Exacaster: 18 Months of Zero Sales to Multi-Million SaaS – with Egidijus Pilypas [441]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Hey, Egidijus welcome to the show

[00:00:01] Egidijus: Omer. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:03] Omer: My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[00:00:07] Egidijus: Yeah, it's I stole it from Steve Jobs actually. So it's everything what around is built by people know smarter than you.

So this quote drives me every day when I think that I cannot do something. I remember it and I know that I can, I love that one.

[00:00:24] Omer: Yeah. That's awesome. So tell us about Exacaster. What does the product do? Who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve? I.

[00:00:33] Egidijus: So we are Exacaster. We help subscription based companies to grow revenue from their existing customer base.

So our primary target market was telecommunication companies. So we help their customer value management teams to grow, to acquire customers, grow existing customer revenue, and retain those customers. And we as a company, we provide an end solutions, meaning we provide strategy consulting, we provide CVM platform and we also provide managed services.

Yeah. So that would be a super brief introduction. And the key thing is like we help to drive this return on investment from existing customer base.

[00:01:18] Omer: Yeah. So I think to break it down or just simplify it for people listening is I think it's your. You're analyzing the behavior of those telco's customers, and then you are giving them the right tools to have the insights and also to, to market to them.

Whether it looks like somebody's going to churn or whether there's an opportunity to sell another. Product or something to the customer?

[00:01:44] Egidijus: Just to give a super simple example would be for example, did you know that you have a 10 times bigger probability to purchase a new iPhone if somebody from your close family has purchased one?

So this type of insights you get from analyzing customer behavior, building machine learning algorithms, and the kind of, if you see that somebody's friend just purchased a new iPhone, you might get an iPhone recommendation as well. So this is part of the magic that we do.

[00:02:17] Omer: And give us a sense of the size of the business.

Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team?

[00:02:23] Egidijus: Yeah. So in size of team, we are approaching 100 team members right now. So we are roughly we are slightly above 7 million in revenue. And we have around 30 clients right now and almost 20 countries I would say.

[00:02:40] Omer: Yeah. So you've got a customer base globally and you have bootstrapped the business and done it. You're based in Lithuania, so you know you've done that from there and I think that's always super relevant. I often talk to founders who are not in the US maybe, there in Europe and Asia, and thinking about how they can grow from there.

Local market to expand, whether it's Europe or into the us. And so I think your journey, I think could provide some interesting insights for those people. Let's talk about like where the idea came from, you just wake up one day and say, oh, I'm gonna build a solution for telcos.

[00:03:25] Egidijus: Actually the idea was not so obvious. I am as a student, when I was studying statistics, I actually worked in one Telco as a product marketing manager. But my passion was actually statistics. I'm I'm su super math geek, et cetera. And in university I met one of a lecturer who was teaching machine learning.

And it was like, I don't know, 20 years ago which is machine learning was not a thing. At that point nobody knew what is artificial in intelligence, et cetera. But there was an old guy who every Tuesday would bring me this amount of latest math papers with best AI algorithms and I was writing the code to implement those.

And what we did with him is we basically would create trading algorithms that would trade the financial markets. And basically tested if it would work or not. And some years ago some years after during that process, basically I left my telecom company to go and further deepen my knowledge in AI and basically with an idea to conquer the financial markets, but one day I lost all my money while trading. Wow. And I said, okay, I think it's enough to play with this trading thing. I need to create some real value for for the world. And I called to my previous boss in in that telecom that I was working and I said, Hey how are you?

I have the best machine learning algorithms in the world and they don't have a business problem. And he was also fresh freshly he left also this telco and he said, do you remember when we were working in that telecom? They all, they have this churn problem, customer would be leaving and they wouldn't know why, when, et cetera, can you predict when customers will churn?

And I said, I have the best algorithms def I definitely can. So he made a call to some of his friends which was a local internet provider company. We asked them to give customer data. This was before all the GDPR and all these kind of customer protection and data protection years.

So they shipped us an Excel file with their whole customer base with all data et cetera. Over like couple of weeks. I during days and nights I would write the predictive algorithms that would predict which customers will turn. So I did a successful job. We made the pitch. We went to that company and we said, guys, these thousand customers will leave you next month if you won't do anything.

And they said, wow, it looks so interesting, but we don't have money to pay for you.

[00:06:30] Omer: Yeah. Funny how that often comes up.

[00:06:32] Egidijus: Yes. So then what we did, we took we took the same pitch and we we asked for a meeting to other telecom company. We take that, took that pitch. We went to them and we said, guys.

We have the best machine learning algorithms in the world, and we can tell which of your customers will churn. And they said I don't understand what you say, because nobody understood machine learning at that point, but it sounds interesting. Let's try. We said, okay guys pay us upfront this amount of money and we will build you a platform.

And they said, okay, let's do this. So we, they basically we signed the contract and they promised us to pay some amount of money. And on December 3rd 2010, we sat down. Two guys, me and Sharon. None of us were developers at that time. We learn how to write code, how to administer databases, et cetera.

And in three months we shipped a working platform. So we worked day and night.

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What was the tech stack, by the way? What did you decide to teach yourself?

[00:08:31] Egidijus: So the tech stack was PHP for machine learning. We used R as a programming language, and then databases like Postgre, et cetera. So we basically learned all that stuff. I knew how to write R code, but no PHP, no database administration, nothing. And basically we shipped it, we shipped the product and the clients looked at it and they said, okay, looks good, but we need this additional feature that to help to do data management piece because it's impossible for us to do it.

We don't have resources. And we said, okay guys pay us another amount of money. We will give you a second version. So in next six months, we de basically developed second increment. And during that time we started selling our product to other companies. So our second client was Alaska Mobile.

We randomly met them in a conference and made a sale. Yeah, so this is basically how it's all start started.

[00:09:36] Omer: So that's like super interesting that number one you identified a pain that was painful enough that a customer was willing to basically fund the development of the product.

And then the other thing I want to talk a little bit about is this this Alaska mobile. Customer and the event piece, a lot of founders who, as we talked about, are sitting somewhere outside of the US and they're thinking about how to expand from their local market into other areas it's often challenging figuring out, do I, do, I just keep going deep in my local market?

Do I? Which, where do I go next? And your approach was all over the place. 'cause you were like, oh, first customer is in Lithuania, the second customer is in Alaska. The third one I think you told me was in Paraguay. So this number one, like why did you decide to take that approach and then how were you able to land.

These customers in countries where, you hadn't done business before.

[00:10:44] Egidijus: By design we were we are limited. So Lithuania is a pretty small country. We have 3 million people. We have maybe five telecom companies. And if you work with one of the, in those days, if you were working with one out of three biggest guys they would say, we will not work with you because we are afraid that.

The, the knowhow, leak, et cetera. So by design, our second client should have been outside Lithuania. And for us, we knew we are from Telco, we have this knowhow, et cetera. So it was obvious that we need to. Find other telecoms around the world. So we started active to search for them actively, but we did not have a lot of time for that.

'cause as I said in the beginning, we started two guys. We were developers, product managers, and data analysts, data scientists, salespeople, everything you know. System administrators you name it. So we we would say, okay, what was the fa what do we have capacity for? So the only reasonable thing was to basically go to telco conferences and and we went to a few of them.

Basically we were limited by our revenue streams. So we went every time we would go to a conference, we would get like one, one and a half lead there, which would basically go and convert further. So we started spreading ourselves. What's half a lead? So basically in one conference you would have one lead.

In the other conference you would have two leads, and on the average you would get one and a half. Okay, good.

[00:12:25] Omer: Thanks. Thank you for clarifying that. Okay, so let's talk about that, that first. The second customer, the Alaska Mobile how many events did you attend before you landed that second?

Customer and were you just turning up and attending these events or were you spending money on trying to get a booth and just demo what you had?

[00:12:46] Egidijus: So we we basically we would get a booth and then try to show do the demos, et cetera. So we would do everything, what we can, what we knew and what we didn't know, basically.

And to get this Alaska Mobile, I think it was a single conference. At that time sales cycles were shorter compared to now. A sales cycle might be two years. Two years and a half maybe at that time the sales cycle would be up to a year. So you meet somebody in a conference and couple of calls.

If the value is good you could get a deal, so it was a bit shorter sales cycle. And for us it was an adventure because it's Alaska is one of the furthest places from Lithuania where you can get a client, yeah.

[00:13:37] Omer: So often what happens when founders go and start working with a customer.

And building a product based on their requirements or having a design partner, is that they sometimes realize they've ended up building a product for a market of one because they've customized so much for that specific customer's needs. Was that something that you were very aware of as you were building the product and when you sold it to Alaska Mobile?

How close were you to meeting the requirements that they had?

[00:14:13] Egidijus: With Alaska Mobile it was we didn't have the struggle. But for us as Exacaster, our biggest struggle usually would be the delivery piece. We would be always be. Pulled to get more service. Also get build some extra features.

And this kind of you get lost when customers are pulling you. But you don't get lost when you have, let's say, two similar size or similar type of customers. You get really distracted when you get when your next customer increase in size dramatically. So for example, we had, I don't know, three or five customers, and then we brought the fifth one, which was like as big as the the rest combined.

And then this kind of single client drags you with all the enterprise requirements and all the other random stuff, and you get so lost in the delivery cycles that you forget about new sales. Because if new opportunities come across as you just say, I cannot do it, there's no time to even make a pitch or to make a good pitch, and and then the other p part is then you fall in this trap of delivering product to one client and basically two years pass, and then you wake up and you say, oh gosh, I need to refresh the whole product to redo everything.

[00:15:44] Omer: Yeah. It sounds like you were trying to do multiple things.

So you're building a SaaS product and you are, you're trying to. Get customers onboarded, support them with that and add new features. But at the same time, every time you bring on a new customer, they are adding their own set of requirements of what they want you to add to the product.

And, it's not like it's a $20 a month customer, you've got these major deals and so they, they expect you to take more. Notice of what they're telling you they need. And then thirdly, it sounds like you had this services business alongside, which you still have today. So with all of that going on tell me about some of, you, you touched on it, that it made it really hard for you to look at new opportunities and grow.

But this went on for quite a while, right? This was like many years that you were in this situation.

[00:16:42] Egidijus: Yeah, so the funny part was that we didn't think about the sales and marketing strategy at all for the first seven or eight years. Maybe nine. Because all that time, our major struggle would be to deliver.

It because we are always short, late more requests than we can deliver type of situation. And this was our biggest challenge was how do we build, organization, which can deliver projects without CEO's involvement, mine involvement, how do we actually scale those teams that would work with clients together?

And one of one of the aspects that are important for us as our customer life si lifetime. Is around 10 years. So when we take a new client, we usually are capable to grow value for those, for the client for at least 10 years. Let's say our first client that we took last year was still growing as an account for us.

This is the aspect when you combine SaaS and the services together, you are basically capable to to grow these accounts. But at the same time, you have a nightmare of how you set up your teams to work with these accounts and to continue building value for these accounts.

[00:18:18] Omer: So how did you eventually get out of that situation? This kind of quicksand, right? It's hey, every time we bring in a new customer, great celebration and then realize overwhelmed with delivery, and then suddenly you wake up, and realize hey, we, we should have attended these events because that worked for us previously and we could have landed more customers.

But every time we land a customer, we get more overwhelmed with delivery. How did you break out of that cycle?

[00:18:42] Egidijus: It came naturally because what you experience in these cycles is like you grow exponentially. Until the point when you break, right? So every time we double the size of organization, we need to change everything, structure processes, et cetera.

And we would be basically growing exponentially. Like some years would be like a hundred percent, 50% and you grow like for three years. Then everything breaks. You designed the organization for one year or two years. You have this basically flat and you say, oh gosh, I needed to do some sales. Then everybody you design a new org structure, you focus more on sales, and then you grow again, and then you break again, and then you redesign the whole organization and then you grow again.

And basically maybe five years ago or or four years ago we said, okay we have pretty good delivery organization right now but we don't have a sales organization. So what we did, we, hi we said, and we don't know how to build it. So we probably need to hire something.

Who is someone who is experienced from English speaking country? So we hired a person from uk, a really experienced salesperson, just not exactly in our. Business and then we started building our first aggressive marketing and sales processes. The key idea was if we have a lot of RFPs or requests for proposals from companies it's just a numbers game.

The more RFPs we get some we will win. So we did lots of cold calls, cold emails and many things. We burned quite a lot of cash over the time, and the result was, I. Nothing. How long were you trying to get this to work? It's almost like one and a half years, almost two. I would say that in the process we participated in some RFPs, but the thing is that we lost them all because we were basically too late in every of the RFP because the thing is if client is.

In writing you randomly to their sales process, you are pretty much too late.

[00:21:20] Omer: So how did you realize what was the aha moment where you said, okay, we know this isn't working because we haven't had any sales through this, but what exactly is going on and how do we fix it?

[00:21:30] Egidijus: Aha moment was when we stepped back and started thinking, so how did we land the initial sales?

In the beginning. And it and it always started from either usually CEO or sureness, who is extremely customer obsessed. And he will die, but he will solve client's problem. And c and clients really appreciate that because they. Start trusting you when you honestly try to solve their problem.

And then we basically understood that we are we are in a relationship business. And then this idea sank into us. Kind of our sales cycles became longer because the project size beca became longer and B2B environment is. More complex. Typically we have, we deal with, in the buying process, we have from seven to 10 personas.

So it's like a very complex purchase process. So yeah. So then our key idea was, okay, if we want to win these RFPs, we need to understand client problems way better before we receive the RFP in order. To help clients to purchase them. And yeah. And this is where we basically said to ourselves that we need to move towards account based marketing strategy.

[00:23:12] Omer: I wanna touch on that because you didn't need a lot of customers to get to the first million in ARR, I think it was like the first five or six got you there. You weren't really doing any marketing other than say, Hey, let's go to events and demo the product, which is marketing. But, it's a pretty simple process to just say find an event, get out there, demo, show the product.

And then once you got beyond that and the business grew, and then the sales outreach didn't work. Moving to ABM was the next thing that you decided to do, but there was also this gap in between where you were like, Hey, we don't really know how to do in marketing, right? We need to learn this stuff.

So how, why did you have that gap? Had you not hired any marketing people onto the team then and how did you go about fixing that?

[00:24:06] Egidijus: This is basically a pure lack of education. It's in that eight, eight year or so only then we understood that I. Our marketing budget and account management budget should be significant because all that time, as I said, we didn't we had a really bad website.

We we would run some marketing campaigns on LinkedIn or so, but it was, like very random, something super small and not very professional, et cetera. We just we didn't have this problem, so because we got those client early clients, pretty organically. So we, we landed this client in Lithuania.

Then we through the same group we went to that via Estonia. We as we said, we landed some clients like in United States, in South America. So it started bubbling pretty randomly. And we we didn't have time to think about marketing and as we bootstrapped. We didn't have, let's say, external partners who would look at our process and would say, Hey guys, it's you can be better.

You can grow faster. But we hadn't because we bootstrapped and as a co-founders, we were in the business itself. We didn't have this external advisory. People who would coach us through, the process. Because our biggest headache was how do we deliver on time?

[00:25:39] Omer: Yeah. Okay. So you figure out you're in the relationship business. That's super important if you're gonna win more customers and then that leads you to account-based marketing. Tell me about how you went about implementing. That, and I think in, in, in the, in, in a very high level, people get it right in terms of, okay, I identified the accounts that I wanna ideally target, and then I build relationships with those people in the implementation of the execution is much harder than that sounds right.

So just tell us what you what your experience was like and then how you navigated that.

[00:26:21] Egidijus: Yeah. It's super easy to say identify accounts. So for us, it took two months to get the full list of all telecoms in the world, but we did it because somebody needs to sit down, write all Google through all the countries in the world in all these different crazy languages, identify what are the telecoms in that country, et cetera.

But this is basically a technical work, but when you think about relationships, it's all about trust building. And trust is not, it's not easy to build. And we had a very vivid aha moment there because as I said, we were our primary audience was telecoms and we have customer value managers as kind of people whom we deliver the service.

And customer value managers are like secret agents in telecoms because they run all the secret campaigns for their client base, which is below the line, like all the personalized marketing, et cetera. And none of competition sees it. And and they deliver revenue through that because you do all this personalization, et cetera, and how you do it is the secret source of driving that revenue.

And the challenge with customer value managers, that they are extremely lonely people and extremely unrecognized people because imagine in Lithuania they are five telecoms. Every telecom have one or two customer value managers. And that's it. Nobody understands them in their organization because if you, if some if you ask somebody, what do customer value managers do?

They say they are sending spam messages to our clients, right? And and now you as a customer value manager, you think, oh my God, I'm doing such an amazing personalization campaigns. I am using all these AI tools, et cetera, et cetera, and you don't have anybody to talk. And one day one of our clients calls to our CEO Una and she says Hey, unas, I'm call calling to you.

Because I feel lonely. I don't have anyone to talk. Can we discuss things, and at this moment we understood customer value managers feel alone. So first thing, what we did is we launched a customer value man a CVM Stories podcast. Where we interview customer value managers and ask them to share their knowhow.

Because customer value management, it's like a super rare field and there's no content, there are no learning materials, et cetera, except some, marketing materials, which is like purchase our marketing campaign automation tool and retain your customers. So we started building this CVM Stories podcast.

And then in our first episode we said, Hey, we feel that customer value managers are lonely. And then they get LinkedIn messages. They I heard your podcast. I really feel lonely.

[00:29:31] Omer: This is like a super niche. Audience. It's, there are lots of telcos around the world, but I think you said to me like, maybe globally, like

[00:29:41] Egidijus: 1,300.

[00:29:43] Omer: There you go. Thank you. 1,300. So if all of those have one or two, these customer value managers, that's not a huge market or audience. So your, you're interviewing these people with in these very niche roles and reaching out to these people. How did you obviously like you were getting learnings and building, this was an opportunity to build relationships as you, you interview these people.

How were you getting this content out in front of other CVMs?

[00:30:17] Egidijus: What I did personally I I put my brand in front, like a and I put, I, I went on a mission to make customer value Manager is famous. So I said on LinkedIn, that's my mission to make customer value managers famous. And then I went and start talking with every CVM on LinkedIn.

So basically out of 3000 cvms, I know now, like one and a half thousand or something like that. Wow. Personally. Wow. Yeah. So yeah, we just go and spread the news. Hey, I'm, I am CM Stories podcast host and I invite you to help to make CMS famous. And from there as we were talking in the podcast, we were getting insights then.

Then next approaches started building like we made CVM benchmark a tool which would allow to measure how well are you performing a against your peers, ggl globally. I. Then CVM started benchmarking themselves out of this. We could launch CVM trends, another research report, not a marketing material report, but true research report.

And then again, we would get insights like, oh my God, thank you. This is so amazing. This is like such a unique source. People would take this translate to other languages, et cetera. Wow. And then as we continue to talk with those customer value managers, we get more and more insights.

People want to contribute. As we were talking with the customer value managers around the world we would be getting more and more insights and people want to contribute to create the knowhow and in customer value management. There is no content to learn from. So for example, in project management, and there is a project management body of knowledge where you learn it, you read it, and you say, I am a PMP project management professional.

So what we did, we wrote customer Value Management, body of Knowledge book. Which is like CVM BoK. And we wrote it together with customer value managers around the world, which are not our clients. So it's we have Sylvia Gomez, who is from Australia large Telco there. We and many like over 30 customer value managers around the world contributed to the content.

Yeah, so we launched the book and we basically embraced ourselves to help to become those cvms famous. And through this basically our marketing strategy is to be genuinely useful for those customer value managers. It's not like shouting ex gas or this and that, but it's basically being extremely useful.

And when you build further, so in LinkedIn, suddenly I became a guy who's get, who gets like messages, Hey, I'm switching my career. I'm searching for CVM opportunities. Can you recommend something? So out of this we created CVM new newsletter where we do some information and also put all open positions of customer value management in the world.

So it's we just do all sorts of useful stuff for these guys. And now it's the thing that the clients of our Compe competition, they post on LinkedIn about CVMB, how they love the the book and so on. So we are yeah.

[00:34:07] Omer: So you basically use the podcast as a way to connect with your ICP. You focus very much on, on them, their problem, their loneliness making them famous. Taking the insights and lessons from these people and teaching that information, educating other people in the industry and all of that stuff is great. But I was wondering like, how long did that take and what about leads and sales and all of that stuff?

What was going on that side while you were doing this?

[00:34:46] Egidijus: So we launched the book, in March, in the beginning of March. And we basically did it in a year. So now it's it took us a year to build that. Eh, as I said, our sales process is two years plus. But so we cannot say that we closed extremely large amount of new deals, but we get way more discussions or ear early leads discussions compared to what we used to, because in the year before we would in the last years we would go to the conference, if we have booked, let's say, two or three good conversations, so then it makes sense for us to fly. This year when we went to a conference, we have booked like 35 meetings which is totally different.

Number

[00:35:46] Omer: And I guess a large part of that is that, that you are, you're known in the industry now, and they see you as an authority and someone who's focusing on delivering value, which it always sounds like a cliche to deliver value, but it really is about just trying, as you said, like just trying to be as useful as possible.

To these people and the belief is that you, you keep doing that and good things will. Happen for everybody, right?

[00:36:16] Egidijus: Yeah. Exactly. This is I strongly believe that if you build this trust, that if you build this connection with the people, you eventually will get get back from the community.

Great.

[00:36:30] Omer: I just wanna talk a little bit about one of the other lessons you learned in the last year or two. About bringing on, yeah, closing large deals, onboarding customers. You for many years you struggle with the service delivery piece, and then over time you figured out how to manage that, have the right org structure in place to, to do that.

But it sounds like from what you were telling me earlier, even a couple of years ago, it was still an issue when you brought. Some of these big customers on board. So can you tell me about what was, what were the symptoms? What were the problems that you were still seeing

[00:37:04] Egidijus: in our sales process?

As we used to be in a situation where. We would struggle to deliver and when a new client request would come. So for example, we get an RFP to deliver a new CDM platform. And this would be a large RFP. We are talking like a million or two of size in terms of revenue. Lots of, kind of complex solution platform delivery service, et cetera, et cetera. We would not spend enough time with the whole organization to groom the response to RFP, et cetera. We would sit down with the CEO, basically write out the response to this request for proposal, and basically do the bidding.

What this would create is that our solutions would not be as good as they could because we don't take into account all the know-how from the organization, from one perspective, from o other perspective, when we would do the pitches. We would fly one or two guys and do the pitch of our proposal so the clients would only see unas or me and or other account manager.

And it would be, that's it. What we learned basically last year. We totally changed the approach. So if we see that a valuable request for proposal comes we organize, I don't know for the biggest bid we used 20 people 20 people in organization contributed to our response. So it, it went way with a bigger quality.

When we went to pitch to the clients, we went I know seven guys. It is and data scientists and data engineers and infrastructure managers, and project managers and product managers. It you go as a team, the client sees you, they see your your value, your people who are contributing to the project, their expertise, et cetera.

And after that we basically. Started e either winning the RFPs or being in top two. This actually changed everything dramatically. I. So over in now we are always overinvesting in the sales process. And when we win in the customer onboarding process, it's the biggest investment that you, you need to do, you take the brightest people, the deliver with the highest possible quality in the beginning to set everything up properly.

[00:39:49] Omer: Yeah, I, it's, when you describe it like that it makes complete sense. Like why wouldn't you involve more people in your organization when you're putting together the RFP? It's gonna be better quality, more well thought through.

[00:40:00] Egidijus: But it's not natural.

[00:40:02] Omer: Exactly. And also you're often thinking, we haven't won this and so how, and we've got a million other things to do and we've got.

All the challenges you talked about. So yeah, so pulling all these people out, there's always this risk that we're gonna, we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna overinvest, but we haven't won this deal. We could be wasting a lot of time on deals that are not gonna go anywhere. But it sounds like the you, you had some level, some kind of qualification in terms of.

W were you doing this with every deal that came along? Or handpicking the ones that looked like the strongest opportunities.

[00:40:40] Egidijus: We we started doing this with biggest deals, basically. And the key thing is it would be very, it is very tough to explain to the whole organization why you would stop doing whatever you are doing.

And now in three weeks time, prepare this proposal document, which is, I know 300 pages. It's extremely difficult to explain. So we even had to invent internal investment processes like our account managers have literally revenue or that they can with which they can purchase internal resources so that the teams who are throwing out whatever they're doing and helping to do the sales.

So that they would still be feeling that they are earning some kind of revenue for their team or whatever. Just basically to understand that this is a real thing, otherwise you say, I am delivering Project A and I am getting revenue there and why I am doing, why I am working for free.

[00:41:50] Omer: So you get you're give you, you're giving these account managers like an internal budget that they can spend to get resources, which probably helps to prioritize depending on how much they're willing to spend. But it also. Yeah I guess it, it feels like you're doing more meaningful work when you're getting pulled off to work on a new RFP or whatever.

[00:42:09] Egidijus: Yeah. Now basically your account manager becomes the same level as external client 'cause they're paying, for your team service, so it's it equalizes.

[00:42:20] Omer: Love it. That's a great idea. Okay. Time to wrap up. Let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you.

Yeah. Let's do this. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:42:32] Egidijus: So it it was like a month or two ago. When our, my coach said gets get used to working with clarity Islands in this extremely changing world, because I was saying my team is asking me, what is our strategy for five years and et cetera.

And I cannot define it because everything changes so fast, and she said get used to working with Clarity Islands.

[00:42:59] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:43:01] Egidijus: Last year's best book for me was The Gap in the Game by Dan s Silvan. It it. Helps to think about the progress that you're making in your business and your life.

Structure it in a positive way. So I think this was the best book for me in a while.

[00:43:21] Omer: Great. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:43:26] Egidijus: I would say it's high energy. And really caring about problem solving and really not caring about what people think around.

[00:43:38] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:43:42] Egidijus: It's writing. Definitely writing. So I write down all the bigger ideas and principles and projects, et cetera, just.

[00:43:51] Omer: Type it. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:43:55] Egidijus: So if I would have all the time and all the money in the world, I would go and create something like total body monitoring tool or tool set or whatever to make sure that I know everything, what happens inside of my body.

[00:44:09] Omer: Oh, I would buy that.

[00:44:13] Egidijus: No.

[00:44:14] Omer: Depending on how much it was, but yeah. Yeah. And what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:44:20] Egidijus: The fun fact is that I am a total introvert and I get freaked out when I need to talk with people that I don't know, or people in general.

But when you are a co-founder, everybody thinks that you are just a chatterbox,

[00:44:32] Omer: I hear you. It's I'm an introvert as well, and I always find that, just sometimes having going and having conversations with people often is just feels so I enjoy it in the moment once you get over the anxiety. But it always feels so draining and it's always, I always feel like I need to spend time by myself just to get my energy back.

It's and then people say, but you do a podcast, you do this, you, it's and finally what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:44:55] Egidijus: I do windsurfing. I love it. And I am pretty obsessed about longevity I read it before it was famous as well.

[00:45:03] Omer: Love it.

Awesome. I guess thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for unwrapping this journey over. The last, 14 years of building this business. If people want to check out Exacaster, they can go to exacaster.com, that's E-X-A-C-A-S-T-E-R.com. And if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:45:28] Egidijus: The best way would be LinkedIn.

[00:45:30] Omer: We'll include a link in the show notes so people can find you. Great. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation. And I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:45:39] Egidijus: Thank you Omer, it was a pleasure to be here.

[00:45:42] Omer: Cheers.