Omer (00:09.920)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the 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 talked to Paul Joyce, the founder and CEO of Gecko Board, a SaaS product that lets businesses build and display real time dashboards to help them focus on the metrics that matter.
Paul was working at a bank in England.
He hated his job and longed to start his own business.
But this isn't one of those stories where someone comes up with a great idea, quits their job the next day and becomes an overnight success.
Paul spent four years looking for the right idea.
He tried and failed about a dozen times.
But his burning desire to work for himself kept him going.
And with each failure, he learned something.
Eventually, in 2010, he came up with the idea for Gecko Board.
He started building his MVP and also posted on Hacker News which helped him build a waiting list of several hundred people.
He launched his MVP a few months later, but didn't get any paying customers.
But he could sense from how enthusiastic people were that there was something different about this idea.
So he decided that it was time for him to go big or go home.
After talking to his wife, he used their savings to give himself a five month Runway and quit his job to work on Gecko Board full time.
It was a huge leap of faith, but Paul's never looked back.
Today, Geco board does well over $5 million in annual recurring revenue.
The company has around four and a half thousand customers and a team of 40 people.
In this interview, we talk about Paul's multiple failed attempts to start a SaaS company.
We dig into why the idea for Gecko Board was different from the dozens of ideas he'd had before.
And we go into detail on how he found customers and eventually built a multimillion dollar SaaS business.
Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Joyce (02:27.650)
Thanks for having me, Omar.
Good to speak to you.
Omer (02:29.730)
So do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you or gets you out of bed in the morning to work on your business?
Paul Joyce (02:35.890)
Yeah, I don't think it's a quote, it's more a passage from Teddy Roosevelt.
His citizenship in a republic talk.
It's something I return to particular, particularly when, as is often the case on this journey, you feel low or you feel like there's plenty of critics pointing the finger.
And it's a great way just to recenter myself.
So yeah, the man in the arena.
Citizenship in a Republic by Teddy Roosevelt.
Omer (02:59.110)
We'll just put a link to that so people can.
We don't have to go through the whole thing right now.
Paul Joyce (03:04.270)
Yeah, quite a long passage.
But it's one of those ones that kind of really uplifts me, particularly when I'm feeling attacked on all sides or feeling in my bunker.
It helps me to come out and put things into perspect.
Omer (03:17.610)
Yeah, Love it.
Great.
So for people who aren't familiar with Gecko Board, can you just quickly tell us what does the product do, who is it for and what's the big problem that you're helping to solve?
Paul Joyce (03:29.130)
Sure.
So Gecko Board is a tool for small to medium sized companies who tend to be growing quite fast.
And it's a tool that they use to help them communicate data within their organization.
So 20 to 250 employees, their data is likely distributed in a bunch of different tools.
They've got spreadsheets, got databases, and they don't.
They're not facing the sort of problems that BI or machine learning can help with or even data science particularly.
This is just basic business fundamentals.
How fast am I growing, how many tickets am I getting?
What's my CSAT rating or NPS score?
Something that they want to keep in touch with all the time.
So it solves two problems.
First of all, it allows you to connect to a whole bunch of different tools that might be where your data is spread across different areas.
And second of all, it visualizes it and puts it in a way that you can read it at a glance.
So no more digging it out and presenting it back.
Omer (04:21.889)
Great.
And give us a sense of the size of the business today in terms of revenue, customers and the size of
Paul Joyce (04:28.289)
the team in terms of revenue.
We are at about, well, we're between 5 million and 10 million US in terms of annual recurring revenue.
We are maybe closer to the 5 million on that, if I'm being absolutely honest.
We are about 40 people.
We're based primarily in London, but we have a team spread across the world to help with customer support.
In terms of customers, we have about four and a half thousand paying customers.
And yeah, at any given point in time we may have a couple of thousand people in trial as well.
Omer (04:59.730)
Great.
Now, the business launched in 2010 and I want to talk about how you sort of basically went from zero to build this business into a multimillion dollar business with thousands of customers.
And we're going to dig into that.
But before we do that, I think it's really important for our audience to know, like, where this all started.
And it's probably taken you four or five years before you got to the point where you had the right idea to start on this business and you had multiple attempts at kind of coming up with ideas and launching those businesses.
Let's talk a little bit about that.
Like, tell us about that journey and what were some of those ideas that you sort of tried and failed with for sort of those three or four years?
Paul Joyce (06:00.800)
Yeah, so I think the journey probably starts about 2006.
At the time I was working at an investment bank and very much felt that I was working in a technical capacity, so designing and building data warehouses.
Very much felt that whilst there are certain parts of the job that I really enjoyed, it wasn't somewhere I wanted to be until I was 65.
And I think I like creating stuff, I like making products.
Was that physical or digital product.
So I always had a side hustle.
But I decided really I wanted to try and turn that into a business that would be able to sustain me and my family and grow, potentially scale to a large size.
So, yeah, it started about 2006 and I. I'm fond of saying that all of the ideas that I had, and I had about a dozen different ideas that I actually worked on mainly sequentially from then, but all of them had two things in common.
The first was that they were designed to try and help people make better decisions with the data that they already have.
All right, so.
Or with data that they can access.
So make better decisions with data was the first thing.
And the second thing was that none of them had any traction whatsoever.
That was a real lesson for me.
It was like you could have the greatest idea, but as is it's complete truism.
But build it and they will come is not a go to market strategy.
And actually understanding what resonates with people and then how to build that, I think were two things that.
That I struggled with in the early days.
Omer (07:27.720)
So give me an example of one of those ideas and you know, how far did you actually take the idea to try and figure out if it had any legs or not?
Paul Joyce (07:39.260)
Sure, yeah.
So one of the ideas was a site.
Remember this is back in 2006.
So things were quite different then.
You know, Yelp was still.
I don't know if it was around yet, but it was still pretty young.
But the idea was, it was called TheBuzz at TheBuzzat.
The idea was that people would check into locations and in real time you'd be able to see which bars and Pubs and restaurants were popular at that moment in time.
And the thought behind this was okay, we can use this data to help people decide what they' going to do of a night out, right?
We can tell them go here right now this place is buzzing or this place is dead if you want a quiet pint.
And so I actually went quite far with that.
So I engaged some designers and we went through quite a few iterations.
Now whilst I have a technical background, my background is in manipulating data and designing data structures and data flows, things I'm very, very comfortable with.
Designing and building web apps is something I was less comfortable with.
And so whilst learning to do that I also through process of outsourcing a lot of the development and I think this is a very keen early learning for me I think.
And whilst I continued to do that to a certain point I think there was a huge amount that I went into it completely blind and with a lot of faith in what people were telling me and not really knowing how to check that.
You know, when I asked various contractors to help build this thing I'm not sure I was using the right language.
We certainly didn't have the right kind of project management not to mind product management side to things.
So oftentimes things would take a very long time and of course all this was self finance so from our family savings.
So I think during the process of building the buzz at was I learned a lot about how to manage developers, particularly those who are not co located, they're remote in different time zone and know what I could expect and what I couldn't expect from a process.
I think the lessons I learned from that directly I directly applied several years later when I was, when I was building Gecko board and I needed some external help to get it to get that first iteration off the ground.
Omer (09:54.110)
So there's a lot of people who would either say, you know, I don't have a great idea and I want to start a SaaS business but I just don't have a great idea.
And there are other people who maybe think that they've come up with the right idea, they maybe go through the process that you just described which is I'm going to fund this myself, I'm going to hire some developers or maybe I can code myself, I'm going to spend time and money building it and getting it out there and then the thing fails, it falls flat on its face.
And maybe after that first attempt, maybe after a few attempts most people would probably say okay, maybe this isn't for me, maybe I'M not cut out to do this.
Most people wouldn't try a dozen times and fail over and over again.
So what was it for you that kept you going?
Paul Joyce (10:46.390)
I think it was risk and it was the risk actually of staying in the bank until I was 65 that represented a huge risk to me.
I could feel it chewing away at the very fiber of my being, my soul.
I'm saying this from my perspective.
Other people I think are able to navigate those internal corporate structures a lot better than I did.
But it something that, that I was relishing and I felt very much that if I stayed there that I would have to come to terms with that and I would have to accept it.
And I felt like if I did that then I would end up in a life position that I really didn't want to be.
And that is with the golden handcuffs of a large financial institution around my wrists and not being able to pursue the sort of things that I can because I simply have been.
I bought into a lifestyle, into a corporate culture that I really didn't want to do.
So I think what was driving me was, well, how do I get out of my current predicament?
Because I don't want to be in this for the next five years, let alone for the next 40.
So I think that was the primary driver was this need to find something that was a little bit more fulfilling for my personality type or for my soul.
Whichever way you want to, kind of whichever way you view the world.
Omer (12:10.790)
Yeah.
I think there's a difference between saying I've got an idea and I'm going to give it a try and if not I'll go back to what I'm doing, which is kind of like I'll dabble a bit versus I really am not fulfilled with what I'm doing.
And this is the path I want to take.
And I don't care how many times I fail, but I'm going to keep trying until I find a way.
And it kind of sounds a little bit like, you know, self motivational talk, but I think it's the mindset and that's really important.
Paul Joyce (12:41.560)
It is and it's how you approach it.
And I genuinely didn't see.
Well, despite the fact that they were catastrophic failures like all of these ideas were, none of them had any real signs.
I mean I learned a lot.
I genuinely didn't see them as failures, but as lessons that got me one step closer, that got me a little bit further understanding of how this process could or should work or where my blind spots were and where I needed extra help and where I could trust myself.
Each of those were, they were steps.
Now, they weren't designed to be steps.
Each of them were designed to be fully formed ideas that would come to fruition and help bail me out of my current situation.
But when it came time to turn my back on those ideas and to leave them and to say, okay, that wasn't, I didn't execute that properly.
It wasn't a good fit or there's no demand for this, each of those times it wasn't.
I didn't leave with a sense of abject failure.
It was more like, okay, how can I understand what happened here and then apply those lessons that will give me an advantage next time that it's going to be an elephant trap that I won't fall into.
And I think that was really the focus.
Omer (13:51.680)
So eventually, over these, this sort of, this four year journey, you finally came up with the idea for what became Gecko Board.
What was different about this idea or what was different about the way you approached this particular idea that made the difference for you?
Paul Joyce (14:13.480)
One of the primary differences was just a penny dropped.
With me, I think all of the previous ideas that I've been pursuing and been working on were all fairly consumer focused.
So that was one thing.
They're all pretty consumer focused because I, as a consumer was looking for the needs in my life and whatnot.
But one of the lessons that came out of the previous startups was actually, when I say startups, they were just ideas or technical proofs or whatever else was.
Then when I did release stuff and I wanted to measure how things were going, I found it very difficult and I found myself in the position that I believe many of our customers today find themselves in.
And that was that they have data distributed in a bunch of different places.
They don't need to do the full analysis piece on that.
I mean, that can happen, but that's not what they need on a daily basis.
What they need is to check in and see how they're doing.
You know, whether that is how many maybe Omar, you're looking at how many people are coming to your website or converting into one of your paid subscriptions or something like this.
And for me, it was very much a case of this is the need that I have.
And I could see that I would spend money on this.
I would see that if somebody solved this very well, that I would spend money on.
So it was the shift from consumer to business.
But through the lens of when I tried my own businesses in the past, and this was something that I felt that, well, if I'm facing this, and this is a pretty low level, if I'm facing this, there's got to be thousands of other businesses, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of other businesses that feel some element of this.
And that felt like a big opportunity to explore.
Omer (15:54.210)
Okay, great.
So you've got this idea.
It feels like different to what you've worked on before.
What did you do with it?
And did you go out and start to talk to customers to try and validate the idea?
Did you get straight into building a product?
Paul Joyce (16:23.260)
Yeah, I think.
And bearing in mind that this was 2010, so 10 years ago now, I hadn't read kind of Lean Startup or any of those kind of things.
So I was shooting from the hip to a certain extent.
And I think that's probably a lesson that, well, I've certainly learned since then.
So I didn't do any kind of customer development at that moment in time.
It was mainly around product development.
And so went straight in from idea to the next day, speaking to designers to then looking for a couple of people, you know, contractors can help me build this and starting to build it pretty much straight away.
So it was probably, well, it definitely isn't best practice.
And I think we could have, we could have learned a lot more a lot sooner had we had gone out in a more staged approach if I'd really kind of honed in on specific needs.
Although I had my own kind of like template of what that looked like.
Actually hearing from real people is clearly going to get you a lot further because they're the people who are going to be paying for your product.
So no, didn't do any customer development at that moment in time, but I sure wish I had.
And I think we would have gotten off to an even better start, I think, had we have done that.
Omer (17:33.620)
And how long did you spend building the product?
Paul Joyce (17:39.300)
So had the idea in March of 2010 and we had a very early version out ready for feedback, but not for payment in July of the same year.
So three or four months.
Omer (17:50.830)
Okay, and did you do any marketing during that time?
Again, the four months that you were building the product, were you just heads down on that or were you already thinking about things that you needed to do to get ready for launch and to start finding customers?
Paul Joyce (18:08.110)
Well, I was definitely head down in product, but I was also working at my day job at the time, so I was.
Omer (18:15.470)
Oh yes.
Paul Joyce (18:17.150)
So getting up, getting up at six in the morning, commuting up to town, up to London, sorry.
Working my job there, coming back in the evening, spending time with my family, then working on this idea and going to bed at about 2 o'.
Clock.
So it was pretty intense at that time.
But we did the only thing we did in terms of before getting the product ready for some feedback, which is what I was really focusing on.
I felt like that was going to be the area if we could show somebody something that we could maybe be able to solicit, whether it's useful or not.
The only thing I did was put up a splash, like a splash page that collected email addresses of people who are interested and then sent out a few tweets.
So that's pretty much all I did in that three to four months.
But in July, I felt like the product was ready to at least be open to criticism.
So I slapped it up on Hacker News, the form set up by Y Combinator.
I put it up on Hacker News, where I put a whole bunch of slew of different ideas before up in order to be able to solicit feedback from some people.
And that was, I think we signed up about 850 people that day and feedback came in.
Now, not many of them stuck around and became customers.
A lot of people were just coming in, kicking the tires and some of them didn't give any feedback, most didn't give any feedback.
But it really opened the doors in terms of we did get quite a bit of feedback, not just on the forum itself and people writing to me separately.
And that really was the first time I was exposed to a lot of people at one time.
And that's when the customers beginning to shape the product started happening in earnest.
Omer (19:57.210)
What kind of feedback were you getting at that point?
Did this sound like feedback coming from customers or was this from other developers coming in and sort of telling you what they thought about it?
But they weren't necessarily the people who were going to buy the product.
Paul Joyce (20:15.220)
I would say the majority were in the latter camp.
These were other developers who were giving me their 2 pence worth or a piece of their mind in some cases.
In fact, one of those developers who had some criticism for us ended up coming and working for us two years later and stayed with us for a number of years.
But there were also potential customers.
And in fact, some of that cohort are still customers today, 10 years on.
But I would say the majority fell into the kind of developers.
So weeding through that feedback, I think was quite difficult and I think characteristic of a lot of the mistakes I made in the first year or so.
Even post that were these kind of, as you rightly called out, different groups of people with different emphases, with different lenses through which they're viewing this product.
And so kind of categorizing them and at least trying to filter through them and understand who's saying what and which to wait and how was very difficult and something that I wasn't good at initially.
Omer (21:16.620)
So you weren't charging at that point.
Right.
So in July the product gets out there, you get people, you said about 800 signups, but there wasn't any, any way for people to stop paying you at that time, right?
Paul Joyce (21:31.740)
No.
And in fact, you know, this was, this was in the days before stripe and we were completely self funded at that time.
So.
So that was in July.
In August I handed in my notice at, at, at my day job and I, and I finished there in September.
Omer (21:46.460)
Wow.
Paul Joyce (21:47.180)
Yeah.
By which stage we were kind of ripping through quite a lot of, of of myself, my wife's kind of savings that we'd kind of put aside over a while and so.
Omer (21:57.020)
Okay, hold on, hold on a second there.
Hold on a second.
Right, so I want to get this straight.
So you spent four years testing about a dozen ideas which all failed.
Paul Joyce (22:08.380)
Yeah.
Omer (22:08.940)
And then you, you came up with this idea for Gecko board.
You spent four months building the product, had 800 odd signups, zero paying customers, yet a couple of months later you felt confident enough to quit your job and work on this full time.
Why?
What was going on?
Paul Joyce (22:32.140)
Well, the first thing was that the difference between, between Gigaboard and anything that came previously is that people were reacting to it.
Some of them positively, some of them negatively, but it was soliciting some sort of, or eliciting some sort of a reaction from people.
It felt like there was, there was something going on there.
As I mentioned, I was working my day job at the time as well.
And I felt like it got to the point, I mean, I'm not one of these people who can boast that they can get by in four hours sleep a night and still be like a functioning kind of well adjusted human.
I'm definitely not.
I need the full complement of sleep.
The more the better.
It got to a squeeze point where it became obvious to my wife and I that we had to make a decision one way or another.
We had to either say that okay, we need to park this and go back to life as normal and get some rest, or we cut out the day job and we give this a good shot and see where we go with it.
And it Wasn't a decision we made flippantly or kind of very casually.
I genuinely felt that these opportunities don't come along very often.
As I'd known from experience, these opportunities don't come along very often.
So we decided together that we would give it a shot and see where it took us.
We had a few months worth of Runway at that moment in time, maybe four.
But actually, no, it was more like five.
And we thought we'd see where we can get it, get some paid plans out the door if we could, and begin to kind of extend that Runway a little bit, if possible.
Omer (24:10.240)
So even though you didn't have paying customers at the time, it sounds like the level of engagement or enthusiasm that you were seeing from people who were using the product was enough to help you take that leap of faith.
Paul Joyce (24:30.880)
Exactly that.
So I'd seen what kind of no traction looks like, and I had a pretty good pattern for that.
And this wasn't fitting that.
And it felt like as good as opportunity as any to just go in there.
And to boot, it was all I was thinking about.
I was completely obsessed with it.
I loved it.
I thought it was a, you know, all of those dreams that you invest in, these ideas can be.
They were beginning to materialize.
And it felt like.
It felt like we had a tailwind.
And I'm not sure what other signs I could have had at that moment in time.
There was no way I could have kept going.
Working at the bank and doing this, it was placing too much demand on my time and mental energy.
So if I wanted to give this a good shot, I had to do it.
But, yeah, despite, we didn't roll out paid plans until the following February.
So it was quite a long time before we actually started charging for the product after that.
But despite that, I felt like this is as good a chance as any.
Omer (25:31.250)
So how did you keep going?
I mean, it sounds like you said you had about five months of Runway.
Pretty sure you run out by the time you get to February, right?
Paul Joyce (25:40.500)
Yep.
We would have, without a shadow of a doubt.
And to exacerbate issues, I mean, as soon as I handed in my notice, I started looking at that moment in time for how you could start charging for this product, how payment would work.
And all of this kind of stuff I wasn't familiar with.
I mean, all of my previous offerings had been consumer, consumer based stuff.
And so it had different, very different business models.
I wasn't familiar with how one could start collecting, like, SaaS payments online.
And remember, this was 2010.
There wasn't a lot of the infrastructure that there is today.
Stripe certainly wasn't around.
I applied for every business bank in the, in the uk, or at least half a dozen of them turned me down for a merchant account because the business model wasn't something that they'd encountered before sas, that is, you know, delivering software over the Internet.
It was the questions I was getting is when are you going to post the CD ROMs out to them and how do you charge renewal fees on an annual basis or whatever.
Account managers there didn't understand how this worked, so we couldn't get a merchant account.
And then I went to apply for a kind of PayPal account to try and collect money, but that was fraught with difficulties as well and ended up not getting that.
And eventually, I mean, I can tell you the tale if you'd like to hear it.
It's quite a fun one.
I, I was, like I said, just desperate to try and find some mechanism collecting money applied to PayPal.
They rejected me and they didn't give me a reason for the rejection.
So I asked them, okay, well why was I rejected?
Why can't I take credit card payments via website Payments Pro, whatever the product was?
They said we can't tell you that, but you can apply again in 90 days.
Which of course is useless because unless I know why it's been declined in the first place, applying again with the same criteria is not going to do it.
So at this point we were pretty much out of options and fairly exasperated and really didn't have like there wasn't a great network in the UK at the time, other startups facing similar problems and by an uncanny coincidence, one of these things that happens, I think, when you try and increase your luck surface area by making stuff and telling people about it.
My wife was actually at the kindergarten and nursery school gates one day and spoke to one of the other mums saying like, oh yeah, this is what's happening and we're finding it really strange and some uncanny coincidence, her sister in law worked at a fairly senior level at PayPal in EMEA and said look, maybe I can put in a word.
And the following day I spoke to her sister in law and she said she'd look into it.
And the day after that we got approved and I found out the reason for the original rejection, which was I converted my personal PayPal account into a business PayPal account and two years prior to that I'd sold a PS3 on eBay.
The person who bought it off me had a change of heart and Instead of telling me, issued a chargeback, which of course PayPal registered as a chargeback against my account, which carried over onto the business account and they looked at the chargeback ratio to spend ratio, which of course was only on a private individual's account at that moment in time and said that we weren't a credit worthy business.
So thankfully that all got cleared up and we were able to start using PayPal to start taking payments.
But yeah, it's amazing how things have changed in the last 10 years.
20 years.
10 years.
Omer (29:12.260)
Yeah.
Like, you know, it kind of feels like these days it feels like Stripe has been around forever, but back in 2010 I think the Collison brothers were like just getting ready to launch Stripe probably around the same time that you were launching Gecko Board.
Paul Joyce (29:33.940)
Yeah.
And I don't think it came to the UK for another couple of years after that.
So I think they launched it in the us but yeah, you needed to be over there in order to use it.
So yeah, it feels like such a vital part of infrastructure, particularly for spinning up a business quite quickly that I'm so glad exists today.
Omer (29:53.860)
And I think it's funny that you share that story about your wife meeting somebody working at PayPal and sort of this serendipity actually remind me of different story.
One of the people that I had on the show previously was a guy called Stuart Crane who is actually a member of our SaaS club plus community.
So you know, he were always kind of chatting and you know, sort of staying in touch, but his story was like that the business that he launched, if I remember this correctly, was it started because he went out one day and started talking to the guy over the fence, one of his neighbors at the back of his house, just to make some small talk.
And that led to them working together to launch a startup which they ended up selling for over $40 million many years later.
And it's kind of like funny, it's just if he hadn't gone out that day to say hello to the neighbor, what would have happened?
I don't know.
So I think it's just really interesting.
These things happen and I think, think it's a, it's a great reminder that, you know, we should always be, I guess, just on the lookout for opportunities.
And it's not just about like, how can I kind of find people that kind of can help me achieve stuff.
But it's just more a way of again goes back to mindset in terms of, I think just thinking about opportunities and you know, where you can Potentially help people where somebody may be able to help you if you open your eyes and just kind of.
I don't know, I hear that too much.
Paul Joyce (31:26.850)
Yeah, I agree.
Open your eyes and open your heart.
I mean, you don't know where any conversation is going to lead you.
And it could be just that it's interesting or it could be that it's entertaining, or it could be that somebody can connect some dots for you, or you can do the same for them.
And that's what's really interesting.
And I talk about luck and needing to be lucky and whatever else, and that's true.
I mean, how many, how many people have great ideas, maybe not the right time or maybe not executed quite right, or maybe just didn't get it out there or something that didn't that stopped them.
Luck plays a huge role in business.
Look plays a huge role in, particularly in the early stages of a business and getting it out there and word of mouth and all of that kind of stuff.
But you can do things that help with that.
You can make stuff, you can can then talk about that stuff.
You can extend a hand to people who ostensibly are asking, just asking you for help, but you never know when those tables are going to turn or when somebody can connect some of those dots.
So I think it's a good thing to do anyway.
But it can also be an incredibly helpful thing to do.
And it helps with that look, it helps with that initial look that all of us need.
Omer (32:41.370)
Yeah, I agree with you.
So, so February, you finally get over this stuff.
You figured out how to charge customers and start accepting money for the product.
What did you do to find those first few customers?
Paul Joyce (33:01.130)
So we were pretty fortunate in that during the beta period, we built up a wait list of people who wanted to try out the product.
And by the time we got into February, we had about 9,000 people on that list who had, who are wanting to try it out.
Not all of them would be willing to pay for this.
Not even most of them would be.
But we had an initial tranche of people that we could go out with to be able to at least put the input energy in to start collecting some revenue.
So I think it was on February 3rd, my mother's birthday of 2011, 8 o' clock in the morning, the post went up on TechCrunch and I was elated and delighted and couldn't believe it.
We sent out all the communications to our customers.
We told them about the pricing, told them when that would kick in, all that kind of stuff.
So I was on Top of the world.
And then about half an hour later the first feedback started coming in as a response to our pricing decisions.
And it came as an avalanche actually from there.
So much so that I was getting so much negative feedback about the pricing that we'd rolled out of that process moment in time that I by the end of the day had told, put something up in our blog and emailed all of the people who had got in contact with us to tell them that look, your voice is heard.
We will be changing pricing.
Let me just have a couple of days to kind of sort out something better.
But we were getting, people were starting up kind of forum posts about how to build an open source alternative to gecko board, how we had kicked them, brought them in like switch and bait, thought there was going to be reasonable, then it was too expensive and all of this kind of stuff.
My stomach, I generally viscerally felt kind of upset, physically upset about this whole thing.
Omer (34:52.499)
So people weren't objecting to paying, they were okay with that?
It was just like how much you were asking.
Paul Joyce (34:59.219)
Yeah.
And how we modeled it.
Okay, so I'll go into a tiny bit of detail but not dwell on it.
But ultimately the product is mainly or certainly was mainly consumed on large screen TVs in people's offices.
So in other words they would connect up all their data and then the dashboard would be displayed and it would be live updating on the TV screen in their office.
I tried all sorts of different ways of like how do we price this?
I'd spoken to some incredibly generous hearted people from the SaaS industry as it was at the time, who were able to kind of dedicate a bit of time to chatting to me over Skype about how to go about it.
Actually finding a mechanism or a value axis for charging for this product was really, really difficult for us.
And so I ended up doing something that would, I think probably most people would have considered some sort of DRM and digital rights management, which was not in favor at the time.
And so we would say, okay, you are allowed to show this on one screen for this much per month and if you go put it on a different screen that that's double the cost, on a third screen it's triple the cost.
And people really didn't like, didn't sit well with them.
So we had all sorts of feedback and then people saying it doesn't work, how about you try this, how about you try that?
And I actually went out and kind of tried to formally collect as many of those responses as possible and Ended up, I think probably overcorrecting Omer.
I kind of ended up coming up with a pricing model that was rather too generous.
And we've since kind of since that second pricing model that came out a week later, I think we've at least 10x'd our average revenue per account since then or our average sales price certainly since then.
So I think we went in a little bit too low and then we built it back up over the years.
Omer (36:54.560)
Okay, great.
So you've got the product out there now, you've got some paying customers.
Let's talk about how you've grown the business.
So it's one thing to get a product out there and find a handful of customers, it's another thing to turn it into a multimillion dollar SaaS company.
So what have been the main marketing strategies or channels that have worked for you?
Paul Joyce (37:27.870)
Yeah, I think certainly in the early days and up to today actually it's still probably our biggest contributor to growth that we have, but education.
So we have to remember that a lot of the businesses that use the product, they don't have a data science team, they don't have a complicated BI stack.
Actually what they want to do is they want to build their business.
They've got some expertise in some area and they want to build that.
And that isn't necessarily around like pulling data in from a bunch of different places and doing complex analysis.
So a lot of people I think start businesses and this is a blind spot for them.
How do you actually stay on top of the numbers that matter?
What are the systems and the processes that you can use and all of that.
And we felt like if we can get people successful with that, then the case for Gecko Board becomes more clear.
So we spent a lot of time on education.
I remember one particular event which I think was just this great confluence of cheap, effective and high impact, right.
It was the authors of the book Lean Analytics.
The book had just come out and they were busily promoting it.
We decided, well, we put on an event in London's Barbican Centre and we would charge people just enough to kind of to cover our overheads to come to this event where we'd fly over the authors of Lean analytics and they would give a course, a one day course on how to choose metrics, good metrics and bad metrics, metrics for SaaS, metrics for Marketplace, metrics for kind of all sorts of different things.
And there'd be a Q and A session.
And so we managed to get a few hundred people in There we got Alistair and Ben across the authors of this book.
We had books to give away.
We put this on.
It obviously raised the profile of Gecko Board, and then we filmed it as well.
And then we put it up on Udemy as a free course that anyone could access.
And I think, you know, at least 10,000 people completed the course.
So with very little outlay from us, we were able to jump on a trend, get a lot of exposure, then have a digital course that was ready to go out that was incredibly useful.
Right there was.
It was all killer, no filler.
Because these guys wanted to pack as much into a day as possibly as they possibly could.
They won because they got more exposure for the books.
We won because we got more exposure for our product.
And ultimately the people who viewed the course either in person or online won because they were able to amass a huge amount of information very, very quickly.
So stuff like that, I think education, education and leading people, allowing them to take their first steps on the road to becoming more data literate or communicating their data.
Something that can be very intimidating for people who are not highly numerous or this isn't their background whatsoever.
If we can be sympathetic to that and we can hold their hand, we can give them knowledge, only point them in the direction of great learning material, but then also give them inspiration, show them what their peers are doing, show them like examples, talk about the different ways of setting goals and monitoring metrics, allow them to learn as much as possible.
Then I think the case then becomes a lot easier to be able to say, okay, well, Gecko Board can help with some of that as well.
Not in all cases, but I think that's been a very successful strategy for us educators.
Omer (40:49.440)
So it sounds like Gecko Board or a dashboard was almost like a secondary thing.
When you were talking to these potential customers, you were focusing more on educating them about metrics and what metrics and why and how to think about this to run whatever business they had, rather than sort of leading with, you need a dashboard.
This is what you should have on the dashboard.
This is how we can do that.
But through that education, once you got them to a point where they were comfortable with the idea of metrics and how to use them, it sort of naturally led into the conversation on, here are different ways, I guess, that you can use this product.
Is that right?
Paul Joyce (41:37.070)
Like how you approach it 100%.
And what's more, I think those people, we're not doing the hard sell.
And those people will have, they'll have very positive brand associations with Gecko board at this point in time.
They've helped them, they've educated them, they're empathetic with the fact that not everyone is a spreadsheet jockey.
And actually it's not just metrics and good metrics, bad metrics, but goal setting frameworks, everything from okrs and v2 moms and all of this.
It's hugely and impenetrable, complex for a lot of people.
A lot of the things that we, the acronyms and the ways of viewing the world that we in the kind of quote unquote, kind of startup world like take for granted are actually quite difficult concepts for a lot of growing businesses.
And with some gentle nudging, they can become a lot more confident.
And actually, yeah, we've seen a lot of those people who have come to us from education actually become evangelists for us as well.
Omer (42:37.620)
Well, so how long did it take you to get to, you know, doing a million dollars a year?
Paul Joyce (42:45.620)
Let's have a think that probably would have taken about.
That was realistically about like maybe four or five years.
Omer (42:55.860)
So around.
Roughly around 2014, 2015, something like that.
Paul Joyce (43:01.740)
Yeah.
Omer (43:02.580)
And so beyond this event that you ran, what else did you do to find customers?
Paul Joyce (43:09.410)
Yeah, so I think we've always leaned hard on education.
I think the typical things like B2B SEO loops, we've always worked on that.
There's a surprising amount of people who want to know answers to basic kind of things like what are some e commerce metrics or what are good customer support metrics or things like that.
Being able to collate all of that in one place, make it nice and indexable and crawlable by Google and for people to find us that way has been a primary driver of growth for us.
I think that as well as sometimes we put out dashboards that are fun or frivolous or interesting in some way that allow people to interact with the product.
We'll create a dashboard for the Olympics or for the World cup or something like this that, that spreads fairly virally.
People can see it and then it's one way of them kind of getting interested in Geckoboard.
I think our bread and butter is talking about metrics, how to set goals, how to communicate data for people who are not in spreadsheets every day.
I think that's the primary way that we grow.
And B2B SEO I think is the main driver of our business.
Omer (44:23.460)
And so you, I know one of the things that you do is you create a lot of these dashboard examples as well as a way to, to educate People and I'm curious, like, what have you learned about, I guess the, you know, what they call like the buyer's journey?
You know, when you get customers, does it typically happen like that?
They're sort of looking at a, you know, the problem is more around metrics and how to organize and manage that information versus people already sort of realizing, yeah, I need a dashboard or, you know, I want to put this up on a TV screen.
Is it a sort of a mixture of both or I'm just, I'm just trying to figure out like how, how sort of mature is the market in terms of understanding that this is the solution that they need?
Paul Joyce (45:12.520)
Yeah, well, I think it's still pretty immature actually.
And the solution itself is evolving.
You know, at this moment in time there's a lot of businesses that are not in the offices anymore and they don't have TVs up on their walls.
And so they have to find other mechanisms for communicating and sharing their data.
And we've got like a slack integration out and you know, a mobile app and all of that kind of stuff.
But in terms of the people who are, who are finding us, you get a lot of people who are very far away from wanting to implement a solution.
They're very, at the very early stages of that journey.
They're inquiring as to what are the possible mechanisms for sharing data.
Or I've got data in Tool X, how do I share that with my team or how do I motivate my team to see this data?
And we're trying very hard to try and capture them very early on in the full knowledge that that are at least be visible to them very early on in the full knowledge that we're not going to turn them into a customer today.
And if we were to turn them into a customer, it probably wouldn't be very successful on account of the fact they're still very early on that journey.
And there are various mechanisms for disseminating data within an organization.
We think ours is particularly helpful.
If you've got data spread across a lot of different SAS tools and you want to be able to communicate stuff at a glance to a non numerous audience.
In other words, if you want to, to redemocratize the access to that data, we think that Geckoboard is a good solution for you.
But that's not everyone and people approach it in a whole slew of different ways.
So we have to be quite mindful.
I think again, it's not with the hard sell.
It's trying to genuinely provide useful information.
But still we get a lot of people signing up and I go on customer calls with trialists and one of the most common questions I hear is well, what do other folks like me have on their dashboard?
What do other E commerce companies have?
And as you mentioned, we've got dashboard examples and KPI examples that we've collated from real world use cases, other customers that have shared it with us, customers that we've spoken to but didn't want to share their own dashboards and whatnot.
And we brought them all into one place.
But aside from that, I still think there's a huge amount of work that needs to be done in order to open up the fact that a lot of people struggle with data.
Open up the fact that, that a lot of people don't know what are the right ways of measuring certain things.
And I think even now in fairly sophisticated, well, in industries that one would imagine is sophisticated in their use of metrics or their treatment of KPIs and data and whatnot, there's still quite a lot of ambiguity and confusion in our own industry.
Exactly how do you work out cac?
How do you work out ltv?
Well, I know that there's at least half a dozen dozen different ways of doing both of those things to come at that from the, from the perception of somebody who's never even heard of those acronyms before, let alone knows how to work them out.
And then they go searching online and they see a dozen different ways of doing it.
It's just piling confusion on top of confusion.
And what we hope is that if we can bring a little bit of clarity to that and we can meet people where they are and empathize a little bit with the fact that this is a difficult thing to get to grips with initially and if the time is right and Geckoboard's the right solution for them, that they're going to choose us.
Omer (48:38.460)
Yeah, I mean that's definitely a kind of more of a long term view of customer acquisition.
And I know that you had tried paid advertising which didn't work as effectively.
And maybe this is the reason that people need to kind of go through that education process before they're ready to buy.
Paul Joyce (49:03.840)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who, when they think of a solution, they believe that it's a heavyweight BI stack that they're after.
So that's what they're searching for.
So we have to get them earlier in the journey.
But that lower intent at that moment in time when they're at the Discovery phase means that they're not in position to buy.
So we have to be able to kind of.
We have to be able to take a long view on that because as you said, we've tried paid advertising, but the volumes of people who are searching for.
For TV dashboard is not huge because that's a solution that people who have gone through a journey and come.
I mean, this is.
It isn't the most common thing out there.
People don't know that this solution exists a lot of the time.
So, yeah, paid advertising is something that we do a little bit of, but it's never going to be like a scalable growth channel for us, not until the market matures at least a little bit or we find some other way of presenting it that allows us to capture more value volume.
Omer (50:03.770)
Okay, we should wrap up and move on to the lightning round.
Before we do that, just a quick question for you.
If you look back at the last 10 years or if you could go back to 2010, what advice would you give yourself?
What do you wish you had done differently?
Paul Joyce (50:19.770)
I would say be way more stringent and diligent about segmenting customer feedback.
It's wonderful to get customer ideas and feedback and whatever else, but it can also be intoxicating.
And I think I got a little bit drunk on all of the feedback and said, oh, yeah, we should try this, we should try this and try that.
So I think being a bit more sober about how to evaluate feedback, particularly about segmentation, what happened as a result?
Omer (50:46.580)
You wasted a lot of time and effort building stuff that nobody really wanted
Paul Joyce (50:51.380)
or that only very few people wanted, and we weren't able to exist.
So an example is we definitely got some interest from agencies early on who wanted to use it as a way of communicating data to their clients.
And I thought, well, this is a great use case.
But actually when we started digging into it, it needed a huge amount of custom work because their data sources were not something we had standard plugins to.
They also, I mean, I can remember having a conversation with, I mean, one of the tenants of our product is that we try and make visualizations that are designed for human visual systems, right?
Our visual cortex and how that works.
And I can remember, and we're quite strict about that, we want to make it easy to understand at a glance, not take a little while to understand.
And I can remember one of my early conversations with an agency and they say, but our clients really like gauges.
Can you give me a gauge with two dials on it?
I was like, okay, well, how's this actually going to work?
This is two dials showing effectively, like on the same scale, all of this kind of stuff.
And I felt like we would get.
We were dragged into rabbit hole after rabbit hole after a rabbit hole that was a section of the market that had its very own specific needs that we would not have been able to meet, at least not at scale.
And yes, we did end up building stuff, wasting time doing all sorts of crazy one off initiatives where there was a very real opportunity cost associated with that.
Whereas I think we'd have concentrated on the core of our business and really understanding that serving those customers that we knew were getting the most value out of this.
And I think we could have sped up and avoided some of those big traps that we fell into.
Omer (52:33.450)
Yeah, that's a good lesson.
Okay, so let's go into the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Paul Joyce (52:41.770)
Go for it.
Omer (52:42.330)
Ready to go?
Paul Joyce (52:42.890)
Yep.
Omer (52:43.250)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Paul Joyce (52:47.080)
We talked about this earlier on, but be lucky.
Omer (52:50.360)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Paul Joyce (52:53.560)
I would recommend Turn the Ship around by David Marquet.
He's a submarine commander who talks about implementing mechanisms to create leader leader cultures instead of leader follower cultures.
And that's been a very powerful thing for us.
Omer (53:08.360)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Paul Joyce (53:13.010)
I think probably we talked about luck.
In the absence of luck, tenacity and resilience.
Until you get lucky.
Omer (53:19.010)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Paul Joyce (53:22.130)
It's a habit.
I take my dogs, two dogs, for a walk in the morning before I start my day.
It allows me to clear my head, focus on what's important and really just line up my day with a little bit of open space.
Omer (53:36.450)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Paul Joyce (53:40.320)
I'm really interested in bridging digital and analog world and I think home automation could be a very interesting area there.
I've got some ideas, but I think it's a very.
It's on the cusp of some big breakthroughs, I feel.
Omer (53:57.200)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Paul Joyce (54:01.040)
Well, I once had a dinner jacket that visited 10 Downing street to see the Prime Minister here in the UK, but I wasn't with it.
In fact, it was an investor who was in town who had an impromptu meeting with the Prime Minister and I Had a meeting with them that afternoon, and he said, could you bring a dinner jacket?
And I said, the dinner jacket ended up at the.
At the highest seat of power in the country.
Omer (54:25.180)
What a great story.
Do you still have it?
Paul Joyce (54:28.860)
No.
In fact, he flew out of London that same day and took him back to San Francisco with him, so never gave it back.
Omer (54:41.240)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Paul Joyce (54:44.360)
I love woodwork, particularly with hand tools.
So it's become, as I mentioned earlier on, love building actual products, whether that's physical or digital.
And I love the peace of mind and serenity that comes with hand tool woodwork.
Not without its frustrations and a complete amateur at the moment, but it brings me a lot of joy.
Omer (55:05.830)
That's awesome.
And I would just say, like, woodworking is something that I've been looking at.
It's something that.
I just think there's this again, like, the process of building things, which is part of the appeal.
Paul Joyce (55:16.390)
But, yeah, it's incredibly powerful and it allows you to kind of get in touch with that making and making something with your hand.
If any of your listeners are interested, I could highly recommend Paul Sellers.
He has a bunch of free videos on YouTube.
Allows you to get started very cheaply with secondhand tools off ebay.
But, yeah, that was my entry point and I love it.
Absolutely love it.
Omer (55:42.610)
Great.
That's good tip.
Okay, so if people want to find out more about Gecko Board, they can go to gecko board.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Paul Joyce (55:53.410)
LinkedIn would be the best mechanism.
Or drop me an email Paul@geckoboard.com Awesome.
Omer (55:59.370)
Paul, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Paul Joyce (56:01.930)
Thank you, Elmer.
Yeah, much appreciated.
I really enjoyed the chat.
Omer (56:05.290)
Yeah, it was great.
I wish you and the team the best of success.
Paul Joyce (56:08.570)
Thank you very much indeed.
Cheers.
