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 took to Palash Soni, the co founder and CEO of Goldcast, a video campaign platform that helps B2B marketers create, boost and share content. In 2020, while at Harvard Business School, Palash and his co founders spotted an opportunity when everything went virtual during the pandemic.
Omer Khan [00:00:44]:
They started Goldcast as a digital events platform focusing on helping B2B marketers get more measurable results. But getting those first customers wasn't easy. Cold emails and outreach efforts weren't working until they eventually realized it was their product's user interface that was holding them back. They spent a grueling five overhauling the user interface, which finally helped them to start getting some traction. Their big break came when Drift became a customer after seeing Goldcast in action, and this opened the doors to more B2B marketers and helped fuel their growth.
Omer Khan [00:01:15]:
But as the market evolved, Palash noticed signs that customer retention was becoming a potential issue, and he made the tough call to pivot the company's focus and expand beyond just events into a full video content platform. His team pushed back, but Palash was convinced it was the right move. And it was a risk, but one that paid off. Today, Goldcast serves over 300 customers, generates more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue, and has raised $30 million in funding.
Omer Khan [00:01:42]:
In this episode, you'll learn how Palash and his team found their fit in the competitive virtual event space, why the product's user interface was crucial and how improving it jumpstarted their growth. The challenging decision to change their business model and expand their product offering, how running their own events became their most effective marketing strategy, and why Bahlash thinks they might have overinvested in customer support and the unexpected benefits they got from that. So I hope you enjoy it. Bahlash, welcome to the show.
Palash Soni [00:02:12]:
Very glad to be here.
Omer Khan [00:02:13]:
Omer, do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Palash Soni [00:02:18]:
I do, I do. It's a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, which is like our odyssey in India. It's called Karmanye Vadikara Ste Mafaleshu Kadachan, which roughly translates to you have the right to work, but you should not expect the fruits out of it, which is something that my grandfather used to Use a lot in childhood and it kind of contributed to making me a workaholic.
Omer Khan [00:02:43]:
So you have the right and duty to work, but should not expect the fruits of that work.
Palash Soni [00:02:48]:
Yes.
Omer Khan [00:02:48]:
That's kind of pretty deep.
Palash Soni [00:02:50]:
It is. That whole book is pretty deep.
Omer Khan [00:02:52]:
Yeah.
Palash Soni [00:02:55]:
Cool.
Omer Khan [00:02:56]:
So tell us about Goldcast. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Palash Soni [00:03:02]:
Yeah. So Goldcast is a video campaign platform meant for B2B marketers to create, amplify and distribute content. So we help marketers from companies all the way up to 200 people, startups all the way up to workday, Intuit, Zscaler Enterprises to run events, webinars, podcasts, and then turn that content into other types of content like short form clips, blog posts and emails, et cetera, and then distribute and measure that across the customer buying journey.
Palash Soni [00:03:32]:
So the problem we are solving is that we provide one consolidated platform to help marketers do video at a very high scale and quality, which is generally a hard problem.
Omer Khan [00:03:45]:
Yeah, yeah, it is. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
Palash Soni [00:03:53]:
Yeah, we are north of eight figures in ARR. So that's revenue. We have 125 employees. So that's 60% in India, 40% in the US and then 400 customers.
Omer Khan [00:04:07]:
Awesome. And you're based in Boston?
Palash Soni [00:04:10]:
I'm based in Boston, other side of
Omer Khan [00:04:12]:
the country from me. And you've raised, I think just around 40 million so far.
Palash Soni [00:04:19]:
Correct. That's over three dots.
Omer Khan [00:04:20]:
Great. And you guys founded this business in 2020. So it's been about four May of 2020. Yeah. You've been busy for the last four years or so.
Palash Soni [00:04:29]:
Oh, very busy.
Omer Khan [00:04:32]:
All right, so we're going to get into that, so why don't we. Let's start with like, you know, 2019. 2020. Like where did the idea come from? How did you get started with this business?
Palash Soni [00:04:42]:
Yeah, so I'll go to 2019, which is when I decided that I want to become an entrepreneur. And that time I was working at my last company, which had the market in the US I was a PM based in India and I realized that kind of doesn't work because I'm too far from my market. So I decided to come to business school and use that as an area to explore ideas. So I was just.
Palash Soni [00:05:06]:
I just had a Google sheet of ideas that I wanted to explore in business school and I found my co founders here as well. So they were Also people with the same mindset and then not many people coming to business school to start up. So we found each other and started jamming. This idea was actually an opportunistic bet at that time. This was around can say April of 2020 when we started thinking about this. Covid had hit. It was apparent that digital events will become a thing.
Palash Soni [00:05:37]:
But we spent two months at the time and everyone was building to kind of hone in on what should the approach be so that this can become a big and sustainable business.
Omer Khan [00:05:47]:
Great. Okay, so did any of you have any experience building a startup or working in a startup prior to that?
Palash Soni [00:05:56]:
So I was working at, I would not say a startup, but a growth stage company. And I had put in one attempt before for eight, nine months and that absolutely bombed. So I had some learnings from that time. My other co founder, he was@jet.com when it was just started. So from that time up to the time it got sold to Walmart, he spent time there. So he was a startup engineer.
Palash Soni [00:06:19]:
My third co founder, Kishore, he was a classic B school guy, BCG and some strategy roles, and never did actual real work, but only in big companies. But he turned out to be very good at it.
Omer Khan [00:06:33]:
Awesome. Okay, so you've got this idea, you start sort of building it. And how did you validate the idea? Did you do, you know, go out and start finding customers and doing interviews or build a landing page and see if you could get people signing up? Like what was. How did you guys get started?
Palash Soni [00:06:50]:
Yeah, so when we, when this opportunity opened up, this market had already become pretty hot and crowded because there was nothing much to do right during the pandemic time to do digital events. So we realized that if we go super horizontal, we'll get killed. And also that probably might not be sustainable because I kind of saw that in my last company where we were trying to do too much in a very broad swath of market and ended up not being super good at anything.
Palash Soni [00:07:18]:
So we went in with a hypothesis that was a very simple to understand hypothesis that came from my own experience that marketing channels have to be inherently measurable for them to be sticky. And so we said, okay, let's make a digital events platform that has measurability built into what it's doing. And there are two Personas doing events that need that. One is B2B marketers and others is trade shows. So we built a hypothesis first and built a pitch as to what the product will do. And then we started cold emailing people.
Palash Soni [00:07:53]:
So that was out of necessity, because we didn't have a network here in the US So we just cold emailed a lot of folks. We tried to find common connections. So any Harvard Business School alums or undergrad alums who are in the Bay Area, et cetera, and see who would bite and give us feedback.
Omer Khan [00:08:14]:
And what kind of response did you get? Like how easy or hard was it to get a reply from people?
Palash Soni [00:08:20]:
I guess so we kind of used that as an indicator for what market is designating more. So I think we sent roughly like 200 emails, half to trade show organizers and parties in that and then other half to what were field marketers. Right, people who were doing events already and were reliant on events and companies. And we got a good response rate from field marketers so they would be like, okay, I'm interested in checking it out. This is a relevant thing that speaks to me.
Palash Soni [00:08:51]:
In trade shows we did not get as much and, and even on the calls we were seeing that they were probably not in tune with what we were thinking. So that traction was some kind of an indicator for us too that where the market actually could lie.
Omer Khan [00:09:06]:
And what was the offer in the email like? Did you have anything to show them at the time?
Palash Soni [00:09:12]:
Yes. No, actually, no. We just had an offer which said, hey, this is, you know, we are actually, we used paid the student card at that time. So we had three students at Harvard Business School. We see this thing in the digital event space that we can build a product for you that can help you create measurability across your digital events and get a seat at the revenue table by showing that impact to your cmo. And that was also a message that I think after two or three conversations got refined.
Palash Soni [00:09:43]:
So early on it was very simple that we can help you throw events and measure it. And then when we started talking to people, we realized, oh, they actually want to show what the impact is because it's very hard to for event marketers to show that versus say digital marketers who are doing ads on LinkedIn. Very measurable. So we started anchoring on that and then that was the thing we were asking feedback. We were not selling anything. We said, we have some early ideas, we want your feedback, your advice. Yeah, that was it.
Omer Khan [00:10:14]:
Actually that's quite smart. I mean it wasn't a huge sample set of 200 emails, but there was clearly like one ICP or segment of the market that seemed more interested and one clearly wasn't at the time. So that was great. And then as you start to have these conversations how long did it take for you to get to the point where you landed those first 10 customers and what was that journey like?
Palash Soni [00:10:46]:
So from this point it took us a lot of time. Actually. We started doing this in May and then we got our first customer end of January in 2021. Yeah. Which was a pretty long time given that there was an immediate need for something like this. And that was a whole process of struggle.
Omer Khan [00:11:04]:
Yeah, yeah. So that was the first customer, the
Palash Soni [00:11:08]:
first paying like big annual contract customer came in end of Jan and like
Omer Khan [00:11:14]:
number one, like why do you think it took that long to land that customer? Was it because, you know, it was kind of a product issue, the product wasn't ready or something? Or was it more about finding the right type of customer? Like, you know, we find lots of people who look at a product or an idea and they think, you know, they'll tell you it's great and they love it and whatever. And then once you kind of ask them to buy, they ghost you.
Palash Soni [00:11:43]:
It was a mix of both. Omar. So we started with this idea of measurability and we were like, okay, let's go hard on integrations and analytics. So we built a product that was out there. We took two, two and a half months to do that. And then we had a lot of emphasis on integrations and analytics and dashboards. We had some basic versions of that and then we had some customers who were like, okay, yeah, we can use it. When you have it, please bring it to us.
Palash Soni [00:12:12]:
And when we brought it to them, they would not buy it. They would either be a little non committal or not take it. And that time the market we were going after was startups, so 50 people or less, like series A seed state startups. And we thought it's easier to get in with them, they are more innovative, have less barrier to use new things. And after not getting any traction, we started thinking maybe this is not a product that should be built. Because the market was already heating up at that time.
Palash Soni [00:12:44]:
There were multiple players with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding at that time and the fault lines were not clear. And we started at one point very deeply thinking whether we should pivot out of building a full events platform and just to integrations that can plug into other events platforms. There was a very deep discussion in our team because not getting any traction was causing some kind of demoralization to us founders and to the three, four people we had.
Palash Soni [00:13:15]:
So we ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons, but that turned out to be a good call. What was actually inherently problematic in the product, which I discounted heavily early on, was that it's UI was not good. So I was in the classic camp of PMs who thought UI was always secondary, but in our product the UI was the space, right? The venue where events were happening and people did not want their venue to look like what we looked like at that time.
Palash Soni [00:13:46]:
And I felt like people were always saying that, telling it to our face in some ways, in nicer ways probably than they should have been, but I always discounted that. And at some point we made that decision, saying, okay, let's change the ui, so we work day and night and change the UI completely in five weeks. And that sort of turned, turned something that helped get some initial traction.
Omer Khan [00:14:12]:
Yeah, I mean looking back at this and the way that you explained it makes a lot of sense, right? Because if you're giving a marketer, let's say like some kind of tool and they're going to be using it, I don't know, some social media scheduling tool. Right. They don't really care how nice it looks as long as it makes their job easier. Right. But in this case the product was going to be. Their customers would be seeing the product. Right. And so there's a higher expectation.
Omer Khan [00:14:40]:
But I'm curious, like you said, they were telling you in different ways that the UI was possibly the issue and you, you were discounting that at the time. How did you figure out that the UI really was the issue and then committed to the next five or six weeks to rehaul this thing? It wasn't just a hunch, Right. Something happened that made you guys think, okay, this is really why we're having problems.
Palash Soni [00:15:14]:
Yeah, absolutely. So when we, when we decided to not just be an integrations product, we realized that there's something wrong. Right. Because the need for this is apparent. It's out there. Why are we not getting traction? Why are people not using us? Why are they being non committal? And one other hack that we used at that time to get some early customers is to bring on some advisors.
Palash Soni [00:15:41]:
So we deliberately targeted people who were sort of mid level, so director, ish type, people in good roles who have an idea of the landscape of the market and they gave them equity in the company saying, okay, you help us navigate this early phase and if we are successful then you make money.
Palash Soni [00:16:00]:
And the main thing I think that was motivating for them is that they wanted to be associated to startups and give that advice, which is not an option that was easily available to people in corporates at that time, I think it's probably more common now. So a lot of them started telling us. One of our advisors, she was in a large enterprise, and she always used to belittle our ui. And I always thought that maybe it's her personal preference.
Palash Soni [00:16:28]:
But then I started going and talking to people again and saying, okay, if not this, then why? What is causing this blocker? And they would always say, this, you. Then I started listening that, okay, it's probably the ui, it doesn't look great. And I could not probably empathize with that first. But I think the extreme push of not having traction made us take that call. Honestly, it wasn't actually while we were even overhauling, clear to us that this will solve the problem.
Palash Soni [00:16:59]:
But now, if I look back at everything that we know, even today, we get feedback from customers in our NPS saying, okay, this product looks great, and that's why I bought it.
Omer Khan [00:17:09]:
I think I love what you just said. That the extreme pressure of not getting traction made you pay more attention to what people were saying.
Palash Soni [00:17:18]:
Yeah, yeah, right. I was probably a little too. Little too dogmatic about what I thought the market should want than actually listening to what they wanted, which was a lot simpler, just a better ui.
Omer Khan [00:17:31]:
Okay, great. So you guys spent the next five, six weeks, you said you significantly improved the ui, and then what happened? Was there a immediate turnaround in terms of the way people were reacting?
Palash Soni [00:17:45]:
Yes. So we already had some people, that initial set of people who responded to us. A lot of them were startup folks, and we started showing it to them, and we could see that reaction. Right. That was different. And they were like, wow, yeah, I want to try it out. And so some marketers started trying it out. At that time. We did not have a backend. So trying it out meant like speaking to someone in the company and giving them an email of what their venture looked like, and then we'll build it for them.
Palash Soni [00:18:14]:
It was very manual, very cumbersome, but we did that for the first few customers. And then one thing that we realized was that there was within that set, there were a couple of companies that were bigger. And we did not anticipate that they will bite, but they started getting in touch with us, and one of them was actually pager duty. So there was a lot of. And that deal did not come through because they had a lot of security stuff that we were not qualified to do.
Palash Soni [00:18:49]:
But that gave us a signal that, okay, this is probably something that bigger companies will want more than smaller startups because they have to figure out their marketing first. Bigger companies have figured that out and they want to scale. So as a happenstance, what happened is one of our investors underscored they were using the product when the UI changed. And the founders of Drift, David Cancel, he was a speaker and he saw the platform, he was like, wow, this looks great. And we reached out to him, sent an email twice, he didn't respond.
Palash Soni [00:19:25]:
Third time he responded and said, okay, let me run it by our marketing team. And they're marketing because he sent the email. They took it seriously. And then one thing led to another. They actually tried us for a pilot and that was like a turning corner because once Drift did an event with us, they became a customer. And then a lot of marketers saw us in their event because it was a martech company. And then we started getting a lot of income after that.
Omer Khan [00:19:49]:
I want to go back to something you said earlier, that you didn't have a back end and customers had to talk to your team and then you were building basically a custom experience for every customer. Can you just explain exactly what was going on?
Palash Soni [00:20:07]:
Yeah, that's because we were in so much rush to get something. We were almost desperate. We, we had what I would say, like an API type of thing where we would write stuff up and then we make an API call. My co founder was doing that in the back end and then an instance will pop up where you can log in, have speakers, talk, something similar to Riverside. So we were doing all of that setup in the backend manually. A customer could not go and do it themselves.
Palash Soni [00:20:40]:
And the only reason I pushed for that at that time was because I realized that our hypothesis are probably, they're not really correct and unless the rubber hits the road, we are not getting the right signals and something is amiss. So I wanted to get the product out as soon as possible, just get people to use it. I guess that was another signal that who was willing to use it because bigger companies were like, yeah, this looks great. I already have an audience that want to attend our events and I'm fine dealing with this.
Palash Soni [00:21:11]:
Get state for now a little bit. We built it eventually, but that early part was like a deliberate trade off we made because we just wanted to get the product out.
Omer Khan [00:21:22]:
I wonder if that turned out to be a blessing in disguise because you were attracting some of these bigger customers and a lot of them, they don't want the self serve experience. Right. They want to be about talking to someone at the company and feel like they're getting some kind of custom solution and and you guys were doing that anyway. But not by design.
Palash Soni [00:21:44]:
Yeah, I think so. There's some aspect of that also. And bear in mind those companies are also not like too big. These were companies with say 50 to 300 employees. That was the range that we were talking about. And yes, they were happy with some of the handholding. But I think what we also learned in that handholding time is that events are inherently as stressful. If you're doing a live event, your reputation is at stake because if something goes down then you look bad in front of your CMO or whoever or your audience.
Palash Soni [00:22:15]:
And so people wanted that someone is there who can run the ship with them and make them successful in that like two, three, four hours when the event is happening. So that was also something that acted in our favor. But eventually we built it because people were like, okay, now it's time.
Omer Khan [00:22:37]:
Now when we were chatting earlier, you were talking about some of the struggles that you had in terms of navigating the target market and figuring out exactly who your ICP was. Can you talk a little bit about that? What was the hardest part of where were you struggling with figuring out your icp?
Palash Soni [00:23:00]:
So we did this in multiple parts. The very first time we were trying to fish out where the initial interest is. It was clear that the initial interest is in B2B companies. And it was kind of a counterintuitive decision at that time when everything was a market, any kind of event was a market and it was easy to make money actually in this market.
Palash Soni [00:23:23]:
But we wanted to deliberately be focused because we knew that chickens will come to roost eventually, things will churn and we want to be in a corner which is going to be sustainable. So we knew it was B2B. But within that, whether it should be like early startups or should it be late stage startups, who exactly is in those companies? That was a process of constant discovery that I explained. So we started with small startups first. So we had a couple of customers who said, okay, we'll do pilots with you.
Palash Soni [00:23:53]:
And then when we brought the product to them, they were non committal and they were like, okay, whatever. And. And that led to a lot of realizations. And in this whole time we were always trying to push the product out in whatever way in the hands of customers and see who is actually more interested or rather pulling it out of our hands. And that is how we figured out it's slightly bigger companies, companies who have gotten some semblance of marketing already figured out. So yeah, it was just like the initial Founder hustle.
Palash Soni [00:24:27]:
I'm always trying to figure out how to put it better, but it was just like a lot of hustle from me and my co founder just trying to speak to as many people, show it to as many people and see how it works.
Omer Khan [00:24:37]:
So I want to try and figure out how you arrived at that conclusion and that icp. Were you systematically trying to talk to different groups of people? Like the example you gave earlier where you said we had 200 emails and we basically did a split test or was it more about. It was a bit more random and all kinds of people were coming and you were just looking for signals.
Palash Soni [00:25:07]:
Yes. So beyond the early exploration, it was sort of iterative. So once we had a section which seemed to be interested, we took the product out to them, they didn't like it. Then we changed the UI and then we went to them and there was still not that like extreme push. And I think what sort of was the signal at that time? Like who is willing to pay us an annual contract?
Palash Soni [00:25:31]:
That was a signal because we wanted this to be a SaaS business, 100% we were not interested in like one time, that kind of stuff. And the payment was what? Like the willingness to pay or enter a conversation where we can talk about this was a big signal for us because at that time it was also hard to figure out who really had the intent. Early customers. Everyone wanted to do events at that time, but who was willing to deal with a half baked product without a backend and willing to give us an annual contract?
Palash Soni [00:26:06]:
That was the signal. So it was more iterative after that. I wish in hindsight that I had a systematic approach, but if one thing we got right was that we always had a hypothesis for wherever we were digging in. So early hypothesis was measurability. Then the second was that the product needs to be more engaging, better ui. And then the third was does someone have a repeatable events program? And that's how we arrived at the target market. We were tempted to go slightly randomly, so we were getting pulled by communities.
Palash Soni [00:26:35]:
For example, lots of communities doing events, they wanted a product and. And we just said no because we could not see that repeatability happening in the future.
Omer Khan [00:26:47]:
Let's talk about growth and how you grew the business. So you explained how you got some of the early customers and obviously landing a customer like drift. Great. That gives you a lot of. You're basically getting in front of all your potential target customers by just letting them run their events. It's awesome. Beyond that, how did you start to build some Kind of customer acquisition engine. And what were the growth channels that have worked the best for you? Maybe let's talk about getting to the first million in ARR first.
Omer Khan [00:27:24]:
What did you do to get to that big milestone?
Palash Soni [00:27:26]:
Yeah, so the first million was honestly just founder sales. It was me, my co founder Kishore and there was one intern who ended up staying us for three years. She was, the three of us were doing it and it was a lot of just cold emailing, outbounding, getting intros, finding people who are willing to be advisors and then making intros. It was a lot of hassle in the first 1 million. The other thing that was working in our favor was once Diff started using us, we started getting some inbound.
Palash Soni [00:27:57]:
So it was not, it was not all just outbound, but it was like a fair amount of outbound. Then once we started seeing repeatability, which was around like I would say 700, 800k in ARR is when we brought on our first growth marketer who ended up being the head of marketing.
Omer Khan [00:28:13]:
Okay, great. So, so founder sales hustle, cold email gets you to that gets you to seven figures in ARR. And then what about beyond that?
Palash Soni [00:28:28]:
Yeah, beyond that we could see that this obviously is not scalable what Bert Kishore is doing with outbound. So we brought in a marketer and the great thing about her was that she discovered us through an event. So she was in an event and she was like, oh wow, this looks cool. And she applied for that role and that's how we got her in. So at that time we had no marketing team, so to speak of. It was just me and my co founder. And there were many ways in which we could spend the money.
Palash Soni [00:29:04]:
We could do a lot of things. Her thing was that a, we need to show the world how to do events very well because everyone is doing it, but it's not a thing that people have been doing forever. So we need to be the thought leaders on showing how to do it very well. In the context of B2B marketers. What do B2B marketers need to do from the start to end? And the way to do that is to do our own events and be the thought partner, thought leader.
Palash Soni [00:29:29]:
And we were like, okay, that kind of sounds good, but it sounds like a long, long term investment and something that will not work for us in the short term. But that ended up being our largest channel in many non intuitive ways. So for example, a lot of folks who attend our events, we see a recurring pattern of people attending our events and they are Sort of like a community in many ways.
Palash Soni [00:29:59]:
And that group also was like the seeding of our Event Marketers Club community, which we established, but the Event Marketers Club and our own events, kind of our community channel that keeps that engagement high. And what it does is it keeps us top of mind. It keeps us in what we call the zeitgeist of marketers. And because we have done it so many times, we are kind of in front of people and we are doing it repeatedly. So that is our biggest channel. Actually.
Palash Soni [00:30:27]:
There's a clear correlation to how much attendees we get in an event and what pipeline we get in a quarter.
Omer Khan [00:30:34]:
So you were doing events about how to do events.
Palash Soni [00:30:38]:
That that was the big thing, right? How to do great digital events, webinars. And what are the different use cases? What should we do before, after? And then we started talking about more broader topics that are relevant to our Persona, which is a director of demand gen or a content marketer. But it was always like very specific to B2B marketers that is relevant to them now.
Omer Khan [00:31:02]:
Got it. So when I think about this thing, you already had some concerns that this would not be a short term ROI. It would be maybe like people think about SEO. It's like, do I want to do SEO, I need leads now, not in 12 months time or something. So you had that concern then. When it comes to running events, there's always the concern about, you know, can I, can I do? Am I able to demonstrate what, what the return on investment, what the ROI was? You guys have got that covered, right?
Omer Khan [00:31:37]:
Because you're talking about measurability and all of that stuff. And then the other issue often is like just you, you promote these events and like nobody turns up or you have like one person on the other end or something. Right. So did you have those kinds of challenges? And also did it really take a long or how long did it take for you to get to a point where you were like, no, I think this thing is working, this thing is worth continuing to do.
Palash Soni [00:32:06]:
Yeah, that's a great point, Omar. So we often had that challenge. We would do something and not a lot of people would show up. And it still happens. Today we throw an event, we do a webinar. Not many people show up. And what we realize is the key is to like keep on, keep at it and also use that as a signal for what is working and what's not working.
Palash Soni [00:32:28]:
So what we ended up figuring out through all of this is that ultimately what works best for us is some kind of like a Weekly or bi weekly series that is talking to a Persona where we can bring great speakers in and allow people to interact with them. So that is a big draw of our events where they can, they can actively re engage with that person, ask questions and chat with them live on stage, which is something that you cannot do on a podcast.
Palash Soni [00:32:58]:
So that is one we bring in the top people, say in demand gen or events and have people talk to them. The second thing that works for us is a lightning strike kind of virtual summit. So if we are doing a product launcher, there's some big team like AI or something, we do a lightning strike of sorts around it where we have lots of marketing going in to that conference.
Palash Soni [00:33:21]:
And that involves a lot of things like having our speakers mobilize and market that event, us doing it, like us doing raffles and draws and things like that. And so there's a lot of ticks and tactics that we figured out work. And it took probably, I would say it's like three quarters for us to have confidence that it works. So it was giving us engagement early on and we were seeing some signals. But I think there were a couple of things that that sort of made us continue investing.
Palash Soni [00:33:48]:
Was one that it, we were seeing some repeat people attend, which made us think that there's value in the content. And the second thing was that this itself gave us a lot of content that we could then use in other places. So we could put it on the website, generate blogs from it. It's a great source of content in general. So it made our lives easier on the content side.
Omer Khan [00:34:13]:
Okay, so you weren't just thinking about this as a live event. You were saying, okay, it's basically also a way to generate a bunch of content because once we've recorded this, we can repurpose it with a platform on video or do whatever else we want to do with it. Was you said it took about 3/4 for it to. You felt confident about it working. What was the inflection point? Did something happen?
Omer Khan [00:34:45]:
Did you get to a place where it was like, okay, we've really nailed how to do these types of events, which is why we're now starting to see leads or customers coming through this channel. What happened around that time?
Palash Soni [00:35:01]:
Yeah, so one of the turning points over was like figuring out this playbook, right. So once we saw that there's increasing attendance, there's increasing engagement, what kind of topics resonate, what cadence resonates, we started seeing a correlation with the pipeline that we were generating. So that like when we started becoming more Sophisticated. We had Salesforce by then and HubSpot installed and everything. We saw that the attendees in the last quarter correlate to the pipeline that comes in the next quarter.
Palash Soni [00:35:38]:
So that's when the second thing we started seeing, which is probably unique to us, but could work for any kind of startup, is that people who we were bringing on, they were our Persona ultimately, right? So these were CMOs or head of Events, folks like that. And they could see the product and they could see that we were a thoughtful thought leader in this space. And when the time was right, they started raising their hand to say, okay, we want to evaluate coldcast, we want to look at it.
Palash Soni [00:36:08]:
We want to replace our current product or webinar platform with coldcast. And that started happening too. So that was a big driver for why we thought this is a good investment.
Omer Khan [00:36:19]:
So you mentioned that a couple of times, but about customers coming and saying, okay, we want to switch to you using this from whatever we were using. You talked about the competitive landscape was pretty aggressive, right? Because there was a lot of investment, a lot of players, a lot of activity happening. How did you figure out how to position Goldcast in that space? So obviously you had the hypothesis about the measurability and doing that, but was it also about, like, you know, were you.
Omer Khan [00:36:52]:
Were you having to, like, kind of persuade people why your platform was better than something that they were using already, or were they basically, through the conversations, you're already figuring out where the biggest gaps were. And I just. Because I often hear about. I had a conversation with a group of founders this morning who were in that situation saying, you know, they tell me they're using another product, and I asked them about what problems they have, and they go, no, it's fine.
Palash Soni [00:37:19]:
That's a great question, Omer. The answer to this question has surprisingly changed a lot, and that has impacted a lot of our strategy. When we started, our main use case was digital events, large conferences. And at that time, that was some kind of a greenfield market. For the first one year, we enjoyed that success and we got to almost 2 million in revenue, and it was greenfield. All was good. After one year, the market started settling. Right. And the realization was at that time that a big use case for digital events platforms is webinars.
Palash Soni [00:38:00]:
Webinars had always been there, but now people were doing more of them. And that space had not seen any innovation in of its own. So it was kind of getting tucked in. And so now we were in this dilemma that if we have to build a sustainable, scalable business and Sticky customers. We have to replace a webinar platform because there's always one. Right. No one is coming in and using Goldcast for the first time. It's like no one gets on the notion the first time.
Palash Soni [00:38:25]:
They'll try something like Google Doc first and then try Notion or ClickUp or all those. So that became a challenge. And so our go to market from that time changed to saying, okay, let's go after companies that are already using Zoom, that are already using another incumbent in this space. There were two or three incumbents in the webinar space, including Zoom, as we started going after them and then it became a rip and replace motion. And our value prop at that time was that we can do both.
Palash Soni [00:38:57]:
We can do big events and we can do webinars also. So we have both in one platform. There's higher degree of measurability and the UI is great. So you get more engagement and hence more engagement means more pipeline for you. This worked for us up to a certain time, but then we realized we will have the same problem. Right. There's not enough people in the market.
Palash Soni [00:39:18]:
Especially as the market started crashing and the priority shifted for marketers from doing things better because everything was like, there was a lot of money out there to sort of in defense mode. Marketers started going in defense mode. The wallets were being crashed and people were fearing for their job all the time. So then they would not wake up and think, oh, I need to replace my webinar platform.
Palash Soni [00:39:45]:
And that led to the bigger evolution pivot that we made last year because, yeah, it was not scalable to operate in a complete brownfield environment in this kind of market.
Omer Khan [00:39:59]:
Yeah. So let's talk about that. So I think it was last year, sometimes 20, 23, that you were around the 5 million-ARR mark and you started to sense that there was an issue and that there was a churn problem. Yeah, right. So just kind of lay that out for us. Like what was going on? What were some of the signs that you were seeing that was kind of raising a red flag for you?
Palash Soni [00:40:32]:
Yes. So churn was definitely there. Churn is always a signal of something. And we were still growing fast enough that the churn was not hitting us in a very bad way. So we were still growing. But I could see, I could do the math that the churn percentage probably will remain the same, but the new sales percentage is probably not going to keep up. So we will hit evolve. And also we started getting this feeling that, okay, it's taking a lot of money to Sell. So our burn was pretty high at that time.
Palash Soni [00:41:09]:
Our CAC payback was probably like 30 months plus. And that is justifiable if you are a cybersecurity company where retention is probably a database. But our retention was not there. And so even though we were growing, I could see that there's something off here and something is probably not working as well. And as a VC backed company we have, we are committed to like 50, 100, 150% growth every year. Right. So I could just not see how the math could work in that.
Palash Soni [00:41:42]:
So we started thinking about okay, what is the next stage of the company? And that's something we had always thought about, that this is a wedge into the greater Martech stack. But we were like 5 million, right? We were still getting our feedback and, and that, and, and so we started looking at like what customers are the most successful. And, and then a lot of customers at that time are putting us in two directions. One was like, okay, you become an events platform fully where you start doing in person conferences as well.
Palash Soni [00:42:11]:
But that had the same problem right where the churn would be high because you're doing a big conference once a year where you need the product, next year you've forgotten about it. And so we decided not to pursue that. We kind of dipped our feet there but didn't do much.
Palash Soni [00:42:27]:
But the customers who were very sticky and successful treated this as a content channel for them, digital events were content and they were always asking us about okay, what can I do with the video that is already out there, how can I host it on my website, how can I get more views, MQLs, all of that that led to the line of inquiry that we eventually pursued and became what we are today.
Omer Khan [00:42:48]:
I want to dig a little bit deeper into that. You made this top down decision and you decided that you were going to become this multi product company. What kind of change did that require you to make as a business and as a team?
Palash Soni [00:43:11]:
Oh, that's a great question. It's, it was a massive change and probably I underestimated that. So in the first quarter when we said okay, this is something that we want to pursue, we want to at least look at, we sort of went back into the early like hustle mode. So when my co founder cto, he built a prototype in like four or five weeks that was working and all it did was it take your recording, cut it up into clips, that's what it did.
Palash Soni [00:43:41]:
And we started showing it to people saying okay, if you are worried about your on demand views why not like make people watch clips instead of like a full video? Because that's what people are doing nowadays. And we could see that excitement and so that, that, that gave us confidence, okay, this can be a part of the product. So we initially built it as an add on. So it was very feature poor. It was a tab in the product and we put it out and then we started seeing some traction around it.
Palash Soni [00:44:11]:
But it wasn't enough traction for us to make that decision completely. But I had this wall coming up which I could see that we will hit and we will crash because momentum will go and that is very hard to come off if you lose momentum. And we didn't have enough data points here to say that this is going to succeed or this is the right inquiry.
Palash Soni [00:44:35]:
But at that time I had started building this thesis that what if we started becoming an end to end video platform which does the whole thing, not just events, but events and then working with this content, editing it, which is the second product that we did and then hosting it, which is something you do on a Vimeo or a Vista or those kind of platforms. And you could also record like you do on a river site and do it all in one platform.
Palash Soni [00:44:57]:
And that was, that sounded like a good thesis but that meant huge amount of complexities because now we were like our whole team was talking about events before and now they have to talk about video content of which events is one part. And so that was one second thing is that we also, we thought that if we do this then we run into the same brownfield problem because a lot of aspects of this thing are already there, right? So there's a competitor in recording, there's. People are using hosting tools for ages.
Palash Soni [00:45:28]:
And while the whole value prop is interesting, how are we going to wedge in because people are not going to replace four tools with us just normally. So we decided to build that content repurposing product out separately into a bottoms up free trial product. So that led to a full scale sort of go to market motion confusion because we were now plg. So early on we were like full top down. Now we had a free trial. And so people. So once we were.
Palash Soni [00:46:00]:
When we were pushing for these decisions, I was getting an immense amount of pushback from my team because they were probably not seeing the wall that I could see. We were hit. So things were going fine, not awesome. And there was just too much change, right? Too much change on what looked like a pretty risky kind of bet. So that change management is something that we are going through even today. We are still training our people how to talk about us. We are still figuring out what that whole product portfolio looks like.
Palash Soni [00:46:33]:
But we have a lot more confidence now and we are sure what direction we have to go in. But I had to almost use the veto card once every quarter on a big decision in these times.
Omer Khan [00:46:46]:
So they're kind of like, are they like four standalone products? Like somebody can come along and just say, oh, can I use you guys for hosting? But not the other stuff.
Palash Soni [00:46:55]:
You technically can. But the idea now is, and this is also a process of, early on the plan was to have four standard products. But now what we have come to is that you come and use this content repurposing product for free and that will have some limited recording and hosting capabilities. And because events are high stakes, we still want them to be like sales gated, but you can use these things for free. And then when you like it, we we this and then we sell you the full platform.
Omer Khan [00:47:24]:
I mean, you said we're still figuring this out and kind of viewing, but you know, you were 2023, you were hitting 5 million ARR, worrying about this problem. We're now October 2024 and you're, you've doubled revenue. You're over 10 million ARR. So something worked from that. The you talked about like the kind of figuring out how to talk to customers. Like, just tell me a little bit about that. Because I'm guessing like, you know, even though, you know you had a decent customer base, it wasn't like you had hundreds of thousands of customers. Right.
Omer Khan [00:48:06]:
But you must have still been recognized as the events platform. Yeah, right. And then you have to now basically kind of retrain, re educate kind of, you know, there's a whole bunch of like changes that come from that.
Palash Soni [00:48:19]:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Omar, that's. So a couple of things. One is there's confidence in the thesis itself, which early on I had to just push for it because we were not small enough where we could just do some things as founders and put it in front. We had to like get the whole team aligned. And so I had to use my CEO card to do that in the early days. Then we actually had a pretty, pretty big quarter last quarter.
Palash Soni [00:48:45]:
And what we saw was that our win rates have doubled in some segments in like enterprises, etc. And that was largely because we have this like whole content thesis. So when people come in now, they see that it's a different kind of product. Right. It's like a content, video content product instead of just events and that excites people. And we, and we have, I think, trained ourselves doing this again and again to see what is real excitement from what is like not real excitement. And it was real excitement.
Palash Soni [00:49:18]:
People were willing to go through that pain and look at and give us more time and our wind rage doubles. That was one. But yes, now the broader challenge we have is that we need to unseat our perception as a digital events platform and become a video platform. That's also a work in progress. But big learning there is that. We can say whatever in the market, but ultimately our perception is driven by what our customers say.
Palash Soni [00:49:43]:
So we are being annoying to our customers right now to give us case studies and go on social media post about us and do whatever we can to have the customers talk about us. So that's a big push right now in the company.
Omer Khan [00:49:55]:
Got it. Great. Okay, we should wrap up and get onto the lightning round. But before we do that, just got one more question. Um, one of the other growth channels that has worked well for, for you guys has been word of mouth, which is great. But then you, when we were talking, you also said to me, well, I think we invested a bit too much in support and customer success and we were a bit too maniacal, you know, kind of focusing on like nps.
Omer Khan [00:50:21]:
I was like, well, we got to talk about that because it's like, well, isn't that how you got the word of mouth and people happy and so on? So why, why do you feel like you over invested?
Palash Soni [00:50:33]:
Yeah, no, actually, Omar, we used to think we over invest there. And that was because events are inherently stressful. So we wanted people to have that hands on support. And at one point when we were trying to validate whether events are the right investment, one other thing which we did was we started asking in our sales calls, how did you hear about us? And people would give us some reasons. And a lot of that was like, oh, I attended this webinar event that you did and really like what you guys. And then checked it out.
Palash Soni [00:51:08]:
People were talking about it, some, some bit of word of mouth at that point also. And I think people, what they, they repeatedly said in those conversations to other like customers was that they have great support, they listen to us, they hear us, and there's always someone responding within 30 seconds.
Omer Khan [00:51:27]:
So
Palash Soni [00:51:29]:
we were like, okay, let's upscale this investment. So at that time we had a support team of four people, which was already high for a startup of our size. We then doubled into eight people. So we were used to responding two minutes. Now we respond in 30 seconds. That sounds almost too much. But we treat it as like CAC investment that we have to do it just to get customers happy to then app that recommend us.
Omer Khan [00:51:56]:
Okay, got it, got it. Yeah, I misunderstood that. That makes a ton of sense now. It's like, yeah, I should try contacting your support and see how long it takes.
Palash Soni [00:52:06]:
Yes, please do. And give me feedback.
Omer Khan [00:52:08]:
30 seconds. That was 35. Okay, great. Let's wrap up. So let's get on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. You ready?
Palash Soni [00:52:18]:
Yeah, let's do it.
Omer Khan [00:52:19]:
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Palash Soni [00:52:23]:
Yeah, it's that the market ultimately matters more than anything else. You can have a great team, an awesome strategy, but if the market is not great, I think people are going to turn around. And I used to have the belief that great execution or great founders can turn a market around, but I don't believe that anymore. I think that the market has to have good characteristics for success.
Omer Khan [00:52:43]:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Palash Soni [00:52:46]:
Yeah, it's this book called the five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni. It sounds like a gimmicky title, but it's one of the best books I have, I've read. So it's like one hour. The best sort of people management book that's very specific to CEOs.
Omer Khan [00:53:00]:
Cool. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Palash Soni [00:53:05]:
Yeah, it's this concept called ID amaze that Balaji Srinivasan has coined. But like great founders, I think are able to navigate that idea. They're able to. They know the history of the market, they understand the market landscape so well that their intuition kind of helps them think which way there's treasure and which way there's death. It's very hard to model that. It's just a thing that great founders inculcate by just being super deep with customers in the market.
Omer Khan [00:53:37]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Palash Soni [00:53:40]:
Yeah, being off social media. I'm on LinkedIn because I have to be for business, but I am off everything else and that's so good for my mental health.
Omer Khan [00:53:49]:
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Palash Soni [00:53:52]:
Yeah, if given time and money, I would love to build like a deep tech venture studio where I can work on multiple companies and like the very cutting edge science that solves real world problems. So like plastics or like reduction of greenhouse gases or nation scale sea to Water pipelines, those kind of things. Cool.
Omer Khan [00:54:12]:
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Palash Soni [00:54:16]:
Oh, I'm big into amusement parks. I just went to LA and spent like 12 hours there in Universal Studios. I think I'm the bigger kid than any other kid.
Omer Khan [00:54:28]:
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Palash Soni [00:54:32]:
Yeah, I'm a very deeply curious person. So I read a lot while doing dishes, while coming to office whenever I get time, a lot of science fiction, history, sorry, science history and evolution, all of that. And I want to sort of put everything to you. So I read a lot of evolutionary psychology. I try to, like, see everything in that lens. That's a big passion.
Omer Khan [00:54:54]:
Cool. Thank you so much for joining me, Palesh. It's been a pleasure. Great to unpack the story. I think we, I. I think we did a pretty good job to cover a lot of stuff in a relatively short amount of time to. To tell your story and hopefully give listeners some ideas, some inspiration, some actionable insights that they can take away and apply into their own startups. If people want to check out Goldcast, they can go to Goldcast IO.
Omer Khan [00:55:23]:
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Palash Soni [00:55:27]:
LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Cool.
Omer Khan [00:55:30]:
Okay, we'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes.
Palash Soni [00:55:35]:
Great.
Omer Khan [00:55:35]:
Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Palash Soni [00:55:40]:
Awesome. Thanks, Omar. Very great to be here.
Omer Khan [00:55:42]:
My pleasure. Cheers.
