What AWS Taught This Founder About Usage-Based Pricing

Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to John Griffin, the co founder and croft of Meter, a subscription management platform that helps software companies enable usage based pricing models.
In 2020, John was working at Amazon Web Services when he and his co founder Griffin realized many software companies were struggling to implement effective usage based pricing.
Having dealt with these challenges themselves in their previous startup, which was acquired by Amazon, they decided to start a new company aimed at helping subscription businesses to seamlessly adopt US Usage based pricing.
As second time founders, John and Griffin quickly encountered familiar roadblocks trying to drive early sales.
Despite their experience and a well thought out product, their initial attempts at connecting with potential customers fell flat.
As their cold outreach efforts continued to stall, the founders felt increasing pressure to sign those critical first customers to validate their product offering and to add to their struggles.
They initially made the mistake of going too broad with the types of customers that they sold to.
This inevitably spread them too thin, making it very difficult to focus on the right features and to craft a clear message.
Just when things started to feel hopeless, they got a lucky break.
An investor made an introduction to a significant first buyer.
Now landing this major customer finally gave John and Griffin the sales momentum that they desperately needed.
Today, Meter generates multiple seven figures in ARR and and has raised just over $30 million in funding.
In this episode you'll learn how the founders overcame early traction struggles and unsuccessful outreach efforts to sign their initial pivotal customers.
What the founders wish they had done differently about their initial go to market and the crucial mistake they made that all founders should avoid.
How a lucky early introduction led to their first enterprise deal and provided the validation that finally sparked some business momentum.
Why the founders believe usage based pricing is the future for SaaS companies and how adopting it can help you grow your revenue.
We also talk about how the founders use content marketing as a primary growth driver and leverage subject experts to help them establish brand trust and inbound leads.
And we talk about how John, as a technical founder, sometimes struggles to zoom out of the details and what he does to focus on the right priorities.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Okay John, welcome to the show.

John Griffin (02:55.570)
Thank you Omer.
Nice to meet you.

Omer (02:57.810)
Same here.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

John Griffin (03:03.570)
I'm sorry, I'm not a Real quote guy.
But if I was to talk about the things that motivate me to do this, I think it's relatively straightforward that a lot of your listeners will be able to identify with.
At heart, I'm a technologist, so I'm passionate about innovation, particularly where I can use technology to help a person or help a company do something much better than they can today.
I love learning.
Recently when I was at Amazon or AWS before starting meter, I actually went back to university to study advanced statistics and machine learning because I really needed felt the need to dive deep and understand properly how much of the machine learning models that are deployed today are built and that became actually hyper relevant for meter because a large part of our product leverages machine learning techniques to do things like forecasting and margin control, et cetera.
But we'll get back into that in a second, I guess.

Omer (04:09.860)
Sure, yeah.
So tell us about meter.
What does the product do, who is it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

John Griffin (04:18.100)
To answer that, if you don't mind, can I just give quick context?
So the thing that's going on here is that how software is priced or monetized, it's changing fast.
And software companies, particularly enterprise or business to business, are evolving how they charge their customers and how they convert the usage of their software into money.
What what was once charged on license models then evolved into subscription models when that software all kind of moved onto the cloud.
And what's happening today is that people are starting to charge based on how much the software is actually used, rather than just the amount of users that have access to it.
And this change is happening so rapidly.
And the existing quote to cash suppliers all the way from the CRM system and the systems that do the quotation for customers through to delivery and through to the systems that essentially calculate invoices don't have the capability to deal with usage data.
Usage data presents a few areas of complexity, not least pricing model complexity, but also usage data complexity and the fact that usually companies will generate big billions and billions of records of usage data.
So something like Salesforce doesn't necessarily want you putting all of that usage data through it.
So Meter is designed to solve that challenge.
It's a pricing operations platform that powers every variation of usage based pricing that a company could have and also automates their billing operations.
And we do this for technology companies that are embracing this change and adopting these new usage based pricing models.
But very importantly to us is we're designed to enable the existing ecosystem.
We have Some competitors, which of course I won't name, but you know, some of those are many of the most are going after the existing ecosystem.
Whereas in Meter, very strategically we're about enablement and fitting in with them.

Omer (06:24.660)
Okay, so I mean obviously SaaS companies are prime candidates for this type of platform.
Are there other types of customers that are also relevant or important to you right now?

John Griffin (06:39.650)
Yeah, you see a lot of kind of sub segments within software kind of embracing this ahead of the curve, as it were.
Ones that are maybe not obvious, but all payments companies.
A monetary transaction is just a piece of usage data.
And often the pricing models are quite complex.
They can be tiered, they can be capped, they can be fixed elements.
They're all embracing it.
There's a lot of companies that could fit into universal communications or what we call modern telco, which are enabling telephony services over ip, whether that's voice or very often messaging, like the likes of Twilio, et cetera.
These companies are open all on usage based models and often their usage based models are so complex that they resemble old classic telco billing systems in terms of their requirements.
And that's interesting because meter set out to be able to handle the complexity of those very different use cases.
So in some cases, particularly when it comes to B2B SaaS, you can have relatively simple usage based pricing models.
In fact, an awful lot of them are adopting what is called hybrid pricing, where it'll typically look like a subscription, but there will be one single usage metric that is used to determine when you should move up a level in the plans.
That's called a hybrid model.
And it's very, very common in normal B2B SaaS.
So meter anyway was designed so that we could cater for all of these.
So every variation of usage base so far, the more simple hybrid models, but all the way down to two telco billing requirements.
And we handle that all very well.

Omer (08:24.910)
Great.
Give us a sense of the size of the business today.
Where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team?

John Griffin (08:37.630)
So we're a global company, we're headquartered in the uk.
The best way of kind of alluding to our size is we completed our Series A earlier this year.
We raised 14 million with that bringing the total fundraising to a little over 30.
We have lots of great customers, many of which now there's case studies in the public domain and accessible.

Omer (09:05.779)
And I think in terms of revenue, it'd be fair to say that you're a multiple seven figure business.
Right, okay, great.
So let's start by where the idea came from.
And the seed of the idea was actually born when you and your co founder Griffin launched another startup many years ago.

John Griffin (09:30.180)
Yes, the genesis of Meter is really.
Yes, it's going back quite a ways.
So Griffin and I co founded a business called gamesparks which was a backend as a service platform for, for games developers essentially it offered things like player management and leaderboards and achievement systems for games.
Developers are typically building their games using technology like Unity or whatever.
But there was no such thing as a kind of back end platform that would allow them to build all of these core back end features that were required.
That's what gamesparks did.
Now why it's relevant to this is that we ourselves deployed using usage based pricing and we therefore struggled with nearly every aspect of it.
It was hard to actually bill.
It certainly wasn't easy to automate the billing and you end up creating errors on your bills which is not good for customer trust.
And so automation is key to reducing that error count.
So it's kind of one of the things that Meter tackles.
You couldn't forecast that business so you couldn't look really determine which customers were going to end up growing next year and how much revenue you were going to make from them next year.
And so that business was bought by aws and when inside AWS it was like da, nah, the penny dropped.
We could see that AWS had all of this sorted.
They're a total usage based business.
They have what, three, 400 different products and services all of which are sold on, on usage based models and they have this kind of equivalent of a revenue operating system internally there which first of all allows them to automate the billing and deliver error free billing at scale across millions and millions of different SKUs.
And so it was just watching that operation and learning from it and the pennies dropped and Griff and I understood, you know what, a lot of software is going to need this capability and there's no chance the world has it because AWS have spoken, spent billions of dollars on it.
And so that was the genesis of the idea.
We along with several others inside of AWS came out of AWS then and said look, let's build an AWS enterprise grade solution to this problem and take it to the wider B2B software space at much more affordable rates than what they can build it for themselves.

Omer (11:58.330)
Okay, great.
So we'll talk about how you guys got started with Meter.
Before we do that, I just want to go back to what you talked about earlier and the trend towards Usage based pricing.
I think you're absolutely right that companies like Amazon or aws, it's been part of their DNA for years to provide usage based stuff.
I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit.
I want to try and understand if someone's listening to this and saying, well, maybe they're not saying, but they're thinking, I've got a SaaS product and I can charge a customer, I don't know, let's say $100 a month every month.
Whether they use my product or not.
If I switch to a usage based pricing model, is the value or the lifetime value of that customer suddenly going to tank because I'm charging them based on very little usage and is that a downside for my business and how is that going to affect revenue?
So number one, is that an objection you've come across?
And two, what's the answer to that?

John Griffin (13:25.970)
I mean, for sure we're not zealots.
Usage based pricing may not be for absolutely everybody.
And if you're the type of software business that has a very, very loyal customer base that is used to paying you an amount of money, whether or not they're using your service or not, and don't mind, I mean, likely the fees are cheap, so the subscription fee must be cheap so that it's falling below somebody's radar.
But you know, within those businesses there's so many things that are going on behind the scenes and this is of course what we learned in our previous company.
So firstly, usually what's happening is half of your customers are subsidizing the other half, that's not very fair.
A competitor is bound to come in and offer a competitive offering to you on a pure usage model just to be disruptive.
So at least prepare yourself for it.
But look, if you're not confident that usage in your platform is going to continue to grow organically with your customers and you're essentially protected by the fact that they pay this monthly subscription fee.
They're not, I would say in those cases it's not for you.
Now I think generally across software where we are confident in our products and our ability to generate organic growth, usage based models have been shown to increase the net dollar retention by as much as 10 to 30% across companies that are equivalent companies charging pure subscriptions.
And so I think that's a big deal.
And so particularly as also another growing trend in software that your listeners will be well used to is the tendency to head towards self service and product led growth.
Usage based pricing is a very, very good companion model for those situations, because the barrier to try is very, very low.
I can get on and try.
And usually in usage based models, it could be like some kind of free tiers and things like that too.
So you can try everything for free, but just as soon as you start using, you're not having to commit immediately to that 500amonth, that thousand a month, that 10,000amonth, whatever it is, you're able to just pay as you go and grow organically.
And that fits very well, as I said, with that kind of product led growth.
I've made the point that usage based pricing models are a great companion for companies that are deploying PLG strategies, product led growth.
But it turns out that many of our customers are in fact enterprise sales led.
And I think a platform like Meter brings some real advantages to companies that deploy these models.
Typically, one expects in enterprise sales models for customers to be on quite a lot of varying, different pricing.
So although you have standard pricing by design, what happens is when the sales teams engage your enterprise customers, they end up doing quite a lot of custom deals and deviations.
And that creates a lot of complexity for Meter's customers because the finance team, in order to essentially bill these customers, has to gather all of the various different deal information for each customer and merge it with the usage data for each of those customers.
And that's something that Meter automates really well for them.
And usually the fact that they're agreeing different deals, often there are different structures and things like that.
And so the requirement there is really to be able to deal with a lot of different variations of usage based pricing.
And so when you go down this journey to try and implement a solution for it, you find that there's a lot more complexity under the hood than you're maybe perhaps first considering.
And so some of the incumbent providers that like take for example Stripe Stripe, would claim to be able to do metered billing.
But when you look at the sophistication of what they're actually able to do, they won't be able to deal with anything like the kind of sophistication that I've just been laying out for you here.
And that is really one of the reasons why our strategy is specifically Meter strategy, specifically around partnering with these companies and enabling companies like chargebee and Salesforce and netsuite to cater for these complex pricing models and dealing with all the usage data that drives them.

Omer (17:37.559)
Yep, makes sense.
Okay, so you and Griffin, you know, had firsthand experience of usage based pricing with Gamesbox.
You landed in AWS world where they, they do that all the time and do that very well.
And then eventually the two of you decided you're going to take the leap and start Meter.
Did you feel by that point you had validated that idea or opportunity enough, just from your experience and what you saw happening around you to be confident that you could start going and building a product, or did you still decide, well, we're going to go out and talk to potential customers, validate this idea further, or whatever.
So what was the approach that you took?

John Griffin (18:32.200)
Well, so first of all, we did have a high degree of confidence.
And that was fueled primarily because within aws, we were working with a large amount of companies that were building on top of it.
And so you got, I guess, to spend time with a lot of different types of software companies that were doing that, and you got to effectively learn from them how they were thinking about pricing.
So we could see that this trend was definitely coming.
There were other things driving it.
For example, with the rise of software, talking to software, as opposed to having a user on a keyboard, or even with just the rise of automation, where the job of the software is to reduce the amount of people, there were some really key tailwinds that were just very obvious that this was becoming a big thing.
So our challenge in many ways was to nail the product, build the right product.
And it is here that we had to go back and do exactly as you suggested.
We didn't assume that we were going to know it all, and we certainly didn't just want to guess.
We took some very different positions in our approach to this than some others that have entered this space.
We saw it as a data problem and that really enabling, providing our customers with pricing operations capability and automating their billing was really just the first step in the problems that they were going to experience next up.
And you could see this cause AWS also solved for this is leveraging the usage data that gets generated to enable your sales teams to be a lot more effective or to enable your finance teams to do more accurate forecasting.
So the data itself is the asset.
And so Meter's vision was really around, okay, let's make a product that allows our customers to manage their pricing, hence being a pricing operations platform that automates billing.
And so takes all of the, I guess, hardships out of the, the monthly billing process or the weekly billing process or whatever it may be.
But really Meter's direction is about turning the usage data into a strategic asset, which ultimately will help you better manage your margins.
Okay, so margin management and secondly will help you respond to signals in the usage area of your customers, such that you should be able to respond to better buying signals and increase your.
Your lifetime value.
Customer lifetime values.

Omer (21:13.110)
When I talk to founders and we go back and talk about the initial launching the product, if there's any mistake that somebody will tell me they made was we waited too long to launch the product.
But when you and I were talking, you, you said the opposite.
You said, I think we launch too soon.

John Griffin (21:38.480)
Yeah.

Omer (21:39.680)
Tell us more about that.

John Griffin (21:40.880)
Oh, yes, and actually I'm surprised that the majority say we waited too long to launch.
So it obviously means that there is a great halfway house.
We definitely launch too soon.
And the impact of that is that you're just getting spread too thin.
Your product teams are being asked to deliver features at a rate, and maybe they're not clustered as well as you might like.
So they're different features for different customers and they're getting pulled slightly.
And so, you know, as you're growing in the beginning, you don't have those capacities in place and it just puts undue pressure on them.
And similarly speaking with the customer facing teams that you have or the people that you have in those roles, you know, they get spread very thin because customers are naturally demanding, particularly with a new product, and particularly one that is critical to the revenue operations of the company.
You know, it creates, it creates a burden.
I think looking back on it and why I think we would, you know, maybe launch less aggressively.
Where we're doing it all over again is I think you can throttle these things pretty naturally.
Actually.
I think that's the learning is that you can narrow your focus.
So say we are only doing customers that look like A, B and C very specifically such that their feature requirements are very clustered.
And that would create less strain on your product development team and, you know, just prioritize them in that way.
In many ways, pick your customers just as much as they're picking you.
Okay, for fit.
Now, if you are very religious about that, I think that will vastly ease the launch process.
And if you've got a good cluster, then you can launch with that cluster nice and early.
And so that might address the concerns of some of the other founders that you're talking about.
The lesson that Griffin, I think learned is just don't rush it.
Pick a handful of design partners, agree a plan with them, stick to that plan.
But anyway, look, thankfully that's all behind us now.
That's in the rearview mirror, as they say.
It's now about a scaling challenge.

Omer (23:51.930)
Yeah, totally, yeah.
I mean we still want to learn from your experience of going through that.
And I think on the face of it, having more customers than you can handle sounds like a good problem to have as opposed to not having any customers.
But can you give us an inside look into what type of issues that caused?
Like for example, we chatted about this idea of how you handle features when you're.
You've got these customers but they're from all over the place with all kinds of requirements.

John Griffin (24:33.310)
Yeah, we had complexity there because we were winning customers that there was high demand for our product when we announced it and launched.
Additionally we had help from a very, very strong suite of investors who are making introductions for us.
So there was high demand.
The demand wasn't necessarily clustered as well as you might like.
And so you might be trying to solve the problems for a modern telco company as we kind of talked about before or alongside, trying to fix the problems of a fintech company or an API ID verification company.
And while they're all talking about usage based pricing models and whether those be tiered, volume banded and then they're layering on prepayments and drawdowns, those all sound the same at a very high level.
But underneath it all they end up having quite different prescriptive requirements around their pricing models.
And similarly on their usage data management they can have quite different requirements.
Interestingly, in payments often transactions need to be rated sequentially, for example.
And that's not something that everything can do.
So the result of non clustered design partners is that you do get spread thin in terms of the features that you have to build.
So I think I'd just be, look doing it again.
I'd just be a lot more focused around that.
Just narrow your focus.
Say we do this for are all companies that do the most specific thing you can imagine?

Omer (26:13.370)
Yeah, totally.
You mentioned VCs giving you intros which helped you find customers.
Was that a growth channel for you guys in the early days?

John Griffin (26:25.690)
Yeah, the most important one I'd say in kind of day one to day 300 or whatever it is.
Of course in Amazon it's always day one, right.
But in meter we had day 300.
Yes, it was an incredibly important channel and it is probably the justifying reason to go down the kind of professional VC money route.
I think it was our most important channel in the beginning because we've established others since and maybe we'll talk about them the content marketing channel or whatever.
But in the beginning you really don't have any of that operation apparatus in place.
You're working on setting it up.
And so the only really influx you have is from the press releases you put out there to announce your great new service.
And that generated interest from some wonderful huge companies.
But really it's the steady supply line comes from the investor community and we kind of weaponize that to a certain extent.
We mine the data on, on the investment companies, portfolios of investments, and we marry that to what is our ideal customer profile.
And recall if I was doing it all again, we might have gone more narrow on our ideal customer profile.
But in this particular case, you're just narrowing it down to people that you know are going to need usage based pricing.
And so then you're able to make the request to them and they'll happily make a friendly introduction.
And this is such a pain point for so many people that you've just got open doors and open conversations.
And it was a really easy way to get to the first 10, 20, 30 customers.

Omer (28:05.820)
So if I understood this correctly, you were having conversations with investors, the fundraising type meetings, but you were being intentional about the types of investors you were talking to or being thoughtful about what types of companies that they were already had in their portfolio that would be a good fit for you.
And then coming in there asking for.
Making an ask, I think is also easier when you can be very specific rather than, you know, do you know anybody who needs our product versus hey, you know, we, we know so you know, XYZ companies, you work with them, we think they're ideal customers for us.
We could help them with whatever.
I think it becomes a very specific and easier ask to make.
Is that fair?

John Griffin (28:58.530)
Oh, I think you're 100% right there on the money.
Yeah, VCs, you know, the investor community.
And by the way, this channel remains open because, you know, naturally a company, we've done our series A earlier this year, naturally, looking forward, we'll do a series A series B someday, a Series C, etc.
And so typically what happens is you maintain relationships with investors out into the future and they are happy to make these introductions to you because it helps them evaluate you also.
Okay.
And that's kind of their motivation.
Now, they probably will tire if you ask them for 15 or so.
But if you go to them in a very targeted way and say we know these three companies in your portfolio, portfolio, or I mean we typically ask for between three and five and maybe they give us three back or four back or something, but we go very targeted, we know exactly where the company is, what they need, etc.
And then you often write the introduction on behalf of the vc.
So it's really, you know, it's not a big ask from them.
They're happy to do it because they want to evaluate you at the same time.
And it's been, it was in the earlier days our most effective channel.
It's.
It's thankfully been overtaken by a couple of others now.

Omer (30:14.990)
Yeah, so let's talk about that.
So content marketing is a channel that seems to be working very well for you.
A lot of SaaS companies will struggle with content marketing, churning out a lot of content and not necessarily seeing meaningful results from there.
What did you do differently or what were you doing that helped you turn this into not only a viable growth channel, but one that's working really well?

John Griffin (30:48.620)
Yeah, so Meter has been pretty religious about being good at content marketing from the outset.
And that was purely a learning from our last company about how necessary it was to develop muscle in this area.
So we kind of knew coming into this that you're just going to invest strongly in this area because it can be your most effective channel if you do it right now.
It's definitely not an easy thing to do.
And in our first time around, we were relatively amateur at it compared to where I would say we are now.
We produce a very high grade of content and I think that's what you're really looking to do.
You've got to produce good quality content.
You're trying to provide a truly valuable resource for people generally, whether they become your customers or not.
They may even go to your competitors.
But it's about utility.
It's about building brand trust for the long haul and it's about educating in the wider market about knowledge of the problem space.
And it's definitely not easy and it takes a lot of time, but we've done a really, really good job of it.
And when you do, it's like the gift that keeps on giving.
Okay, so we now generate more inbound leads from this channel on a weekly basis than any of our other channels reliably.
And it just grows.
And it grows at a great rate too.

Omer (32:25.220)
So what is it?
What type of content have you been creating?
Maybe give us an example or two.
I think everybody knows that they should be creating high quality content.
It's just the devil is in the detail of actually what you end up executing and delivering.

John Griffin (32:43.120)
The devil is in the detail.
I don't think people will achieve their goals if they're leveraging too much of the generative AI to crack out a set of articles what we specifically look to incorporate subject matter experts into most of the pieces that we write.
And those subject matter experts will come from industry, they will come from the venture capital community, they will come from finance and did I say customers.
They'll come from our customers, within our customers.
For example, there is a lot of pricing expertise.
And the subject that we write about most, because this is what meter helps people with, is pricing operations, is that it's being very good at pricing operations.
And so we've got a piece that's coming up shortly which is about some of the pain points associated with pricing for fintech companies specifically.
So for that we will incorporate a pricing expert that has a lot of previous experience working for pricing consultancies.
We will incorporate a customer to.
We will incorporate a person that we work with a lot that is from the investment community and is now a well known writer on this kind of subject area.
And so we put all of this together and you kind of, you're looking to kind of create maybe, you know, something that's deep enough to give the audience some benefit, just like your podcast does.
You know what I mean?
It's not lightweight, airy, fairy stuff.
It's, it's essentially people are looking to learn from it.
And so if you go in with that mindset, I think that's a better one to have.

Omer (34:24.719)
Yeah, I love that.
So when you were, were these subject matter experts writing the articles or was this more about your team was kind of orchestrating this thing and putting together the idea and the content, but they were leaning on these experts and customers to provide input into the piece of content?

John Griffin (34:53.350)
Yeah, we do a bit of both.
And in the earlier days you're probably leveraging existing authorship and then as you progress and you mature, you take more ownership.
And so we typically orchestrate most of it in ourselves.
Yes.

Omer (35:09.200)
What was a typical arrangement?
Like when you, you have a subject matter expert identified, what do you do?
You reach out to them, you invite them to write some content.
Is it kind of something you commission and pay for their time or is it just, it's kind of more like a guest post than an opportunity to get in front of your customers and audience.
Like, what did a typical kind of arrangement look like?

John Griffin (35:33.200)
We have, you know, I guess commissioned, but it's not the default.
As soon as you start building momentum.
And if the people you're inviting are interested in what you're doing, like I said, if some of them are customers, they're going to be naturally interested in what you're doing.
I think you Know, you just gather momentum and you don't end up having to commission as much things.
You can find experts that are willing to contribute because they rate you, they rate what you're saying about a particular subject.
They believe in your point of view Most probably are at least find it interesting enough to offer a canter one.

Omer (36:15.720)
You know we talked about content marketing being one of the channels that help you to get to the first million in ARR but it sounds like it's even today it's the dominant channel.

John Griffin (36:28.840)
Yeah, that one never goes like you know, you when you understand how good it can be and when you understand the rewards that it can deliver reliably.
Like I said, I don't want to overuse it.
The gift that keeps on giving, when you understand that you just keep doubling down and you just keep allocating more and more resource and spend to it as you grow because it is, you know, it's like a rolling snowball.
It just keeps gathering momentum.
And remember the mission, one of the parts of the mission is to establish brand trust alongside generating leads because somebody read something of interest.
And so for that you got to keep investing in that area.
It's very important to keep investing there.

Omer (37:19.880)
So let's talk about another growth channel that you started fairly early on, which is partnerships.
And that's something that you felt was a strategic area that you wanted to invest some time and money in and you got involved fairly early on.
Can you tell us what type of partnerships are we talking about here?

John Griffin (37:42.200)
Yes, we're talking about partnerships with other software platforms that make up the existing Quote Cash stack.
And so it could be Salesforce, it could be chargebee, so we're talking about those types of relationships the reason that this works for us.
So first of all, it's unusual for companies to do this so early.
It's usually partner channel is normally something companies do later in the revolution.
But the reason it worked for us I think is because very strategically meter's intent was not to displace the incumbent supplier ecosystem in this area.
It was to enable it to solve the problem that usage models, usage price models are going to be prevalent, if not already and the fact that they can't currently deal with them.
So our product strategy is such that we enable them and fit in with them.
So integrations is like a ridiculously important part of our overall product.
How we integrate with, with Salesforce, how we integrate with chargebee is very important to us.
And when you have that strategy it becomes quite a, I guess a natural follow on to say, well hey, maybe there's a go to market opportunity, a joint go to market opportunity here where what you're no doubt seeing, like if I'm talking to say for example a subscription software vendor, we're aware because we can see the prevalence of usage based pricing in the industry and we know that their particular software we would know the limitations around what it can do.
It's very natural conversation to say, well look, you're not able to deal with X, Y and Z type customer because you can't do this, whereas we've already got an integration with you.
So why don't we actually co sell this and go to market together and solve this problem for the customers?
Because we're not offering the full, full breadth of the end to end service that you're providing.
We're just kind of going deep in this particular area around pricing, operations, metering and rating.
And so we found that that was very, very well received by the existing subscription software ecosystem.
And so it's become a very significant part of our go to market strategy and will only get more important as time goes on.

Omer (40:06.960)
Are there a small handful of partners that you've built integrations with or is this something that you're continuing to grow with as many partners as you can?

John Griffin (40:17.840)
So because the supplier ecosystem is, there's a lot of different suppliers there, we have a lot of integrations.
If you kind of on the invoicing side of things, there's a ton of different finance systems and so we have to integrate gracefully with each of them, but we don't necessarily have a partnership with each of them.
We choose our partners carefully because go to market takes sophistication, it takes focus from both companies.
You have to invest the time, it takes investment from both companies.
And so in order for it to work really, really well, I think you've got to develop a muscle that takes quite a while to actually build.
I'm reticent to use the term partner first, but next to everybody else we're competing with, I would say we are.
It's really about enablement and partners for us.
We are very selective about the partners that we invest the time in going to market with.

Omer (41:22.740)
And then how do these things typically kick off?
When you identify a potential partner that you think is worth building an integration with, do you start conversations right away with the key people that you can get talking to there or is it more about, look, they already have an API available.
Let's just build something as kind of step one and then once that's up and running, then having A conversation with people should be the next kind of natural thing to do to look for opportunities for co marketing or whatever.
Is there a kind of a model or an approach you take?

John Griffin (42:04.330)
Yes, I think there is a natural flow to it.
As I was saying before, it's customer demand initially that determines the various different integrations that we need to set up.
Because our customers will suddenly present that they've got a finance system that you didn't previously have an integration for.
So you build the integration for one, you end up getting more customers that have that particular system and yes, you've got another integration.
But taking it to the other level about when you're going to jointly go to market with a partner, that's kind of another question entirely.
Often you can have high level conversations with nearly all of these companies.
Companies and in my experience, even before meter partnership conversations in everybody.
Are you going to bring me any leads?
And it's both sides equally hungry to get bull leads.
But in this particular instance it was very different for us because what you had was a rich supplier ecosystem, a competitive supplier ecosystem in the subscription billing space.
The biggest ones there are chargebee, maybe Zora, Stripe Play there, Paddle are there.
And so what you find is that that's a competitive space and their customers are asking them to be able to deal with the complexity of usage based pricing.
And they are not able to.
So they either and they're not, they may try and build it.
Different companies will have different strategies in that area.
So for us it was ever so slightly different.
We found those conversations just, just more fulfilling straight away and we hired in this area.
So like I said, I think doing partners is actually it's muscle you need to develop because it takes persistence, it takes skills that not everybody has.
And so we hired very specifically in this area, highly competent individual and individuals that had done this many times before to accelerate our momentum with a hand picked view.

Omer (44:14.030)
Let's talk about outbound.
If I was looking from the outside or before we started our conversation, I would have probably said yeah, for this type of business, outbound and the types of customers and the types of deals you're potentially doing seems like a pretty natural growth channel.
But that's one that hasn't worked great for you so far.
Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the things that you've tried?

John Griffin (44:45.550)
Yeah, look, I put my hand up and I know this is a vital thing to get right.
I mean we're lucky that our other channels are performing so well.
But yes, this outbound outreach, what I'M talking about here is the team of BDRs business development representatives that are kind of sitting there cold emailing or cold calling prospects on your behalf.
And we have this, and we've been doing it for a long time and the results are mixed.
It's a confusing space.
It's made more complicated by gdpr, which is more acutely felt over here in Europe than it is in the States, although there are similar protections over there.
But GDPR is treated very, very seriously as a European company.
And you cannot go around spamming companies in bulk emails and get away with it.
That's just a fact of life.
You can't call them though.
It's just cold calling is probably more effective in North America than it is in Europe too.
To make clear, by the way, the majority of our customers and our focus is really North America.
It's just that we, that we're headquartered here.
But it's also hard because people are fatigued, aren't they?
I mean, what ratio of emails in your inbox are spam?
You know, it's a very, very high ratio for most people today, so there's a lot of fatigue.
So look, I just think we've had to go on a journey to learn how to become good at it and to get to grips with it.
And it's, you know, there are new approaches and playbooks which are more effective and they're far less, less about spray and pray and far more about targeting, knowing exactly which accounts you want to win and then coordinated, timely outreach on multiple channels, social mail calling, perhaps, et cetera.
But it's about targeting and it's about coordinated campaigns of, of outreach and just ever so slightly carefully using the term campaign because it is more often associated with the spray and pray, but it doesn't have to be.
And so account based marketing techniques are really replacing the old models of this kind of casting a wide net, which was all a numbers game.

Omer (47:10.580)
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
I think in many ways some of these outreach tools have made it so easy to send cold emails at scale that it almost feels like email boxes have become so saturated that people are fatigued, people are tuning out, it's harder to get people's attention.
And I'm sure there are companies out there still doing well with cold email.
But you're not the first founder at a SaaS company who's said, look, we need a different playbook.
The old way of doing cold outreach isn't there.
And I do agree with you.
I think whether it's account based marketing as we know it today, or maybe potentially how it evolves in the next few years.
But getting a lot more sophisticated with and intentional about who you're reaching out to, how you're doing it, and kind of focusing more on relationships than just kind of these transactional emails is probably the path forward.
I think that's going to start to get people paying more attention.
Yeah.

John Griffin (48:29.170)
And I certainly think that the email can no longer be the first point of contact that you have with somebody.
It'll only work or have any utility if it is the nth point of contact that you've had with somebody.
And those other point of contacts might be you've met them at an event or they have read a piece of the content that you've been investing in for the last several years.
So it goes hand in hand with your content marketing strategy.

Omer (49:00.940)
Great point.
Yeah, totally agree with that.
Okay, we're going to have to wrap up soon.
Get onto the lightning round.
But one question for you.
You're a second time founder here.
You had a successful exit with Gamesbox.
You've been building this business for a few years now.
What's kind of at a personal level?
What's one of the hardest things still that you deal with on a day to day basis?

John Griffin (49:27.570)
I mean, I have to put my hand up and say I struggle with time management.
I'd say it's one of the more common mistakes that founders make and your listeners will be able to identify with this.
I'm sure it's not necessarily the amount of time you're spending, it's where you're spending your time.
I am still technical.
I'm sure people in my company would be debating about what level that is or not.
But as a person who is still technical, I like to get stuck into the details of particular problems and would still have some utility in fixing things as such.
And so I personally struggle from being deep in the weeds versus coming back up and having a healthier perspective about the business as a whole and how we're going to scale certain things, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's something I personally have to work on.
I've always had this and I'll have to work on it for time immemorial.
So I just think for other founders, I'm sure it's very, very common across your listener base.
I just think it's about being hyper aware.
The way I get around it is I really try and stay tuned to my colleagues in meter and listen to them because they'll normally give you the signals that they need something else from you than what you might be spending your next 15 hours on.
But it does bring me to a point, and I know you said we're getting to the end, if I have one, learning about having now done this for a second time.
And one of the greatest motivations for me in this whole thing is getting to work with a kind of smaller, highly motivated bunch of people.
And so if you've gone to the trouble of kind of putting that band of brothers and sisters together to be that cohort, you've got to listen to them, okay?
And startups and success in them will all be about that.
And.
And so I think Griff and I would be huge advocates of making comms part of the core fabric, part of the culture of your company, making sure that everybody in the company feels empowered to contribute, to disagree, to contribute to a solution to a problem.
And if you do that, what you'll find is that the answer is to not all.
100%.
I'll go the whole way to 100%.
Of the challenges that you're going to face are actually probably all sitting there within your team.
And so, you know, you should just use the hive mind wherever possible to solve some of the bigger challenges that you're going to come across.

Omer (51:58.790)
Yeah, I mean, I guess the challenges of leadership.
Right.

John Griffin (52:02.310)
Just,

Omer (52:05.830)
it's easy to say those things, but it's hard to put them into practice.
And as you said, it all starts with.
With having that self awareness.
Right.

John Griffin (52:16.300)
So self awareness now.
Yes, that's everything.

Omer (52:21.500)
All right, let's get on to the lightning rounds.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

John Griffin (52:30.780)
Not to go ahead with the startup idea.
I had immediately before Meter, which was about optimizing supply chains for the restaurant business.

Omer (52:40.170)
Interesting.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

John Griffin (52:44.890)
Inspired by Marty Kagan.
Why?
I think it's the bible on how to establish a product function.
My co founder is a real guru in this area and one of the things I've learned the most from him is about servant leadership and Marty Kagan's real advocate of that.
And so I just.
So Griff and Marty Kagan are my two kind of go to guys on that.
I think it's one of the most important skills you can have as a founder.

Omer (53:11.250)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder so connected with that?

John Griffin (53:16.650)
I think it's understanding your weaknesses.
Everybody has them.
Perhaps I more than most.
And the way you get around them is with your co founders and your hires, isn't it?
You just basically hire people to fill the gaps of where you're weak.

Omer (53:30.530)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

John Griffin (53:33.930)
Oh, tool.
Boring.
But it's top of mind because I've just ditched evernote after about 10 years minimum and moved to Notion, which I think is the best notes app around.
And I do everything in that.
My whole life is in Notion now.
Not that I want any hackers or anything to.

Omer (53:56.410)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

John Griffin (53:59.810)
Well, I think optimization of supply chains for fast food.
No, no, no, I'm just kidding.
But I would like to do another company after this.
I think I'm pretty wedded to the idea of God.
This is going to sound so contrived, but I really am.
I think about a lot leveraging AI tooling just for a better purpose.
And the better purpose would be just turn it towards equalizing.
They are reducing the gap between the haves and the have nots.
So helping the third world with AI technology.
Something like that.
At least it's a good mission.
Our very high level early stage vision.

Omer (54:39.530)
Yeah, totally.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

John Griffin (54:44.970)
Probably not that interesting, but I do love coding more than I nearly love every other aspect of my job.
And I mean, the problem with that is that the guys in Meter who are very good at it, don't allow me to do it as much as I would like.

Omer (55:01.440)
Yeah, I'm the same.
I love to code.
But when I was at Microsoft, it was like they wouldn't let me anywhere near the code.
It was like, go home and do it.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

John Griffin (55:17.500)
Got to say family.
I'm a family man at heart.
Pretty passionate about animal welfare too.
These are things I really care about.
But at the end of the day, I love tech.
And so outside of work, I'm probably just messing around with more technology and how we can apply it to other problems.
Sadly, I'm just addicted to that.

Omer (55:39.740)
Nothing wrong with that.
All right, so, John, thank you so much for joining me.
It's been a pleasure chatting and, and unraveling the story of Meter.
If people want to check out Meter, they can go to it's meter.com but the first e is a 3, so it's m3t e r dot com.
And if folks want to get in touch with you.
What's the best way for them to do that?

John Griffin (56:05.590)
They could connect to me on LinkedIn is probably one of the easiest.
I also have an email address johneter.com I would welcome any mails, questions, whatever, and I will definitely respond.

Omer (56:17.840)
Great.
Awesome.
John, thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure.
I wish you and the team the best of success.

John Griffin (56:23.520)
Thank you very much Omer, for your time.

Omer (56:25.600)
Pleasure.
Cheers.