Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Brandon Fu, the co founder and CEO of Paragon, a platform designed to help software companies create integrations with third party applications.
Back in 2015, while working on a previous startup, Brandon and his co founder Ishmael discovered how painful it was to build and maintain integrations themselves.
This experience ultimately inspired them to start Paragon.
At first, they had trouble finding customers for their product idea.
After a lot of customer interviews, they realized that that they were building the wrong product.
More importantly, those conversations helped them figure out what type of product their prospective customers actually needed.
Today, they've grown to several million dollars in ARR, built a team of over 30 people so far, and have raised just over 16 million dollars in funding.
In this episode, we talk about the lessons they learned from their previous startup and how that helped them avoid making the same mistakes again with Paragon.
The iterative approach they use to find product market fit, including refining their product idea and gradually increasing their pricing.
How they're using LinkedIn as a key growth channel and profitably acquiring customers through it, and how Brandon is overcoming the challenges as a founder of delegation and learning to let go of tasks in order to build a more effective and scalable team.
So I hope you enjoy it.
All right, Brandon, welcome to the show.
Brandon Foo (01:49.100)
Hey Omer, thanks for having me.
Omer (01:50.700)
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Brandon Foo (01:55.180)
Yeah, I'd say my favorite quote is one by Confucius and it goes, we all have two lives and the second one begins after we realize that we only have one.
I think this is something I think about a lot and that motivates me personally in terms of relatively speaking, our lives, our time on earth is short.
And really looking at it from that lens, that helps, I think focus on what is really important, what really matters to you in life and what you want to do in your time here.
Omer (02:21.910)
Love it.
I think I heard naval share that quote as well.
Maybe it was on Joe Rogan and that was the first time I heard it and it was just like it really makes you think.
All right, so tell us about Paragon.
What does the product do?
Who's it for?
What's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Brandon Foo (02:39.030)
Yeah, so Paragon is a embedded integration platform for SaaS applications.
And what we do is help software companies integrate their product with third party applic applications like Salesforce, Slack, Netsuite, HubSpot, and ultimately today every software company, at least every B2B software company, is building integrations.
If you go on their website, there's a list of integrations on their website.
And largely these companies are spending millions of dollars in engineering to build and maintain these integrations on their own.
There really is no de facto solution in the market aside from building and maintaining these integrations in house.
So we started Paragon to solve that problem and to essentially serve as a unified connecting lay between your products and the broader SaaS or software ecosystem that allows you to seamlessly provide native product integrations for your customers.
Omer (03:29.390)
What's the typical size of a customer for Paragon?
Brandon Foo (03:34.790)
Yeah, so today we work with just over a hundred companies, 100 customers around the world ranging from SMBs, so startups to enterprise publicly traded software companies.
I'd say we definitely started on the smaller end as we first went to market selling to startups, Series A, a series B companies.
And as we've continued to grow, we've moved more up market, selling to mid market and now starting to focus more on enterprise customers as well.
Omer (04:00.410)
Okay, great.
And can you give us a sense of the size of the business?
Where are you in terms of revenue, size of team?
And I know in terms of funding you guys have raised, you recently raised a 13 million Series A overall, about 16 million you've raised.
What about revenue and team?
Brandon Foo (04:18.349)
Yeah, so we started the company in 2019 just about three and a half years ago.
So since then we've grown to a few million in ARR.
Our team is just over 30 people and as you mentioned, we've raised just over 16 million in venture funding, including a series A led by Inspired Capital last year.
Omer (04:37.149)
So before we talk about how you came up with the idea for this business, this is your second startup, this is your second YC company, I think, isn't it?
Brandon Foo (04:46.220)
It is, yeah.
Omer (04:47.740)
So let's tell us about the first one.
What were you doing before Paragon?
Brandon Foo (04:51.740)
So before Paragon, I started a company called polymail around 2015.
Polymail was a email productivity app.
Many of your listeners are probably familiar with Superhuman.
So like I think in some ways we were Superhuman before Superhuman became popular.
But we started with, you know, the idea to perhaps naive idea to fix email.
I think we've all probably had some idea like that in the past.
As entrepreneurs we live in our inboxes and so we designed essentially a Super powered email app, email client that had built in productivity features and made it a lot easier for you to get through your day to day email.
We did go through yc for polymail, that was in winter 2016 and worked on polymail for about four years until I eventually stepped down to start Paragon in 2019.
Omer (05:38.750)
So where did the idea for Paragon come from?
Brandon Foo (05:40.910)
My co founder and cto, Ishmael and I have actually started a previous company together.
This was before Polymail even.
So I met Ishmael while I was in college.
After I graduated, we started a software development company where we built products for other companies like Uber and Universal.
And then of course after that I went on to start Polymail.
And so in our careers as founders and software developers, we built dozens of products.
And you know, one of the pain points that we consistently saw was building integrations, especially at my last company, Polymail.
You know, we started off sort of in the consumer email space and eventually tried to pivot to more B2B, enterprise focused.
And when we did, the number one most important thing for customers was we need a Salesforce integration, we need HubSpot Slack integration.
And so we ended up building those integrations and it took us months and months, basically reinventing the reel every time we had to build one of those integrations.
And of course beyond that, not only you build the integration, you have to maintain it indefinitely.
And it was a huge, huge pain point for us.
And one of the reasons why I think we failed to ultimately successfully make that B2B pivot at Polymail.
So coming back, it's a Paragon.
Reconnecting with Ishmael, we had a broader thesis to democratize software development.
As developers, there's so many parts of the software development process that are repeated in every product, you know, every app that is built.
And as the world has reached a place where every company in the world is a software company, but less than 1% of the population are software engineers, you know, our thesis was that there had to be a fundamental shift in the way that software was built in order for this world to work.
So democratizing software development was kind of, you know, our higher level thesis or, you know, kind of goal approaching Paragon.
And so that took us back to integrations.
It took us, you know, a few iterations actually, you know, to get to where we are today.
But ultimately, you know, we came back to this pain point of integrations, pain point that, you know, I.
And we had experienced ourselves as developers and you know, what we realized is that this is essentially A problem that every software company in the world faces today.
Like I said, you know, if you go on the website, any software company has an integrations page and there's really no de facto solution outside of building those integrations yourself.
So, you know, what we saw there was a huge opportunity to take some of our learnings and what we had, you know, struggled with and ultimately tried to solve ourselves and, you know, really try and build a productized solution for SaaS integrations.
And so our vision at Paragon is to really become the stripe for SaaS integrations, that single connecting layer for your products and all of the thousands of other SaaS applications in the ecosystem.
Omer (08:28.330)
So at this point, a lot of founders would go and spend months building a product before figuring out whether people wanted it or not.
It's kind of what you did with Polymail.
But you took a very different approach with Paragon.
Like you went out and you decided, we're going to validate this idea before we go and build the product, right?
Brandon Foo (08:50.100)
Yeah.
So I think with Polymail I ended up making the classic first time founder mistake, which is over indexing on products and under indexing on the distribution or the go to market.
So, you know, we spent months building a product.
We had this vision of, you know, we can make email so much better.
Here are all the features that email should have to make.
And this is going to solve email.
Right?
And ultimately I think we built a good product as a result of that.
We had tens of thousands of active users and paying customers even.
But you know, ultimately, you know, it ended up being sort of this consumer app where people were paying five or ten dollars a month.
And it was a what I would describe as a nice to have in a lot of ways.
Right.
We weren't solving a very concrete problem that the market had.
And as a result of that, as we tried to grow the business, we tried to go up market, sell B2B, sell Enterprise.
And I think we were taking a product that we had built, a product that we had built against no clear pain points in the market and tried to find problems in the market that we could slot it in to.
So, you know, ultimately I think we weren't successful taking that approach.
But I don't think that's an uncommon problem.
From what I've seen talking to a lot of other early stage founders who have spent six months or 12 months, you know, with this grand vision of here's exactly what my product should be, it's going to be perfect, we just need to spend 12 months building it.
And they end up getting to market and realize that what customers want is actually something completely different.
Certainly informed our approach the second time around with Paragon.
And as we built the products in the first few months of the company, we really started by talking to customers.
And we started with maybe 100 interviews with customers or who we thought were potential customers, showing them mockups, doing a fake demo or a real demo, whatever it might be, to validate that, you know, this is actually something that customers buy, would want to buy.
And I think about that as, you know, taking a distribution first approach to products market fit through that process, we eventually went through several iterations.
The first idea that we had that we were building for was actually completely different or different in many ways from where we are now.
But we learned so much in that process, talking to users and trying to sell the product in its current form about what the market wanted, what the market didn't want, and ultimately what they were willing to pay for.
And so I think through that process we probably continued that for the first, better part of the first year at Paragon until we ended up landing on where we're at today, the product that you see Paragon as today.
But I think that's ultimately the process that has led us to where we are.
And I think that's been one of the biggest reasons for the success that we've seen here at Paragon.
Omer (11:43.900)
So how did you figure out who to go and talk to?
Like, you didn't have any customers, so you're trying to figure out who your ICP is.
And as far as SaaS companies go, you can have startups that at least early stage startups that small teams don't want to invest in any integrations because of all the work that's involved in maintaining it.
So they're just like, yeah, we'll integrate with Zapier and let customers kind of figure that the rest of it out themselves.
Then you've got larger teams, they maybe have some people dedicated to building and maintaining these integrations.
And then you've got enterprise customers which are doing it on a whole another scale.
So you've got sort of different types of customers who could use a product like this in the early days.
Like, who did you go and talk to and did they turn out to be the right customers?
Brandon Foo (12:41.230)
Yeah, so you're absolutely right.
And I think that the process that we took was definitely a very iterative approach to reach products market fit.
And so we started off talking to startups, our friends who were working at startups as developers who are engineers and just asked about what are the problems that you have, showing them examples or early demos, prototypes of what we're building and trying to understand if and how that solves the problems that they experience in their day to day.
So I would say that in that process, one thing about finding product market fit is actually invalidating product market fit or finding out what people don't want.
So maybe if you're not, you know, finding this is exactly what customers want, you're at least invalidating, you know, what we're building is not valuable for people.
And so, you know, through that process, I think, you know, we're able to directionally orient ourselves towards what is, you know, eventually where we, you know, landed at and eventually product market fit.
But, you know, startups, small companies, I think, experience the same types of problems in a lot of ways as larger companies do.
They may experience them in very different ways and different magnitudes, but at least directionally, I think it helps point you in the right direction, right?
And that, okay, you know, customer or prospect is talking about this type of problem.
There's something more here.
Let's go a little bit deeper.
Let's try and understand why this is a problem, what they're trying to achieve, and if more people have it, right?
So directionally it kind of leads you in the right way.
And then the biggest test I think that every company should be doing at this stage in line with their product development or even before, is actually asking customers to pay for the product.
Even before we ship the product, we were asking customers to pay, I think it was like $30 at the very first, you know, in the first phase of Paragon, and we got some people who are willing to pay $30 and like, okay, so there's at least $30, you know, worth of value for this problem that we're working towards.
So that's at least some validation.
So maybe next time let's try charging $50.
Let's try charting $100, right?
See how, you know, what is the magnitude of this pain point, right?
What is the actual size of the value that we can capture if we're able to solve this problem in the market.
So through that process, you can kind of iteratively work your way directionally towards product market fit, starting with, you know, the developer at a small series A or seed startup, right?
If they can pay $30, you know, let's try going to a series B company, see, can they pay $100?
And eventually we've raised our price, you know, many, many times since then.
But it was a very iterative process and we literally started from, you know, $30 to where we are now to get there.
Omer (15:21.150)
I've seen a lot of founders kind of deal with a lot of angst trying to figure out what their ideal pricing should be when they don't have any customers.
And it's like, yeah, you hear a lot about pricing and optimization and all that, and yes, you should do that, but there's a time for doing it.
But as you just said in the early days, when you're trying to get those first 10 customers, I think you just need to prove they'll pay, anybody will pay something.
Right.
They see some value in what you're doing and you could always keep increasing your prices like you guys did.
I'm curious, you took this approach to say we're going to go out and talk to customers first.
I didn't do this the last time around.
And we're going to learn from that mistake.
What was one big insight you got from going out and talking to customers that if you hadn't had those conversations, would have sent you in a completely different direction or led you to making a big mistake down the line in terms of how you built or positioned the product?
Brandon Foo (16:25.510)
Yeah, well, I would say that process shapes our entire product strategy in paragon, as it is today.
So like I said, we started with actually a fairly different product, still a developer tool, but through this process of talking to customers, selling first and, you know, customer discovery, we iterated on our products many, many times to reach the point that it is now.
So, you know, at a very high level, we started with a product that was more, I would describe as like a backend, as a service.
That was our very first approach to this.
So something more similar to like a parse or a firebase that, you know, you can stand up a database and you know, a production ready app with a few lines of code or no code at all.
And you know, through that process we found that wasn't actually what people wanted or it solved.
It solved some problem in the market, but it really wasn't big enough where, you know, people were willing to pay that much or there was going to be a big enough market for this to be really exciting, you know, so we took that idea and like, okay, what are parts of this that we can shave off or, you know, how can we iterate based on what we've learned from the market?
And really that's, you know, talking to these customers, you know, they're giving us feedback on what we're showing them already, but they're also telling us other problems that we may not have heard of.
Right.
And so, you know, in that process, people, you know, bringing up integrations, right?
And like, I need to build these integrations and that's one of the pain points that I have.
I don't want to spend six months building this integration every time my customer asks for one.
And they're like, okay, that's, you know, different than not exactly what we're building for right now.
But, you know, there are ways in which we can adapt and we can, you know, pivot or iterate our idea and our approach if we can validate that that is a big enough opportunity in the market.
And so I would say, yeah, not, not just, you know, any one mistake or one thing, I would say that inherently shaped and, you know, helped build and create our product as it is today.
Omer (18:15.710)
So building a product like Firebase is very different to what Paragon is today.
And I think if somebody is listening to this and they're going out and they're at the same stage of a Firebase type idea and they're hearing from customers, yeah, maybe there's a need for it, but it's not like, it's not like the burning issue.
Like, what's a good question that you, you are asking that helped uncover other issues.
Brandon Foo (18:47.770)
Will you pay $100 for this right now and actually ask them to put in their credit card?
We did that.
We would ask people to put in their credit card on the call, we would give them a stripe form to put in their credit card for.
We didn't even have, we didn't even build this product, by the way, the Firebase, you know, thing.
We never ended up building it, but we asked customers to pay for it just to validate that it was actually solving a pain point and they weren't lying to us too.
It is, it is very different.
Right, but that's kind of the point is that we actually, through this process, we actually never ended up building this thing.
It was just a, you know, very high level idea directionally.
Right.
That we know there's something in this direction.
And this is one iteration of, you know, this thesis that we have about solving the software development process, right.
And just testing it in the market and what I like to call, you know, sell before you build.
I think any company who is at that stage, any early stage founder who is in that early product discovery or development phase, they should try to get their first 10 customers before they even write a single line of code.
Right?
And that Will, you know, feel unintuitive, I think, for a lot of people who are really excited about building.
But what I've seen that can save you months or even years of time of, you know, figuring out, is this something that people actually want?
You don't have to write a single line of code to answer that question.
Just show people enough to describe your products or your solution and ask them to pay for it right now.
And that's what we did, that's what we tried to do.
And ultimately from that, you know, process, we didn't feel like there was a compelling enough response from the market that it made sense to continue in that direction.
But we learned enough from the market from talking to them that we knew that here are other opportunities in the market that are even bigger, that are even more compelling than what we initially started with.
Omer (20:33.380)
Great answer.
So I've got a two part question as a follow up there.
Firstly, when you're asking somebody, hey, you know, let's talk about that kind of Firebase type product, would you pay $100 for it?
Here's the stripe page.
And they say, not really.
What's the follow up question to figure out where to go next?
Because what I'm trying to get to is a lot of times founders focus on just figuring out, okay, is my idea valid, will somebody pay for it?
And if they hear a no, sometimes it's like, okay, that's the end of the call.
But you guys were going a little further and you were kind of then figuring out, okay, if these people are not that excited about it, what other problems do they have that we could solve?
So what, how are you asking that question?
Brandon Foo (21:26.620)
Yeah, so I think before you ask them to put in their credit card on the stripe page, you know, I would treat it like a actual sales process.
Right.
And in an actual sales process, the most important part is the discovery.
Right.
So hopefully you're leading this discussion with some form of discovery process that uncovers, you know, what pain points that your prospect has in relation to your solution.
You know, with any good discovery process, you should be able to get the prospect, you know, to talk as much as they can.
Right.
About, you know, the pain point that resonates with them.
And so in that process, if you're trying to validate your idea and you find that, you know, maybe this problem is already solved.
Right.
The prospect is actually not that concerned about this problem that I'm trying to solve.
Well, that's a pretty clear indication.
Maybe this is, you know, some form of invalidation.
But hopefully in the discovery process, you know, rather than asking, yes, no questions, right.
You know, you can, you can make it more open ended.
Right.
And you can use that as a process to really understand who your buyer is or who your ICP is and, you know, what kind of their day to day life looks like.
Right.
They have problems.
Every person has problems that they're willing to pay for.
Right.
And I think software developers, coming from being a software developer myself, right, we have some intuition of like, okay, here's kind of the shape of a software developer's workflow in their life and the types of problems that they're likely to experience.
So, you know, kind of just having that discussion in an open ended way.
And again, I would compare this to a good discovery process that, you know, a salesperson would have to really try and understand who their buyer is, what their day to day life is, what they care about, what are they motivated by?
Right.
Is their goal to ship as much code as possible?
Is their goal to, you know, get this feature to market so they can close this customer?
Right.
So beyond just a surface level like, will you buy my product?
Hopefully you can get deeper into what is the, you know, motivators like as a person, what motivates them?
Right.
Like what do they really care about?
And maybe my specific, you know, version of this product isn't aligned with that, but, you know, from that root cause of what do they care about, what problems do they have?
You hopefully can have enough conversations to get some intuition of, you know, here are potential solutions to, well, first of all, what their actual problems are and then here are what potential solutions might be.
Omer (23:50.920)
I think you gave some great advice in terms of every founder starting out should try to get their first 10 paying customers without writing a line of code.
Brandon Foo (24:00.390)
Mm.
Omer (24:00.950)
The difficulty that I think a lot of early stage founders have is even if I get them to pay, like, what's the offer like, why would they pay me when I don't have a product when it might take me six months to come back with something?
So what exactly am I telling them that they're paying for, which creates enough sense of urgency to get their credit card out right now?
And so what was the offer or the promise you made for these people to get their credit card out now versus saying, yeah, come back when the product is ready and then we'll give you a credit card.
Brandon Foo (24:40.500)
So, you know, the Tesla Cybertruck?
Yeah, yeah, they announced it maybe two, three years ago and I don't know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people instantly put down $1,000 for the Cybertruck, it still hasn't seen the light of day two, three years later.
Omer (24:54.280)
Right?
Brandon Foo (24:54.600)
But there was enough there, there was enough of a compelling product.
I don't know if it solves a real problem, but, you know, enough of a compelling offer there that these people were willing to pay at least some non trivial amount of money at the promise of being able to eventually get this product.
Right.
And so I would look at it that way.
The money itself actually doesn't matter, right?
It's is this problem valuable enough that people are willing to pay some money and recognizing maybe there actually is some risk, right.
That this product is never going to see the light of day, even knowing that this problem is meaningful enough to me that I can put down $30 or $50 or $100.
Right.
If it's actually true that I can get this product and it will actually solve my problems the way that you're describing it, right.
And so I think that's really, you know, trial by fire.
Right?
And if you can't get at least, you know, 10 people, at least some number of people to pay a non trivial amount even if the product's not ready yet, right.
I think that's, you know, a sign that there may not be a compelling enough, you know, market or need in the market for what you're building.
You can phrase it in a number of different ways.
It could be, you know, to get on the wait lists, you know, it could be, you know, pre sale, it could be, you know, you'll get your money back if we don't ship by whatever date, you know, you can kind of figure your way around about it.
But I think the most important thing is it's not the money itself, right?
It's the indication, right, that this problem is valuable enough for this person, person to risk losing $30 or $50, whatever, right.
If it's actually, you know, the promise of the real solution is there, yeah, that's great.
Omer (26:28.920)
Okay, so when you did ship, well, actually, how many people did you convince to get out their credit card and give you money?
Like did you get to the first 10 before you shipped or started building the product?
Brandon Foo (26:41.400)
Yeah, we got to a few dozen Elliot's.
I don't remember exactly how much, but back then, yeah, back then we were paying 30 or we were charging $30.
And so it was a relatively small amount.
We should have charged more.
I think in hindsight we eventually did.
Over time we raised that price, of course, but yeah, we got to, you know, maybe 2030 customers or so that were paying us at least $30.
And that made up sort of our initial customer base.
And even beyond that, even after we did ship, our products evolved and iterate.
We iterated constantly over the course of maybe a year or so, and obviously we're still continuing that process.
But we had at least a core group of a few customers, a few dozen customers that we could test these ideas very rapidly, get feedback from.
And we knew that they were, at least they had some skin in the game.
They were paying us at least $30.
So they're not giving us, they're not lying to us.
If something's actually not valuable to them, then we have some reasonably reliable source of constant feedback that allows us to, to continue this process of iteration even beyond shipping that first version.
Omer (27:45.090)
Okay, so you spent a fair amount of time going out and interviewing prospective customers.
I think you said you aimed for or you got to about 100 interviews.
You were asking people to give you money before, I think you kind of already started building a product, but basically you were still getting people to give you money before the product had shipped.
And so you go out there and you've got a couple of dozen customers.
What did you do next?
What did your go to market, your initial go to market strategy look like?
And how did you try and find other customers?
Brandon Foo (28:28.650)
Yeah, so our initial go to market strategy was just emailing, calling, getting into demos, calls however we could with our friends, with friends of friends, anyone that we could who is remotely close to our ICP that we could get onto a call.
And really in those early days, I think it's a matter of being able to get a higher volume, a higher data set of feedback.
And as we grew from there, we eventually transitioned to more of a marketing based approach.
And so one of our first hires at Paragon was our head of marketing, Brian.
We brought him on maybe a little bit after our first year at Paragon.
And at that point we knew we had at least something working, we had at least some paying customers.
There was enough there that we could start to look at, okay, if we can sell to this set of customers, then I think we can start to scale to a broader audience.
So in working with Brian, we tried a number of different approaches and we tested all the usual suspects.
So email outbound, some content, and ultimately what we landed bid on that started working for us was performance marketing on social channels.
So we started off with some Facebook, some Instagram, some LinkedIn.
And over time what we found is that, you know, for us, obviously selling A B2B software products.
Facebook and Instagram worked a little bit when they started to introduce the iOS 14 privacy changes.
It completely fell off, basically.
So LinkedIn is what really ended up becoming our most consistently successful channel.
And still to this day, we or are able to utilize LinkedIn for a large amount of our marketing and lead acquisition.
I think that for any B2B software company or B2B company in general, LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools and channels out there for lead acquisition.
And it's definitely one that's, I think for us, you know, been one of the most successful drivers of our growth in the last couple years.
Omer (30:30.280)
Yeah, I mean, I think LinkedIn in terms of being able to target B2B customers is by far the best place to go and do that.
I know a lot of companies struggle with the cost of running LinkedIn ads and turning that into a positive ROI.
You guys have probably obviously managed to do that because you've got it working and you're still doing that.
What does a typical funnel look like?
If a Prospect is on LinkedIn, they're going through their newsfeed, what would they see about Paragon and what's the call to action and what do they do and how do they get to becoming a customer?
Brandon Foo (31:19.980)
Yeah, so at this point, our LinkedIn strategy, I would say is fairly sophisticated.
We utilize a variety of different types of campaigns on LinkedIn.
So a lot of what we do is actually not necessarily direct response.
We do have some that are direct response, like book a demo, but a lot of what we do is more top or mid funnel content distribution.
So Brian and our marketing marketing team creates content pieces, some long form content pieces that we use essentially as lead magnets in a way that can help qualify prospects who may be earlier in the buying journey.
Maybe not necessarily to buy or even book a demo quite yet, but an example is we wrote a guide on build versus Buy.
So what are the top criteria or factors you should consider when deciding to build your own integrations versus buying a platform like Paragon?
So this has been one of our highest performing pieces of content.
So if you're on your LinkedIn newsfeed and you're scrolling by, you might see this guide to add to Download our Build vs Buy guide.
And so, you know, from our perspective, we see if a prospect, you know, clicks on and downloads that piece of content, even if they're not ready to buy today, they're at least probably thinking about this problem.
Right.
There's some qualification there.
Right.
And so we can use that as a signal, you know, to further focus on certain prospects or certain audiences.
That's a very simple example and I think there's a lot more that we're doing now.
But more broadly, I think we found that LinkedIn is incredibly powerful, you know, not just for, obviously direct response, but for, you know, distributing a pretty wide variety of types of content and messaging on their platform.
I would say earlier on you talked about, you know, kind of the price and the cost of LinkedIn.
I would say, you know, certainly LinkedIn is more expensive than some other ad channels.
Earlier on, you know, I would say our approach is, you know, similarly taking a minimum viable approach to distribution.
So what that means is similar to building a minimum viable product.
You know, our goal was not to build the perfect or validate the perfect distribution channel, but to first see what works.
And, you know, with, you know, we tested email, we tested content, we tested LinkedIn just with the goal of seeing can we validate that we can at least consistently deliver leads at some reasonable price.
It doesn't have to be necessarily, you know, the fully optimized price.
But, you know, is there a, is there a possibility, you know, can we validate that?
There's a possibility that this can become a scalable long term channel for us.
And so in that process we ran a series of experiments to validate, okay, if what we're seeing LinkedIn is generating the most consistent results, maybe it is more expensive today, but in the last two years, and, you know, what we continue to do is optimize our approach to LinkedIn where we've been able to see, you know, really strong economics in general from LinkedIn.
And it's an ongoing process of iteration similar to, you know, how I would think, you know, we approach product development and it's one that we continue to this day with our distribution strategy as well.
Omer (34:22.349)
Great.
So, so basically, top of funnel, top of funnel, middle of funnel, you are distributing a bunch of content on LinkedIn using paid ads as a way to boost distribution, get it in front of more of the right people.
And really the goal there is education, demand gen and building some kind of retargeting audience that you can then run different types of ads to, you know, lower down in the funnel.
Brandon Foo (34:54.760)
Yeah, that's a simple example.
Or, you know, it's top of funnel piece of content, they download the ad.
In that process, you know, we can get their email and then, you know, with our SDR team or our sales team, now we have a list of qualified prospects that are at least somewhat warm.
We know that there's at least some interest to thinking about this problem.
Right.
That gives us a much more targeted audience.
And so I think, you know, the reason why this is so valuable and so powerful for B2B specifically is that you can take a very more holistic ABM approach rather than just, you know, consumer ads on Instagram where it has to more or less be direct response.
Right, because we can take an ABM approach.
You know, first of all, LinkedIn lets you feed an audience of really your entire list of companies or your list of prospects.
There's other criteria that they can use for targeting that's useful as well.
But yeah, I would say LinkedIn is just one part of several layers of our acquisition funnel.
But a lot of it starts with LinkedIn.
I think that's where we've seen the most consistent success in terms of the foundation of what we've built.
On top of that as our overall go to market strategy.
Omer (36:04.750)
What does the sales cycle look like from the time you do kind of first touch, maybe a demo to the point that you end up closing a deal?
Brandon Foo (36:16.830)
Yeah, it varies.
So we've seen two week sales cycles, we've seen two month and two quarter sales cycles as well, depending on obviously the size of the company, the nature of what they're trying to build on Paragon.
But overall our sales process is, you know, pretty straightforward.
So we have a team of SDRs, AES, Solutions Engineers as well.
Typically when prospects engage with us, they're signing up for a free trial or we're leading them through a proof of concept in some way.
Usually through that process we're able to demonstrate the value of Paragon through building a basic integration, for example, you know, some proof of concepts of, you know, here's the integrations that they're trying to deliver using Paragon.
And in that process we're able to obviously identify, here are the pain points that this prospect has and that Paragon can help solve for as we get into enterprise, you know, and larger prospects.
Of course, the process can involve quite a few more steps there as well.
But overall I'd say that kind of describes the shape of our sort of go to market sales process.
Omer (37:21.630)
What's typically involved in a customer setting up a first integration?
Can you just give me kind of like just very high level, like what are the steps involved?
How long does it take?
Is it something they can do in a day and it's pretty easy to prove that they can build integrations and get them working?
Or is onboarding still something that takes longer and you're still trying to figure out how to streamline and optimize.
Brandon Foo (37:50.670)
That's a great question.
So we have had customers go live with their first integration in as fast as a day or less on Paragon and at a very high level.
How it works is that we provide an SDK, a simple JavaScript SDK that you can embed into your application and then use our built in API connectors with third party integrations like Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, and provide those integrations as built in product features in your application.
So Paragon essentially lives as a layer of your application.
We have some built in UX components as well that allow users to say, connect their Salesforce account to authenticate.
And so we really make it as much as possible an out of the box experience for our customers who are setting up and building their first integration or even their 10th or 20th integration with Paragon.
So obviously by nature of software development in general, that can, the mileage can vary depending on the type of use case that you're building for.
Right.
A Salesforce integration could be very simple.
It could also be incredibly complex and can have, you know, many different functions, features, you know, capabilities.
And so kind of the balance that we try to strike is allowing our customers to get to market quickly, to get started as quickly as possible by providing as much out of the box with our API, our SDK and our platform in general, but still providing enough flexibility that allows our customers to still achieve much more complex use cases.
Right.
If they're trying to build a very deep Salesforce integration, that's real time, bi directional sync for multiple record types, custom field mapping, still providing that depth of functionality or the ability to achieve that depth of functionality with Paragon.
So it's not an easy balance to achieve, but I think that's one of the things that we try to focus on the most.
Omer (39:39.330)
How many integrations do you, do you support today?
Brandon Foo (39:42.930)
So we support about 90 integrations out of the box today.
So out of our integration catalog, these are pre built connectors, we have about 90 integrations today.
In addition to that, we also have a custom integration builder which allows our customers to actually create their own custom connectors with any integration as long as it has a public API.
So even if we don't support that integration natively as part of our catalog, we do have many customers who are creating their own connectors and integrating with Paragon that way.
Omer (40:12.670)
And your platform takes care of things like authentication and all of those things so that the integration that they have to do on their End is a lot simpler than it would be if they were doing everything themselves.
Is that right?
Brandon Foo (40:28.830)
That's exactly right, yeah.
So Paragon provides fully managed authentication.
So that means that Paragon securely stores and manages the credentials for your customers, Salesforce or Slack, HubSpot, other applications and we also provide out of the box UX components.
So what we call our Connect portal that you can display in your application to provide a Salesforce integration to your customer, allow them to, you know, one click on board to the Salesforce integration, authenticate their accounts, configure settings.
All that's provided as part of our platform that can be dropped into our customers apps.
And really what our customers do then is map the data between Salesforce and their application.
Right.
So if they're syncing contacts from their customer Salesforce account, you know, our customers just need to map.
Here's how contacts from Salesforce should map to contacts in our application.
For example.
Omer (41:23.050)
Okay, so you're, I think you said you're a team of about 30 people today.
And one of the things we were talking about before we started recording was some of the challenges that you're dealing with right now in terms of scaling as a CEO from kind of a business that's been very founder led and now you're building a team around you and getting the right people in place and kind of starting to let go of a lot of the things that you as founders were doing.
So that all looks good.
What are some of the challenges that you're dealing with right now as you make that transition?
Brandon Foo (42:01.280)
Yeah, so at just over 30 people right now, I'd say that we've definitely taken an overall pretty lean approach to building our company, which I think is the right approach.
But as a result of that, I'd say we're still very much in the transition phase from being a founder led company to building out an organization that scales beyond just myself and my co founder.
So I think there's ways in which we've done this well and ways in which we're still trying to accomplish this or could have done this sooner.
I think that as founders we have a natural tendency to want to hold on to the things that we do and maybe we are the best person at the company to do those things.
But that also first of all limits the ability for the company to scale over time and also limits the ability for your team members to grow into a position where they can be responsible and own areas that maybe, you know, I or my co founder are responsible for today.
Omer (42:55.040)
Can you give me an Example just to make it a little kind of more real.
Brandon Foo (42:59.280)
Yeah.
So up until we raised our Series A last year, our sales team was me and one account executive.
And so, you know, I think between us, we did maybe the first million in ARR at Paragon, which I think is okay.
But arguably, you know, we could have start to build, started to build our sales team sooner.
And so a lot of, you know, our sales process today still, I think, you know, is based on my intuition and what I've been doing in the last year, which has worked well for me.
Now we're in a process of, okay, how do we scale that to a team of SDRs and AES?
You know, we brought on our head of sales last year as well to help lead this process of really building our sales organization.
And I think, you know, that's one area where, okay, you know, we've proven that the founder can sell the product, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we can build out, or at least not overnight that we can build out a scalable team of AES that, you know, can do the same thing.
And I think, you know, that's an area that arguably, you know, we could have started doing sooner, maybe at half a million ARR, maybe even earlier than that.
And so I think it's hard to say, you know, for every company it's probably different.
And that's just one example.
I think we've, you know, many others as well.
But I think that's, you know, just a trade off that we have to make at some points.
And, you know, as founders, you know, we have to decide here's what we're going to be, you know, best in the world at, and that's, you know, going to be the highest leverage thing that we're going to do at the company.
And here's where, you know, we can build a team that can eventually, maybe not today, but eventually be way better than I am at doing this thing.
Right.
Omer (44:29.310)
Yeah.
So I want to ask a follow up question there because I think that might be a useful lesson for people in a similar situation other than hiring and building the sales team earlier.
If you knew a couple of years ago that in 2023 you were going to be dealing with this thing of trying to build out the sales team and scale it and kind of take yourself out of the picture a little bit, let these people kind of control their own destiny a little bit, whatever there's challenges you're dealing with other than kind of starting the hiring sooner, what would you have done a year ago 2 years ago that you think would have helped you be more successful today in achieving that outcome?
Brandon Foo (45:16.290)
Well, I think hiring is one aspect of it.
Right.
But I think ultimately it's a question of ownership.
One of our core company values is high ownership.
And what that means is, you know, we like everyone on our team to have a founder like mentality where, you know, we don't have to, you know, we're not telling people, here's exactly what you should do, but we're aligning on here the high level business objectives where we're trying to get to giving them ownership to solve that problem problem and to own the results, success or failure.
So hiring.
Yes, that's one part of it.
Right.
You have to have people in order to do those things.
But I think it's also, you know, a philosophical or, you know, shift in mindset and approach to, you know, building the sales organization or, you know, certain functions in engineering or in product.
Right.
If I can bring someone onto the team that's, you know, better than me or can be better than me at this thing, give them ownership over, you know, what this should look like one year or two year from now, two years from now, you know, that results one to two years from now, it could be much different than maybe it is today.
That's just one example.
But I think, yeah, part of it is the hiring.
But I think it's also, you know, kind of that mentality of ownership and, you know, giving the team members, you know, as much ownership as possible to, you know, own entire functions, projects, you know, teams of the business, which ultimately in the long term is good for you as founders.
Right.
To help you focus.
But it's also, I think, a necessary step for the business to be able to scale and to develop those leaders.
Right.
And you want to have as many of those leaders on your team as possible.
Omer (46:51.630)
Yeah.
And not kind of sounding doom and gloom, but that problem is just going to keep getting bigger as you hire more and more people right through the organization.
But it's part of the fun of being a founder, I guess.
Brandon Foo (47:05.550)
Well, it's always good to get people on the team.
I always want people on the team who are better than me at what we're doing.
So as long as that's the case, I think we're continuing to grow in the right direction.
Omer (47:17.470)
Cool.
All right, we should wrap up.
So we've got the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Brandon Foo (47:25.470)
Sure.
Omer (47:26.110)
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received.
Brandon Foo (47:29.880)
YC has some advice that your startup has never failed until you give up.
So I think there's always a way if you have the ability to learn and adapt.
And that's what we've tried to approach building our company with.
Omer (47:44.200)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Brandon Foo (47:47.320)
I'll go with the classic here.
I think this is probably required reading by this point, but the Lean Startup
Omer (47:52.280)
what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Brandon Foo (47:56.890)
Perseverance.
Like I said before, I think the most important thing for a founder is just never giving up.
Your startup has never failed until you do.
And I've seen a lot of companies founders who took them five years, maybe even 10 years to build a world class company.
Omer (48:12.810)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Brandon Foo (48:16.090)
I'll go with Polymail.
I don't know if that counts, but yeah, I'll give a shout out to Sunsama, another YC company.
They're a task management calendar tool.
I use it every day.
Incredible productivity app.
Everyone should check it out.
Omer (48:31.140)
I was looking at that the other day.
I think isn't it a combination of like a calendar and some time blocking or something like that?
Brandon Foo (48:37.540)
Yeah, it's kind of like asana and calendar in one.
The great thing is that you can take tasks from your to do list and you can slot them in as blocks in your calendar so you can be really proactive about planning your day.
A lot of the times as founders you're doing so many things, it's just like whatever is the highest or seems like the highest priority thing that comes up so you can actually have more discipline if you use it correctly.
About your daily productivity.
Omer (49:01.450)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Brandon Foo (49:05.450)
Okay, so I'll give you an idea that I think this will happen in the next five years.
AI generated influencers.
So right now on Instagram, you know, influencers Kardashian, like you know, with generative AI, I think it's been proven that we or people will eventually create, you know, completely AI based influencers.
Not only that, but they can also engage with fans, millions of fans on a one to one level.
It's completely outside of SaaS, but I think this is something that will be very likely to happen in the next five years.
I don't know if I'm the founder to do it, but I think that's one of the cool applications of AI.
We'll see soon.
Omer (49:46.220)
Yeah, I Think that's an interesting one.
And, and I can see as some of this AI technology continues to improve, how that becomes feasible.
I think today it's a very painful experience because one of the things that I've started to see more of on YouTube is these AI kind of generated videos where it's not a talking head, it's just like B roll and stuff that somebody's put together.
And there's almost like an AI generated voice which has no character or personality.
And you just like.
The headline kind of draws me in.
And then I listen to the first 10 seconds and I'm like, oh, another one of those.
It's like I'm seeing more and more of those coming, but I can definitely see, like, once you get to the point where that technology has evolved enough where it doesn't sound so boring or monotonous or whatever, that it could actually be a useful piece of content.
Brandon Foo (50:43.110)
Yeah, it's still early days, but I think we'll get there and I think we're getting there a lot faster than a lot of people expect.
Omer (50:49.510)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Brandon Foo (50:53.350)
Before this, my first aspiration was to be a musician.
I grew up playing music, violin, piano, guitar, some music production.
And I wanted to be a musician, an artist.
So I still have ambitions eventually of getting into.
Into the music or artist industry.
Probably not as a talent, but maybe as an investor, you know, we'll see what the future has in store.
Or maybe as a AI generated musician or artist.
Omer (51:19.890)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Brandon Foo (51:23.490)
Well, we already went over music, so I've been recently getting to golf a little bit more.
I grew up playing golf and recently started picking it back up.
Huge fan of golf and yeah, if any.
Any listeners are in la, I'd love to play around sometime.
Omer (51:38.960)
Sweet.
Brandon, thanks for joining me and sharing your story and some of the lessons you've learned along the way.
I think there's some really good stuff that you shared around, kind of going through the process a second time and what you've learned to do differently or some of the mistakes you've been able to avoid.
If people want to check out Paragon, they can go to useparagon.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Brandon Foo (52:05.640)
Yeah, you can add me on LinkedIn or on Twitter.
Follow me on Twitter at brandonwfoo.
And yeah, we'd love to connect.
Omer (52:15.320)
We'll include links to those in the show notes.
Cool.
Thanks, man.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for taking the time to chat.
I wish you and the team the best of success.
Brandon Foo (52:25.080)
Thanks, Omar.
I appreciate it.
Have a good one.
Omer (52:28.000)
Cheers.
