AMP: Speed and Customer Focus in Building an 8-Figure SaaS – with Patrick Barnes [408]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Patrick, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Patrick: Thanks, Omer.

[00:00:02] Omer: Omer, do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:07] Patrick: Yeah, I've got two. One is speed is the primary business strategy which we also say internally going super far. Like, yeah, we like to go fast. You make mistakes faster, you learn faster, your feedback loops are tighter.

[00:00:19] You can even do the wrong thing as long as you're doing it really, really fast and tracking everything. So speed is the primary business strategy. And the second one is related to something I think will come up a few times throughout of our conversation is related to co-founders. And that is, there's this film called The Town with Ben Affleck.

[00:00:37] And this is one scene where he walks into a room and he says something to the effect of Hey, I need your help. We're gonna go out tonight. We've gotta hurt some people. I can't tell you what it's about. We're never gonna talk about it again. And the other character in the scene says, whose car are we gonna take?

[00:00:55] Which is something my co-founder and I reference a lot. It's probably slightly different to some quotes you get at the start of shows, but I, I think that having that partner that you can work with and have that mentality with and that openness with is really especially yeah, it's, it's important throughout the cycle of, of the business.

[00:01:14] So yeah, that's the second one. Whose car are we gonna take? I

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[00:01:56] That's lead feeder.com/try. Alright, let's get back to the show. So tell us about amp. What does the product do? Who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:02:07] Patrick: Yeah, so we help e-commerce merchants run their online business. Businesses. We're doing what we, I. Talk about being like, almost like a HubSpot for e-commerce.

[00:02:16] What does that mean? Multi-product? SaaS deeply integrated, but we're doing it for the e-commerce vertical right now. We have two products. We have analytics a bi, a specific, a e-commerce specific BI tool and a conversion product that helps with upselling automatically on, on their websites.

[00:02:35] Omer: And is there a specific type of Shopify customer that you.

[00:02:40] You focus on?

[00:02:40] Patrick: No, from, from the largest. We're fine. I would say we typically work more with brands. What do I mean by that? You know, so if it's an online store selling loads of different parts that are buyers from loads of different people. Or they're selling AirPods, they buy from somewhere else. We typically work with brands like Ridge Wallet or Hex Cloud or True Classic or something like that.

[00:03:01] Omer: Cool. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team?

[00:03:07] Patrick: Yeah, so we have 20,000 paid customers, plus another say 10K on our free plans. 50 employees, thereabouts. And yeah, we raised eight and a half million. Series A about nine months ago. And revenue eight figures.

[00:03:22] Omer: Eight figures. Okay. So you founded the business in 2022 with your co-founder, Cameron, but the story starts probably back in 2013. So why don't we start there and just set the scene for us, like what were you doing at the time and, and why is. 2013 relevant to this, this story of, of Building amp.

[00:03:51] Patrick: Yeah. So in 2013, I joined a company called TradeGecko.

[00:03:55] It's a company my co-founder started. It did something related to what AMP does now. It provided software for e-commerce merchants to help them run their online stores. It did inventory and order management. Before that I was at Oracle, you know, which is you typically focused on internal systems. That was my first experience with SaaS, where you could ship something to production and see customers using it immediately, or you know, you could log into a dashboard at 6:00 AM and you'd see 39 people were online using the tool during the free trial.

[00:04:27] So I loved working at, TradeGecko with Cameron. I stayed there for three years. The first year was amazing. You know, we were at say 70,000 in ARR in 2013, but we had all these leads and there was an amazing team. And I think we went from 70,000 to 1.1 million in ARR in 12 months. Which like a lot of people do now, but in 2013 in Southeast Asia was pretty, was pretty good.

[00:04:57] I left TradeGecko. I didn't leave that far though. I co-founded a company with one of the software engineers from TradeGecko amazing guy called Lachlan, who also happened to be Cameron's little brother. And we worked from the TradeGecko office quite a lot. What we founded was a company called Advocately.

[00:05:14] It did review management for SaaS companies. Websites like Capterra and G2 that I'm sure your audience is familiar with. We actually bootstrapped that company. We bootstrapped that company for nearly three years. And then right when we were looking to go for that next stage of growth, we actually were acquired by G2 which was great.

[00:05:37] And then I had my own out at G2 with Lachlan learned loads working at G2. TradeGecko was actually acquired by Intuit which was specifically their product, QuickBooks Online which again, I'm sure your audience is familiar with. And then, yeah, Cameron and I were getting to the end of our earnouts and it was time to figure out what we wanted to do next.

[00:06:00] So we got back into the customer development for a couple of different SaaS ideas, one of which was e-commerce related. And yeah, just couldn't stay away from helping merchants. We thought it was cool in 2013 and in you know, Shopify was probably doing 30 million in revenue at that time, and now they're doing 8 billion in revenue and we still think it's a great time.

[00:06:23] To serve to serve that audience.

[00:06:25] Omer: So what I love about your story is that with Amp, you didn't take the traditional route of going and building a product. You actually acquired a Shopify app, and then you grew that and you grew that pretty fast. And one of the reasons you were able to do that and, and avoid a lot of mistakes along the way was because of all the struggles and mistakes you made with Advocate Lee and the lessons you learned there.

[00:06:52] I helped you guys with, with Amp. So that's why as you and I were talking, we just said, Hey, look, the, the story of Advocately is, is just as important because that's where you kind of, you know, got your stripes right. So why don't we start there? So you, you're at TradeGecko where does the idea for Advocately come from?

[00:07:15] Patrick: Yeah, the idea for Advocately came from, one of the best lead sources at TradeGecko was the software review sites. They are very bottom of funnel, so let's say I'm going to San Diego in a month or so, 'cause we're sponsoring an event there for merchants. I. If I'm looking for hotel rooms in San Diego on a review site, I'm in buying mode.

[00:07:38] If I don't find a hotel room in San Diego, you know, I'm on the street or whatever. So, but one of the challenge was, is like making sure our team responded to all reviews, asking happy customers to write reviews. So that's where I just saw, you know, if merchants could. You know, manage their reviews on those sites where SaaS companies can manage their reviews on their own sites better.

[00:08:00] I'd say that comes with the own challenge, right? That's basically a version of building a better mousetrap. If you compare it to say, payroll software, everybody needs payroll software. Everybody knows they need payroll software. There is a budget in mind for payroll software. Not the review sites, then were actually kind of nascent, you know, in 2016, I think G2 was probably at 10 million in revenue or something.

[00:08:23] If a founder came to me today and they're like, Hey, I am gonna build an add-on on a 10 million ARR business, I'd be like, I build on Shopify, build on Salesforce, build on Zero. Like that's a crazy idea. So it was, or, or even because those review sites had lower levels of adoption, you know, you'd even talk to people and they'd be like, well, why do I need a review?

[00:08:48] I, I've never had reviews on this site before. I'm at 30 million ARR. Everything's kind of fine for me. Yeah, so that, that was one of the challenges of building a better mousetrap, essentially.

[00:08:59] Omer: Okay, great. So you see this, you, you, you've got this idea. Did you do any, any of the customer development stuff?

[00:09:05] Did you go out and talk to potential customers, validate your idea?

[00:09:09] Patrick: Yeah, I did all of the customer development. This is a challenge as well though. 'cause the first, 'cause we were in the SaaS industry we did, the first few customers were my friends, you know, like TradeGecko bought it a bunch of, a few other Aussie SaaS companies bought it in the zero ecosystem and then we needed to figure out, and then the product was just getting started.

[00:09:32] So it's not like they were all the happiest, healthiest customers getting value. From the product, they were amazing 'cause we could pump their feedback back into the product to make sure it worked for them. But I, I do remember the first customer who was not my friend. Friend was Krish from Chargebee.

[00:09:51] I was in Singapore at the time. Krish was close by in Chennai in India, but that was the first person I, or I'm sure it wasn't the first person I called DM'd on LinkedIn, but he was the first person to get back, do a trial and actually pay for it. Yeah. And Kris' still a, a really good friend and I, I've gone to see him in Chennai since and seen him in Barcelona and San Francisco and, and wherever else at various events too.

[00:10:15] Omer: Krish been on the show. He's a great guy.

[00:10:17] Patrick: Has he? Great. Cool.

[00:10:19] Omer: So. Okay, I, I wanna understand this a little bit because you, what I'm hearing is you basically built the product, the customer development was basically talking to your friends who were running SaaS companies.

[00:10:32] Patrick: Not, not quite, but we definitely did customer development cold as well.

[00:10:37] It was more just, there was, it was great quitting your job and starting with seven customers, but what was not great is then having to. Having, it's not like there was any, any real pipeline or anything.

[00:10:51] Omer: So you got those seven customers pretty quickly, and then what happened to growth

[00:10:56] Patrick: Tanked was terrible.

[00:10:57] It was, yeah. Well the thing is, I, I think I, I really, you go from a TradeGecko. We were growing super fast. I loved working there. You are working with your friends every day. You know, even though I left track, Cameron and I still doing stuff on the internet 10, 11 years on now, I guess. Then you, especially in your mid twenties, you always have this idea of how well everything is going to go.

[00:11:20] And I remember, I actually read two books I was reading. I read two books in close succession, and it made me realize that you reading the right book at the right time is really important. The first book was called Behind the Cloud by Mark Benioff, where he talks about all these playbooks. He used to grow Salesforce and one of them's like how he hired the CEO of Oracle Japan to launch Salesforce in Japan.

[00:11:45] And I'm like, I can't even pay rent. Like what is this about? But the second book was, ego Is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday. And I think to date, that's still like the best book I've read in the context of like reading the right book at the right time. So yeah, it was definitely, you know? Yeah. You, you always think it's gonna go better than it actually goes.

[00:12:03] Omer: So you said growth tanked. It just stalled, but how long, you know, how long were you in that situation?

[00:12:10] Patrick: Oh, no. Look, we were, we weren't in that conversation very long. My co-founder and I, and, and that's one thing that made it not that tough is I always had a great friend and co-founder in Lachlan, and we were always in it together.

[00:12:22] Back to the, the first quote. No. I think we were pretty quickly able to hustle around and start addin G2 to four customers a month or something. Wasn't a yeah, we were able to figure that out pretty quickly.

[00:12:34] Omer: So I wanna pick up on one of the things you said earlier. You said one of the struggles you had was you would talk to potential customers and they would say, why do I need this?

[00:12:45] Right. It was, it was like this. I hear this over and over again where founders will say, you know, I get the thing about the vitamin and the painkiller and it feels like I'm solving a problem, but it feels like a vitamin. It's like a nice to have. They tell me they, they kind of get why they need it, but there's no sense of urgency.

[00:13:06] There's just, they can happily live without it, and that's not a great place to be. But you figured out how to turn that around, so. How did you do that? Was this about repositioning the product or was it about building features into the product that they cared more about ?

[00:13:22] Patrick: It wasn't one specific thing.

[00:13:24] I think one, the market did grow. We were probably just a little bit early. Now Capterra and G2 are pretty standard industry practice, so I think the market. Did come to us a little bit. We were just, we didn't realize how early adopters we were in caring about it. I think the, we continued to flesh out the product and made sure it, meet people's. Yeah, we offered great free trials where we'd almost do like a free proof of concept, not like a 14 day free trial, but make sure everything was set up, let it run for a month, and then when people saw, you know, new reviews coming into a public Slack channel every day. And then, you know, maybe the CEO or the CMO was in that channel and they're like, oh, we probably don't want this to stop.

[00:14:12] Yeah, it was, it, it was not, it was. Probably a bunch of, one or two 20% things like the market coming to us. And then, yeah, I'd actually, I would say on the positioning thing, on the messaging, one thing was it always comes back to ideal customer profiles. And what we just realized was, hey, our ideal customer profile is somebody who's spending money on G2 and Capterra already, like they're already spending pay per click dollars on Capterra.

[00:14:39] They're already spending $70,000 a year on G2. Who cares about paying us $500 a month if you're paying G2 seven $70,000, like you can spend an extra $6,000 a year to make sure that that profile is tended to like a vegetable garden. You know, it needs to be looked after. So that was, that was the main, I would actually say that was probably bigger than all the other things put together.

[00:15:01] Omer: And how did you figure out. Who those leads were. Were you like going on G2 and Capterra and just looking at the ads, like who's advertising there?

[00:15:10] Patrick: Yeah, you can, you can tell there are characteristics on both sites that enable you to tell if they're paying for the product or not. I can, there's premium listing features.

[00:15:21] Got it.

[00:15:22] Omer: Got it. Okay. So the, the other thing I wanna pick on that you said was. Part of this was growing because the market started to grow and you, this, this kind of proof of concept that you were doing, it sounds pretty pivotal because the way I'm, I'm hearing it, you, you went from like telling them what the product would do.

[00:15:50] To actually showing them and, and getting it to a point where, you know, we talk about this, like, you know, get people to the aha moment. And I think that aha moment was these reviews showing up on Slack where they're like, okay, I get the value of this thing. Like, why, why would you want that to stop? And then it becomes, I guess, a much easier sale, right?

[00:16:11] Patrick: Correct. That was the first thing. And then the second thing was how do we get more of these proof of concepts started? Like how do we. We didn't call 'em proof of, it's more just like an actual free trial and we take on as much of the burden as possible to make sure it goes through. And it doesn't really matter what time the trial starts, it matters when the it goes live.

[00:16:33] So we didn't really worry about an arbitrary 14 day free trial or anything like that. So the question would be, Omer, how do we get more people to that point? So what we did is we launched a free Slack tool. And we said, Hey, anytime you get a new review, we'll pump it into a Slack channel for free.

[00:16:51] And we ran this outbound it was very successful at the start. It was actually like too successful. 'cause we made the onboarding like three or four clicks. Again, it was 2016. I think the permissions on Slack were a little bit more lax. Like most people could install a public app to a channel. I don't think anybody lets anyone do that anymore.

[00:17:08] Any organization of size, but we even had HubSpot using it and stuff. And so, so what the product did, it worked a little too well in that people would install. The app and then we'd be like, Hey, do you want to talk about this other software product we have? And I'll just would never get back to us.

[00:17:24] So what we did is we then, which is fine, like the it, it's for free, but what we did do is we said, Hey, we've got this free site tool. It will do this. I think it may have be, yeah, it, it will do this and that. It will put, put all your new reviews in Slack so people can see it or put 'em in your customer support tool so your support reps could see it.

[00:17:43] Do you want to set it up on a quick call? We'd schedule a call and then we would just help them set it up and it would all be done in the first two minutes of the call, and then we would say, Hey, while we're here, do you mind if we tell you about this? That's, that product is free. It's yours forever. We can end the call right now.

[00:18:01] It's not a bait and switch. It's not like it's not timeshare. It's not at the end. It's right at the start. We say, Hey, we've got a few more minutes. Can I tell you about this other product we have? That helps drive more reviews. And then that's where I, I don't think anybody ever said no. And we were, it was always a very gentle, gentle, softly, softly thing, and everybody still had that free Slack product forever.

[00:18:26] Omer: Love it. Okay, so you, you figured out who your ICP was and. This basically were companies who were spending money on Capterra or G2 with ads, and then you were able to build a, a prospecting list by basically researching and finding who, who was paying for ads on those sites. And then you were sending them cold emails or LinkedIn messages, trying to get them to, like, did, did the, did the tool come as a result of all the outbound not working very well, or was this the tool, like always a part of the outbound strategy from the start?

[00:19:06] Patrick: I think the tool was just a flyer idea. I think actually loads of people were launch. We probably just saw other companies launching free Slack tools and we were like, oh, what if we do it?

[00:19:15] Yeah. I, I, I don't remember, but I don't think it was. I think it was a natural evolution.

[00:19:22] Omer: And who, who was it in these companies that you were targeting?

[00:19:26] Patrick: So we would typically target the Director of Demand Gen or VP of Marketing, depending on the size of the company, the person who actually owned the budget.

[00:19:36] What we did at the start is we would target customer success, but it's just not the same as owning the budget in the same way that demand Gen person does.

[00:19:45] Omer: Okay, cool. So once you've got that going, you said you were generating what, were you generating G2 to four leads a week or were you closing or gettinG2 to four customers a week?

[00:19:56] Patrick: Maybe we closed 10 customers a month or something.

[00:19:59] Omer: And how, how many I. Like roughly like what volume of outbound or emails were you having to send and, and you know, just, just kind of getting an idea of like how, how kind of effort you, how much volume we're talking about here.

[00:20:15] Patrick: Every list we ever sent was significantly less than 500 people.

[00:20:19] These were highly tailored, highly personalized. We'd even include. Examples of reviews in the outbound email, like reviews from their site. Like, Hey, imagine this review from April 16th going into your Slack channel, and then a screenshot of the review or something. So I think our. I've talked about this publicly before.

[00:20:43] I gave a talk at SaaStock a few years ago. 'cause yeah, we were doing all sorts of stuff. We would pre targett the people on Facebook, 'cause back then you could upload a email list to Facebook so they would see our ads. Before they even before they even got the first email. But I think we were rocking maybe, you know, like if it was 300 send 30 meetings type thing.

[00:21:06] I, yeah, I don't, I don't really remember, but it was, it was very highly converting. But also it was, I was doing calls. I, I, I mentioned I was in Singapore. I was, so, most of the customers were in the US so I was doing calls. My calendar was open till two or 3:00 AM. Monday to Thursday. So there was no, you want to convert meetings like there is a there is a method.

[00:21:30] It's not that fun, but there it can be done.

[00:21:33] Omer: You did that. You did that for two years?

[00:21:36] Patrick: Yeah.

[00:21:37] Omer: Wow.

[00:21:38] Patrick: Yeah, and then we were acquired by G2 and actually even at G2 I did still quite a lot of evening, evening work.

[00:21:44] Omer: So roughly where, where were you in terms of revenue when you got acquired?

[00:21:48] Patrick: Yeah, we were in the like hundreds of thousands of ARR and, and how did the acquisition come about?

[00:21:54] Well, G2 was a key partner of ours. You know, it was the main integration everybody used. And I had met, it was actually the VP of sales Olivia LaBelle, who I'd formed a bit of a relationship. And then he introduced me very quickly to Godard, who's the CEO? Who who. It's an amazing, amazing SaaS leader, like such a huge supporter of Locklin and I, and we got to know one another quite well.

[00:22:24] And then I flew out to, yeah, I think he just sort of slowly brought us into the fold. He's like, you know, it's like, Hey, I am coming to San Francisco. Can I work from your office for the week? He's like, yeah, absolutely. You know, and then we'd spend hours. We'd spend, oh, he'd always, he was always very we'd spend a lot of time together.

[00:22:40] He really was very focused on how we were helping their customers and how we could help them at the enterprise with, you know, old on-prem software like software Ag through to HubSpot, through to smaller, smaller SaaS companies. And then he'd be like, yeah, well, why don't you come to Chicago? Oh, well, I'm actually in Chicago next week, so why don't you stay another week and come to Chicago?

[00:23:02] It was very much a natural progression, but I think it was because the overlap in our customers was key, and I think it was because the, the, there was a, the overlap in our customers was there and now the connection we had with the many people at the G2 team from the CTO through to the sales team.

[00:23:22] And then I think there was a conversation I had with Godad where I just said, know, I just kind of explained, I said like, Hey, look, like one thing I I did wanna ask you about is if, you know, joining up with G2 would be a, you know, like offering adequately, formally to G2 customers as part of G2 alluding to an acquisition would be something possible at any stage.

[00:23:44] Like, I wasn't trying to say it has to be now, 'cause I'm just like, we might then expand at a second product that does Google reviews for hairdressers. You know, like we might expand the scope. Beyond SaaS, if you are, if this is always gonna be a partner thing, but if it's something that could happen in the future, maybe that's something we spend more times building towards.

[00:24:02] So I did just have a, a very friendly, frank conversation with him around that. Then sort of became like, well, if it is a possibility, maybe a good time to do it is is sooner.

[00:24:14] Omer: Cool. Okay. So that happened in 2019. If you were doing. Several hundred thousand in ARR, whatever that was probably the acquisition.

[00:24:31] You know, it wasn't like, you know, some life changing number that you're never gonna have to worry about money again. Right.

[00:24:38] Patrick: Yeah. We got a strategic multiple on, yeah, so it was, it was. It was, it was, yeah. It wasn't, wasn't the same as when TradeGecko was acquired by Intuit, but it was still pretty good for two people, two Bootstrappers in their twenties who'd worked on it for two years and three quarters.

[00:24:56] Omer: Yeah, totally. And then, so you were at G2 for two or three years?

[00:25:00] Patrick: Two years, yeah.

[00:25:01] Omer: And then in 2022. The stars aligned and you and Cameron were able to team up again. And so what happened? How, how did the, the idea for Amp come about

[00:25:19] Patrick: During Covid, Cameron and I, I would go for these long walks and talk about what we wanted to do next and talk about these different ideas we had and areas we'd start researching and doing the customer development in.

[00:25:30] And then we started one of those areas was e-commerce. We had a background there. We loved helping merchants. It's like a area we both genuinely enjoy and care about, and we think is significantly growing. And then through talking to the merchants, you know, HubSpot is now at 8 billion or so in, in revenue, thereabouts.

[00:25:52] And we spoke to the merchant and they're having to use, say. 25 to 40 SaaS products that maybe I might say politely, I'll say a varying in quality, like having to use 40 different SaaS products to get their website running the way they want. That doesn't include QuickBooks or payroll or anything. The, these are the SaaS apps.

[00:26:14] The, the people were using that, that was kind of the first thing we observed. Secondly, the market for SaaS products for this specific set was very fragmented. You know, there was something like 10,000 different SaaS apps and we noticed there were some real diamonds in the rough as well. Like the first company we acquired, like really high quality product.

[00:26:34] Really high quality founder, and that's why we thought it would be a, a good opportunity to combine doing what we love, which is building software products for customers. And, and that was one thing that was tough at the start that led to the first acquisition as Cameron and I were so used to having customers who cared about our product and the team to build.

[00:26:52] So that's where the first acquisition came about because. Yeah, it was really not having any customers was really painful for both of us to help drive the innovation. So that's where the first acquisition was, in part driven by, Hey, we have 2000 customers now who will scream at us if this product goes down or if anything goes wrong with it.

[00:27:11] And angry customers are really beautiful thing. Like if your product. If people aren't upset if your product is down, that's a real problem. They're like, if they, they can, hey, well I'll come back tomorrow then, then use it, then you do not matter. And you should work on something else. So that's where, that's part of what motivated, I'd say.

[00:27:28] We definitely have a major in building and a minor in buying. And what the first acquisition allowed us to do was have customers to talk to, come up with ideas, ship, ship to prod. And, and take it from there.

[00:27:44] Omer: So I wanna, I wanna talk about how that acquisition came about, how you found that app and, and ended up acquiring it.

[00:27:52] But before we do that, I wanna talk a little bit about customer development. And this was a conversation I was having with some founders just a few days ago, that when you're, when you're, when you're starting out and, and trying to get. You know, your startup off the ground or you're doing the customer development.

[00:28:09] I guess there's like two ways you can do this. You, you either start with a problem and then you find people who have that problem, which in many ways is what you did with Advocate Lee, right? You already knew like this customer review thing, it can be fixed. We can do it better. Now let's find people who, who care enough about it.

[00:28:29] There's kind of like a market approach, which is, okay, I wanna work in this space. You identified e-commerce, and let's go and find a problem that we can solve. And both of those approaches work. But from your experience, was one or the other kind of easier to get to a point where you felt like you'd identified a problem?

[00:28:57] That was painful enough. And a customer who was happy to pay for a solution.

[00:29:02] Patrick: Yeah, I, my personal approach is the market one. 'cause I think it helps you find the largest pain point. Yeah. So a personal approach has been market, but you, you always have a combination of both, right? 'cause customer development happens, naturally, even one of the, you know, we launched an Amazon integration for our BI product. How did that came up? It, it came up through a combination of talking to the customers around finding out their challenges, and one of the challenges was that they were doing their analytics for Shopify. In us and they were doing the analog analytics for Amazon in a spreadsheet.

[00:29:43] And I'm like, well, that's not gonna, we don't have product market fit. Right? We have to eventually, the tolerance for that is gonna deteriorate. So I, I would say is had a market. Yeah. So, so yeah. Our approach this time was market. I tend to skew market, but I think also amazing companies have built, through being like, Hey, this is the, I think both work, as long as there's somebody there saying, Hey, there's the hill. We're going up that hill, and we're gonna do it super fucking fast and we're gonna figure it out. I, I think you can get there, but we, yeah, we did mark it this time. And that, that's where, so the whole idea of amp being single, unified brand, multi-product focused on, you know, conversion and analytics.

[00:30:26] That was very much driven by this market understanding of the challenge in having so many varying quality SaaS products. Nobody wants 40 SaaS company providers. Right. That's where we landed on this.

[00:30:38] Omer: So you, you found this app that had about th 2000 customers at the time, and from what you were telling me earlier, this was like a.

[00:30:49] You know, a one man company. It was a developer who was bootstrapping and he'd kind of got enough traction, had to get to 2000 customers, not a huge amount of revenue.

[00:30:59] Patrick: Amazing founder.

[00:31:01] Omer: So was he looking to sell the, the app or did you just reach out to him and, and kind of explore the idea of acquiring?

[00:31:10] Patrick: Yeah, so we met we met in sort of like a online developer community and then. He was thinking about selling it. I think he just had a few other things he wanted to work on. And I think you know, when you start building something, it's great. You can ship code to prod. It doesn't matter if it really works or break something 'cause there's no customers on it anyway.

[00:31:31] And then when you're a one man band with 2000 customers, eventually your job just becomes doing customer support. And so I think I think he had thought about wanting to sell it and then sort of. Chilled off. And then he just, I think six months after we first spoke, he sent me a message on Telegram and you know, we put an offer together for him pretty quickly, I think in a, a day or two.

[00:31:53] Omer: Before we get into that, like I.

[00:31:56] Why did you and Cameron decide that you wanted to go the acquisition route? Like everyone wants to build their own product, right? You get to start from scratch. It's your vision, everything. Yeah, sure. You don't have any customers. But what, what was your rationale for saying Let's go down the acquisition route here?

[00:32:16] Patrick: Yeah. Well, like, and, and the, the thing is, is we still do both, right? Like we still, we, we released a product in April this year that was totally built from scratch by us. So, so we do both. I think it was just at the start. We just wanted to, yeah, we just, like I said at the start, we like to go fast.

[00:32:35] So we, there was nothing precluding us from buying this and then three months later being like this ain't it. Let's do something else. That, that didn't, that, yeah, I think it was more just that that velocity, customer centricity element and that that product is now unrecognizable. Right. Like I would say.

[00:32:55] 90 plus percent of the code is new code since, since the acquisition. We've got a full-time team on it now that we hired. Like, I would almost look at the fact that that started as this, the, you know, as just a kernel of a frontend add on this now. Yeah, it was just a, a, a skip that first six or 12 months in the, in the desert.

[00:33:16] Omer: Do, do you remember what the growth trajectory was like of that app at the time when you acquired it? Was it like growing really fast? Was it kind of just, you know, stable, acquiring a handful of customers here and there? Like, what was the situation at the time?

[00:33:31] Patrick: It was growing? It, it, so it had been growing very, very fast.

[00:33:36] Right, but then it sort of naturally tapered out with a self-serve SMB SaaS product, but it was still, it was still growing. I don't remember any specifics though.

[00:33:47] Omer: Okay. So the, the reason I want to, I'm trying to set the scene here, is because once you and Cameron acquired this app, you guys hit the first million in ARR pretty fast, and I want to talk about.

[00:34:04] The things that you did to, to turn that around and drive that growth, because those, the lessons from what you two did are just as applicable to a founder if they're building their own product or they've acquired something. Right. That doesn't change. Right. It was just in terms of best practices. But like, tell me, tell me about like where did you start?

[00:34:25] Like how did you go about saying, okay, we got this thing, it's kind of growing, but you know, we want to grow. Faster. What did you do?

[00:34:35] Patrick: So the first thing we did is we talked to all the customers. As many, not all of them, there's so many, but we talked to so many different segments to just really understand the, the beauty is it was product led already.

[00:34:46] You know, it was all self-serve all coming through naturally. So we wanted to understand. The new customers who are signing up, why are you signing up? What are you actually looking to do? Why is this important to your business? Why instead of doing something else, are you starting a trial of this SaaS product?

[00:35:02] Through to talking to the customers to cancel, talking through to talking to the customers that stayed and then just the open market customer development with them. It's like, Hey, what SaaS product are you looking to add after this? Like, really that customer centricity to understand the mindset of the customer.

[00:35:19] And what they were going through in what was already a, what we used to call self-serve or freemium. And we now call product led growth and I'm sure we'll call it something else. You know, I'm sure there'll be other people who are inexperienced on Twitter. Now it's claiming they're experts. So we really did that with the customer.

[00:35:36] And then just, frankly, we just had a bunch of playbooks from the last 10 years that we could just layer on right around. Redesigning the onboarding flow to drive more adoption? Yeah, just some SaaS best practices. There was no, no one had ever received an email. There was no email marketing.

[00:35:55] Omer: No way.

[00:35:56] Patrick: No way.

[00:35:57] Yeah, indeed. And we weren't even capturing the right email. We were just capturing the, with Shopify, there's a default store email address, which is typically something like orders at or help at. If you email that address as a SaaS provider, that is never get, you know, if you think SaaS companies get a lot of support, customer support tickets, imagine an e-commerce brand, how many customer support tickets they get, they get a literally a thousand x maybe 10,000 x number.

[00:36:27] You know, if we think about a G2 around that, a hundred million a RR mark, I would guess that a e-commerce brand doing a hundred million in revenue would get 10,000 times as many tickets as may, maybe more. So yeah, we just, there was just a bunch of optimizations that we could run out as well as then build more product.

[00:36:47] I would say it was all. The, the product velocity was the biggest thing.

[00:36:52] Omer: I, I wanna dig into the, the, the product piece and, and what, what started to drive the growth? One quick question on reaching out to customers. Was it hard to get customers to say yes to talking to you?

[00:37:05] Patrick: I mean, it's always hard to a degree, right?

[00:37:07] It's a volume game. I think personalization is the key. Typically what I would do is I would send them a Loom video of me on their site. So even when you see the preview of the Loom video. It is their website. So there's no chance that it's anyone, anyone else. So I'd say this being authentic is the most important thing.

[00:37:27] So what's more authentic than being like, no, it's me. I want to talk to you here, is here's where I'm curious. I love where you've done this. We wanna see if we can help or, yeah. You already used the product. We're not here to sell you anything. The pricing is exactly the same. So I, I would say that was a key, key thing.

[00:37:44] Omer: I mean, it, it blows me away how. How so many companies or people doing lead gen still send these generic, you know, what they call 'em, like spray and pray type emails with no personalization other than the first name or something silly. And it's like you, you're never gonna get a, a great response rate with that.

[00:38:12] And I think people avoid doing what you just described. Because it's hard, right? And so it's, it's just easier to take the, the simple route where you can just upload a CSV and have a bunch of templates and, and you know, click a few buttons and it goes out to thousands of people. But I think the same applies also, we're talking to customers like we were chatting earlier.

[00:38:35] It's like people really avoid talking to customers. Right. And that was your experience as well when you started. You know, kind of growing.

[00:38:47] Patrick: Yeah, I think, yeah, the Pete, I was, I think I was joking before before the call that it's like, yeah, the, the amount of work people will do to not talk to a customer is like, you know, the amount that, yeah.

[00:38:59] And it's just something we need to, and that's not targeted to anyone specific at amp. It's just as you grow there, there are two natural, the the two cultural. Things that you have to drive forward the most is to always talk to the customer, start with the customers, and walk backwards, which everyone at the company now is amazing at.

[00:39:16] But you know, I think I hired 16 people in Q2 of last year. So there, there is sometimes a natural tendency towards documentation and internal meetings, which are all important. And yeah, there's always a natural resistance to going, super fast. Like people want to talk about stuff next Tuesday. It's like, what are you doing right now?

[00:39:35] Like, let's you know if it's actually the most important thing, which it is. We, we have to, yeah. Not, not with customers. They can't, they can talk to us next Tuesday, but I mean internal meetings or moving projects forward.

[00:39:47] Omer: Yeah. Okay. So I think in, in terms of like avoiding talking to customers, I, I, I agree with you.

[00:39:54] I don't think it's an individual thing. I think if you. Go and look at a lot of teams or companies, and you ask people like, when was the last time you talked to a customer? Like there will be people there who haven't ever talked to a, a customer, right? And so if you, if you're coming from that kind of environment, if it's, if it's just the, you just think it's the norm, right?

[00:40:18] It's not like anything else.

[00:40:19] Patrick: We have, we have individual contributor software engineers running their own customer development calls.

[00:40:24] Omer: Wow.

[00:40:25] Patrick: Yeah. I have a call with my VP of engineering and a customer tomorrow morning. Our marketing team does all their own customer calls. We're good at record. There's libraries and libraries of calls.

[00:40:35] Yeah, we, they're all segmentable and, yeah. So yeah. It's a, it's a huge part of our organization.

[00:40:43] Omer: It's part of your culture.

[00:40:45] Patrick: Yeah. There, that's the number one value is customer obsession, starting with the customer and working backwards. And then speed is the primary business strategy.

[00:40:54] Omer: Yeah. So let's talk about the speed, like, you know, going super fing fast.

[00:41:00] A lot of people don't wanna do that, right? It's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna screw up, I'm gonna make mistakes. Customers are gonna think I'm an idiot. They're gonna think my product is crap.

[00:41:10] Patrick: It's gonna be crap anyway. You know, now you just know, like, you know, like, yeah. Yeah, so I think it's really important.

[00:41:17] The second layer is, is it does require prioritization. You know, I think we, we typically, I, I want like one to three priorities in the whole company at any given moment. And there's 50 of us with 20,000 customers. So it does, there is a layer of prioritization. It adequately actually had blocked in my calendar from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM every day.

[00:41:38] I think the quote is something to the effect of what is the one thing that would make everything else irrelevant. You know, whether it's like, oh, if we just had. A thousand inbound leads a month, we know our funnel would just skyrocket. 'cause we have 98% net retension. We have, you know, like whatever it is for any given business.

[00:41:57] If I had two more engineers, I could do, you know, like, okay, let's go hire two engineers.

[00:42:02] Omer: There's one thing when you're a solo founder or a, you know, a couple of founders going super fast, right? You can, if you start to do that and things don't work out or break, you can. You know, you can adjust course, you can make changes quickly.

[00:42:18] You can keep going. When you start building out a team, I mean, you've got like 50 plus people, but even with a team of 10 people, if everyone's moving at that speed, things can break. And you might not even know something's broken or how it broke until you look at the numbers and just say What happened to our.

[00:42:40] Whatever number. Right? A performance number or a revenue number or whatever. So how do you make sure that you give people the freedom to be able to move fast, but still have like. Some bumpers in place to make sure that you can, you know, manage risk.

[00:42:56] Patrick: Yeah, I think there's a couple of things there.

[00:42:58] 'cause yeah, we, you definitely want decentralized decision making. Like people should be able to make their own decisions and they shouldn't have to be checking stuff all the time. I think being clearer about prioritization is important. So we use a framework called B two Mum. It's from Salesforce.

[00:43:15] It's very similar to OKR. Where you have the, the two day-to-day components are the methods and the metrics. They're the equivalent of the OKRs. And I think as long as they are the focus, I, I don't know, in my experience with clear prioritization clear prioritization, documentation, and communication, the only things that break by going really fast are the things that don't matter.

[00:43:40] Like, it's not like going really fast as, and focusing on the MQL number has ever like dropped the MQL number and no one has noticed, like, I've just never seen that. I've never seen that happen. I've never seen obsessing over customers and or my culture of talking to customers all the time. I've never seen that result in customer support getting really slow or engineers not fixing customer bugs.

[00:44:04] It builds the culture, you know, so the things that get left behind are. I don't know stuff. Yeah, I, yeah, I, I, I hear where you are coming from, but it's typically stuff breaks and stuff gets less behind, but it typically things that probably maybe shouldn't have been there to start with. And Oh, and stuff will break by getting really fast.

[00:44:25] But you, you, you notice, you don't not notice.

[00:44:29] Omer: Yeah. I I think it goes back to having clear priorities across the company. Yeah. You know, I, I want to talk about, there was another example you shared with me earlier about the Amazon integration and sending out that email. I'd love for you to tell that story because.

[00:44:50] I think sometimes when people hear these kinds of interviews and they think. Oh yeah. Once you get to like seven figures or eight figures, you've made it. And, you know, things are kind of easy after that. And, and that, that example you gave me there was like just so real, the kind of thing that every founder who's, you know, even trying to get their first 10 customers kind of experiences.

[00:45:10] So why don't you just share that story about the, you know, the number of clicks and stuff.

[00:45:13] Patrick: Yeah, yeah. I, so I. What I was talking about in, in broader context, I was talking after, even after all these years, every new thing takes longer to hit than you think it will. So the example I was sharing is we launched an Amazon integration, which I expected to have.

[00:45:31] We'd done all this analysis, we'd spoke to loads of people that they were using us for the BI tool for Shopify, and they were using a spreadsheet for Amazon and. You know, 60% of our ICPs in North America sold millions a year on Amazon, and we just thought this thing was going to explode. And we have four, 4,000 customers that fit this perfect profile and we launch it and it gets like 46 clicks.

[00:45:58] Like, like, it just doesn't, it just does not. Take off at all. And then now, and I think I, I thought it would get to, you know, 500,000 a RR in the first month. And we got there, it just took more like a few months than, I think it took more like six months than a month. And even again, last week we launched we launched I do wanna get better at product launches.

[00:46:18] Some people are amazing at it. It's just not something I'm as good at. I'm better at retention, I think, which I would still choose over. Launch launches. But yeah, last week we launched something. We have a bi tool that can predict things like propensity for repurchase and we enabled the upselling tool we were talking about, which is, you know, when you go on Amazon, it's like you add a basketball to your cart.

[00:46:45] It's like, Hey, do you want a pump? Do you want some shoes? This sort of natural upselling. We do this for. Decentralized you know, not non-Amazon businesses. So we launched this thing where the models from the BI tool could intelligently upsell products with say the highest repurchase rate you know, the highest propensity to repurchase to help drive greater LTV.

[00:47:08] And again, at large it was, the verbal response was very incredible. It was amazing. But the actual, the actual numbers, who, number of customers who set it up and started doing these machine learning based upsells was, was, was lacking. But I, I know, I know we will, yeah, I always expect to launch to like rakers applause, and sometimes I launch to silence slash the sound of 46 people clicking a mouse out of 4,000.

[00:47:37] Omer: The struggles don't go away. They just, they do. Cool. All right. We should wrap up. Let's get onto the lightning round. So I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Ready? Yeah. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:47:52] Patrick: I think no one will be surprised. Talk to customers. Start with the customers and work backwards.

[00:47:57] Go really fast. And then I think to the original quote, have, you know, do, especially if you're right at the start of the journey, focus on, on finding a co-founder who can really, yeah. Build, build together.

[00:48:09] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why? And you can use the same book again if you want.

[00:48:14] You mentioned earlier?

[00:48:16] Patrick: Oh, no, I think that was, I think the I, I, yeah, I think Seven Powers by Hamilton Almar, the Outsiders by William Thorndyke, to me are the two, two best business books. Keeping in mind the audience, though I might be breaking my own rule of the right book at the, at the right time, anybody who's sort of getting to that first 10 person team read Amped Up by Frank Sluman.

[00:48:39] 10, 10 person team to 10,000 person team. I literally called my company amp. It's, it's an amazing book.

[00:48:46] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:48:51] Patrick: So, people often conflate, there are two categories, you know, working really hard, talking to customers. These are table stakes.

[00:48:58] That's like, you haven't even arrived at the start line. If we're not doing those two things, they're not attributes of successful founders. They're like. Small, blind, big blind. You cannot play poker if you, you, you don't you don't do those. And then I think the second one, though, I would say, especially right at the start, the number of people who succeed without a awesome co-founder is, is, is restrictive.

[00:49:21] Again, I'd have that as like a table stakes.

[00:49:23] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:49:27] Patrick: So in general, I hate this category. Like people are like, oh, I use this to-do list app, or I just find it all kind of ridiculous. But I, I, my personal one though would just be having routine and being active is important.

[00:49:39] Important for me. I find it compounds into my performance.

[00:49:44] Omer: You mean in terms of like just working out energy, that kind of stuff?

[00:49:47] Patrick: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:49:49] Omer: Yeah. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time? I mean, I don't,

[00:49:55] Patrick: I'm so uninteresting that I don't really have one. I, we were just so deliberate about this and also you have two years on the sidelines at G2.

[00:50:05] You just on the bench or I love my time at G2, but you are obviously thinking about what you want to do next and, and you can't, so yeah, I'm not one of those ones people that like wanna start a space company or anything. Yeah, I'm, I am focused and this was a, this is a long-term bet. 'cause whilst the G2 exit wasn't the biggest exit in the world, the ma Yeah, I'm sort of fine.

[00:50:28] So yeah, if I wanted to do something else, I, I just would

[00:50:32] Omer: I. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people dunno?

[00:50:36] Patrick: Hmm. I I actually play quite a lot of video games. I yeah, I play a pretty significant amount of video games. That's something I, I really enjoy. Not as much as I used to, but yeah, basically during Covid I started playing for the first time since Halo and Tony Hawk skated too.

[00:50:52] And yeah, I love it and it's a great way to keep in touch with my friends.

[00:50:57] Omer: Cool. And finally. What's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:51:03] Patrick: Surfing surfing's the outside of work. Surfing's the number one non-family related passion.

[00:51:09] Omer: Love it. Patrick, thank you for joining me and, and kind of unpacking the, I guess, the last 10 or 11 years of your journey.

[00:51:17] Hopefully I think we, we covered a lot of things and a lot of really useful lessons that I think. I hope that people listening to this can get some. Some insights or something that they can take away and apply in their own business. So I appreciate you doing that. If people wanna check out amp, they can go to use amp.com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:51:43] Patrick: Yeah. I'm, @pc_barnes on Twitter.

[00:51:46] Omer: Cool. We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes. Cool. That was awesome, man. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:51:54] Patrick: Thank you for having me, Omer. Appreciate it.

[00:51:55] Omer: My pleasure. And given the time difference, we still made this work and it was fun. So I appreciate you.

[00:52:01] Patrick: No, I, I got a lot easier when I moved, so I just moved to Sydney from Singapore in, the last two weeks, so I think it's being in Sydney made it a lot easier.

[00:52:10] Omer: Cool. All right man. Thanks so much. I wish you and the team the best of success.