account based marketing and focused on building real relationships with their ideal customer profile. Today, ExoCasto does over 7 million in ARR serving customers in nearly 20 countries. In this episode you'll learn what forced Egidius to walk away from trading and start solving a real customer problem that.
- [02:20]
Omar Khan
Led to his first SaaS product.
- [02:22]
Egidus Pilipas
Why bootstrapping an enterprise SaaS company can trap you in years of delivery work that slows growth and stalls momentum, how exacaster burned 18 months on outbound sales with zero results and the hard lessons that changed their strategy. We talk about what triggered their pivot to account based marketing and how trust became the key to winning big enterprise deals and how they turned an overlooked lonely buyer Persona into a thriving community and became the go to voice in their niche.
- [02:50]
Omar Khan
So I Hope you enjoy it.
- [02:53]
Egidus Pilipas
I talk to a lot of founders who have the same challenge. They've got an amazing product idea but need a technical team to build or scale it. If you're looking to develop a to be SaaS product but don't want to hire and manage an in house team, listen up. Gearhart is a product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your software. They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite, whose founder trusted Gearhart after his $200 million exit to help build his next big venture. Some of Gearhart's customers have gone through YC and their portfolio companies have won over 10 startup competitions. Until the end of May, they're offering our listeners free strategy sessions with their leadership team. Just visit Gearheart IO to book your session. That's Gearheart IO.
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Hey guest, welcome to the show Omer. Thank you for having me.
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Omar Khan
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?
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Egidus Pilipas
Yeah, it's like I stole it from Steve Jobs actually. So it's like everything what you see around is built by people no smarter than you. So this quote drives me every day. When I think that I cannot do something, I remember it and I know that I can.
- [04:05]
Omar Khan
I love that one. Yeah, that's awesome. So tell us about exacaster. What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
- [04:15]
Egidus Pilipas
So we are exacaster. We help subscription based companies to grow revenue from their existing customer base. So our primary target market was telecommunication companies. So we help their customer value management teams to grow, to acquire customers, grow existing customer revenue and retain those customers. And we as a company, we provide an end to end solutions, meaning we provide strategy consulting, we provide CVM platform and we also provide managed services. Yeah, so that would be kind of a super brief introduction. And the key thing is like we help to drive this return on investment from existing customer base.
- [05:04]
Omar Khan
Yeah, so I think to kind of break it down or just simplify it for people listening, I think it's you're analyzing the behavior of those telco's customers and then you're giving them the right tools to have the insights and also to market to them whether it looks like somebody's going to churn or whether there's an opportunity to sell another product or something to the customer.
- [05:33]
Egidus Pilipas
Well, just to give a super simple example would be for example, did you know that you have a 10 times bigger probability to purchase a new iPhone if somebody from your close family has purchased one. So this type of insights you get from analyzing customer behavior, building machine learning algorithms, and kind of if you see that somebody's friend just purchased a new iPhone, you might get an iPhone recommendation as well. So this is kind of part of the magic that we do and give.
- [06:10]
Omar Khan
Us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.
- [06:15]
Egidus Pilipas
Yeah. So in size of team, we are approaching 100 team members right now. So we are roughly, we are slightly above 7 million in revenue. And we, we have around 30 clients right now in almost 20 countries, I would say.
- [06:37]
Yeah.
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Omar Khan
So you've got a customer base globally and you have bootstrapped the business and done it. You're based in Lithuania, so you know you've done that from, from there. And I think that's always super relevant. I often talk to founders who are not in the U.S. maybe they're in Europe and Asia and thinking about how they can grow from their local market to expand, whether it's Europe or into the US and so I think your journey, I think could provide some interesting insights for those people. Let's talk about where the idea came from. You just wake up one day and say, oh, I'm going to build a solution for telcos.
- [07:30]
Egidus Pilipas
Well, actually the idea was not so obvious. As a student when I was studying statistics, I actually worked in one telco as a product marketing manager. But my passion was actually statistics. I'm kind of, I'm super math geek, etc. And in university I met one of kind of a lecturer who was teaching machine learning. And it was like I don't know, 20 years ago, which is like machine learning was not a thing at that point. Nobody knew what is artificial intelligence, et cetera. But there was an old guy who every Tuesday would bring me this amount of latest math papers with best AI algorithms. And I was writing the code to implement those. And what we did with him is we basically would create trading algorithms that would trade the financial markets and basically tested if it would work or not. And some years ago, some years after, during that process, basically I left my telecom company to go and further deepen my knowledge in AI and basically with an idea to conquer the financial markets, you know. But one day I lost all my money while trading.
- [09:03]
Omar Khan
Wow.
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Egidus Pilipas
And I said, okay, I think it's enough to play with this trading thing. I need to create some real value for, for the world. And I called to my previous boss in that telecom that I was working and they said, hey Sharunas, how are you? I have the best machine learning algorithms in the world and they don't have a business problem. And he was also fresh, freshly, he left also this telco and he said, egidius, do you remember when we were working in that telecom, they all, they have this churn problem. Like customer would be leaving and they would, wouldn't know why, when, et cetera. Can you predict when customers will churn? And I said, shroomless, you know I have the best algorithms, I definitely can. So he made a call to some of his friends, which was a local Internet provider company. We asked them to give customer data. This was before all the GDPR and all these kind of customer protection and protection years. So they shipped us an Excel file with their whole customer base with all data, et cetera, over like couple of weeks. During days and nights I would write the predictive algorithms that would predict which customers will turn. So I did a successful job. We made the pitch, we went to that company and we said, guys, these thousand customers will leave you next month if you won't do anything. And they said, wow, it looks so interesting but we don't have money to pay for you.
- [11:03]
Omar Khan
Yeah, funny how that often comes up.
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Egidus Pilipas
Yes. So then what we did, we took the same pitch and we kind of, we asked for a meeting to other telecom company, we took that pitch, we went to them and we said, guys, we have the best machine learning algorithms in the world and we can tell which of your customers will churn. And they said, well Egidius, I don't understand what you say because nobody understood machine learning at that point, but it sounds interesting, let's try. So we said, okay guys, pay us upfront this amount of money and we will build you a platform. And they said, okay, let's do this. So they basically kind of, we signed the contract, they promised us to pay some amount of money. And on December 3, 2010 we sat down two guys, me and Sharunas. None of us were developers at the time. We learned how to write code, how to administrate databases, et cetera. And in three months we shipped a working platform. So we worked day and night.
- [12:21]
Omar Khan
What was the tech stack by the way? What did you decide to teach yourself?
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Egidus Pilipas
So the tech stack was PHP for machine learning. We used R as a programming language and then databases like postgres, et cetera. So we basically learned all that stuff. Well, I knew how to write R code, but no php, no database administration, nothing. And basically we shipped it. We shipped the product, the clients looked at it and they said, okay, Looks good, but we need this additional feature to help to do data management piece because it's impossible for us to do it, we don't have resources. And we said, okay, guys, pay us another amount of money, we will give you a second version. So in next six months we basically developed second increment. And during that time we started selling our product to other companies. So our second client was Alaska Mobile. We randomly met them in a conference and made a sale. So yeah, so this is basically how it all started.
- [13:36]
Omar Khan
So that's like super interesting that, number one, you identified a pain that was painful enough that a customer was willing to basically fund the development of the product. And then the other thing I want to talk a little bit about is this Alaska Mobile customer and the event piece. A lot of founders who, as we talked about, are sitting somewhere outside of the US and they're thinking about how to expand from their local market into other areas. It's often challenging figuring out, do I just keep going deep in my local market, where do I go next? And your approach was kind of all over the place because you were like, oh, first customer's in Lithuania, the second customer is in Alaska. The third one, I think you told me was in Paraguay.
- [14:39]
Egidus Pilipas
Right.
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Omar Khan
So number one, why did you decide to take that approach? And then how were you able to land these customers in countries where you hadn't done business before?
- [14:54]
Egidus Pilipas
By design, we are limited. So Lithuania is a pretty small country. We have like 3 million people. We have maybe 5 telecom companies. And if you work with one of the. In those days, if you were working with one out of three biggest guys, they would say, we will not work with you because we are afraid that the know how leak, etc. So by design, our second client should have been outside Lithuania. And for us, we knew we are from telco, we kind of have this know how, et cetera. So it was obvious that we need to find other telecoms around the world. So we started active to search for them actively. But we did not have a lot of time for that because as I said in the beginning, we started two guys. We were developers, product managers and data analysts, data scientists, salespeople, everything, system administrators, you name it. So we would say, okay, what was the kind of, what do we have capacity for? So the only reasonable thing was to basically go to telco conferences and kind of so and we went to a few of them. Basically we were limited by our revenue streams. So we went. Every time we would go to a conference, we would get like one, one and a half lead there, which would basically go and convert further. So we kind of started spreading ourselves.
- [16:42]
Omar Khan
What's half a lead?
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Egidus Pilipas
So basically in one conference you would have like one lead. In other conference you would have like two leads and on the average you would get one and a half.
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Omar Khan
Okay, got it. Thank you for clarifying that. Okay, so let's talk about that first, the second customer, the Alaska Mobile. How many events did you attend before you landed that second customer? And were you just turning up and attending these events or were you spending money on trying to get a booth and just demo what you had?
- [17:18]
Egidus Pilipas
So basically we would get a booth and then kind of try to show, do the demos, etc. So we would do everything what we can, what we knew and what we didn't know, basically. And to get this, Alaska Mobile, I think it was a single conference. So at that time sales cycles were shorter compared to now. Kind of a sales cycle might be two years, two years and a half maybe at that time the sales cycle would be up to a year. So you kind of meet somebody in a conference and couple of calls. If the value is good, you could get a deal, you know. So it was a bit shorter sales cycle and for us it was an adventure because Alaska is one of the furthest places from Lithuania where you can get a client.
- [18:23]
Omar Khan
Yeah. So often what happens when founders go and start working with a customer and building a product based on their requirements or having a design partner is that they sometimes realize they've ended up building a product for a market of one because they've customized so much for that specific customer's needs. Was that something that you were very aware of as you were building the product and when you sold it to Alaska Mobile, how close were you to meeting the requirements that they had?
- [19:02]
Egidus Pilipas
With Alaska Mobile, we didn't have the struggle, but for us as exacaster, our biggest struggle usually would be the delivery piece. We would be always be pulled to get more service, also build some extra features. And this kind of. You get lost when customers are pulling you, but you don't get lost when you have, let's say two similar size or similar type of customers. You get really distracted when you get when your next customer increase in size dramatically. So for example, we had, I know, three or five customers and then we brought the fifth one which was like as big as the rest combined. And then this kind of single client drags you with all the enterprise requirements and all the other random stuff and you get so lost in the delivery cycles that you forget about new sales because if new opportunities come across, you just said, I cannot do it. There's no time to even make a pitch or to make a good pitch, you know, and, and then the other part is like, then you fall in this trap of delivering product to one client and basically kind of two years pass and then you wake up and you say, oh gosh, I need to refresh the whole product, redo everything.
- [20:51]
Yeah, it sounds like you were trying.
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Omar Khan
To do multiple things. So you're building a, a SaaS product and you're trying to get customers onboarded, support them with that and add new features. But at the same time, every time you bring on a new customer, they are adding their own set of requirements of what they want you to add to the product. And it's not like it's a $20 a month customer. You've got these major deals and so they expect you to take more notice of what they're telling you they need. And then thirdly, it sounds like you had this services business alongside which you still have today. So with all of that going on, tell me about some of you touched on it, that it made it really hard for you to look at new opportunities and grow. But this went on for quite a while. Right. This was like many years that you were in this situation.
- [21:59]
Egidus Pilipas
Yeah. So the funny part was that we didn't think about the sales and marketing strategy at all for the first seven or eight years, maybe nine. Because all that time our major struggle would be to deliver it kind of, because we are always kind of short, late, more requests than we can deliver type of situation. And this was kind of our biggest challenge was how do we build organization which can deliver projects without CEOs involvement, mine involvement, how do we actually scale those teams that would work with clients together? And one of kind of one of the aspects that are important for us is our customer life lifetime is around 10 years. So when we take a new client, we usually are capable to grow value for those, for the client for at least 10 years. So let's say our first client that we took last year was still growing as an account for us. So this is kind of the aspect when you combine SaaS and the services together, you are basically capable to grow these accounts. But at the same time, you have a nightmare of how you set up your teams to work with these accounts and to continue building value for these accounts.
- [23:55]
Omar Khan
So how did you eventually get out of that situation? This kind of quicksand. Right. It's like, hey, every time we bring in, in a new customer, great celebration and then realize overwhelmed with delivery. And then suddenly you wake up and realize, hey, we should have attended these events because that worked for us previously and we could have landed more customers. But every time we land a customer, we get more overwhelmed with delivery. How did you break out of that cycle?
- [24:21]
Egidus Pilipas
So it came kind of naturally because what you experience in these cycles is like you grow exponentially until the point when you break. So every time we double the size of organization, we need to change everything, you know, structure, processes, etc. And we would be basically growing exponentially. Like some years would be like 100%, 50% and you grow like for three years, then everything breaks. You redesign organization for one year or two years, you have this basically flat and then say, oh gosh, I needed to do some sales. Then everybody kind of, you design a new org structure, you focus more on sales and then you grow again and then you break again and then you redesign the whole organization and then you grow again. And basically maybe five years ago or four years ago, we said, okay, we kind of have pretty good delivery organization right now, but we don't have a sales organization. So what we did, we said, and we don't know how to build it right. So we probably need to hire something who is someone who is experienced, from English speaking country. So we hired a person from uk, a really experienced salesperson, just not exactly in our business. And then we started building our first aggressive marketing and sales processes. The key idea was if we have a lot of RFPs or requests for proposals from companies, it's just a numbers game, you know, the more RFPs we get, some we will win. So we did lots of cold calls, cold emails and many things. We burned quite a lot of cash over the time and the result was nothing.
- [26:55]
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Omar Khan
How long were you trying to get this to work?
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Egidus Pilipas
It's like almost like one and a half years, almost two, I would say kind of in the process we participated in some RFPs. But the thing is that we lost them all because we were basically too late in every of the rfp. Because the thing is if client is inviting you randomly to their sales process, you are pretty much too late.
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Omar Khan
So how did you realize what was the aha moment where you said okay, well we know this isn't working because we haven't had any sales through this, but what exactly is going on and how do we fix it?
- [28:19]
Egidus Pilipas
Aha moment was when we stepped back and started thinking so how did we land the initial sales in the beginning? And it always started from either usually CEO who is extremely customer obsessed and he will die, but he will solve clients problem. And clients really appreciate that because they start trusting you when you honestly try to solve their problem. And then we basically understood that we are, we are in a relationship business. And then this idea sank into us. Kind of our sales cycles became longer because the project size became longer and kind of B2B environment is more complex. Typically we have, we deal in the buying process. We have from seven to 10 Personas. So it's like a very complex purchase process. So yeah, so then our key idea was okay, if we want to win these RFPs, we need to understand client problems way, way, way better before we receive the RFP in order to help clients to purchase them. And yeah, and this is where we basically said to ourselves that we need to move towards account based marketing strategy.
- [30:16]
I want to, I want to touch.
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Omar Khan
On that because you, you didn't need a lot of customers to get to the first million in ARR. I think it was like the first five or six got you there and you weren't really doing any marketing other than say hey, let's go to events and demo the product, which is marketing. But it's a pretty simple process to just say find an event, get out there, demo, show the product. And then once you got beyond that and the business grew and then the sales outreach didn't work. Moving to ABM was the next thing that you decided to do. But there was also this gap in between where you were like, hey, we don't really know how to do a marketing right, we need to learn this stuff. So why did you have that gap? Had you not hired any marketing people onto the team then and how did you go about fixing that?
- [31:21]
Egidus Pilipas
This is basically a pure lack of education. It's like in that eighth year or so, only then we understood that our marketing budget and account management budget should be significant because all that time, as I said, we had a really Bad website. We would run some marketing campaigns on LinkedIn or so, but it was like very random, something super small and not very professional, et cetera. We just kind of, we didn't have this problem. So kind of, because we got those early clients pretty organically. So kind of we landed this client in Lithuania, then we kind of through the same group, we went to Latvia, Estonia, as we said, landed some clients like in United States, in South America. So it started bubbling pretty randomly and we, we didn't have time to think about marketing. And as we bootstrapped, we didn't have, let's say, external partners who would look at our process and would say, hey guys, it's like you can be better, you can grow faster. But we hadn't because we bootstrapped. And as a co founders, we were in the business itself. So we didn't have this external advisory people who would coach us through, you know, the process because our biggest headache was how do we deliver on time.
- [33:19]
Omar Khan
Right, yeah. Okay, so you figure out you're in the relationship business, that's super important if you're going to win more customers. And then that leads you to account based marketing. Tell me about how you went about implementing that. And I think in a very high level, people get it in terms of, okay, I identify the accounts that I want to ideally target and then I build relationships with those people. The implementation or the execution is much harder than that sounds. Right, so just tell us what your experience was like and how you navigated that.
- [34:04]
Egidus Pilipas
It's super easy to say identify accounts. So for us it took like two months to get the full list of all telecoms in the world. But we did it because somebody needs to sit down, write all kind of Google through all the countries in the world in all these different crazy languages, identify what are the telecoms in that country, etc. So but this is basically a technical work, but when you think about relationships, it's all about trust building. And trust is not, it's not easy to build. And we had a very vivid aha moment there because as I said, our primary audience was telecoms. And we have customer value managers as kind of people whom we deliver the service. And customer value managers are like secret agents in telecoms because they run all the secret campaigns for their client base which is below the line, like all the personalized marketing, etc. And none of competition sees it. So and kind of. And they deliver revenue through that because you do all this personalization, etc. And how you do it is the secret source of driving that revenue. And the challenge with customer value managers that they are extremely lonely people and extremely unrecognized people. Because imagine in Lithuania there are five telecoms. Every telecom have one or two customer value managers and that's it. Nobody understands them in their organization. Because if you ask somebody what do customer value managers do? Do they say they are sending spam messages to our clients. And now you as a customer value manager, you think oh my God, I'm doing such an amazing personalization campaigns, you know, I am using all these AI tools, etc. Etc. And you don't have anybody to talk. And one day one of our clients calls to our CEO Cheryl Nets and she says like hey Sharonas, I'm calling to you because I feel lonely. I don't have anyone to talk to. Can we discuss things? You know, and at this moment we understood customer value managers feel alone. So first thing what we did is we launched a customer value CVM Stories podcast where we interview customer value managers and ask them to share their know how. Because the customer value management, it's like a super rare field. There's no content, there are no learning materials, etc. Except some marketing materials which is like purchase our marketing campaign automation tool and retain your customers. So we started building this CVM Stories podcast and then kind of in our first episode we said hey, we feel that customer value managers are lonely. And then they get LinkedIn messages, they gidious. I heard your podcast. I really feel lonely.
- [37:35]
Omar Khan
I mean this is like a super niche audience. There are lots of telcos around the world. But I think you said to me.
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Egidus Pilipas
Maybe globally like 1,300.
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There you go.
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Omar Khan
Thank you. 1300.
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Egidus Pilipas
So if, if all of those have.
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Omar Khan
One or two these customer value managers, that's not a huge market or audience. So you're, you're, you're interviewing these people with, in these very niche roles and reaching out to these, these people. How, how did you like obviously like you were getting learnings and building. This was an opportunity to build relationships as you interview these people. But how are you getting this content out in front of other CVMs?
- [38:26]
Egidus Pilipas
What I did personally, I put my brand in front like Egidius and I went on a mission to make customer value managers famous. So kind of I said on LinkedIn that's my mission, to make customer value managers famous. And then I went and started talking with every CVM on LinkedIn. So basically out of 3,000 CVMs I know now, like one and a half thousand or something like that.
- [39:01]
Wow.
- [39:01]
Personally we just Go and spread the news. Hey, I'm Egidius, I am CM Stories podcast host and I invite you to help to make CMS famous, you know. And from there as we were talking in the podcast, we were getting insights. Then, then next approaches started building. Like we made CVM benchmark, kind of a tool which would allow to measure how well are you performing against your peers globally. Then CVM started benchmarking themselves. Out of this we could launch CVM Trends, another research report, not a marketing material report, but a true research report. And then again we would get insights like oh my God, thank you Gidius. This is so amazing. This is such a huge unique source. People would take this, translate to other languages, you know, et cetera. Then as we continue to talk with those customer value managers, we get more and more and more insights, people want to contribute. As we were talking with the customer value managers around the world, we would be getting more and more insights and people want to contribute to create the know how. And in customer value management there is no content to learn from. So for example in project management there is a project management body of knowledge where you learn it, you read it and you say I am PMP Project Project Management professional. So what we did, we wrote a customer value management body of knowledge book which is like CVM bulk and we wrote it together with customer value managers around the world which are not our clients. So it's like we have Sylvia Gomez who is from Australia, large telco there and like over 30 customer value managers around the world contributed to the content. So yeah, so we launched the book and we basically kind of embraced ourselves to help to become those CVMs famous. So and through this kind of, basically our marketing strategy is to be genuinely useful for those customer value managers. It's not like shouting Exocaster is this and that, but it's basically being extremely useful and when you build further. So in LinkedIn, suddenly I became a guy who gets like messages, hey, I'm switching my career, I am searching for CVM opportunities. Can you recommend something? So out of this we created CVM News newsletter where we do some information and also put all open positions of customer value management in the world. So it's kind of, we just do all sorts of useful stuff for these guys. And now it's the thing that the clients of our competition, they post on LinkedIn about CVN Block, how they love the book and so on. So we are kind of. Yeah.
- [42:46]
Omar Khan
So you, you basically use the podcast as a way to connect with your icp. You focus Very much on them, their problem, their loneliness, making them famous, taking the insights and lessons from these people and teaching that information, educating other people in the industry and all of that stuff is great. But I was wondering how long did that take and what about leads and sales and all of that stuff? What was going on on that side while you're doing this?
- [43:32]
Egidus Pilipas
So we launched the book in March, in the beginning of March, and we basically did it in. In a year. So now it's kind of. It took us a year to build that. As I said, our sales process is two years plus. But so we cannot say that we closed extremely large amount of new deals, but we get way more discussions or early leads discussions compared to what we used to. Because kind of in the year before we would kind of in the last years we would go to the conference if we have booked, let's say two or three good conversations. So then it makes sense for us to fly. This year when we went to a conference, we have booked like 35 meetings, which is kind of totally different number.
- [44:51]
Omar Khan
And I guess a large part of that is that you're known in the industry now and they see you as an authority and someone who's focusing on delivering value, which it always sounds like a cliche, deliver value, but it really is about just as you said, just trying to be as useful as possible to these people. And the belief is that you keep doing that and good things will happen for everybody. Right?
- [45:22]
Egidus Pilipas
Yeah, exactly. This is kind of. I strongly believe that if you build this trust, if you build this connection with the people, you eventually will get back from the community.
- [45:40]
Omar Khan
Great. I just want to talk a little bit about one of the other lessons you learned in the last year or two about bringing on, closing large deals, onboarding customers. So for many years you struggled with the service delivery piece and then over time you figured out how to manage that, have the right org structure in place to do that. But it sounds like from what you were telling me earlier, even a couple of years ago, it was still an issue when you brought some of these big customers on board. So can you tell me about what were the symptoms, what were the problems that you were still seeing in our.
- [46:20]
Egidus Pilipas
Sales process as we used to be in a situation where we would struggle to deliver and when a new client request would come. So for example, we get an RFP to deliver a new CVM platform and this would be kind of a large rfp. We are talking like a million or two of size in terms of revenue, lots of kind of complex solution platform delivery Service, et cetera, et cetera. We would not spend enough time with the whole organization to groom the response to RFP, etc. We would sit down with the CEO, basically write out the response to this request for proposal and basically do the bidding. What this would create is that our solutions would not be as good as they could because we don't take into account all the know how from the organization. From one perspective, from other perspective, when we would do the pitches, we would fly like one or two guys and do the pitch of our proposal. So the clients would only see Sharonas or me and, or other account manager and it would be, that's it. What we learned basically last year we totally changed the approach. So if we see that a valuable request for proposal comes, we organize. I don't know, for the biggest bid we used 20 people. 20 people in organization contributed to our response. So it went way, way, way, way with a bigger quality. When we went to pitch to the clients, we went like, I know seven guys, you know, it's like, and the data scientists and data engineers and infrastructure managers, you know, and project managers and product managers. So it kind of, you go as a team, the client sees you, they see your, your value, your people who are contributing to the project, their expertise, etc. And after that we basically started either winning the RFPs or being in top two. So this actually changed everything dramatically. So now we are always over investing in the sales process and when we win in the customer onboarding process, it's like the biggest investment that you need to do. You take the brightest people, deliver with the highest possible quality in the beginning to set everything up properly.
- [49:27]
Yeah.
- [49:30]
Omar Khan
I mean when you describe it.
- [49:31]
Egidus Pilipas
Like that, it makes complete sense.
- [49:32]
Omar Khan
Like why wouldn't you involve more people in your organization when you're putting together the rfp, it's going to be better.
- [49:39]
Egidus Pilipas
Quality, more well thought through, but it's not natural.
- [49:43]
Exactly.
- [49:44]
Omar Khan
Right. And also you're often thinking we haven't won this and we've got a million other things to do and we've got all the challenges you talked about.
- [49:58]
Egidus Pilipas
Yeah. So pulling all these people out, there's.
- [49:59]
Omar Khan
Always this risk that we're going to over invest. But we haven't won this deal. We could be wasting a lot of time on deals that are not going to go anywhere. But it sounds like the you had some kind of qualification in terms of were you doing this with every deal that came along or kind of hand picking the ones that look like the strongest opportunities.
- [50:28]
Egidus Pilipas
So we started doing this with biggest deals Basically, and the key thing is it is very tough to explain to the whole organization why you would stop doing whatever you are doing and now in three weeks time, prepare this proposal document which is, I don't know, 300 pages. It's extremely difficult to explain. So we even had to invent internal investment processes like our account managers have literally revenue or that they can. With which they can purchase internal resources so that the teams who are throwing out whatever they are doing and helping to do the sales so that they would still be feeling that they are earning some kind of revenue for their team or whatever. Just basically to understand that this is a real thing, you know, Otherwise you say, I am delivering Project A and, you know, I am getting revenue there and why I'm doing why I'm working for free, you know.
- [51:46]
Omar Khan
So you're giving these account managers, like an internal budget that they can spend to get resources, which probably helps to prioritize depending on how much they're willing to spend. But it also, yeah, I guess it kind of feels like you're doing more meaningful work when you're getting pulled off to work on a new RFP or whatever.
- [52:09]
Egidus Pilipas
Yeah. Now basically, your account manager becomes the same level as external client because they are paying for your team service, you know, so it's like, it equalizes.
- [52:23]
Omar Khan
Love it. It's a great idea.
- [52:25]
Egidus Pilipas
Okay, time to wrap up.
- [52:27]
Omar Khan
Let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
- [52:31]
Egidus Pilipas
Yeah, let's do this.
- [52:32]
Omar Khan
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [52:37]
Egidus Pilipas
So it was like a month or two ago when my coach said, get used to working with Clarity Islands in this extremely changing world, because I was saying my team is asking, you know, what is our strategy for five years and et cetera. And I cannot define it because everything changes so fast, you know, and she said, like, get used to working with Clarity Islands.
- [53:10]
Omar Khan
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [53:13]
Egidus Pilipas
Last year's best book for me was the Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan. Helps to think about the progress that you are making in your business and your life. Kind of structure it in a positive way. So I think this was the best book for me in a while.
- [53:38]
Great.
- [53:39]
Omar Khan
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [53:44]
Egidus Pilipas
I would say it's high energy and really caring about problem solving and really not caring about what people think around.
- [53:55]
Omar Khan
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [53:59]
Egidus Pilipas
It's writing. Definitely writing. So I write down all the bigger ideas and principles and projects, etc. Just kind of type it.
- [54:12]
Omar Khan
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [54:15]
Egidus Pilipas
So if I would have all the time and all the money in the world, I would go and create something like Total Body Monitoring tool or tool set or whatever to make sure that I know everything what happens inside of my body.
- [54:30]
Omar Khan
Oh, I would buy that.
- [54:34]
Egidus Pilipas
I know.
- [54:35]
Omar Khan
Well, depending on how much it was. But yeah. Yeah. And what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [54:44]
Egidus Pilipas
The fun fact is that I am a total introvert and I get freaked out when they need to talk with people that I don't know or people in general. But when you are a co founder, everybody thinks that you are just a chatterbox, you know.
- [55:03]
Omar Khan
I hear you. It's like I'm an introvert as well. And I always find that just sometimes going, going and having conversations with people often just feels so.
- [55:15]
Egidus Pilipas
I mean, I enjoy it in the.
- [55:16]
Omar Khan
Moment, once you get over the anxiety, but it always feels so draining. And it's always. I always feel like I need to spend time by myself just to get my energy back. And then people say, but you do a podcast, you do this. It's like. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [55:35]
Egidus Pilipas
So I do windsurfing. I love it. And I am pretty obsessed about longevity, so I read it before it was famous as well.
- [55:46]
Omar Khan
Love it. Awesome, I guess.
- [55:48]
Egidus Pilipas
Thank you so much for joining me.
- [55:50]
Omar Khan
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for unwrapping this journey over the last, I guess, 14 years of building this business.
- [56:01]
Egidus Pilipas
If people want to check out exacaster.
- [56:03]
Omar Khan
They can go to exacastr.com that's ET. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [56:13]
Egidus Pilipas
The best way would be LinkedIn. So LinkedIn egidiuspilipas.
- [56:21]
Omar Khan
We'll include a link in the show notes so people can find you. Great.
- [56:25]
Egidus Pilipas
Thank you so much.
- [56:25]
Omar Khan
I really enjoyed this conversation and I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [56:31]
Egidus Pilipas
Thank you, Omer. It was a pleasure to be here.
- [56:35]
Omar Khan
Cheers.
- [56:36]
Egidus Pilipas
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