Omer (00:09.760)
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 Gil Fye, the co founder of Merge, a unified API platform that allows you to add hundreds of integrations to your own product.
After experiencing firsthand the pains of managing integrations at previous companies, Gil and his co founder Shenzi decided to build a solution.
Before starting their business, they talked to around 100 companies to research and get feedback.
Most of those conversations were pretty positive, but some of the feedback was harsh.
There were three companies in particular where people told them that they would never use the product and that they should probably give up on the idea now.
The two founders spent six months building the first version of the product, and thanks to all those interviews they'd done, they landed their first 10 customers pretty quickly.
But as they tried selling their product to more companies, they quickly realized that they still had big obstacles to overcome.
Most companies were building their own integrations and many of them weren't convinced they needed help or a product to make it easier.
And other companies weren't willing to trust their integrations to an early stage startup that might not be around tomorrow.
Despite those challenges, Gillen Shenzi have grown their business to multiple seven figures in ARR with a team of around 65 people, and they've raised almost $75 million in funding.
In this episode, you'll learn about the successful strategy they used to set up those hundred or so meetings.
When many founders struggle even to get an email reply.
The techniques they used to overcome objections from prospective customers who didn't see the value in the product.
We also talk about how they were able to win over big customers who initially weren't willing to use a startup as part of their mission critical infrastructure.
And how starting early with SEO and content marketing and doing that consistently over the last few years is, is now helping them drive a significant share of their revenue.
So I hope you enjoy.
All right, Gil, welcome to the show.
Gil Feig (02:21.500)
Thank you so much for having me.
Omer (02:22.860)
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Gil Feig (02:26.460)
This is actually a quote I heard when I was young and it's something I've really believed in.
My parents raised me and kind of beat this idea into me, but I think it's Thomas Edison said genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, meaning you gotta Put in the hard work.
You gotta sweat to get where you want to go.
Especially these days with so many startups and they're all competitive, you have to reasonably assume that everyone's working smart.
So you have to work hard if you want to win.
And that's something that's driven Merge since day one.
Omer (02:54.000)
And a good reminder that even though you think you might have a great idea, there's probably a lot more to do than just coming up with that.
Gil Feig (03:01.080)
And probably a hundred people have had that idea before you.
Omer (03:03.560)
So tell us about Merge.
What does the product do?
Who's it for?
And what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?
Gil Feig (03:08.820)
Yeah, so Merge is we build unified APIs for B2B companies.
And what that means is today's B2B companies need to offer integrations to their customers with a variety of different platforms.
But there's a lot of work to do, a lot of different integrations to build.
And so let's say a company wants to offer HR integrations to their customers, they have to offer integrations with all the HR platforms because they don't know which one their customer might be using.
But building, managing, maintaining 50, 100 integrations requires a whole team of people, and no one should have to do that.
So with Merge, they integrate once with our unified API, and once they've done that, they can offer 50 integrations or more to their customers.
So in some ways you can think of it as plaid, but for B2B companies, and we offer integrations in a variety of categories, so hr, payroll, ticketing, CRM, accounting, and so on.
Omer (03:56.730)
I watched a demo video that I think you created a while back.
So you walk through the dashboard and how to set up, you know, the APIs and everything.
I don't know how old that was, but it gave me a good sense of how to use the product.
And I've got to say, it seems surprisingly easy to use it and start building these integrations.
So I guess that's what the whole idea was of building this product.
So give us a sense of the size of the business.
Where are you today in terms of revenue, how much you've raised, size of team, customers, what can you tell us?
Gil Feig (04:35.220)
So we're currently around 65 people.
We have two offices, and we're completely in person.
So we have New York and San Francisco offices.
In about 18 months, since coming out of stealth, we have over 4,000 customers and we're at several million in revenue since our from the time of our Series B in the year leading up to that we more than 30x revenue.
So we're scaling really fast.
It's been super exciting.
Definitely faster growth than we ever expected.
Omer (04:59.620)
Yeah.
And we're going to talk about what that 30x growth, what happened there.
Before we get into that, let's talk about what you were doing before you started Merge.
What's your background and did you always want to start your own company?
Gil Feig (05:16.580)
I think since I was even a little kid, I always said I wanted to be an inventor before I knew what an entrepreneur was.
I definitely wanted to, but I wasn't just going to force it.
The right idea had to come around.
I had to make sure I had conviction on it.
But, um, I had the right, the right co founder in place and definitely felt prepared to do it.
So yeah, in college I minored in entrepreneurship and I wouldn't say that it was, you know, basically going to set you up to start a business from day one, but definitely, you know, taught me a lot of concepts that I really followed when it came to Merge as well.
And once I had my co founder and we came across our idea, which I can dive a little bit more into, we decided to tackle it and start Merge.
Omer (05:52.640)
You were a software engineer.
You were doing that for six or seven years before you started Merge.
Your co founder, Shency, how did the two of you meet?
Gil Feig (06:00.590)
Shency and I have been best friends since freshman year of college.
We just stayed really good friends.
And then throughout the years we were in computer science classes together and then senior year we were class president and vice president together.
So I think we've had a friendly relationship and I would say we're still best friends, but at the same time we've also had working relationships together.
We threw wine tasting event senior year for 600 people for $3 a person.
So we've been very resourceful.
We've definitely tackled some big challenges.
So we knew it would be right when again we both came across this idea at our previous companies.
Omer (06:32.570)
So let's talk about that.
So how did you come up with the idea?
Where did that come from?
Gil Feig (06:37.450)
Yeah, yeah.
So we had both done stints in different companies.
Shenzi was working in finance and I was in tech.
Worked at LinkedIn and Wealth Front.
But then I joined a startup called Canvas.
It's now called Untapped and it's a diversity recruiting platform.
Led the engineering team there.
And while I was there, one of the big things we had to do was build applicant Tracking system integrations or ATSs.
So those are platforms like Greenhouse Lever, Workday.
They basically Help recruiters and teams, you know, track candidates through the recruiting process.
And at untapped, we had to build very tight integrations with them because we were a recruiting platform and we had customers come to us.
I'm on Greenhouse, I'm on Lever.
Great.
We offer those integrations.
But then we got more and they were on smart recruiters and Taleo and ISMS and all these other atss that we just didn't have the time to build integrations with.
It was really stressful and we were turning away customers as an early startup, which is not ideal.
And then Shenzi, my co founder, she moved out of finance at some point to a cybersecurity company where she was chief of staff to the CEO.
And they had to build ticketing integration.
Same problem, right?
They would detect issues with security, they had to open those issues in their customers ticketing systems.
And so they had to build integrations with a variety of platforms as well.
And we realized we are in very different industries, integrating with different industries, but fundamentally running into the same exact problems.
Organizationally, it wasn't just building that.
It was pre sales, post sales, customer success.
It was everything.
And it was bogging down the entire organization and blocking sales for both of us.
Omer (08:01.800)
A lot of companies in that situation would build a Zapier integration and tell their customers, go and use that.
And Zapier is not a competitor to you guys, they're different products.
But can you just explain that difference?
Because if there's anybody else sort of thinking about, know what's the difference, just help us understand that.
Gil Feig (08:23.070)
So I would say the first big difference is Zapier is generally used for internal use cases.
So someone would set up a Zapier connection from one platform to another.
And often, you know, a platform will offer a Zapier integration and then, and then the customer themselves go in and build that integration with another platform within Zapier.
Merge is a bit different in that we help companies offer embedded native integration.
So you know, you go to their app marketplace, you connect your platform and boom, it's just connected.
You're not doing any work to do that.
The other big difference is Zapier in a lot of ways is just a, it's a workflow tool and so you're building one by one integrations.
Merge's biggest value prop is that we are a unified API.
So companies just need to build one integration to us to offer 50, 60 integrations depending on the category to their customers.
So if you were trying to accomplish the same thing with Zapier, you would need them to have a pretty robust embedded product that you could, that the actual provider themselves would build.
And then they would have to build all the connections with 50 different platforms.
So it's a lot of work.
And then lastly, of course, these integrations are deep.
They transfer a lot of data.
There's a lot of custom use cases and things that need to happen.
With a platform like Zapier, it tends to be a little bit more surface level and focus on, can you transfer some data?
Not every single piece of data matters.
And companies need to build integrations exactly as they want them to function.
Omer (09:39.860)
You've answered that question before, haven't you?
Because you were very clear about that.
Gil Feig (09:43.860)
Yeah, I mean, from day one, it was actually one of our biggest challenges was talking to investors and having them understand when the concept of a unified API, even now, is very foreign to a lot of people.
But two and a half to three years ago, when we were talking to investors, they had no idea.
So our pitch deck had charts and comparisons between incumbent products.
Even though we knew we were in no way competitive with them, it didn't matter.
We had to convince other people.
And so, yes, we worked on this language pretty heavily.
Omer (10:09.230)
You see this problem and you and Shenzi decide that you're going to go and solve it.
How long did it take for you to quit your jobs and start working full time on Merge?
And what did you do when you came up with the idea?
What did you do next?
Gil Feig (10:30.290)
You could say that both of our companies were essentially building something similar internally.
It's not the same, but in general, when companies go to solve the integrations problem, they're building this sort of internal unified data model and then connecting all these platforms to it.
So, so we knew that this would work.
We knew it was going to function well.
And so probably I would say it took us about six months from the time we thought of the idea to decide, all right, we're going to go do this right now.
And that involved talking to probably over 100 customers, courtesy of the, the Lean Startup methodology, which, which we really love.
But it was all about validating your idea before you, before you just dive in and just start building something that you don't know if customers are going to want.
So we were very confident that this was going to succeed.
We, we knew we had product market fit basically from the day we started building the product, which was very lucky for us.
Omer (11:17.010)
A lot of founders go out and they want to try and do something similar and talk to customers or potential customers and do the research and they find it very hard to get people's attention or a reply to their email or let alone actually the time to have that conversation.
So how are you able to talk to roughly a hundred customers?
What did you do differently or why were you able to do that when you know many other people struggle with that?
Gil Feig (11:45.200)
Yeah, it's all about your network.
You have to, you have to utilize your network.
We did the same for our funding as well.
But essentially we found target companies that we thought could use a product like Merge.
We basically searched through product leaders, engineering leaders, and found anyone that we had mutual connections with and reached out to those mutuals and asked if they could get us an intro to that person.
But so we were able to pretty quickly set up a lot of calls.
There were days where we talked to probably five different companies.
And again, it was all through the power of the network.
I think expecting people to respond to a cold outbound to just give you 30 minutes of their time is a pretty tough proposition.
Omer (12:19.200)
Yeah, so that's a great point.
I think sometimes we underestimate the value of a network.
You know, you want to go out there and you want to talk to people, so you're like, how do I reach those people?
How do I build an email list?
How do I cold email these people?
And sometimes just looking on LinkedIn, where you worked at LinkedIn.
So, and who are my second degree connections or even my third degree connections, you might be quite surprised who's out there that you can get an introduction to and start talking to.
And as you guys have proven, that's more of a successful approach to having those conversations.
I want to talk about one thing you said.
Right from the outset, we felt like we had product market fit from those conversations.
And I'm thinking, you don't have a product yet, so how do you know you're at product market fit?
What was happening in those conversations that made the two of you feel so confident that you were onto the right idea product here?
Gil Feig (13:22.670)
So I think, of course it's tough to say we actually had product market fit.
We knew for a fact, I would say we were heavily, heavily confident in that.
And a big part of that was that, you know, when we were talking to these customers, they were like, we have a whole team of people working on this.
We would pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars for your product.
But unfortunately it's just not possible to build what you want to build.
And the cool thing was that both of our companies had built it internally, not quite the same way that we did it but in a way that we knew it was possible.
And so we were like, hey, if people are saying they're going to pay a lot of money for this, they already have a team doing this, and we know that we're able to solve this problem, then we know that this is going to succeed.
And.
And out of a hundred people, I think my co founder talks about this, but maybe three said, no, we are not going to use a product like this.
Omer (14:06.590)
They said more than that.
What did they tell you?
Gil Feig (14:09.070)
They said no one would ever use a product like this.
Omer (14:12.030)
Didn't one of them say to you, you should probably just give up on the idea now?
Gil Feig (14:17.150)
Yeah, I mean, that was from so many different people.
But part of that is perseverance.
There's going to be haters and there's going to be people who don't believe in you.
And I think you have to take that with a grain of Salt.
And when three out of 100 people say that, it's enough for us to know, you know, they're just not seeing what we're seeing.
Omer (14:32.810)
Yeah, that's where the founder resilience comes in.
You know, I think a lot of us struggle with that.
Even with me with this podcast, you know, it's like, get great reviews and people leave five star ratings and reviews, and it's the three star that I notice.
And I'm like, I'm a failure.
What did I do wrong?
You know, and you have to just.
You have to just work through those and put things into context and.
But it's still going to be tough when someone's telling you you should just give up on your idea.
Gil Feig (15:04.320)
It is tough, but I think you have to have resilience.
And also we kind of spun it into a positive.
And that was, you know, if every single person we talked to said, this is the most incredible idea I've ever heard, it would have been done already.
If it was so obvious and so correct, we would have been way too late.
Omer (15:19.200)
Were you both still working at the time when you went out there and were talking to people?
Gil Feig (15:23.530)
So Shenzi wasn't.
And then I would in my free time.
So kind of, you know, not during business hours.
It was really important to us to do right by our past companies.
And so, yeah, we did a little bit, but it was really once we both left that we went full time, you know, going hard on those conversations.
Omer (15:39.530)
And when did you start building the product once you left?
Gil Feig (15:42.890)
We started building the product right about what was in May of 2020.
So just a few months into Covid,
Omer (15:51.230)
was that just you or does Shenzi code as well?
Gil Feig (15:53.310)
Shenzi codes as well.
She is, she is incredibly multifaceted.
She was a computer science major in college with me, as I mentioned, but after school she went into finance.
So she never coded professionally.
But I think early on there's some business set up to do some strategy, some research.
But overall there was just a lot of time and me and Chancey are incredibly hard workers.
And so Shenzi just wanted to learn and I think it maybe took her all of a month to become a full stack engineer.
Super proficient was building full stack features and doing them well.
So yeah, it was both of us awesome.
Omer (16:23.340)
You spent about six months building the product.
What happened once you launched?
Did all those companies telling you, we need this, we would pay for this.
How many of them actually paid for it once you had it out there?
Gil Feig (16:43.060)
So the answer is a lot.
I think from day one, a lot of them were into it.
The one piece is with building integrations or any sort of product facing feature in general, it has to be roadmaped.
And so I think a lot of them at the time were like, this is great, we definitely will start using it, just not right this minute.
We had our cohort and we had, you know, out of the hundred we spoke with, which is such a large number that it still gave us, you know, probably 10 to 15 companies that were ready to start immediately and those became our first customers.
Omer (17:10.580)
And were you charging from day one?
Gil Feig (17:12.420)
We were charging from day one.
I think we offered maybe a one or two month closed beta to a few customers that we didn't charge for.
But yeah, after that we started charging.
Omer (17:21.690)
And what did you learn from those first 10 or 15 customers?
I think you had mentioned that obviously building something like this is mission critical and there's very little room for mistakes.
So six months building the product, you feel confident, but you're not going to catch every bug, every problem.
So once these customers started using it, what happened?
How smooth was that onboarding and kind of rollout?
Gil Feig (17:55.960)
It was hard at first.
API integrations are just tough, which makes them a good business as well.
But yeah, I think in our early days we had customers sort of onboard, they ran into bugs.
And one thing that we realized relatively quickly is that in engineering you want to be as proactive as possible.
You want to build a lot of tests, you want to have potentially manual testing, automated testing, making sure that you're running through betas and getting everything perfect.
But with API integrations, because you don't control what's Running in other systems, you have to be often inherently reactive and with that building processes that let you be reactive most effectively.
And so for us, it's all about being able to serve our customers and if anything ever goes wrong, be able to solve those issues within minutes because they have customers depending on them and notably merges B2B2B.
So we sell to B2B companies and that means our customers have sometimes multi hundred thousand dollar contracts with their customers.
So they expect absolute, absolute perfection from us.
And when there's not perfection, they expect the world's top customer support.
And that's something we've really had to build out.
Omer (18:59.280)
Security is another thing that you told me was obviously that's super important.
What did that mean to you?
What was the challenge that you had to deal with specific to the product that you're building?
Gil Feig (19:12.400)
So I think for us, we knew from day one we were going to be storing sensitive data.
Our first categories were hr, payroll and ats.
And when you're powering HR and payroll and, and even ATS where you have, you know, EEOC or you know, Equal Employment Opportunity data being stored for, you know, all these end users or our customers customers data.
We knew we were going to need, you know, top security.
And so obviously we built everything, you know, with all of that in mind.
But we also needed to be able to prove that.
So we went for SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, all of that over time.
But SOC2 we got before we ever launched to any customers because we just knew it was going to be so important.
And so we were seeking that as we were building out the product to
Omer (19:52.300)
begin with, you quit your jobs, you've talked to, you know, 100 odd customers, which in itself is a huge task.
You're building the product and you raised your seed round of about four and a half million.
At what point?
Gil Feig (20:08.980)
That was about probably four months into the journey.
So we had built a prototype at that point.
It wasn't 100% functional, but we, we had shown that it was enough to relatively work.
But we also just had the feedback from all of the customers we had spoken with.
And one cool strategy that we did was because we had spoken to so many, whenever we talked to a vc, we tended to have already spoken to one of their portfolio companies about using Merge.
And so we would pop those logos into each specific presentation and those VCs had someone to go talk to and really get a detailed set of information about what Merge could offer to them and especially from a company that they
Omer (20:44.310)
trusted and how long did it take you to close that round?
Gil Feig (20:48.080)
It probably took us.
It was maybe a few weeks.
The interesting part was because fundraising had all moved to zoom, we were able to take a lot of calls in a day.
And so there were days where we did eight to 10 pitches, all just from my living room couch.
Omer (21:02.320)
And you guys launched the business in the middle of the pandemic.
This was like June or July 2020.
Was that a good time or a bad time to be starting your company?
Gil Feig (21:13.050)
What's funny is, at the time everybody was saying this is the best time to start a company, a recession or some world pandemic that's happening.
It's the best time.
And I think for us, we were just so early into the pandemic that it did make fundraising a little bit challenging.
I think VCs were getting ready to deploy capital, but it was still a bit early and things were still a bit unknown at the time.
But we did end up raising.
And a big part of that again, was having all the customer references and everything that we needed.
But we also think of COVID as an incredible time to build a company because the world was shut down and all there was to do was for us to build.
And we were an in person company.
We were together in the office.
We were so small that we just wore masks and, you know, we were sort of, you know, obeying all the, all the laws.
But it was a chance for us to get out and be together.
And with that, you know, it helped us just really build and just be united as we built the product together.
Omer (22:04.900)
So you've raised the seed round.
I think about a year into after you'd launch, you were at about 30, 40 paying customers and you were on track to hit your first million ARR by the end of that year.
Is that from my research?
Anyway, I remember hearing you say something like that, that you felt confident that you were about to get that.
So did that happen?
Gil Feig (22:25.280)
Yeah.
So we've far exceeded our revenue goals every time we've set them, which has been really exciting.
Omer (22:30.240)
That's impressive.
So did you just lowball the estimate or why do you think you exceeded that goal?
What happened that got you beyond where you expected to be?
Gil Feig (22:41.670)
I think setting goals early on when you don't have any historicals, is tough.
And so for us, it was kind of based on our current growth.
What are we thinking we're going to hit?
And that growth just continued to increase with that.
We exceeded our goals and there's a lot of reasons for that.
We can Dive into.
But word of mouth was spreading.
We were showing up in other customers products.
We started to really build trust in a brand in the market and that just really accelerated, accelerated our growth.
Omer (23:05.410)
So let's talk about some of the challenges of trying to sell the product.
So far it's, it's looking good.
You know, you've done your homework, you've talked to, you know, you've done the lean startups thing, you've, you've leveraged your network and you've got the seed round.
So things are looking good and you've got initial customers.
What was one obstacle you faced when you tried to sell to other customers and keep growing the business?
I know there was one thing that you struggle with in those early days, repeatedly when you had these conversations.
So tell us about that.
Gil Feig (23:39.010)
Yeah, I think, I think in a lot of ways it was convincing people of the value that Merge was providing or how we were solving the problem.
Because a lot of engineers have never built integrations, but they understand APIs and to them the challenge isn't that tough.
And in the early days of founder led sales, when it was me and Chenzy just selling our product, we were able to talk about that.
We had lived through it, we had experience it.
We could give concrete examples of, you know, how we had felt the pain.
And I think as time went on, when we added AES and we built out a sales team, it was really important for us to build a repeatable motion because we had customers coming to us and engineers saying, oh, I can do this.
I built out integrations before not understanding the complexity of a B2B integration with millions of rows of data being transferred and getting one thing wrong, causing payroll to run incorrectly.
You know, the actual criticality of this was insane.
And so we had to build out again all of those materials, really be able to convince our customers and show them the problems they were going to encounter before they ever did.
And we always like to say our best customers are ones that have tried to build at least one integration before because they've lived through the pain and they never want to do it again.
Omer (24:44.160)
Yeah, and it's not just building the integration, it's maintaining it and supporting and dealing with all the problems that go on.
And.
And that was something you experienced in your previous roles?
Gil Feig (24:55.010)
Oh, yeah.
I think we say that building is 20% of the problem.
Maintaining is actually the hardest part.
And it's not maintaining in the sense that people always say like, oh, the APIs might change and you have to do that.
I think it's pretty well established in the world that making backwards, incompatible changes to an API is not acceptable.
You don't see it happen super often, but what you do see happen is you build this integration with your demo account.
All works, it's going well, but then you go and you onboard an actual customer and the data looks completely different.
And then you onboard another customer and that data looks different.
And there's edge cases and weird things that pop up.
And the way that surfaces in a company is, you know, all right, our integration's done.
Our team has moved on to the next roadmap item.
But nope, engineers, stop what you're doing.
Get right back on that.
Go dig into the problems, but do it with a lot of pressure, too, because your customer is banging on your door saying, we paid you because you said you had to work integration, and you don't.
And so you're stalling.
You're not able to support your customers.
You're probably experiencing churn.
The pain is so, so bad beyond just building out that initial integration.
Omer (25:57.930)
Now, from our.
From our earlier conversation, I think of it as, like, two categories of customers that you were getting objections from.
There was the one that we just talked about who felt like, hey, we can do this ourselves, and why do we need a product like this?
So I want to talk a little bit about what you did to overcome those types of objections.
And then you had another category of.
Of prospects who were basically like, we're a massive company.
You guys are this tiny startup.
How can we possibly trust you to run our business?
So I want to talk about both, but let's talk about that first group.
So you've heard these objections.
They're feeling like, hey, we can do this ourselves, or why do we need a product like this?
So when you started getting those types of, that type of feedback, what did you do to address that or overcome them?
Gil Feig (26:54.189)
Yeah, I think it's a mix.
So for some, we were able to just give actual examples of what we had experienced in the past, what we saw at our previous companies, and how we got through it.
And I think that that worked for some companies, but there were others that continued to object.
And, you know, this is easy.
I'll do it.
We, and we found just letting people go try to build it was.
Was the best.
They always come back, you know, and so for us, it was like, hey, go try it.
Don't let us just tell you it's tough.
Go do it.
Go figure it out on your own and you'll be back.
Omer (27:20.260)
That's one way to do it.
And I'm sure a number of them came back once they deal with those issues.
You also created a bunch of like collateral, didn't you, to try and help with the, with the sales process.
Right.
So what were you, what were you kind of putting in front of these customers?
Gil Feig (27:35.480)
Yeah, it was a lot of collateral, just around putting a dollar cost on what was actually occurring and also trying to really help them understand the pain that comes afterwards.
So it had some examples of things that can go wrong.
I talked about how a lot of our tooling helps people solve some of the deepest problems, like bugs coming in from your customers or connections failing and how engineers have to be pulled off.
And I think that rang true for some of our customers who had semi experienced it before.
And for those that didn't, it was sort of a good example and a good way for them to just understand how they could do that.
And we talked about all the tooling that Merge offers that lets customer success and support teams actually do what engineers would typically do when it comes to debugging those integrations, all just using Merge's vast toolset that's there for them.
Omer (28:22.050)
And in those early days, apart from you and Shenzi, who else was on the team?
Gil Feig (28:26.370)
In the early days, we had, I would say mostly engineers.
They were our first hires.
And design was always really, really important to us from day one.
We think just because we're an API product, it's no excuse for having poor design.
And especially because onboarding is a huge part of our product.
Docs are a huge part of our product.
We think of those as first class citizens.
And so we spent a lot of time on design as well.
Omer (28:47.780)
And that was the one thing that I liked.
I mean, when I looked, I don't know how old that design was that I looked at the dashboard, but it was like, this is pretty neat and very easy to understand.
For me, it's like when you go to like Amazon documentation and you know, trying to use that gives me a headache.
Right.
So this is kind of like pretty user friendly.
So I think more companies should be investing in design.
And I'm not a designer, so.
But I'm just saying that because I think it's important.
Let's talk about some of the things you did around marketing.
So the first two years, I think growth was organic.
You guys weren't really doing much.
You just told me that the team was just design and engineering.
So you two are basically doing sales and building the product and everything else.
So the first couple of years, it's Mostly organic growth and word of mouth and so on.
What else?
Actually, before we talk about beyond that, there was one thing.
I remember I heard you say that you were doing in the early days that when you would get a new integration set up, you guys had some kind of thing that would generate content and publish it out on social media and all this stuff almost automatically.
So what exactly was that?
How did you set that up and did it actually work?
Gil Feig (30:21.660)
Yeah, it absolutely worked.
Anytime we publish a new integration, we automatically generate landing pages, social, you know, the meta images that appear.
We were generating a ton of different material and very SEO optimized and it was pretty quick.
I think whenever we launch an integration, it takes a matter of maybe a couple weeks before when you search for, let's say just works API or workday API, it takes maybe a couple weeks from us publishing that to the time where that becomes a first page Google Google search result.
So it's definitely been a big, big driver of growth for us.
Omer (30:52.400)
So how did you automate that?
What did you do?
You just put in like here's the new integration and here's a bunch of additional information and then run some code and it would just generate these pages for you.
Gil Feig (31:03.840)
Yeah.
So on our side, whenever we build a new integration, we do things like we put in the integration name, we put in how we authenticate images, highlight colors, all of that good stuff.
And as soon as we change the stuff status of an integration, we sort of have an internal representation.
Soon as we change that to published, all those pages just get generated by the systems that we've built.
Omer (31:22.940)
Do you still do that?
Gil Feig (31:23.900)
Do we still auto generate pages?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we absolutely do.
It's been an incredible driver of growth for us.
So yeah, we plan on continuing that.
Omer (31:32.300)
Well, you have to now, right?
Because I mean in those early days you didn't have that many integrations.
Right.
And today you've got what?
Hundreds?
Gil Feig (31:41.880)
Yeah, hundreds.
Omer (31:42.720)
Or you could always hire a full time person to do that.
Right.
Which wouldn't be.
Gil Feig (31:46.080)
Yeah, but look, if we can build it once, in the early days, it didn't take that long and all we could do was work because it was Covid.
So you know, I think I personally built that late into the night.
One night, it took me one night.
And now it's run for hundreds of integrations and it'll continue forever with us.
So we definitely invest in scalability and automation from the beginning.
Omer (32:03.560)
So SEO is one of the, the big drivers for you in terms of inbound.
Is it mainly those pages that are still now paying off in terms of driving traffic or was there something else you did in addition to that?
Gil Feig (32:24.480)
Yeah, it's that it's also.
Content marketing has been really powerful for us.
It's something we started a little bit later in our journey but we definitely now have a lot of content that is also, you know, first page search results for some really, really key the sort of search search terms that we value.
Omer (32:39.280)
So you've got SEO, content marketing, big driver, you do outbound.
Is that also a significant driver of revenue or is that something that you're still developing?
Gil Feig (32:53.040)
Yeah, yeah, outbound is becoming a more significant driver of revenue.
We always want inbound since it's kind of an automatic motion.
We always want that to continue growing as well.
But yeah, we've started doing more outbound.
We also again utilize power of our networks to get into some larger companies.
So yeah, it's a, it's a solid mix of both.
Omer (33:10.730)
So you, you raised, I think it was October 2022, you raised your series B which was I think 55 million.
So you guys are at now 74.5 million in total.
And one of the things that you announced at the time was that hey, we've raised our Series B and in the last 12 months ARR has increased 30x.
Now if you were at like $10 MRR 12 months before, that's not so interesting.
But we know you weren't, right?
So we've already talked about ballpark where you were in terms of revenue and so It's a multiple seven figure business today.
What drove such a big 30x increase in that 12 month period?
Gil Feig (34:05.220)
It was a mix of usage and more customers coming on board.
In our early days, you know, we had smaller companies, you can naturally charge less, they have lower volumes, but we built a reputation by, by signing with them and by serving their customers effectively.
Some of our customers who we were with in the early days, so Drata for example, incredible early customer for us and worked very closely with us.
They grew massively and that helped us establish our brand, you know, kind of alongside them and that helped us move on and sell to larger and larger companies and that, that helped drive, you know, revenue growth.
So I would say it was larger companies and it was more customers that were, you know, sort of, you know, using more volume that, that ultimately drove our growth.
Omer (34:40.920)
You're adding the logos.
The more logos you add, the more proof and credibility you're building.
And Drata being a good example of that.
What about some of the bigger companies, the ones that basically said we can't rely on you.
I've seen some logos on your site now, which are some pretty big companies.
At some point they came back.
What was different this time?
Why did they feel confident?
Gil Feig (35:13.670)
Yeah, I think in our early days we would get on calls with larger companies and they didn't even.
It almost felt like they didn't care about our product or if it worked.
And it was more just focused on how many people are you, Are you going to be around?
Are you going to even survive?
Because we are core infrastructure and no one wants to build on top of us and then have us go under or get acquired and force them to get out of there.
So I think in the early days we had a narrative.
We are not looking to get acquired.
We want to build a big company here that helps companies integrate with all platforms.
Were not going anywhere.
But I think it was the continued fundraising rounds and just serving larger customers that helped them build comfort.
So having those logos on our site has definitely helped, you know, and now for this year, our plan is to just move up even more as we continue to, you know, serve larger customers with higher security demands and who need more.
More sort of affirmation from us that we're going to be around for years to come if they're going to rely on us to power all of their integrations.
Omer (36:05.860)
Yeah, I mean, that's a tough thing.
Every startup, I think, faces that kind of challenge, especially if you become a huge dependency for your customers that how can they trust you?
How can they have that, that confidence?
And obviously now where you are in terms of the logos and how much you've raised, I think people have more confidence that you are going to be around.
Tell me about the three companies.
Don't give me names, but the three companies that, you know, when you were doing the talking to the hundred customers that told you that they would never use your product and you should give up on your idea, what happened with them?
Gil Feig (36:42.310)
So eventually all three ended up signing with Merge and that was just really exciting to us.
It was.
It's hard to forget customers, you know, in the early days who tell you that your idea is not going to succeed.
And especially because, you know, some people, they can go in and say, look, I might not use this, but it's interesting.
But these were harsh feedback to us.
These were people telling us, you have a bad idea, do not go forward with it.
And so I think when the third one finally signed for us, it was validation that we had moved along the right path and we had built the right product.
For our customers and what it really took for them was just seeing that their competitors were using us and were offering 10, 20, 30 times more integrations than they were overnight.
Omer (37:18.480)
That's a nice way to wrap up on the story.
And you're right.
When you get feedback like that, you don't forget that.
Okay, let's get into the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Gil Feig (37:30.440)
Yep.
Omer (37:31.200)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Gil Feig (37:33.600)
Probably the hard work front.
We have to work hard if we want to win.
Omer (37:36.480)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Gil Feig (37:39.280)
I like the Lean startup.
It really drove our methodology and I'm a big fan of that.
Omer (37:43.120)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Gil Feig (37:47.200)
Perseverance.
Omer (37:48.560)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Gil Feig (37:52.160)
Definitely using keyboard shortcuts for everything.
You should always be using shortcuts.
Minimize mouse usage as much as possible.
Omer (37:58.720)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Gil Feig (38:02.400)
I really like E commerce and I have some really interesting ideas in that front, but right now, fully focused on Merge, of course.
Omer (38:08.720)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Gil Feig (38:12.320)
Yeah, I got a cease and desist letter from Facebook when I was 16 for coding some things that were a little bit against their terms of service, but of course had to stop once I got that.
Omer (38:22.000)
That's a good one.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Gil Feig (38:26.520)
I really enjoy fitness, all sorts of workout classes, and anything to keep me active.
Omer (38:30.920)
All right, great.
So thank you for joining me today, Gil.
If people want to check out Merge, they can go to merge.dev and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Gil Feig (38:43.720)
Yep, you can just email me gilmerge.dev or connect with me.
Gil Feig on LinkedIn.
Omer (38:48.840)
Thanks, man.
It's been a pleasure.
Congratulations on what you guys have achieved so far, and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Gil Feig (38:57.650)
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Omer (38:59.410)
Cheers.
