← The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
Community-Led SaaS Growth: How Ninety Hit $44M ARR
00:50:08
Mark Abbott (Ninety) on community-led SaaS growth, surviving a copycat competitor, and bootstrapping to $100M+ valuation on $500/month in Facebook ads
Loading summary
Transcript83 lines
- [00:03]
A
Welcome to the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Omer Khan. AI has changed the playbook for building and growing SaaS. Every week I talk to founders who are writing the new one. He talks openly about his startup idea. A competitor took it and beat him to market. My guest today is Mark Abbott, founder of 90 Software that helps leadership teams run their company and stay on the same page. He's grown it to nearly 44 million in ARR and has over 18,000 companies as customers. In this conversation, Mark breaks down the pitch he made to the guy who owned the framework. His entire product is built on why he spent years becoming a certified coach before writing a single line of code, how $500 a month on Facebook got him his first thousand customers, and why things actually got worse after he raised $20 million. So I hope you enjoy it. I talk to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They're an AI powered product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your B2B SaaS platform or AI agent. Built by serial entrepreneurs. They they understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One. Right now, they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call@GearhartIO. That's GearhartIO. I've interviewed over 450 B2B SaaS founders on this podcast. Success leaves clues and I've been taking notes every week. I send out the shortcuts, the blind spots and the tactics that actually work so you don't have to learn everything the hard way. Over 5,000 founders read it. You probably should too. Sign up free at SasClub IE newsletter. That's SasClub IO newsletter. Mark, welcome to the show.
- [02:12]
B
Thank you. We're delighted to be here.
- [02:15]
A
Yeah, my pleasure. So for people who don't know what 90 is, can you tell us what does the product do? Who's it for? What's the main problem you're hoping to solve?
- [02:24]
B
Yeah, so what the product does is it really helps leadership teams get on the same page in terms of who they are, what they're doing, where they're going, how they serve their ideal customer, sort of what pace they want to go at. But fundamentally, you know, you know, the core of it is it helps Align everybody. It helps everybody get on the same page in terms of planning. It helps everybody get on the same page in terms of how they're measuring performance. And then ultimately it helps everybody, you know, sort of execute, you know, well, so that they can turn these crazy ideas for businesses into exceptional companies.
- [03:04]
A
Now this 90 is built around the concept of the EOS framework.
- [03:12]
B
Yeah, it's an interesting. It really wasn't started that way. Right. So the original idea came to me back in 2005. I was a senior partner at private equity firm and I was sitting on a bunch of boards and I'm like, guys, this isn't that complicated. And by the way, back then it was all guys, right? You know, if you want to build a great business, it's just like building a great house. You have, you have to have a vision that's compelling because it's hard work. And then you have, have to have plan and then you have to have tools and disciplines, right? And then there's a whole process that go from the idea all the way to whether you want to say, a successful exit, an ipo, passing, you know, the ownership or even just leadership onto the next generation. But I honestly just was very frustrated. I built at that point in time, I had invested in over a hundred companies. I'd sat on dozens of boards and I thought, geez, this should be easier. And so I wanted to. I had this idea for writing a book and creating the software. I won't get into why some private equity guys doing software, but it's not the first time I built something and designed something from a software perspective. So had this crazy idea back in 2005 and then I got recruited to be a senior part to actually to be CEO for a company that hedge fund was starting. So I kind of put the idea on hold and then they changed their minds, as hedge funds can do. And I went back to the drawing board on this thing and I was investing in some companies personally and one of them was starting to run on this thing called eos. And so I got a copy of the book Traction. I'm like, hey, this was the book I was going to write. But what was super cool about, I call it like a peanut butter and chocolate moment was that I hadn't planned on standing up a coaching community. And. And then I was like, whoa, right? This, this could be a really cool community to be part of. The coaches could ultimately help me sell the software. And so I literally met with the founder, Gino Wickman, and maybe some of your, you know, your Audience knows, but, you know, the book Traction is pretty well known. And I said, hey, I was going to write a book. You wrote it much better. But I, I really want to do the software thing. Given issue with that. And, and he literally said, we tried it, it's not in our DNA. And we're talking like 2,000, I want to say 12. And as I say, the rest is history.
- [05:44]
A
So when Gino said it's not in our DNA, was it like, it's not in our DNA and it's a bad idea and you shouldn't do it?
- [05:50]
B
They actually tried it. They tried to do the software thing and it didn't fail. And then, so when Gino said that to me, he, you know, I believe he meant that we're not a software company, we're not a technology company, we're a training and development company.
- [06:05]
A
And so how, how did you structure that relationship? Because you're taking some IP from Gino, you're building software around it. He's not. Doesn't sound that excited about getting into the software business. So what did you have to do in terms of structuring that deal or partnership and how easy or hard was it to get his confidence and trust that you were the right guy to go and do this?
- [06:43]
B
Yeah, so there's a long story, but I'll make it relatively short. So this is 2012 when we had this conversation. And since he said he was not opposed to it at all, I joined the coaching community. And the first thing I wanted to do is just really get to know Gino and the community. And so I spent several years just really developing my understanding of EOS as an EOS implementer. And I think I was number 35 or 33 today. It's almost 900 implementers around the world. But so, you know, I got, I just started working on developing a relationship with Gino and the other and the other implementers. And I actually had a related company that, in a software space that I was helping a little bit. So I was kind of, you know, you could say distracted to some extent. But I started to socialize the idea with the implementer community in probably 2015. Ish. And then one of the guys that I shared a lot of my vision with, he had a client who said we should do software. So they actually decided they were going to do it. And he said, hey, just got to let you know, I have a client who's in the software business and software space and they're going to, they want to start a version of, you know, what your vision was. And I said, well, you know, kind of, kind of bummed that I shared with you, but, you know, I understand. And it's, obviously, it's a free, free market. Could I be an investor? And came back and said, no. So that company was called Traction Tools and it started, I want to believe, in 2016. And I was like, ah, man. So then I said, I really want to do this. Traction Tools entered into a license with eos and they showed me the license agreement. I'm like, I don't really want to have all those restrictions. And so I actually started as EOS compatible in 2016. We started laying the code in 2017. We got our first customer. But yeah, we started as EOS compatible and then actually had a number of implementers who invested in the business alongside of me. And they just kept saying, mark, you gotta be, you have to use the trademark terms. This is what we teach. It needs to be in there. So ultimately, in 2018, toward the end of 2018, we entered into a license with EOS and so that's how that all started.
- [09:35]
A
So this wasn't an overnight thing, right? You had the first seed of the idea in 2005 and it was 2016 when you got your first customer. And that story you just shared. For many early stage founders, that is the biggest nightmare that you're told. Go out, share your idea, talk to people, get feedback and they're worried someone's going to copy the idea. And, and whenever I talk to those friends, I'm like, ah, don't worry about it. No, the chances of someone actually doing that are so low. And that's exactly what happened to you. Did that change your kind of view about how much you want to share with people?
- [10:18]
B
Well, you know, as I mentioned,
- [10:22]
A
you
- [10:22]
B
know, I was in the, you know, in the private equity industry and there are a number of times where the senior partner, so I was a senior managing partner, senior managing director, but there was this, you know, there's a founder of the, of the private equity firm and, and, and he gave me grief on numerous occasions for helping some of these companies that I was looking at investing in think about their strategy. So he thought I overshared. And, and, and you know, I have had a number of times in my life where I've shared some stuff that's been leveraged. But, you know, I think life is long and I'm not about burning bridges and I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be learning the lessons I need to learn. So it is what it is.
- [11:11]
A
So tell me about the first version of the product. So it sounds like you've got. It's a bit of a tightrope that you're walking here. On the one side, you want to be something that helps EOS practitioners. On the other side, you don't want to be the official thing because you have to use all the terminology and all the restrictions and everything. So how did you navigate that? What did that first version of the product look like? And just generally, what was the reaction when you got it into people's hands?
- [11:46]
B
Yeah, in hindsight, there was a lot of really good things that happened for us, but the restrictions were actually extraordinary. They could tell us we were not allowed to teach. So imagine being PLG software where you have no ability to teach about, you know, teach what your product does, right? So we were not allowed to teach everything we did. Marketing literally had to go through EOS worldwide and get approved. And as you can imagine, that was not a fast process. And oftentimes, right, things got cut up materially. Nothing in the, you know, in, in, you know, and then I'm talking about once we, once we had the license, right? And then, and then once we had license, literally every change to the software they had to approve. It was extraordinary. It was excruciating.
- [12:35]
A
Right.
- [12:36]
B
And a lot of the stuff that I had written for when we were EOS compatible was immediately deemed no bueno. And so we gave up a lot of flexibility in order to get that license. But, and then there's. I can tell you lots of stories associated with, you know, life after the light. Well, once we got the license, but it was, it was not an easy decision. It really wasn't when we started it, you know, as, you know, you know, when, when we, when we started it, because I was close to the community, a lot of the coaches and, and I mentioned there were investors, including the current CEO of eos. And so, you know, when we started it, you know, there was a lot of, you know, a lot of support for us, number one. Candidly, you know, I think we were a brighter product than the product that was out there. So that was, that went to, that was inert to our benefit. So, you know, we got off the ground pretty well.
- [13:46]
A
What did that first version of the product do? Was it like a stripped down mvp or did you actually spend time saying, this isn't going to work unless we've got the whole kind of system working in there?
- [13:59]
B
So, as I mentioned, my idea for this goes back to 2005, and what I haven't Shared with you is I started thinking about AI in 2012. So I had a pretty clear point of view on what I wanted to build and sort of the crawl walk run associated with the platform. And candidly we're like at 5% of what I wanted to do at this point in time still, right? And so I had a very clear point of view. I've gotten a lot of grief over the years because a lot of people are like that's not how you build software, it's agile, blah, blah, blah. But no, at a very clear point of view of what I wanted to build, number one, I knew what we needed to build to begin, right? EOS has this thing called the five foundational tools. And so we needed to have a great vision traction organized in there, we needed to have a great meetings tool in there, we needed to have a great rock setting tool, we need to have a great scorecard in there, right? And we needed to have, you know, an issues list. And so, you know, right off the bat we had, you know, these five foundational tools in it when we started. And I spent the first, literally six months just developing the data schema. And so because once again I had this vision for where it was going to go and how data was going to be super important for, for our success. And so, you know, in hindsight, you know, we started using MongoDB. I got advice that that was the right thing to do. Now we have both Mongo and a relational database. But yeah, we took, and by the way, I hired a third party to help me figure it all out software wise. So I put a fair bit of my own money in the beginning of this thing.
- [15:47]
A
Was it all self funded in the early days?
- [15:49]
B
Plus the, you know, I wanted to have the, the implementers have an opportunity. So we had customers and coaches and me and, and then I had one, two co founders, one of which put, you know, a little bit of money in. But when they were, when I, as you may have already sensed I'm okay with sort of taking playing the long game and they wanted to go a lot faster than I thought was appropriate. And so in the end I bought them out pretty early on.
- [16:21]
A
I mean today we should give people a sense of the size of the business today. Where are you in terms of revenue, customer size of team?
- [16:30]
B
So we have like, I want to say we're nearing 44 million in revenue. We've got 18,500 companies that are running on it, you know, and there's, you know, in those companies there's almost a Million employees and then about 25% of the employees are actually paid seats right now.
- [16:53]
A
Okay, and then you, I think you've raised about 35 million to date, is that right?
- [16:59]
B
Actually 55. So we did a $20 million Series A with Insight Partners in 21 and then we did 35 million with that was led by Blue Cloud Ventures, Insight Pro routed up and then a new investor as well, Catalyst Ventures came in. So right now we have three institutional investors in the company.
- [17:22]
A
But when you started, I think if I'm right, you didn't raise any money. You were basically self funded through to roughly what, the first thousand customers.
- [17:33]
B
Yeah, that's about right.
- [17:34]
A
And how much did you charge the first customer?
- [17:37]
B
$12 per seat. And to this day we still charge $12 per seat for the least. Yeah, the least sophisticated model. Yeah, we go 12, 14, 16. That's ch. That's going to change in the not too distant future because we've got a lot going on with AI right now. But yeah, and then, and then it would go down based upon, you know, more and more, you know, of your employees you put in the company. The seat price would go down.
- [18:08]
A
Are you looking at more like usage based pricing now with, with AI and just the pressure on kind of per seat pricing?
- [18:16]
B
Yeah. So we're going to go and we're still working on it right now, to be very candid. But what I see is the next step is they'll get a certain, so there'll still be three or two packages. Personally I'm kind of aligning towards with AI and without package and bringing it down to two. And then on the, with AI you get a certain amount of consumption and then thereafter you, you pay. Ultimately I, you know, I believe the world's going to get to a place where you're paying for the, the value we create. But it may take a couple years for us to really get into a position where we can, we can do that in a manner that, you know, is a win win for us and our, and our customers and the investors, of course.
- [19:04]
A
What was the reaction like in terms of getting the first 10 customers? Now on the one hand, you took your time. Most people, if they had an idea for eos, they wouldn't say, ah, a good next step is to go and spend the next two years being an EOS practitioner to learn this really deeply. They would be like, I need to build a software. So you did that, you built relationships. But I'm still curious for a system or a framework that had been used pretty successfully without the software to back it up. How much demand was there for a software product?
- [19:47]
B
As I said, we came out second. Traction Tools went out first. And so there was no question that there was, you know, sort of product market fit in my mind. There wasn't. There was no question in my mind before I ever started the company, before Traction Tools ever existed. Because, you know, when you think about it, you know, just making sure everybody in the company's on the same page and, you know, we all know where we're going. We all understand what we're working on, we all understand what measurables are needed. You know, we, you know, you just, you just, you know, I, in my mind, I connect all this stuff, and so I just see how it's all integrated and how it informs one another. And so as an example, in your, in, you know, in our, in our feedback system, it pulls the core values from the vision Traction Organizer, pulls your roles and accountabilities from the, you know, accountability chart or the org chart. Right. It pulls your rocks from the rock system. And so it's all right in there and integrated.
- [20:46]
A
And.
- [20:46]
B
And then, you know, like, as, you know, back in 2012, I'm starting to say, well, when AI comes along right now, we can literally help people understand where they are developmentally. And, you know, we just literally launched, you know, our biggest sort of effort on the AI front. But you can go in now and, you know, you can ask our companion bot, which is Maz, short for Maslow. You can ask Maz what's working, what's not working up and down and across the organization, and boom, it's got, you know, it could tell you it's super cool. Right? And so to me, it's always been, you know, obvious that the, you know, there's so much power when you integrate these tools and you put it in the cloud and that you. And when you can leverage AI. So I don't know, I just have been confident that it's right.
- [21:41]
A
Okay, So I think with the first thousand customers you bootstrap, you got to the first million in ARR, just selling to them. What was the model for selling? Because you were selling to coaches, right? Not to the end users or people who would be using the product.
- [22:04]
B
Yeah, for the first, I want to say, two plus years, yeah, we just leaned right into the, into the coaching community. So that was our, you know, that was our channel. I remember spending 500 bucks a month on Facebook and that was it. Right. And for years. And then, you know, people would hear about us, you know, we were starting to become somewhat known in like, you know, the entrepreneur organization eo and then, you know, later on Vistage and ypo. And so, you know, there's, you know, there's the entrepreneurial sort of communities that are out there, peer groups etc, started to learn about us. And so, yeah, and, and that was really it, it was, you know, it was 500 bucks on Facebook. It was being, you know, started starting to become known in some of these entrepreneurial peer groups. And then it was the coaching channel.
- [23:09]
A
So you were running 500 bucks a month on Facebook to target EOS coaches?
- [23:16]
B
No. To target, no, because I'm a part of the community. Remember, the community gets together every, every quarter. They call it a quarterly collaboration exchange, qce. And so I'm networking with them and just developing relationships with, you know, the coaches. And as I said, when I joined, I, I'm pretty sure I was like number 33. And you know, today it's at 900. And so, you know, from 2000 and I was in the community until such time as it, they had to transition to a franchise or franchisee model. And the restrictions associated with being a franchisee were I just couldn't, I couldn't abide by those.
- [23:53]
A
So.
- [23:53]
B
Especially for other reasons, which we can get into if you want. But yeah, so I started, you know, just have, you know, strong relationships with coaches and, and, and from the very beginning, you know, we really believed, I deeply believe in exceptional service. And so we were really, really good on the service side, taking care of the coaches, taking care of their clients, and just, you know, we, we, we really, you know, from day one, that was a huge thing for us. So the product was good, it was easier to use and frankly had a better UI UX than traction tools. But providing exceptional service was just something from the very beginning because the coaches are my friends and I've been around entrepreneurs and business owners since almost the beginning of my career. I started in the private equity in a leveraged buyout business in 85 and did workouts before then. So, you know, I just have a deep affection for people who are starting and building companies and want to make darn sure that we're doing everything we can to support them. And, you know, so like, very early on, we, we were 24, seven, five days a week in terms of our support.
- [25:12]
A
So I'm still curious, what was the $500 a month Facebook ads for? What were you doing with that?
- [25:16]
B
We were targeting, you know, EOS Aware entrepreneurs. You know, the EOS world's really interesting Right. I think today maybe there's, you know, there's a whole EOS library and it's sold like three and a half million copies of sort of the EOS library. And so, you know, traction was getting out there and spreading around. The EOS community will tell you that I think this is about, right, that for every company that ultimately gets a coach or an implementer, there are about nine who dabble with it. We call them self implementers. And so even in 2000, 16 or 17, 18, 19, there are a lot of us aware companies that were self implementing. And so you just, we just targeted, as best we possibly could, 500 bucks.
- [26:15]
A
So I've heard some different terminology. EOS coaches, EOS implementers. Are they the same thing or are they different?
- [26:22]
B
Yeah, they refer to themselves as implementers. So yeah, they're called EOS implementers.
- [26:28]
A
And then you had the EO entrepreneurs, which was another bucket of people.
- [26:33]
B
Well, EO is a peer group for entrepreneurs and so it's a national, it's a global peer group. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurs around the globe. Just like Vistage, right? Vistage is more CEOs, but Vistage, the community's well over 20,000, so. And then YPO, I don't know the number off the top of my head, but it's, I would dare say, I mean, it's thousands and thousands.
- [27:00]
A
I mean it strikes me as, you know, a PE guy going in and bootstrapping and moving fairly slow. Doesn't sound like what I would expect your DNA to be. So I'm curious why you did that and how much of a pressure were you feeling from peers from your team to maybe raise funding, put some more fuel on the fire here to accelerate growth. Yeah.
- [27:28]
B
So, you know, with my background being, you know, what it, what it is, what it was, you know, I didn't start the company to go work for someone and. Right. And so, you know, I've been on a bunch of boards, as I said, you know, I've been on 30 boards in my career. So, you know, my perspective was that I was going to bootstrap it until I got the thing to evaluation of 100 million and then I, I, I'd raise $20 million. So, so, you know, so the first, the first round diluted me by 17, you know, some odd percent and, and even after the second round, you know, I was still over, over 50%. So I just, you know, I'm too old to work for someone.
- [28:23]
A
So. Did you get to 100 million valuation before you raised money?
- [28:27]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [28:28]
A
And I'm curious what changed after that?
- [28:31]
B
You know, we did stupid things because once you have 20 million, you can go faster. Right? And so, you know, I, I've learned a lot of lessons and this isn't, you know, this is not my first startup. It's actually my third startup. You know, I did one for, for, for a hedge fund and, and then I built a business, you know, so I actually, by the time I was 36 years old, I was running a multibillion dollar lending and investment platform that I helped take public. And, and, and the lessons that I learned in, in those situations didn't serve me as well as I thought they would. You know, in, in, in those worlds, the, yeah, they were upper out cultures, number one. You know, we were, we were, you know, hiring very, you know, you know, we were hiring, you know, pretty exceptional human beings and paying them a lot of money. And, and, and, and so, you know, when I, when, when I got a fair bit of money, we, we, we hired fast. And then I started to hire some executives who in hindsight, you know, were well suited for the game that was being played. Right. I mean, to your point, now we're running fast and you know, these executives you start hiring, whether it's a marketing person or, you know, a product person or an engineer, et cetera, they all come with their own Playbooks. And next thing you know, I've got this mess on my hands because everybody's bringing their own playbooks. They're actually trying to create their own cultures. They have their own levels of sort of a pace and various levels of ambiguity that they're comfortable with. And then, you know, and, and, and they're smart and got some more junior people who've never experienced it, still on the senior leadership team because, you know, because that's just the way it happens. And they're listening to these other people and they're like, well, that sounds smart to me. And you know, you're starting to lose control of things. And so, you know, once we got the money honestly, you know, we started to go fast. But you know, in my mind, I made, you know, a number of bad hiring decisions, to be very honest.
- [31:04]
A
Was it just the hiring decisions or when you were you, when you were deep in the trenches? There was. Did you ever have a moment where you felt like, I wish I hadn't raised the money and we just kept doing what we were doing with less chaos?
- [31:17]
B
That's a great question. And I never did go there. As I said earlier, I deeply believe we are where we are learning the lessons we need to learn. So I don't do the rumination, wish I could do it all over again thing. It's just not in my DNA, to be honest with you. You. So, you know, I'm super fortunate to be where I am.
- [31:44]
A
So.
- [31:44]
B
No, never, never, you know, regretted the hires. You know, there's like, there's decisions we've made that, yeah, like, those were stupid, but, but yeah, I, you know, like I said, I had to learn those lessons. And, and frankly, you know, part of what we do is we help people, you know, go from, you know, from zero to, you know, an exceptional organization. And I look at a lot of the lessons that I've learned over the last, you know, three, four, five years as extraordinarily valuable for, you know, for my clients. Because what we, what, what we haven't really talked much about is, you know, I've coached a bunch of companies as well. Right. I was building this thing. I continued to coach up until I still have some, a few clients. But, you know, I'm very proud to say I've helped a couple of businesses, you know, go from zero, right, zero revenues to, you know, valuations, you know, in the nine figures. And so, you know, I'm, I, I take a lot of my scar tissue and, and help them avoid some of it.
- [32:53]
A
We talked about the hundred million million valuation before you raise money and you talked about a few channels that you were putting your time and effort into selling to the community. The $500 a month Facebook ads, word of mouth. Was there something else that you said
- [33:12]
B
as well, really going out and as we hired some more people sort of working, networking within the various peer group communities, like I said, you know, EO and Vistage as an example.
- [33:27]
A
Is that all you did to, to acquire customers and, and keep growing the business or were there other channels that did those sort of stop working and you had to expand into other areas?
- [33:39]
B
Well, we, we, we probably three, four years ago, once we got the, did the Series A, we started to, you know, invest in paid. Right. And so mostly just buying Google AdWords. And then, you know, we also, you know, mucked about with LinkedIn and some things like that. But honestly, we've never been, you know, it's not fair to the current team. But, you know, we struggled for a long time in terms of feeling like we're really, really good at marketing and there's a whole host of reasons for that. I am actually fairly obsessive and especially in terms of the look and feel and the brand and how we position ourselves. And so, you know, there's, there were a lot of sort of founder mode moments around being on and off brand over the years. But, you know, I think we're, I think we're finally doing a pretty decent job.
- [34:41]
A
You touched on AI a little earlier and some of the things that you are doing with the product to evolve it, given what some of the things that are happening right now, we're seeing this whole kind of takeoff of vibe coding and people thinking that they can build the software themselves, why pay for it? And then you've got companies like Salesforce going completely headless and kind of completely leaning into that. I'm curious, is that something that keeps you up at night? Is that something that you see as a potential threat for your business?
- [35:34]
B
Well, as I said, I had a pretty clear point of view on how AI would, would really take what we do to the next level. All the way back to 2012, we raised the Series B to get to work on, on, on you know, embedding AI into the platform. And, and so we started that effort two plus years ago. And you know, and, and you know, it took us a while to really figure out exactly how we wanted to do it, number one. Number two, sort of, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, I've been really thinking about how to leverage AI in a way that's, that's really, you know, good for humanity and obviously preserves the trust of the coaches and the clients. So, you know, there's a lot of, I've got a lot of hours thinking about how we want to do this and, and, and we had some fits and starts, but we, we wanted to make sure that the way we did this is, is, is, is something where we feel really, really good about how we're. Howard. Howard. How we're helping and how we're embedding it. Since, you know, we did the race and since we started the work, you now have this sort of, this, this battle, you know, within the software industry in terms of, you know, AI embedded versus AI native. And, and, and you know, ultimately, you know, we're, we're sort of, you know, we're doing the AI embedded, but we're also, you know, seriously sort of thinking through how the transform the platform over time into, into AI native. You know, as far as what I worry about in terms of sort of the, the competitive space is that, you know, someone with someone who has my vision, which I'm not sure about that I don't have any evidence that someone has my vision for what I really want to build here, but someone who has, you know, that vision and is con, has lots of conviction and can throw tens of millions of dollars at building something AI native. You know, I feel that pressure on the back of my neck on the one hand. On the other hand, you know, you hate to use the term moat, but you know, we've got, we've been in the community for 10 plus years, we have great relationships, including a bunch of implementers who are investors. You know, we've got an amazing database if you can think about it, right. 18,000 plus plus customers. And, and, and I think we've done, you know, I think what we're doing right now with AI is, is, is pretty cool. So you know, I, you know, you know, I, I, I like Andy Grove's perspective. You got to be paranoid. And so I'm paranoid. But I think we're doing the right things. Would I love to go faster? Yeah, I'd love to go faster and because there's just a tremendous amount of, of, of build that I think is in front of us still.
- [39:13]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean I, I've probably been doing more sort of vibe coding than I should be in the last few months. And the frustrating thing is my list of things to do just seems to keep getting longer when people keep saying AI makes it faster. And it's because you just keep coming up with more ideas and more things that maybe five, ten years ago you would have ruled out because it was too complicated or too hard. And maybe that's why you having a long time vision for the product is maybe why you feel that in many ways you've only scratched the surface with where you want to take this product and business.
- [39:56]
B
Well, the interesting thing is that for a long time now I've said if you talk about before there was software, right, how people were doing, you know, running on eos and you know, it was kind of, they were kind of like acting like, you know, a general contractor who's building their saws and screwdrivers and nails and, and, and, and hammers, you know, et cetera, at night. And that's like, that's not your job, man. Right. And, and I think a lot of people are sitting here going, well, I can vibe code this. And you're like, well, you know, yeah, you could. But is that your job number one? Is that how you add value to the world? Is that your customer base? Or now are you getting into an entirely different industry with an entirely new customer base? And by the way, just because you build it does not Mean, they come right, you got to figure out distribution to state the obvious stuff. And then once you have some scale, right, you gotta figure out how to make this thing damn secure. And it took us years to get SOC2 as an example. And then don't even get me started on gdpr. Right. And so it's easy to romanticize and all this stuff, but at the risk of staying in the obvious, building a company that's actually has what it takes to scale and to honor the commitments that it's making to its customers. Yeah, it's not easy.
- [41:38]
A
Yeah, in many ways maybe building a product has gotten easier, but everything else has gotten harder.
- [41:43]
B
Yeah, there's parts to it right now that are, we're leveraging AI, not just in the product, but obviously operationally as well. And there's no question that it's helping us do a bunch of things. And one of the things that we're working on right now, it's kind of a side project is it's really exciting. But so, but it, but it is, it's just a different, you know, it's, there's another set of capabilities that have to be integrated into the system and you got to figure out, you know, how, how to do that in a manner that, you know, makes sense for you, who you are, where you're going, how you serve. And, and so it's just, It does make things a little bit more complex on the one hand. On the other hand, there's no question that, you know, it has the ability to increase the velocity of certain work that's being done.
- [42:46]
A
If you're building an AI agent, a SaaS product, or stuck trying to scale, check out Gearhart. They can act as your fractional CTO and technical team, bringing AI expertise from projects for Meta and Google plus, strong Silicon Valley connections with founders and VCs. And since they're a Ukrainian born company, you get senior engineers with an offshore pricing model with offices in San Francisco and London and a distributed team of 40 experts. They've helped build over 70 successful products. Right now they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call at Gearhart IO. That's Gearheart IO. All right, we should wrap up. So let's get on to the lightning round. I've got five quick fire questions for you. What's a piece of startup advice that you disagree with?
- [43:41]
B
One of the things I talked a little bit about is companies go through these unavoidable stages of development and I think that you need to be really Careful with regard to who you're hiring. They need to fit the stage you're in. And then the problem is that if you're growing fast, you're going to be going through those stages fast. And so the nature of leadership changes on the ones and threes and it just does. Right. And so if you hire someone who's got a lot of experience into an early stage and they come in with their playbooks and they come in with, I'm not going to say 9 to 5 ish, but they come in with a different level of pace than, you know, then your team's running at, there's a, you know, it's just going to cause issues, right. And you got to remember that they're going to come in and they're going to start overseeing people and they're going to be building, you know, alliances and, and it can be a mess. And so I think, you know, you need to be very careful with regard to your, your early hires and making sure that they fit the stage you're in.
- [44:45]
A
What is a recent great book that you have read?
- [44:50]
B
My business reading is predominantly skim oriented, but my history reading is where I go a little slower. And so I'm a big Neil Ferguson fan and so I've read over the last year probably all, I don't know, six or seven of his books. But I love the way he looks at the world and tend to support his worldview.
- [45:16]
A
Tell me about one thing that you had to learn the hard way.
- [45:19]
B
Entrepreneurs don't get to decide what their culture looks like. The marketplace dictates what your culture looks like. And so the higher the pace, the more ambiguity. You just have to match that marketplace with your culture. And so you can come in and think that you can create a lifestyle sort of kind of a culture where it's nine to five and, and everything's pretty straightforward. But if your industry is going 90 miles or 120 miles per hour and there's tons of ambiguity associated with it, you got to build a culture that's going to thrive. And I think our early on years we probably our core values include resilience and inquisitiveness. I think we under indexed on resilience and inquisitiveness early on. And that sucks because I really, really, really try hard to take care of all of our employees. It's a very important thing for me. But sometimes it doesn't work out. And we've been phenomenal in terms of the cultural side from a work, you know, people working well with one another. I think we have great people who really work well together, but not all of them were really comfortable with the pace or the level of ambiguity associated with just the nature of the game that's being played right now.
- [46:50]
A
What is a tool or habit that saves you the most time?
- [46:54]
B
The honest answer is Claude. I mean, it's pretty bloody amazing right now.
- [47:00]
A
Yeah. Hard to compete with Claude these days. And finally, what do you do for fun when you're not working?
- [47:06]
B
Yeah, I like. Like to hike, like to run. My son and I are free diver and love to spearfish. We haven't done that as much as we. We'd like to these days. He works with us as well. I love skiing. He. He rides a snowboard. But just being outdoors and, you know, appreciating the grandness of the world is, you know, it brings me back to, you know, sort of center.
- [47:37]
A
Yeah. Love it. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. I love your thoughtful approach to building your business. And in many ways, you break the mold of what a startup founder is supposed to do. In other ways you are doing. It's not like you do completely the opposite. But I just love, you know, hearing some of the counter sort of views that you have and how it still helped you build a sizable business and sounds like you still have a big vision for where you want to take this business. Now, if people want to find out more about 90, they can go to 90io. That's the word, not the number. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to.
- [48:32]
B
Yeah, either LinkedIn or my email. Mark, 90io works great. We'll respond well.
- [48:40]
A
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Wish you and the team the best of success.
- [48:43]
B
I appreciate it, Omer. Thank you.
- [48:45]
A
Cheers.