Omer Khan [00:00:00]:
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 Kaveh Rostampor, the co founder and CEO of planhat, a customer success platform that helps businesses keep customers and grow revenue. In 2014, Kaveh was working at a SaaS company dealing with a bunch of challenges around reducing churn.
Omer Khan [00:00:41]:
At the same time, his future co founder Nicholas, was trying to solve churn and retention issues using technology. Eventually, the two of them teamed up and started planhat. For the first six years, the founders bootstrapped the business. They had to be really careful with their cash, focusing on building a product that delivered real value. Getting initial customers was also tough. It required building a deep understanding of potential customers problems and relentless cold calling. As plan Hat started to grow, the founders faced a new challenge. Trying to make both small companies and enterprise customers happy.
Omer Khan [00:01:17]:
They had to make some tough decisions about which features to build to ensure their platform was powerful but but still easy to use. Despite these challenges, they kept pushing forward. There were moments of doubt and financial strain, but Kavi and Nicholas stayed committed to their vision and they constantly improved their product based on feedback and steadily gained traction. Today, planhat serves hundreds of customers with tens of thousands of daily users generating over eight figures in ARR.
Omer Khan [00:01:46]:
And despite having raised over $50 million, they haven't spent that money yet and continue to operate with a frugal bootstrapping culture. In this episode, you'll learn how Kaveh and Nicholas used their own experiences to build a product that solved a critical problem. How they leveraged just two customer acquisition channels to help them grow to eight figures in ARR.
Omer Khan [00:02:10]:
How the founders navigated the challenges of serving both smaller companies and large enterprise customers as they scaled why being smart with their money and maintaining a bootstrap mentality even after raising over $50 million was crucial for plan ad success and how the founders persevered through the challenges of bootstrapping, finding product market fit and fundraising to build a successful SaaS business. So I hope you enjoy it. Kaveh, welcome to the show.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:02:38]:
Thank you. Thank you.
Omer Khan [00:02:39]:
Omer, do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:02:45]:
Yeah, actually Don, I'm not big on quotes, but there's one I think is very good that we think a lot about when thinking about Planet Building Planet and it's we say that nothing of value comes easy. And I think that that's very true, at least for from my experience and experience of building this company.
Omer Khan [00:03:04]:
So tell us about planhat. What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:03:11]:
So planet is a customer platform built to retrain, retain and grow and service your customers. So you can think of it as like a post sales CRM that we built. Maybe a bit more nerdier way of thinking about it is that it's a time series CRM built for customers to understand their full sort of customer life cycle and give the help, give their customers a better experience. Yeah.
Omer Khan [00:03:41]:
Who are your typical customers? Maybe some, some logos.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:03:44]:
So you know we, we sell to data driven companies so we're starting out. We sell a lot to SaaS, software companies, but we also have a lot of customers in health care, MSPs, services companies, service security companies and whatnot. And interesting with our platform and our business is that we serve sort of both the SMBs fairly smaller, smaller companies up to very big, large enterprise companies.
Omer Khan [00:04:12]:
Cool. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:04:19]:
Yeah. So we are roughly 200 people split between both revenue and employees in both EMEA Europe and North America. We're eight figure business in ARR and we're growing.
Omer Khan [00:04:36]:
And I think you guys have raised about 50 million now, right?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:04:40]:
Yeah, yeah. So we, the background of the companies that we were bootstrapped for a very long time raised $50 million a few years ago, but sort of the bootstrap mentality has not disappeared. So company still has roughly $50 million in the bank and you know, operating similar to before.
Omer Khan [00:05:02]:
So when you say bootstrap for a long time, how, how long are we talking about?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:05:05]:
Oh man, the first six years of the company was a bootstrapped. So a fairly, fairly long time.
Omer Khan [00:05:11]:
That's a, that's a bootstrapped business. Right. Like some people say we bootstrap for the first six months. Right.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:05:15]:
But yeah, the first two weeks.
Omer Khan [00:05:18]:
Yeah, exactly.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:05:20]:
Cool.
Omer Khan [00:05:21]:
Okay, great. So before we get into like where the idea for this business came from, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your business background because I think that's pretty relevant to like how you know, plan hat came about. So like where, what were you doing before this business? What's your background?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:05:40]:
I work for. So I've done, I say to people to kind of done two things in my life. One is That I was used to be a fighter before studying and go to school at university. But after school university I joined you know, a software SaaS startup, a fairly small company back in the day from Scandinavia, Swedish myself. And this is now I think 19, soon 20 years ago. So yeah, that's how I learned business by working in software and SaaS.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:06:13]:
I joined that company when it was fairly small and I was there for a long time and helped to grow the company. It was, yeah, it was a SaaS business fairly early on. You know, thought about, you know, fighting churn, selling deals, entering new markets and whatnot for a long time.
Omer Khan [00:06:35]:
So you founded Plan Hat with your co founder Nicholas. Where did the idea come from?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:06:43]:
Yeah, so as I said, so I was working in a SaaS business, right and I was in charge of go to market teams, I was in charge of the customer success team there. And at a fairly young age I was managing you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in, in ARR and try to fight churn and reduce, reduce churn, do more upselling, grow, grow revenue from existing customers and whatnot.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:07:11]:
And you know, their thinking about the problem a lot that the problem of gross and net retention or problem slash opportunity of improving gross and net retention becomes bigger over time. And try to solve this by a bunch of different things. I don't have a technical background so try to solve it by addressing it through different salary models for post sale functions from you know, a bunch of different playbooks and just trying a million different things to solve gross net retention.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:07:53]:
So you know, identifying that like at the core this problem has to do with customer centricity. You know, where companies typically, when they're growing, they're thinking that you know, sales is typically king in a company. Sales is king. You typically see a lot of companies as they're growing and scaling quickly selling bad deals or non bad fit deals to their customers and as the company grows, net revenue retention becomes this key metric in companies.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:08:21]:
Sort of seeing that and also seeing that this is very much a technology problem, a time based problem that you need to sort of understand your customer data over time. I need to make sure that everybody in the company have access to customer data and whatnot. So that's sort of from thinking about this problem. And also Nicholas is my co founder. He's an amazing guy, you know, has a math background, national chess player, went on to be a management consultant and done a lot of really interesting things.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:08:58]:
And he sort of came to this a bit more from a technical perspective. He also worked in SaaS and software for a long time and try to solve for similar things, but by thinking about technology first and building products and technology for these things. So, you know, you have one co founder coming from there, sort of from my commercial background, the other one from my technical background, and be like, hey, like this is a problem.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:09:24]:
Like a lot of the CRMs and technologies out there, they're sort of mainly transactional systems built to help companies close deals, not necessarily to grow existing customers over time.
Omer Khan [00:09:39]:
Okay, great. So you've, you've seen the pain firsthand. You guys feel that this is a problem worth solving. How did you get started? Did you go out and do the whole, let's, let's validate this idea, let's find, you know, customers, potential customers to interview. Or was it more about let's start building the product? Like, how did you guys start?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:10:02]:
Yeah, no, it wasn't research based for sure. It was. Niklas was, we met many years ago and Nicholas was on paternity leave. And we're like, yeah, this is a problem. And Nicholas, you know, being a techie, he was like, I'll start building on this thing and let's see what comes out of it. So validating. I would say that. No, like we weren't out there researching and interviewing companies because we sort of felt this ourselves firsthand for many years. Felt the pain deeply. Right.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:10:32]:
So it was very pragmatic, like, hey, let's start to build the first version of this thing, see if we like it ourselves, if it works, and sort of take it to market. Now what was interesting for us was that very early on we started to get a lot of inbounds because it was obvious that it wasn't only us thinking that this is a problem, that the CRM sort of weren't sufficient enough for this problem. So a bunch of inbounds and, you know, plan has had this bootstrap story.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:11:03]:
But we had a, I remember that we had a very important customer fairly early on that invested in the company by buying the product and helping, helping to sort of shape the product? So that came from fairly early days. We had customers signing on and try to, you know, address this with the product that we started to build.
Omer Khan [00:11:26]:
How are they finding you?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:11:27]:
Yeah, it's a good question. Website SEO. I usually say that if you build a good product, people will find you in the era of Internet. But yeah, so it was, I can't think of that we did. There wasn't much SEO or paid advertisement that we did. It was, we had a website out and maybe there was some blog posts out there, but people found us.
Omer Khan [00:11:58]:
Yeah. So I know that in the early days, I mean, one of the biggest challenges that founders have at this stage is figuring out who is their ICP and what's the target market. And I know you guys got to a point where you were very focused on who that buyer was in a very specific problem in terms of like, you know, net revenue retention. But how did, how did that come about? Like, how did you figure out who your ICP was, what industry you were going to go after?
Omer Khan [00:12:34]:
Like, again, it's a pretty broad problem you're solving here and there's a lot of, you know, SaaS businesses out there and you know, already doing any kind of subscription talk business. How do you focus in so they know when they come across the product that this is what they need. Like, how did you go through that process?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:13:00]:
When we started out, we thought about the product and we still sort of think about the product as solving something much bigger than solving for churn. Right. We thought about like, hey, you know, you have this big, you know, big, big company, Salesforce with their CRM sitting in all these companies. It's a big system, it's clunky, it's super expensive. And like, we're like, hey, the world needs something else and let's build some platform, you know, inspired by Salesforce.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:13:34]:
But that where we look at, instead of having sort of the opportunity being center of the business and sales being king, making sure that the customer in center of the center of the business and making sure that everybody in the company can access information about the customer, which is the most important thing you have in your business. So that's how we started. And then we said, okay, so let's start with sort of selling this thing to SaaS B2B companies that are scaling fast.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:14:01]:
So today we have customers, you know, telcos, healthcare businesses, services businesses using planet. But when we started that, we were thinking that, hey, our ACP is just SaaS B2B businesses that are scaling fast and the problem we want to help them with is only to solve for churn prevention. So that's how we started out. And that was a big and still is a big enough problem for us and for our industry sort of to tackle. So that's how we started then.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:14:36]:
That was sort of the pitch, that was what the product was about early on and whatnot. But obviously as we grew, we saw that, hey, this customer centricity and having access to customer data and managing customers, giving customers a great customer experience throughout the Full life cycle. This is not just something that is important for SaaS B2B businesses. It's everywhere.
Omer Khan [00:15:01]:
How long did it take to get those first 10 customers a good.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:15:05]:
I think within the first year we got the first couple of customers. But I say like say 12 months, 612 months, the first 10 customers. And obviously it was fair to say too right. Is that plan is a bigger company today. But like when you're a small company you sell to other small companies. That's what you do. When you're a bigger company, you sell to bigger companies. And so yeah, and
Omer Khan [00:15:31]:
I think you mentioned earlier about that you sell to SMBs and to enterprise businesses. Was that something that you set out early on in terms of thinking about this as a enterprise type product or at least was that the vision or did that come later? And in those early days it was like our customer is like whoever will buy this thing from us.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:15:57]:
Yeah, no, I think that when you just, when you know, day one, we just start out the first couple of weeks, months, obviously whoever is willing to buy from you, you're happy. Right? But, but that said we were, I mean we. When I say that we sell to SMBs, we don't sell to you know, 10 man companies, 20 man companies. We, our, our product is not necessarily super cheap. So, so we don't sort of solve the very small companies out there. And early on we did speak about that.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:16:32]:
Hey, we think that our experience and knowledge sort of fits better if the company has some scale. So you know, today I think the Planet is good if you're at least fifty hundred employees and up. That was always been sort of that that's where we want to operate. But if you're 100 people or less than maybe planet is not always a good fit for you. So yes, early on we said that we want to build an enterprise grade product.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:17:03]:
So that's always been important for us which is why we spend just all this time building out the technology and product and security and all the things that comes around it if you want to serve larger companies.
Omer Khan [00:17:16]:
Let's talk about that journey to the first million in ARR. 99% of the time when I talk to founders and I'll say how did you grow or what worked? What didn't work? Paid ads is always like top of the list. We tried paid ads, didn't work and I asked you that question and paid ads was like top of the list in terms of one of the things that did work for you guys.
Omer Khan [00:17:40]:
So just tell us about how that worked for you and you know, how easy or hard was it to get that working as a growth channel for your business?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:17:53]:
Yeah. So paydad is definitely somewhere you can just spend a lot of money and don't see it's easy to spend money when it comes to paydad. So I mean, obviously I know about our business, I don't know about all the business out there that you speak to, but in a B2B setting, typically you're building a software that you're sort of selling to some division head of a company. You know, you may have, you sell something to a head of engineering, head of finance, head of head of something. Right.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:18:23]:
And I think that what helped, what helped in this case was that we sort of deeply understood the people we were selling the product to.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:18:33]:
So and if you fully understand the sort of, the challenges or if you deeply understand the challenges that the buyer of such a product would have or the department head of that function would have, and it's easier, I would say, to sort of tailor your messaging, both SEO and paid advertisement for, for that, for that buyer and the, the sort of more specific use cases you can, you can connect your messaging to the better and the more outcome based you are, the better.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:19:06]:
So I think that for us that was, that was, I mean that, that helped a lot. You know, and, and I say to a lot of people I meet that said, hey, nobody, you know, nobody says that, hey, I don't want to invest in improving my NRR. Nobody says all, I'm not interested, I don't want to improve my nrr. Like no, that's not a, that's not something that we, that we hear a lot. So I think that, that, that, that helps, you know, that together with like timing, targeting these ads and, and, and whatnot.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:19:36]:
And also we're not selling a product that is super cheap either. Right. So if you pay X dollars to get the person to do a demo with you and your contract sizes are fairly big, again, it's not $10 per month or something, then you can get the math to work.
Omer Khan [00:19:52]:
So back in those days, typically what was the average contract value of this type of deal?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:19:57]:
Early and maybe first 1, 2 years, $10,000 ish per year and then yeah, I would say around 10k and then up from there. Yeah.
Omer Khan [00:20:10]:
So you're using paid ads and you mentioned SEO. So basically the hypothesis being that you know, your icp, they have this pain, they're probably searching for some kind of solution. So let's spend some ad dollars to get in front of them. Let's also do a great job with organic search because then we don't have to pay for those clicks. And especially as a bootstrap business, right? This is not like you don't have a lot of money to blow on paid ads.
Omer Khan [00:20:44]:
Once you were getting leads coming through these channels, what was happening, how easy or hard was it to close these types of deals and who was doing the selling?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:20:57]:
One thing that, I mean obviously I'm biased here but I think that we have a great product. We've always had a great product. Obviously it's way stronger today than it was day one or year one. But product has always been something that we have wanted to lead with. We say that we're a product company first and foremost. We take great pride in our technology. So we always say that hey, if we get somebody to just see this damn thing and they will buy like it's a good product, it creates a lot of value.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:21:28]:
And you know, it's as I said, like if we help you to improve your net revenue retention, get faster time to value to hire less people in your post sale function and scale. Well, you know, with our product more than you would do without our product, you know, it's an easy investment. It's easy to justify the investment. So I think that getting, if you get to we got people to view the product and get a demo of it and try it out a bit then we typically always have done really well.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:22:06]:
The times when we have not still today we don't do well if it's more around brand recognition or not getting the foot in the door in the first place. So let's say that in the early, early days who sold like I know Nick Klasser, our CTO co founder, he sold deals even though he's an engineer. So that's cool. I've sold deals obviously so anybody. We had a very flat organization early on. So you know everybody that we had people in customer success support selling deals early on. So and that helped.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:22:40]:
But obviously for myself and Niklas being you know, senior in the space and understanding the problem deeply and product really well. So fairly easy to sell a deal, a $10,000 deal in early stages and you know, so yeah, cool.
Omer Khan [00:22:55]:
I know the other growth channel that worked well for you guys was just doing direct sales and cold calling and you made the point that cold calling is not dead. So what were you doing there and why do you feel that you were able to have some success with just calling people?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:23:19]:
So again like you know what problems you're solving, you have A hopefully a very good product, competitive product and you have a buyer that you identified. You know, this is the person that's head of this department or function or the workflow that we can help or reduce cost or whatever it is that you can help the customer with.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:23:38]:
Just getting the fastest way from point A to point B is to get a hold of that person and get the person on a call or on a zoom meeting and describe what you're doing and see if you can be helpful. So that has worked well for us. And yeah, you know, personally, I've been involved in a bunch of different companies throughout the years as board members, you know, early, early employee of companies that grow to be very big public companies, private companies, whatnot. Like direct sales works really well. It's a very efficient.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:24:12]:
If you get it, if you get it to work. But as you're saying, it typically obviously starts with having a good product and two, that you know who you're going to talk to about what. I think that it sounds very basic, but it's surprising how many companies I think or people struggling with that.
Omer Khan [00:24:36]:
Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things where whether you're doing cold calling or cold email is like just, just the relevance.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:24:44]:
Right.
Omer Khan [00:24:45]:
If, if you're, if you're talking to the right person about the right problem, it's a much easier conversation than, you know, just kind of, you know, what did I say? Like spray and pray. Right. In terms of I'm just going to try and contact everybody and, and hope that there's somebody out there who might have this problem and then the.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:25:07]:
On that too. Right? It is. So if you're head of a function like your job is to find ways of creating more efficiencies in your business, part of the job is to buy software, is to implement methodologies or whatnot to just make your team more efficient and grow faster, more profitable and whatnot. So if you're the right person about the right things. It happens all the time. Yeah, people call me all the time. Sometimes it works.
Omer Khan [00:25:40]:
How did that play out? Once you started building a sales team, you're starting to hire salespeople. Was cold calling still part of the kind of the plan?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:25:52]:
Yeah, so yeah, yeah, of course, yes. But I would say that majority, up until maybe just one two years ago, majority of our sales was on inbound still. So again. Right. So we're solving this fairly. Starting out, we started to solve this very niche problem which is to improve their net revenue retention. We have a very good product, great reviews Customers speaking well about us customers changing jobs and buying our product again and again.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:26:25]:
And, and we are, I think what's important is that we're sort of operating in different markets so we don't have a sales or go to market team sitting in California where I live and try to sell to companies all over the world or all regions or all, you know, countries.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:26:44]:
We have sort of this go to market motion where and this is start when we started to hire people on the salespeople that, you know, if you're buying plan hat today in France, you speak to a French ae, you speak to French speaking customer success managers or people that implement your software. There's a person that speaks French that is head of that market. Same thing if you're in Germany or you're in Scandinavia or in the UK or US or whatnot.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:27:13]:
So that localized approach has, has always helped us a lot, you know, so, so that has helped. I think that's one. And then second thing is that when you're looking to buy software like this, again, if the people you speak to and is servicing you is just local to you, that this is something that we experience is helping a lot. So was outbounding a strategy from early days? Yes, but it was enough.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:27:47]:
You know, obviously when you're a smaller company, if you do inbound, well, there's enough to just focus on for the sales team in the early days. But then, yes, as you know, we're hitting scale, you need to have other channels helping out too.
Omer Khan [00:28:08]:
When I talk to founders who are, you know, on their journey to, let's say the first million in ar, there's often this assumption that, you know, you've got to be, you got to have a ton of different growth channels. You got to be trying, you know, seven, eight, nine things and, and working all of these channels to, to acquire customers.
Omer Khan [00:28:32]:
And one of the things that you had said earlier on when we were kind of preparing for this was, you know, focus on like just one or two channels even to get to like the first 10 million in ARR.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:28:47]:
So
Omer Khan [00:28:49]:
just kind of tell me about that. Just help kind of rationalize that for somebody who's thinking sort of very counter to that kind of point of view.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:29:00]:
I think it's easy when you start out that you have these, I don't know, um, that you listen to all this advice from different people and there's all, you know, somebody was very successful with partnerships from inbounds, outbound enterprise sales, plg and you, and you get excited and you think that, well, it Worked for those people, so you should work for me. I think that that's, I think focus is extremely important. Yeah. So I think. So I think that 2 channels for the first $10 million in revenue. Absolutely. I think that that's plenty.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:29:33]:
I do think that again, the place to start is to think about, hey, who am I solving a problem for? And that needs to be extremely clear. And it shouldn't be a problem that only I think that I'm solving for the person. But the person is like, yeah, I'm head of whatever function in a company. I think that this is a problem. I want to have a product or service that, you know, help me reduce costs doing this thing or grow faster or whatever it is that you're trying to do. Right.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:30:05]:
I think that nailing that early on is very important. And then nailing sort of the product, making sure that the product is actually creating value and it's not something that you think is creating value that like is actually creating value. I appreciate that it sounds very basic, but like get. Spending time getting that right, then experimenting with 10 different channels. I think that I would focus more on the first. Now the. In a B2B setting. Again in a B2B setting. I think that, you know, there's a lot of companies going plg.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:30:42]:
Some people, companies starting out, they just want to serve the enterprise or mid market or whatnot. I think that like companies should, I think it's good if you sort of focus on the segment where you feel that you have maybe a the founding team or the first couple of employees in the, in the company. We feel that, hey, we understand this segment really well. So if none of us have ever done PLG before and we're all, you know, in our entire careers we've been doing enterprise B2B software sales.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:31:12]:
You know, I feel like, hey, let's do a PLG motion. Like we've never done it. Like it's not, it's not as easy as you may read about in a blog post. And the same thing if you're a PLG experience and background as a founding team and be like, hey, let's start selling to the enterprise. Like it's. Stick to what you know really well and sort of do that, do that.
Omer Khan [00:31:32]:
Well, did you try doing plg?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:31:34]:
No, we've never done the plg. And again, it's not that core experience in our sort of management team today. And we said that like until we have, we have people that are, you know, have deep understanding of the PLG motion, we're not Going to sort of
Omer Khan [00:31:52]:
do that, stick with what you know.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:31:54]:
Right, yeah, yeah.
Omer Khan [00:31:57]:
Let's talk about. I want to go back to this thing about serving SMBs and enterprises and one of the challenges of that is like how do you build the right product for two very different types of customers? I think. Right, so was this a struggle for you guys?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:32:18]:
Oh yeah, man, it's still a struggle, you know, because at the end of the day, like it's about how do you prioritize your resources and resources are always limited. You don't have unlimited resources to serve both enterprise customers and smaller companies. So I feel that it's still a challenge with our company. You know, as the years pass, we sort of getting closer to picking lanes and saying no to business, which is obviously hard to do, especially if you have a bootstrap background.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:32:54]:
But yeah, I think that, you know, it has a lot to do with the depth of the platform that you have enterprise functionality to spill out, the security layers and just all the things you need for enterprises. It just takes time to do. But once you've built it and if you have a sort of modular platform where you can sort of make it be also easy to use and just fit for smaller companies, if you can, I mean, then you can obviously serve both. But that's, that's just on the product and product side. Right.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:33:29]:
I think that it's an equal big challenge on the go to market sides if you have say salespeople that again, like have a enterprise background, enterprise sales motion background to hire those people and say, hey, go out and sell ten $20,000 contracts. Like that's, that's hard. And the same thing if you have very transactional sellers in the business saying that hey, go and chase this big, you know, public company, I think that that's equally hard.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:33:54]:
So, so getting these things right is, I think it's, I think for us at least it's still something that is hard that we struggle with. How do we organize the teams, how do we package the product, how do we charge for different things? How do we let people, companies that are fast scaling to scale with us, you know, and maybe bring them on board even though they're small and yeah, just, just be able to sort of live up to the promises that we make to both big and small companies? It's hard.
Omer Khan [00:34:23]:
I mean somebody listening to this might be wondering like, why not just like what's holding you back from picking a lane from just saying like we just go all in with SMBs or we just do enterprise. I can just Explain what the challenges of that.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:34:37]:
It's a very good question, man. I mean, when we have our management meetings at Planet, I ask the same question. We speak it in our board. It's a very, very good question. I don't have a good answer to it, to be honest. I think that there's two things, why it's hard. One is that if you are successful with. I think, yeah, if you're successful with serving both segments, then it's hard to say no to one of the segments, right?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:35:07]:
So if you come to our, you know, if I come to your company, say, and I'm like, hey, Omer, like, forget about this segment. Just focus on this other one. You're like, hey, I'm doing well here. Why would I, why would I stop? It's different if you're struggling as a business, right. And I'm like, hey, why don't you pick one of these lanes? It's hard to do well in both. So I think that that's one.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:35:29]:
The second thing is that, at least for us, if you come from a bootstrapped business and bootstrap background, it's very hard to say no to business. You know, it's. Theoretically, it's easy. It's easy in an Excel sheet to justify it, but like, you're out there in the fight and somebody's there, they want to pay you, say, half a million dollars, but for some reason, you can't serve that big company. Like, it's hard to be like, oh, no, it's not right for us.
Omer Khan [00:36:00]:
Yeah, yeah, I think that's. It's almost like it would be easier if you weren't doing well with one of those segments. Right. The decision is like.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:36:08]:
But also just on that, I think another thing is that even though, and you know, what is doing well, you can always do better. You could argue that, hey, you would do better as a company if you actually picked a lane and just focused even more. So that's the other side of that, I think.
Omer Khan [00:36:25]:
Right. You mentioned the kind of the bootstrap mindset and kind of difficulty saying no to business. Completely understand that. Did you, did you say at the beginning that you'd raised the 50 million but pretty much most of that money was still in the bank?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:36:41]:
Yeah, yeah. So.
Omer Khan [00:36:43]:
So the company is growing. You got, you got like a couple of hundred people in the company, well funded, generating, you know, eight figures in revenue. Is that bootstrap mindset just with you and Nicholas, or do you still try to kind of create that as part of the culture in the company.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:37:04]:
Yeah, I think that if we're trying or not, it is part of the culture in the company. You know, early days I say that when you're bootstrapped. The good thing with being bootstrapped is that when you start out, you know, everything everybody is doing has to create real value, you know, real value. If it doesn't, then you will die.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:37:27]:
Now that, and if you operate like that for many years and then, you know, get a big sum of money on your bank account that doesn't disappear over time, you know, it sort of becomes part of your culture, it becomes part of the standards you have for, for yourself and for each other. That hey, we're not going to have any people that in the business that's not creating value, that, you know, we're just not going to be that kind of company.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:37:50]:
So I would say that it's, yeah, it's, it's not from the founders, but it's like it is how we operate, how we think about things. It's also core if you think about the platform and the mission that we're at. Right. We think that hey companies, there's like this big era where businesses are moving away from being promised things, you know, in this sort of sales driven world to a place where people will only pay you for the value that you actually deliver to them.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:38:19]:
See this in subscription business models and you know, consumption based business models and whatnot. And when you're operating in these business models, you have to create actual real value for the customer. And that means that like internally you need to be value driven. So yeah, it's very core to the mission at hand, how we started the business and how we just operate.
Omer Khan [00:38:41]:
And on that note, I think we should wrap up and get onto the lightning round. So I've got seven quick fire questions for you. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:38:54]:
Yeah, so I don't know if I have the best business advice, but I think a good advice is like don't listen to advice, especially from people that haven't done the things that you're trying to do. So yeah, so anybody listening to this like you're on your own path. What may have worked for us doesn't work for anybody else. Like it's.
Omer Khan [00:39:15]:
Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, having done like, you know, like over 400 of these interviews, it's like, it's amazing how you come across people who do founders who do exactly the same things and get completely the opposite results from that. And so to Be able to just say, go and do XYZ because it worked for so and so is like, that's a dangerous kind of, you know, thing to do. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:39:45]:
So I think I worked for a guy who recommended the good. The book Good to Great by Jim Collins many, many, many, many years ago. I think. I still think it's a great business book. You know, empirically speaks about sort of what sets great companies away apart from good companies. I think it's a great book. I haven't read it now for many years, I'll admit, but, like, it's a good book. Cool.
Omer Khan [00:40:10]:
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:40:15]:
Successful founder. I think you need to be very good at building teams. Yeah. Especially if you want to scale something. I think that's very important. It's always important that you are resilient and like that you. That you stick to the things. But I think if you cannot build the teams, you're not a good team builder. It's harder than to build a successful company.
Omer Khan [00:40:38]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:40:42]:
I don't have any productivity tools, but I say to all our employees as often as I can that they need to sleep well if eat well and exercise every day. I do that myself. I think that that's my best productivity hack.
Omer Khan [00:40:57]:
Cool. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:41:04]:
I don't have one. I mean, I work. I'm very passionate about Planet, so I think it's the best thing ever. So I don't have one.
Omer Khan [00:41:13]:
And what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:41:17]:
I think your audience don't know that I used to be a fighter. I've been a Swedish champion in martial arts many times. I've been fighting for the national team. I've been. I still fight. So, yeah, I'm a good fighter.
Omer Khan [00:41:31]:
Wow. So. So, like, it's something that you still, like, train seriously for, like, even now, like while you're still running. Plan hat.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:41:40]:
Yeah. Being a serious fighter is hard as you sort of get older. It's really that way. It's not. Yeah. It's not like a lot of sports, but yes, you. I still work, you know, go to the gym. I still do martial arts. Yes. It's. I do. It's just like, it's definitely. It's, it's. It's absolutely not at the same levels as.
Omer Khan [00:42:06]:
As earlier and what is this? Is this like Taekwondo, or was it. Is that what I came across?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:42:11]:
Yeah. I started out doing taekwondo. I do jiu jitsu. I've been doing Muay Thai. I've been doing a bunch of different sports.
Omer Khan [00:42:19]:
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:42:24]:
So I have a family, three kids. I have a dog, and as I said, I work out, and I work a planet. That's sort of my life. That's what I do.
Omer Khan [00:42:35]:
As long as you're happy, that's all that matters, right?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:42:37]:
I am happy. Love it.
Omer Khan [00:42:40]:
Okay. Gavi, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure chatting. If people want to find out more about Plan Hat, they can go to planhat.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Kaveh Rostampor [00:42:52]:
Send an email or. Yeah, email is best. My first name at Planet is a good one.
Omer Khan [00:42:59]:
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for making the time. I know it's a lot to unravel, kind of going back almost a decade and distilling that down, but appreciate you doing that, and congratulations on everything you've done so far, you and Nicholas and the team, and I wish you all the best of success.
Kaveh Rostampor [00:43:19]:
Thank you. Thank you, Omar.
Omer Khan [00:43:20]:
My pleasure. Cheers.
