Omer (00:09.280)
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 talk to Jeb Banner, the co founder and CEO of Boardable, a board management SaaS product that centralizes communication, document storage, meeting planning and everything involved with running a board of directors.
In 2016, Jeb was running a creative agency when a client asked if he could build a board management portal for their nonprofit.
He and his team scoped out the project, but it was going to take a lot of money to build that solution and the client wasn't ready to spend that much.
But Jeb had already started two nonprofits at that time, so he was well aware of the problem space and so were his partners.
So the three of them huddled and decided that there was an opportunity for them to sell the solution as a product, so decided to run with it themselves.
Today that product is a multiple seven figure SaaS business with a team of 50 people and the founders have raised over $12 million in funding.
It sounds like a great story of someone who was running a services business and successfully transitioned to a SaaS business because they had a great idea.
But the reality of Jeb Story is that he and his co founders failed 10 times over a period of about 12 years with product after product that failed to get any traction.
They learned a lot during that time, but it was also extremely frustrating.
In this interview we dig into what they did differently with Boardable and how they were able to find product market fit this time.
I hope you enjoy it.
Jeb, welcome to the show.
Jeb Banner (02:00.820)
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
Omer (02:02.820)
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you or gets you out of bed to work on your business?
Jeb Banner (02:07.700)
It's not a quote that you would normally associate with business, but it's one that I really come back to.
And I don't identify as a Christian, but I often think of the simple quote of love one another.
And as a CEO, I think that a lot of my job is to love my team is to create an environment of love where they feel safe and accepted to be who they are.
And as much as they feel welcome to to show up with their whole self at work.
And so I think about that quote probably more than any other quote of how can I I often think about how can I be an instrument of love and create an environment that is Loving and caring.
Omer (02:43.420)
So tell us about boardable.
What does the product do, who is it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Jeb Banner (02:49.180)
It's a board management product.
So it helps boards, nonprofits and for profit Boards centralize and manage all of their documents, their communication, their agendas, their minutes, everything you think about around a meeting.
Workflow.
A board workflow.
Voting, for instance.
And it's a SaaS product, of course, because we're on a SaaS podcast here and it serves about 2,000 customers in 40 countries around the world.
And it's built to be very easy to use and very affordable, hence the rhyme with boardable.
And it's also meant to be very self service.
So self service product with easy to use and easy pricing too.
Omer (03:30.940)
Great.
And can you give us a sense of the size of the business in terms of revenue and team?
Jeb Banner (03:35.400)
Yeah, we are at 50 people and we did our Series A back in 2020, so we're well into the seven figures, growing at generally doubling year over year and, you know, just looking to do something similar this year.
So trying to get out of the seven and into the eight soon.
Omer (03:53.720)
You've raised a little over $12 million to date, is that right?
Jeb Banner (03:57.560)
Correct.
Omer (03:58.360)
Let's start the story with, before you founded Bordable, you were running a creative agency.
And so I'm interested to know how somebody running a creative agency starts a SaaS business to help boards operate better.
So tell me about, like, how did you get started?
Where did the idea come from?
Jeb Banner (04:17.480)
Yeah, it came from one of our clients, which is, you know, always a great place for an idea to come from.
United Way of Central Indiana was one of our clients at Smallbox, the creative agency.
We had spun off a little side company just to build product for businesses.
So building software for businesses.
They said, hey, could you build us a board portal?
And we scoped it out and it was, you know, a lot of money.
They said, well, that's not really what we want to spend right now.
And I had started two nonprofits at that point.
And so I was well aware of the problem space and I was feeling it as a board chair.
And so were the other partners in that business.
And so the three of us huddled and Jason Ward, who was running that, that side business, said, why don't we just go for it?
He wireframed it out and within about six weeks we built an mvp and we kicked it out to about six or seven nonprofits locally and said, kick the tires, tell us what works, what doesn't work.
And they gave us great feedback.
And then we completely rebuilt it from scratch at that point and started to go to market with Boardable as the brand.
Omer (05:18.930)
What was the reason for targeting nonprofits at the time was that just because that was the sort of the scenario or use case that you were most familiar with at the time?
Jeb Banner (05:27.730)
To some degree that's true.
It was.
We were also know very much in the startup world too.
And here in Indianapolis there's a very vibrant startup scene and all those boards have.
Sorry, all those businesses have boards.
But the pain that a nonprofit experiences managing a board is very different than what many small VC funded businesses have.
For instance, it's not uncommon for a company like ours has 50 employees and has five board members.
The opposite can be true of a nonprofit where you might have five employees and 50 board members, volunteers, committee members, all on different groups, and you might have one part time resource managing 50 people.
And they're doing it almost entirely via email and attachments and doodle polls and maybe they're using some hacked up version of teams, but overall we call it digital duct tape.
They're doing something to just basically make it bearable to serve on the board.
But it's a mess.
It's terrible for continuity, it's terrible for experience.
And it can create real problems.
Organizationally, things get lost, access is given that shouldn't be given.
There's all kinds of things that happen when you do it that way.
So the nonprofit problem is more acute in many cases than the business problem when it comes to managing boards.
Omer (06:45.920)
And then today, what percentage of your customer base is still Nonprofit?
Jeb Banner (06:50.530)
We're about 80, 20 nonprofit to for profit.
So we've grown considerably in the for profit space.
We've learned that in going into the market after that nonprofit customer and solving for them because of the complexity of their problem, of the scale of what they're doing, it actually has made us a very good solution for a lot of these for profit boards that are, you know, beginning to, for instance, a large organization managing a number of different boards within the organization.
For we talked today to a bank that's managing funds, for instance, within their organization.
So they've got a number of funds, dozens of funds that they're managing.
But we're built for that kind of complexity and scale because of our nonprofit background.
Omer (07:33.810)
Okay, so you built the mvp.
You got some feedback on that.
You rebuilt the mvp.
At what point did you start charging for the product?
Jeb Banner (07:43.500)
Yeah, so 2016 was really the MVP time, you know, the second half of that year.
And then in 2017, we had our first customers in January and they were friends and family customers, like folks that told us they wanted the product, they were willing to pay for it.
We had a very inexpensive version, I think around $49 and another one around $99.
And so we really were just trying to get people to use the product.
Our first stranger customers, which I think are really important to have customers that are not your friends and family that would have no gumption firing you, in other words, if you're not doing the job that they hired you to do.
Those came more in February and March.
We took in our first money in January.
In terms of investment, I think just a little bit after, when we had some customers and soon we grew pretty quickly using mostly payments paid directories at the time, like Capterra in particular, and all of their different subdirectories.
So we found that we can get into some of these interesting markets, including Australia and New Zealand.
And we were getting customers signing up self service through the website.
And then we realized we needed somebody on the sales side to start answering questions and doing demos that were being requested.
So we kind of just found ourselves a little bit like catching the tail of it and having to react to it.
And then that growth started to kick in as we go through 2017.
Omer (09:10.140)
So when you were using sites like Capterra, were these just organic listings or were you actually paying those services to promote the product?
Jeb Banner (09:18.620)
Yeah, we were paying and we still do pay.
They're not as important to us now as they were back then because we've built up a brand and we've also built up a very strong organic search position.
So we're often showing up ahead of them in search, whereas before that was their whole play to some degree is, you know, we own search and you, it's, it's sort of a buying SEO, you know, sort of proxy a little bit.
So yeah, we were paying and then that was getting us really good quality traffic, which then we were converting.
Mostly self service in the product.
Omer (09:52.420)
When you started out, you were telling me earlier that you spent a long time trying to focus on product led growth.
Growth and not so much on building a sales organization.
And then eventually you figured out that you needed to have a sales organization.
What were some of the challenges that you were facing when people would go through this self serve signup process?
Aside from like, okay, we don't have anybody to do the demos, what else were some of the challenges that you were facing?
Jeb Banner (10:20.170)
So I think a few things were happening.
You know, we think of product led growth as the product itself is creating the revenue opportunities for the business.
So the usage of the product is exposing other people to the product and then that exposure creates more users and those users are buyers.
So one of the fundamental sort of thesis or theories with product led growth is the user is the buyer.
That's not the case with board software.
The user is often an administrative assistant or an EA or someone like that.
The buyer might be the executive director or another executive or senior person.
They use it, but they're not the primary user.
And so the person coming in and signing up for boardable is not always the decision maker, which is kind of a fundamental piece of product led growth.
So that was sort of one thing that we were struggling with then.
The second thing was the product was becoming more and more complex as we built it out.
So we started off with something very simple, but as of course you do with any product, you solve more and more of the problem.
And that's part of the value you bring your customers is that they see more and more of that value as you go further.
And so by the time we got into 2020, the product had gotten pretty mature.
The self service experience was not what it was before because now you are getting a little bit lost in the product.
Despite what we did with Intercom and tours, et cetera.
And we were seeing that we needed to rely more and more on a sales conversation to dig into the problem we were solving and to really explore what the opportunity was on our end as well as.
So we were leaving money on the table by only doing self service or primarily self service.
And so we moved from really just having one or two reps to then this January we brought on our first VP of sales and now we've built up that sales team along with the BDR team, BDR SDR team to really complement all that inbound activity that we've been generating since early on.
So we've already seen huge improvements in our conversion rate and our ASP based upon those investments.
Omer (12:25.400)
So you set out with the product led growth model, realized that you needed to have more of a sales focus and eventually started to build that out.
It sounds like you have a much a more significant sales organization now than you did back then.
Tell me a little bit about what the sales process looks like here.
So you get, let's say you get an inbound lead coming through Capterra people maybe want to get a demo.
What happened after that?
How long did it take you to close from first touch, closing the deal?
What was that sales process, like yeah,
Jeb Banner (12:59.250)
so there's a number of different doors that can come through.
They could come in and they can start a free trial.
And then we're using machine learning and data science on the back end to score that activity both in terms of the firmographics, their marketing behaviors and their product behaviors to determine whether that prospect should go self service, which we still do about 25% of our new business or is a bigger opportunity or simply isn't getting product usage where it needs to be to need more of a sales touch.
And so then we will work that into a sales conversation which you could also call a demo, where we're really walking them through the product through the lens of like what problems they're trying to solve and really getting to understand them and their organization.
And so then that usually goes through a traditional sales cycle there of like presenting proposal.
There might be a follow up call if it's a larger deal.
It's not uncommon for a one call close in this business with a lot of these opportunities because they know what they're looking for and they already have familiarity with the trial.
But you then go through usually a 30 to 40 day cycle at most to get to a decision and then you win or lose.
Right.
That's a very common path.
People also come in directly into the demo sign up or they might come in and they might want to see our pricing or they might want to attend a webinar and then they might raise their hand to be followed up with afterwards, download an ebook again looking at behavior, scoring it and following accordingly.
It's kind of 101 stuff, but it's just, it's all about dialing it in and doing it in a way that's very effective.
Omer (14:36.600)
At what point did you start building in that type of backend activity like the lead scoring?
You're obviously doing that now.
But was that something you started doing in, in the first year of running this business?
Jeb Banner (14:48.279)
It was more in around the second and third year.
We started contracting with a data scientist who built some scoring and then he came on full time, Dr. Ben Smith with us in 2020, so worked with him for about a year really on that.
And then he's had impacts all across the business since then.
Omer (15:10.610)
So I'm curious because that's not something I hear about a lot with founders and taking that a very data driven approach to looking at leads.
Yeah.
Potentially once you're further down the road, you 10, $20 million business.
Yeah, that becomes very important.
But a SaaS startup in the early Days, it's probably not high on the list.
So why was that important for you and why did you consider that an area to invest in early on?
Jeb Banner (15:37.520)
Well, a couple things.
One, I came from the background of a marketing agency, so we were setting up campaigns and spends and everything else for our clients.
And so I had an understanding of that and the value of it.
And I understood the power of content and organic SEO as well.
And so early on, our first director, then VP of marketing, she's a real wizard at this stuff.
And she really came in and just built a content machine.
She built up HubSpot and all the tools around that.
And so we really had an intentional focus on that, of creating a lot of activity and hundreds of trials, thousands of leads a month, just really just generating a lot of activity so that we could then filter through it.
And again, as I mentioned before, our call a little bit is before the start of the podcast.
We made some mistakes there around not really harvesting the way we should, but we did a great job generating activity.
So that was one piece of it.
The other piece was I just happened to be connected to a data scientist who was at a university here locally and looking to do something new.
And so I had worked with him on a previous project and really enjoyed working with him.
And we just were excited about trying something.
And we had a great VP of product, Krista Martin, on our team who was excited to do something here as well.
And so we said, hey, if we could really start scoring these trials and understand what's going on with them beyond the most obvious things, then it would be really transformational for the business.
And I'll tell you one funny little antidote from that.
We determined that we have an agenda builder in our product, just for reference, that when somebody in the trial builds an agenda and deletes an item off the agenda, they're almost certainly going to become a customer.
Just that one little thing.
So we started to uncover these little nuggets, behavioral nuggets, through the work we did.
Omer (17:35.720)
Can you just explain that?
Why is that a strong signal?
Jeb Banner (17:39.710)
Well, it's predictive.
The AI says that's a strong indicator of future customers behavior.
So you're looking at the behavior of your existing customers and then you're looking at the behavior of your trial customers, if you will.
And you're starting to see where they're starting to behave like customers.
When they start to behave like customers, you know that they're on that path to conversion.
I think the way I look at it is when you're starting to use the product for real.
Like, you're not just kicking the tires.
You're really intentionally building something out.
You're like, we're going to have a board meeting with an agenda, and I'm going to build that agenda.
You know, that's how you can look at deleting an agenda item, is that they're being serious about using the product.
Omer (18:24.570)
That's really interesting.
Okay, we talked about Capterra as being or those types of sites as being one source of traffic.
What else were you doing to drive inbound leads?
Jeb Banner (18:37.020)
Well, we certainly Google AdWords like the rest of the world.
Omer (18:40.620)
Right, and did that work for you?
Jeb Banner (18:42.380)
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Google AdWords.
Now, you can waste a lot of money on Google AdWords, and we certainly have done that.
But I think dialing it in, really finding how to target the right keywords, the right places, the right time, the right landing page, the right language, ad copy.
We've invested in that a lot, and there's a lot of secret sauce to that.
But at the end of the day, it's just a lot of testing and refinement across the board.
And it does drive a lot of value for us.
You always got to keep a close eye on your CAC to LTV ratio because it can get a little wacky if you're not careful there.
And social media to some degree, a little less.
So we've had some success with Facebook, less success with some other places.
Instagram's interesting.
Sorry, not Instagram.
LinkedIn's interesting.
And we're still trying to sort that out a little bit.
Omer (19:33.450)
What's the average deal size for you?
Obviously, LinkedIn is a completely different ballgame and probably customer acquisition costs are a lot higher there as well.
So is that something that.
That makes sense for you in terms of your average deal size?
Jeb Banner (19:47.290)
Yeah, our deal size is going up, so our deal size has gone up by about 100% from a little over a year ago in terms of our new deals, because we have a more robust product.
We now have a video conferencing tool in the product that's pretty competitive with, actually superior to Zoom in many ways.
It's called Spotlight.
We now have a tool that has E Signature functionality and has all these different things that really.
It's a full suite.
I sometimes think about boardable as a combination of a co working space and a Kinkos, like kind of virtualized because we have rooms for you to meet in.
We have a board book builder.
That's your copier.
You've got your fax machine that's your discussions and messages.
So we've kind of virtualized a lot of that functionality.
And so we're seeing ourselves go up market.
Increasingly, as you go up market and hire acv, asp, then you can spend a little differently too and get into some different spaces.
But LinkedIn is a good place for us because that is where our customers are.
Omer (20:46.990)
What are the channels that haven't worked for you?
What are the ones that turned out to be a waste of time or just didn't work as you had expected them to?
Jeb Banner (20:55.630)
Yeah, Twitter has been disappointing because, you know, I hope there would have been more opportunity there and maybe if we went more after the VC backed board market, that might be true.
But that has not been a very effective market for us.
There's been a lot of different sponsorships we've done that have been disappointing.
And you know, there's been some other things that we've tried more in the traditional media realm that have been a little disappointing.
But you know, it's hard with brand investments when you're doing a brand play versus an acquisition play where you're trying to drive specific leads versus create brand awareness.
It's always hard to measure, particularly at this stage of the business.
Omer (21:30.920)
Yeah.
Anything else apart from Twitter that didn't work?
Jeb Banner (21:33.640)
I mean, Instagram, we try to, we, we still do a little bit there.
That's just a brand play.
It's not a big spend.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say there's anything.
We've done some outbound SDR outsourcing that's been mixed, some effective, some ineffective.
Omer (21:49.870)
So you went from running this services business into moving into this SaaS business.
How long did that transition take for you?
How long were you still running a services business and basically have a foot in both camps?
Jeb Banner (22:01.230)
Yeah, I mean, it was really 2017.
I was very much CEO of two businesses.
They were both in the same building, which was helpful, but it was very stressful and I would not recommend it.
But by the end of 2017, it was becoming clear to me and to our investors that Boardable needed a full time CEO.
And so this is kind of, kind of a whole nother story, but my wife took over as CEO of the services business of the creative agency and she ran that business for two years.
That business had atrophied under my leadership the last couple of years because I just wasn't.
And so she kind of had to come in and clean up my mess a little bit.
And let me say that that is not an ideal dynamic for marriage.
We Got through it.
Lots of good counseling and conversations and stronger for it, but it was a challenging time.
Omer (22:53.720)
And is that business still going?
Do you still own that?
Jeb Banner (22:56.200)
Yep, I'm still an owner in it.
A new CEO, Meg's in there.
She's fantastic.
Actually.
I think 2021 was its best year ever.
So clearly I needed to leave the business.
I was pretty burned out, you know, I was.
I felt like it was a hamster wheel.
I wanted to be doing more of a snowball than a Sisyphusian kind of climb to the top of the mountain every day.
You know, I'm definitely more of a product person overall in terms of how I like to build businesses.
Omer (23:21.800)
Now.
When you started out, you self funded the SaaS business, presumably through the agency.
How long did you continue to do that before you went out to raise money?
Jeb Banner (23:31.040)
We self funded for about nine months and then in early 17 we raised money.
So we've self funded most, you know, all of 16.
So up to our early customers, up to like our early, like marketing and website, up to the point where we were like, yeah, we've got something.
We funded it out of Smallbox, which was a drain on that company's resources, which was part of the challenge of.
It was not in great shape because I was pulling money out of it to do boardable, but it was the right decision and both businesses have thrived since then.
Omer (24:01.610)
That seed round, how much did you raise initially?
Jeb Banner (24:04.090)
We did about 1.3 million.
Omer (24:06.090)
And it took you quite a while to close that round, right?
Jeb Banner (24:08.890)
Yeah, we took a different approach because of the fact I was in a split role.
We were not aggressively pursuing growth.
We were focused more on building product, really pushing our revenue numbers as much as we were pushing just building a team and building the product.
So we did a fundraise from basically January of 17 through roughly January of 18 and just kept it rolling with the same valuation and we established the pre money on that and then just whatever we were post.
And then we did our first institutional investment.
We had some institutional folks in that round, but they came in as convertible notes that converted during the Series A.
But we then did our first institutional investment with High Alpha in 2019.
Omer (24:53.070)
Had you raised any money before?
Jeb Banner (24:54.670)
No, I'd always bootstrapped everything I'd done.
I'd borrowed some money from family, but no, I never raised.
And one of the things that was very helpful is that one of our co founders, Andy Clark, who came into the business right around the time we were about to rebuild the mvp, he and his wife came in as co founders.
He had extensive background in the SaaS world, had been involved with half a dozen SaaS companies and fundraise quite a bit, and understood the mechanics of how to do that and also the people to talk to.
And so he was a great accelerant to the business when he got involved.
Omer (25:26.370)
Yeah, I'm sure that was handy to have him with you.
Jeb Banner (25:28.690)
Yeah, Handy Andy.
Omer (25:30.130)
Handy Andy.
Yeah.
So one thing I'm curious about is what does the landscape look like here for board management software?
Was this.
Were you creating something new?
Was it all largely manually done by boards?
Were there other products out there?
How did you figure out what that opportunity was?
Jeb Banner (25:51.850)
Yeah, there were competitors out there.
There was kind of like the 800 pound gorilla diligent that had sold around that time for about 700 million to inside Ventures.
And so that was sort of a wake up call for a lot of people.
It's like, oh, holy smokes, this is a real thing.
There was passageways on board, which is here in Indiana as well.
They were more of a portal company, Internet company that became a board portal company and continued to thrive and do well along with us and others, and then a lot of other smaller ones out there.
But it definitely was what I call a bit of a sleepy industry.
Come 2016, 2017, the market awareness is very low.
And overall, the nonprofit space was not using board software at all.
So we were the first to come along and say, hey, we're really going after that nonprofit customer.
And that nonprofit market needed a little bit of time to wake up and get educated.
But once they saw the solution, they were so grateful to have it, because just as I did as a board chair, they felt the pain of it every day.
Omer (26:58.550)
Okay, so one of the things you did was you looked at that and said, there's a particular niche nonprofits that we're going to focus on.
What else made your product different or better than the alternatives that were out there?
Like, one, what was that differentiator?
And two, how did you figure that out?
Jeb Banner (27:13.820)
Well, to be honest, early on, our product was not better.
It was cheaper and faster.
So you could go to the website and be in it as you can now within seconds.
And you knew the price.
It was transparent.
Nobody else had that still doesn't.
And you could buy it for less than 100 bucks a month and it would solve your problem.
And it may not have all the bells and whistles back then now it certainly does.
But it solved your problem in a way that was very simple and easy to use and affordable.
So that was our value proposition.
And then also our message was like, we get it.
We are nonprofit founders.
We have been in this space.
We're on the same journey as you're on.
And that's still a lot of what we say to people, because it's true, like we're solving our own problem.
We are customers of our product.
Most of our employees serve on boards.
Most of our leadership team serves on boards.
So we're actively using the product.
So that was how we went to market.
And the space that we got to was pretty wide open.
And since then, of course, more people have woken up to it.
Omer (28:16.650)
Tell me how you think about competitors today.
I was talking to a founder recently who basically went out and built a product in a new category.
And life was pretty good because they were the only solution there for some time.
And then competitors started to move in and literally, like copycat competitors.
Like copying the website, the.
Copying the copy on the website and things like that?
Jeb Banner (28:39.560)
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (28:41.000)
How do you think about competitors?
Is that something you spend a lot of time keeping track of what's happening, what competitors are doing?
Do you focus more on your customers and how to serve their needs better?
What's your view to competition?
Jeb Banner (28:58.670)
Yeah, it's a mix.
We certainly have an eye on certain competitors that we come up against so that we understand how to set and navigate competitive traps, just like any good sales organization does.
And I think we're getting smarter at that.
But we're also not looking to just play their game.
We've got things in the product that they don't have.
We've really solved the calendar record issue, which is super challenging for nonprofit boards in particular because calendaring is such a messy thing.
Omer (29:29.300)
Can you explain what that is?
Jeb Banner (29:31.620)
Most organizations run calendars for meetings off of personal calendar invites.
So if you're.
If I am Bob and I'm running a board meeting, then you'll get an invite from Bob to the board meeting.
Now Bob's no longer at the organization.
You got some problems because you're not using a calendar of record.
So the organization should be the one sending out the invites, right, not Bob.
And so boardable does that, and it does it with integrating with existing calendar systems and does it with reoccurring meetings, meeting scheduling and multi day meetings, which our competition doesn't do.
There's a lot of complexity to that, and that's part of us coming in and solving the nonprofit problem first because they have that complexity, whereas businesses don't have it as much, but has a lot of value to businesses.
When they need it.
So that calendar of record thing is a differentiator.
Our video conferencing solution, Spotlight, is a big differentiator.
Nobody else has that single screen experience where you can present documents directly from your document library without screen sharing.
And they're interactive and you can go through them with your board or your team, and they can annotate and work on them collaboratively together in that session.
It's very different.
So there's things that we're doing that our competition's just not doing.
So to some degree, we're kind of ignoring them, but we also keep an eye on them to make sure that if they're setting a trap for us, we know how to respond.
Omer (30:57.360)
The video conferencing one is a good example.
If you end up trying to build functionality that there.
There's already, I guess, like best of breed software out there, like Zoom or whatever, there's a danger that you're going to end up, if you're trying to do this in multiple areas, you're going to end up kind of doing a mediocre job because you're trying to cover so many bases, build so many products.
Why was that something that you, you felt was functionality that you needed to build into the product versus, like, let's just figure out how we can integrate with Zoom and take advantage of what those guys are doing.
Jeb Banner (31:32.550)
Yeah, and we do integrate with Zoom.
We do that too.
It's frankly an inferior experience to what we built with Spotlight.
And when you think about the future of board meetings, which is what we were building for, kind of where the puck's going, they're hybrid.
You're going to have some people sitting around a table and some people sitting at home, and you want them as much as possible to have a equitable experience where they all feel like they're having the same experience.
That's what we're designing for with Spotlight.
Spotlight actually works just perfectly fine.
Next to Zoom, you can still do the document presentation and it'll push it into everyone's browsers and have Zoom right up there doing the video conference while you're in the agenda, the documents, the discussion is all happening in Spotlight and Boardable.
So we're not looking to be Zoom.
We built on top of Amazon Chime.
Because we're not looking to also really own that video conferencing solution.
We're looking to integrate it.
So if you think about what we're doing, we're just saying, look, there's a really seamless integration with Amazon on Chine, which is native to portable.
And then there's a less desirable but works zoom integration that doesn't have as much of that seamless one screen experience that we think is preferred.
So we're not looking to be masters of video conferencing.
We're looking to be masters of, of the hybrid board meeting.
Omer (32:51.580)
Got it.
Makes sense.
I think when somebody listens to your story, Jeb, it kind of sounds like everything went your way.
You had a client coming up with this idea that you were able to then go and build out this, this mvp.
You were able to bring on new customers fairly quickly.
When you went out to fundraise, you had handy Andy to help you along with that.
And we're able to raise your seed round and you've gone on to raise $12 million.
And a lot of the things that we, we talked about in terms of marketing, customer acquisition, they've been things that you've tried and they've worked really well for you.
But what were the.
Some of the tougher moments or challenges and what's been the hard part of building this business over the last five or six years?
Jeb Banner (33:35.730)
Yeah, yeah.
I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture.
Let me, let me back up a little bit and give you a little bit of the road.
Before we got to boardable, we built my technical co founder and I Joe.
We built close to 10 tools that we wanted to be products before we got to boardable, including starting in 2006, a to do list.
We built a content management solution, CMS.
We built a content gathering tool called Wrangle.
We built a digital leave behind sales tool.
We built an employee engagement tool called Culture Tap.
We built tool after tool after tool trying to find a product, trying to find something that had that alchemy that we found with boardable.
So we failed almost a dozen times before we got to boardable.
So we had done it a lot, which was good learning but extremely frustrating.
We spent almost a dozen years not getting there.
So just want to kind of give you a little.
There's a whole lot of like wreckage on the path, you know, to get to, to, to boredom.
Omer (34:35.560)
Why do you think all those like, I mean there must have been different reasons and so on, but generally when you look back, why do you think that none of those products got any traction?
Was it because of the way that you guys were coming up with these ideas or what was different about Border Ball that, that you weren't able to.
To achieve with any of these other attempts?
Jeb Banner (34:57.410)
Yeah, that's a really interesting Question.
Because to me, I. I think about it in terms of like, almost an alchemy of Boardable had the right problem, the right people, the right time, and the right market in terms of both funding and receptivity.
Time in terms of time of life and what was going on, it was just sort of the right blend, and we hadn't had that before.
We were, I think, in many cases, trying to solve problems that we thought were interesting, but we were also doing that within an agency.
And whenever.
Whenever it came down to hitting payroll.
I mean, agency after agency will tell you this.
I think Basecamp, for all of its success, one of its legacies is that it sent a whole bunch of creative agencies down rabbit trails they should never have gone down and got them distracted.
Trying to follow that pattern from 37 signals to basecamp, where they built out a product within a creative agency, it's very, very hard to do.
We didn't figure that piece out until we separated them into two different entities.
It had two different payrolls and really initially two different locations.
We brought them back into one location.
It's the whole you can't serve two masters thing.
When you're looking at your priorities in an agency.
If it's not right there at the top, then it's not going to get done because you got to focus on what's driving revenue.
And a product will not drive revenue for a long time.
And that was the number one reason they failed, along with all the other mistakes we made.
Omer (36:25.510)
And so at what point did you.
You set up portable as a separate entity?
Was that from day one?
Jeb Banner (36:30.870)
Well, we had spun out a business to build software for other companies.
So we had this business.
We called it Gravy Lab.
Gravy, meaning the byproduct of the business, become sort of this delicious thing.
Right.
So Gravy Lab was set up as a separate business, only with two employees, but it was building product for other people, building software.
And so we already had it walled off.
And then when the idea for Boardable came along, we happened to have the right structure in place, whereas before we had tried that without creating that separation.
And it just didn't work because it just got pushed to the back of the line time and time again.
Omer (37:09.660)
What kept you guys going with the product side?
You build one product, it doesn't work, you try again.
And the third time.
But to try so many times over almost 12 years, what kept you guys coming back and saying, we're going to try this again?
Jeb Banner (37:21.990)
I think Joe and I, our relationship was built around building product together.
We built our first product together back in 2004, 2005, called musical family Tree, which was really the first online archive for local music.
Think about it in terms of like an interconnected MP3 site for musicians to upload their music.
So similar to some other things at the time, but it was built really specifically around archiving a music scene.
That was a product we built together.
And I just loved it so much.
I loved MySQL database, the PHP admin, and he and I just really enjoyed working together.
That way I could point the screen and say things and he could make them happen.
And so we just kept doing that.
We kept doing that again and again and again.
And yes, he would do billable work, but he and I always had some sort of side project going, and that just was sort of the foundation of our business and friendship and the way we worked.
So that's where Boardable eventually came from as well.
With Jason, the other partner involved.
Jason did more of the pointing at screens this time, but it was just Joe is a builder and that's his genius.
And you give him like 20 sentences, he'll build you a product.
Love it.
Omer (38:34.580)
And thank you for providing the backstory there, because I think that's important part of the journey that you've gone through here.
Jeb Banner (38:41.600)
Yeah, I mean, we've made so many mistakes, Amir.
I mean, we've made so many bad spends and made some bad hires and we've underinvested in sales when we should have done that sooner.
As a leader, I've made a lot of wrong calls.
I didn't move fast enough sometimes.
I moved too slow other times.
So I don't want to paint a rosy picture here.
Every startup and every business that breaks a 1 million ARR has got like a thousand bad calls.
It's just the way it is.
Omer (39:17.500)
On that note, we should wrap up.
We're going to go into the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you, so just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Jeb Banner (39:31.180)
The one that comes to me immediately is, it's okay to say you don't know something.
It's okay to not be the smartest guy in the room.
One of my previous partners, Dan Ripley, said that to me once.
I was in the antique auction business with him.
He's like, it's okay to say you don't know something.
And then I started to realize I could apply that to so many other things.
Because having that beginner's mindset's so critical.
Omer (39:51.800)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Jeb Banner (39:54.360)
You know, the book that we've been really studying is Crossing the Chasm recently.
That's by Geoffrey Moore, I believe is his name.
And that's just a fantastic playbook to move from that visionary early adopter to the more pragmatist middle of the market.
Very pragmatic business book.
Not all of them are that pragmatic.
I think in general, I love Anything by Patrick Lencioni.
He's one of my favorite authors, and I recommend pretty much everything he writes.
Omer (40:19.540)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Jeb Banner (40:23.700)
I think that they have this sort of irrepressible curiosity to them about what could happen, and that curiosity then drives them and pushes them forward.
So they're just very curious people.
They don't have a fixed mindset.
They have a very flexible, open mindset.
Omer (40:40.090)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool, or habit?
Jeb Banner (40:42.730)
My habit would be meditation, starting and ending every day with that, it's like clearing the RAM in your computer or closing all your browser tabs.
I can't do be very present and focused.
When I slack off on that, I find myself just becoming more and more unfocused.
Omer (41:02.740)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Jeb Banner (41:06.900)
I want to kill all the ticks.
I hate ticks.
I'm a mushroom forager, and I have an idea for a business called Tick Magnet where I want to go out and build these contraptions that attract and kill ticks because I don't want ticks to give people Lyme disease.
It's a terrible, terrible disease, and it's spreading because of climate change.
And I want to go kill all the ticks.
Omer (41:27.710)
I've never heard that one before.
Jeb Banner (41:29.950)
I've got a lot of other ones, but that you said crazy, so I thought I'd go there.
Omer (41:33.630)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jeb Banner (41:37.070)
Most people don't know.
You know, I wanted to be a rock star when I was young.
I played music and spent most of my 20s doing music.
I still play music, you know, every week.
Every Tuesday night I go to the studio and write and record music with friends and.
And I've usually got two to three different album projects going on at once, so that might be something people don't know.
I'm not sure who's listening, though.
Omer (41:58.890)
Right, Exactly.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work, other than music?
Jeb Banner (42:05.290)
Yeah, I would say that.
I mean, I love foraging.
I love wild foods.
I love cooking with wild foods.
There's nothing more amazing than building a fire, foraging mushrooms and herbs, and then cooking, you know, some meat and mushrooms and, you know, onions and stuff over a fire outside with friends.
That's a glass of wine that's pretty perfect for me.
Omer (42:27.940)
And I think as a tech founder, getting into nature is a therapeutic thing.
I think.
So I'm sure you get some benefits from that.
Jeb Banner (42:34.420)
Absolutely.
I'm a big believer in the woods.
The forest.
Omer (42:38.500)
Awesome.
Well, Jeb, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story with Boardable.
If people want to find out more about Boardable, they can go to boardable.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jeb Banner (42:53.960)
My parents were, like, super visionary, and they gave me a great name for Google.
So just Google my name, Jeb Banner, and you'll see my Twitter account, my LinkedIn profile, and anything else that might be interesting.
A website, stuff like that.
Omer (43:08.530)
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
I wish you and the team the best of success.
Jeb Banner (43:11.650)
Thank you, Amir.
I appreciate you having me on.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Omer (43:15.090)
My pleasure.
Cheers.
