OnRamp: From No-Code MVP to 7-Figure B2B SaaS – with Paul Holder [434]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

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

[00:00:01] Paul: Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

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

[00:00:07] Paul: Yes, I do. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. If you wanna know why, I could tell you why. I think, I think listen, like starting a startup is all about like it, especially as a first time founder, doing things that you've never done before, and that's gonna push you in many different ways.

And . You know, I, I, I like to try to embrace some of that and say, Hey, like, that's living man. You do things you've never done. You push yourself. And and so anyway, that quote's always just stuck with me and is relevant every single day in what I'm doing here.

[00:00:34] Omer: Totally. I love that. Actually, I had to think about that for a split second before, or I never heard that one before.

Okay, . So let's talk about OnRamp. What does the product do? Who's it for and, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:46] Paul: Yeah, so OnRamp, automates and orchestrates customer onboarding and customer onboarding is that critical time from kind of when you sign a new customer to when they're getting value from your product or service and you know, we do this by giving our customers the tools to build, run, and measure their onboarding programs, as well as share those programs with their customers to complete them. We're a B2B SaaS business, and our customers are from a variety of verticals and a variety of. Yeah, industries. But it is, you know, it is a mix of both SaaS businesses and non SaaS businesses.

So yeah, we have a wide swath, a wide customer base, which is fun.

[00:01:24] Omer: Cool. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team?

[00:01:30] Paul: Yeah, we're so we're coming up on a hundred customers. We have 25 employees and we're doing seven figures today.

[00:01:37] Omer: Great. And I think you have raised just a little over 14 million so far.

[00:01:42] Paul: That's right. Yep, yep.

[00:01:44] Omer: Okay, great. So the business was founded in 2020. Let's go back to maybe like 2019. What was, what were you doing at the time? What was your, your co-founder Ross doing and, and where did this idea come from?

[00:01:59] Paul: Yeah. So at the time I was leading customer success for a company called Troops, which was acquired by Salesforce after a few months after I left my co-founder Ross was at, was at business school and so had all the time in the world to think about startup ideas, but actually . Where we met was a company called VTS, which is a SaaS business in the, in the commercial real estate space.

And I actually led customer onboarding there. And, and Ross was on my team for a little bit before doing like operations, finance, accounting work. I. But that's really where the idea kind of seeded, you know, for us. And Ross and I had kept in touch over the years and realized that, hey, you know, the problems, you know, we kind of asked ourselves like, is the problems we face kind of scaling and creating amazing customer onboarding experiences?

Was that, was that just a VTS problem? Was that just a, something we were dealing with and, and like, you know, seemingly really critical to us, but not anybody else. And, and fortunately we were able to take some time and really validate that that wasn't the case and . You know, we heard the same thing over and over again from a bunch of interviews that we did with other customer success leaders, and obviously that made us feel like we were onto something at the time.

[00:03:03] Omer: Okay, great. So you have this idea, a lot of people have ideas and do nothing with them. What was the case with you guys? How long was this just an idea you talked about and, and how long did it take for you to say, okay, this is something that we're gonna execute on.

[00:03:17] Paul: Yeah. For us that was a period of probably about three, four months back in, back in 2019.

And, you know, as it, it was funny Ross at the time, again he was at business school, fortunately he was in a, he was in a PM class and they needed to have an idea for something to work on and kind of validate an idea on. And him and I had been kind of in the background thinking of . Different businesses we could potentially work on together.

And, and again, we kept coming back to this idea of customer onboarding, customer experiences, and . What we're able to do is Ross's like, well, you know what? I'm gonna use this in my PM 1 0 1 class and and, and see if we can get some validation on this and get some traction on it. And that, that honestly kind of kicked off, Hey, you know, this, this just an idea on a whiteboard and the whole thing to like, oh, what is the actual use case look like?

What are the pains that we're actually solving? How could this, how would you actually think about this? Is, is, is a software product the right way to solve this? Or is it something else? You know, we were lucky at the time to be able to have . Those resources and, and you know, him, him going through that experience to kind of help kick, you know, push us out the door, so to speak at the time.

[00:04:19] Omer: And as, as part of that process, did he create a, a prototype or was it just like a pitch deck or what, what was it?

[00:04:27] Paul: Yeah. In, in the early days it was just a big PRD and a presentation to a class. But you know, when him and I said, Hey, you know, this is actually something we think is worth pursuing and, you know, quote, quitting our jobs over in his case, you know, not finding another one.

We, we said, Hey, we're two people who are not technical. How do we go validate this in the market? And we ended up using a tool called Bubble, which is a no-code platform to build a proto. We, we learned it as best we could build a prototype and, and that led us to get in front of folks and say like, would you actually pay money for, for the, the solution that we're bringing to you?

[00:05:03] Omer: Love that. And you and I were talking about Bubble earlier and, and how, you know, I mean, there's a lot of . AI tools around, but bubble's been around for years and it's, it's amazing how much you can get done even on a product like that if without ai, if you have no technical skills now, so both of you non-technical, you don't have a technical co-founder.

You wanna build this product. You having to teach yourself how to use bubble in order to be able to build the product. What did it actually do? Like how sophisticated was it?

[00:05:36] Paul: The version I built, not very sophisticated and, and to make matters, you know, more interesting. Right. As I mentioned, we're not just a tool for you know, our customers to use that can just be used internally. There's actually that component, but then there's, you know, what we call the customer portal or, or their customer facing component. So, you know, imagine trying to add that complexity to a tool like bubble. I, I think for us, like what, what we did initially was, you know, we realized that.

What, what really got people excited about the idea was, was this idea of, Hey, give me something amazing. I can put up, put in front of my customers to take them step by step through our onboarding program. So with the first version of Bubble, we basically just built that and a very, a very, very simple version.

And, you know, the question that we tried to ask. You know, answer at the time was a, will you pay money for this? But B, is this something you will actually put in front of your customers? Like, is this good enough to, you know, where, where's that bar? Right? And I think we realized pretty quickly that.

There's really nothing in the market to, to solve this. And so, you know, despite it being super simple, despite it being bubble like people were willing to, you know, people were willing to use it. And that you know, I'll never forget the first couple customers who actually did that. You know, for us is, that was a pretty watershed moment for us.

[00:06:47] Omer: So you, you, you, you were able to actually sell the Bubble. Product. It wasn't just a prototype.

[00:06:53] Paul: Yeah. Now our customers at the time, I don't think they knew it was on on bubble. That was not widely advertised. But, but yeah. And I mean, I mean, listen, early customers, right? You're talking like a hundred bucks a month or something.

I, I even forget at this point. But, but the point is less about the, how much it, it's more will you actually, you know, pay for this. And and so the answer for us was, was yes. You know? And, and that was, that was obviously really exciting. Felt like we were onto something.

[00:07:17] Omer: Okay, let's take a quick breather here.

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You get like those first 10 customers or so, I think maybe one thing we should clarify before we go further is a lot of people listening to this would be familiar with, you know, kind of like onboarding for a SaaS product, right? You, you maybe have some some kind of guide to get people to go do a very simple product led growth type.

You know, you know, onboarding experience maybe give us an example of a non SaaS customer and how or what they would be using OnRamp for, I think that might make it a little bit more real for people to understand.

[00:08:27] Paul: Yeah, for sure. And I think there is a difference between, you know, PLG SaaS onboarding, like user level onboarding and what we do, which is kind of the overall orchestration of the onboarding and adoption kind of programs.

And so I'll give you, I'll give you a SaaS example and I'll give you an on SaaS example. The, the SaaS example I like to use is Slack. Obviously you can go in, you can use Slack and like you can share it with your friends and got super viral just from like, you didn't need to talk to anybody at Slack or work with anybody at Slack.

You just, you know, early days, right? You'd be like, this is cool. I'm gonna invite somebody. Right. But you know, when Slack looks at implementing Slack at a company like IBM, they can't just rely on, oh, we're gonna release this thing into the, you know, a hundred thousand person organization that is IBM and assume we're gonna be successful.

Right? They have a really, you know, organized, frankly complicated set of procedures and workflows that they need to work through with IBM, it's a massive project, essentially. And that is something that we would help facilitate on the Non-SaaS side, here's an example, one of our customers, Cardinal Health, a huge healthcare distributor when a, when a pharmacy who's their customer signs a contract with Cardinal there is a about, you know, 30 day process where they have to get set up on all of Cardinal systems.

They have to like provide an, an exchange a bunch of data with Cardinal and previously that was done all through email and literally in person like meetings and and now it's all done through, through OnRamp. And so those like mom and pop pharmacies right, are able to be onboarded, you know, about, you know, 50 to a hundred percent faster than they they used to be using our platform.

[00:10:01] Omer: Now I know these days you, you, you're, you've, you're moved or moving more up market and, and targeting bigger customers. In the early days, who was your ICP? Who, who were you focused on? Like, I mean, I know in, in many ways in the early days, it's anybody who who'll buy the product, right? , but who, who, who were you trying to, to reach at that time?

[00:10:21] Paul: Yeah, it was, it was, you know, again, this, this came out of bird, out of kind of Ross and mine experience at VTS. And so we tried to find lookalike SaaS companies who were like, who had a, you know, white glove, you know, largely white glove onboarding process. Right? Somebody who, who wasn't our ICP was, yeah, this is a totally PLG product.

You know, I'm gonna use a Pendo or some other tool to like onboard my users, right? It was, Hey, this thing takes three or four months to get our customers stood up. It's actually a pretty complicated orchestration. There's technical components involved, there's an integration, there's many team members involved, like both on our side and our customer side.

And so, yeah, for us, in the early days it was like classic, but like it works like other startups that fit that, other startups that fit that bill. And it had to be other startups because you know, at that time we couldn't go to a fortune, you know, 500 customer and say, Hey, we're two people in a garage.

Like, will you take this on?

[00:11:17] Omer: We just learned to use Bubble and we got this product.

[00:11:21] Paul: We just learned to use mobile. You know, I think the thing about our, our tool that's interesting is . You know, this is something that, you know, is a, key component of your customer journey. This isn't something that's just like, oh, hey, we're selling to an engineer.

Go use this off to the side and tell us if it's interesting. If it is, great If it isn't, like, cool, we're gonna learn. But no, no skin off. Anybody's back. This is like, you, you're gonna use this for your customer onboarding. That's a, that's a big like . You know, that's, that's a big promise that we have to fulfill.

And so for us, like going to those earlier stage companies that were that were willing to take more risks, like, and be more entrepreneurial minded, that that was really where we cut our teeth in, in the early days and learned a ton from.

[00:12:00] Omer: I I think you, you told me that outbound had been one of the, the biggest growth channels for you.

Can you tell me about how, how things got started and maybe one of the bigger challenges you had in getting that working for you?

[00:12:19] Paul: Yeah, I mean, outbound's hard, right? Like it's, it's drumming up demand from nothing is, is not easy. You know, everyone wants to, ideally just. You know, hit the, hit the hit the ads button and just let be like, oh, we're just gonna have inbound, you know, inbound leads all day.

Come to us. And, you know, and, and for us in the beginning, you know, that, that worked for, that worked for a little while. And, and we, we had a heavy Google ads presence, right. And it was working from the perspective of it brought in, it brought in folks, but they often were not our ICP. They were often, for example, trying to figure out how to even set up their onboarding program. Right? And they were looking for a services business, not a SaaS business. And so what, what we realized, what we realized was that the customers who we can best serve are those who are trying to scale and automate and grow and, and, you know, grow their onboarding programs.

And, and, you know, those folks were not coming in from Google that, you know, Google ads was not a way to reach those folks. And so, yeah, we had to, we had to kind of pivot our strategy . And, you know, really rely on, on outbound cha, various outbound channels, which I'm happy to kind of talk through to, to bring in the right, the right type of customers.

Right. Which is, which is ultimately what we're trying to do.

[00:13:29] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's talk about that. May maybe, maybe tell me about one of those, those, those outbound channels.

[00:13:34] Paul: Yeah.

We, you know, LinkedIn's a big, LinkedIn's a big presence for us. And increasingly so. And, you know, I, I am the first to admit, I get annoyed by the, some of the LinkedIn.

Dribble and some of the you know, some of the, what I would say is less than valuable posts, but I, I'll, but I'll tell you this, I, I think used to great effect. It can, it can work really, really well. And for us, you know, we really, it's where our buyers, it's where our buyers are. It's where they hang out.

It's what they watch and listen to and so, like for us, it's just a, you know for us, I think it's, it's twofold. One is it's, it's driving awareness of our product category and who we are. And, and LinkedIn's huge for that and I'd be happy to share some tactics that we've, we've used for that. But, but two is like, yeah, we've also, you know, shifted our paid dollars there as well and that's been, you know, that's been successful and, and is picking up.

So for us that channel has just made a lot more sense than . Then, you know, a, a just purely Google Ad strategy.

[00:14:31] Omer: So yeah, maybe talk a little bit about LinkedIn and maybe LinkedIn ads, how that works. So what kind of ads are you running? How are you getting in front of the right people? And then once they do raise their hand, what does that buyer journey typically look like?

[00:14:46] Paul: The ads, we're testing them all the time, so we're testing content, you know, all, all types of content. But what I would say is . And it's true of any social, you know, social site is videos rich content for, you know, outpaces text for us a lot of times. And, and as far as who we're targeting, you know, we, LinkedIn does a great job of giving you the tools to say, Hey, I'm targeting, you know, for us it's SaaS with these specific personas in these specific verticals, and we're able to test that, right?

So that, that's been, you know, that's been fairly easy for us to set up and, and get going on. But I would say the content's really interesting, right? Like as a new product category, you don't necessarily have people searching or looking for customer onboarding software. It's, it's kind of new. So what you have to do is really speak to the problems and speak to, you know, speak to, in our, our case, these customer success directors, VPs, managers, in a way that you know, drives, you know, top of funnel awareness for your product category first, and then convince them, Hey, we're the right solution, you know, for this. But in, in many times it's a problem they didn't even know that they had and they, they know it once they hear it, but it's one of those, like, they have to be told that they have this problem, you know, first before actually finding a solution for it.

So I say all that because a lot of our ads and a lot of our content is really driven towards those, those things. And, and and so, you know, for us that's what's been successful in driving, you know, the, the leads that we really want, the people that we wanna bring in.

[00:16:11] Omer: Yeah, I, I mean this is not like selling a CRM where somebody's saying, I need a new CRM go in shopping and pick one here.

You're having to go much higher up in the funnel and, and educate people about the problem that they have, but don't fully realize that they need to solve or have just accepted that this is the way it has to be. I guess that's always a, a challenge when, when you in, in your, anytime you're kind of building a new category what does the typical sales cycle look like?

I mean, if, if there's like a lot of education going on and you know, is it like, you know, like how long does it take to, to close a deal?

[00:16:49] Paul: Yeah. And, and certainly it depends if we're, you know, selling a hundred person, 200 person company compared to a Fortune 15, as I'm sure you can imagine. But I yeah, typical.

What, what's cool is there's a lot of education, but we're trying to get that education done upfront even before they come in and officially enter the sales cycle. And you know, you ask what happens when they actually raise their hand. Yeah. They get connected, you know, they get connected with a rep and, and we do.

I. You know, I, I would describe it as a fairly traditional process of, you know, they'll do a discovery call. We'll actually figure out like, okay, is, is the problems they're talking about is why they came to us? Is that something we can actually solve? And we're very upfront with it. If we can't, then, you know, it's not worth our time and not not worth their time.

But from then, it's a series of what tends to be demos and getting the right people on board. And, you know, it's your product or solution is half the battle of selling the other half is getting . You know, the customer get, getting everyone aligned to, in, you know, internally to, again, like selling upward, selling outward, getting as many, you know, champions as you can, you know, involved in the process.

And you know what that culminates for us is you know, about a 60 day sales cycle, like end to end on, on average. But, you know, a bigger company can take six months. Right? And enterprise can take six months where you're just driving it, you know, you feel like you're having the same conversation eight or 10 times, but it's all slowly chipping away at building that momentum.

And, and, and having your customer feel comfortable, you know, with you know, bringing a startup on board. Right. Which is a, a big, you know, bet for them to make ultimately.

[00:18:18] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. I, I wanna just go back quickly to the MVP, the Bubble product, firstly, how, how far were you able to get with the bubble product in terms of, you know, did you hit six figures with it?

Or did you, was there a certain point where you're like, okay, I can't go any further. We need to, you know, actually get somebody to build the, the product now?

[00:18:37] Paul: Yeah. Yeah. It was we didn't get the six figures with it, but we did. I, I forget exactly where we got to, but, but we got our first, I think maybe our first like 15, you know, customers on it. And that was, you know, kind of me and my co-founder building it. At first. We, we then were able to, you know, with the validation that we had, we were able to raise a pre-seed round, which allowed us to actually bring on board an engineer Sean, who's, who's, shout out Sean.

He's still with us today, which is, which is awesome. And he, he then built, you know, OnRamp on our, you know, on our own, on our own code base . And, you know, for us, I think it was pretty clear that scaling, trying to scale bubble beyond that, you know, first 15, 20 customers and, you know, trying to get to six figures.

It wasn't gonna, you know, we, we were running at that point, we were running into too many, like, okay, we can't quite do this with this tool, let's, you know, but we know that this is the thing that people want. Let's, let's go for it. And for us going for it meant actually hiring a real technical talent to, to build it out.

Right.

[00:19:32] Omer: And I guess also because this wasn't like a, a CRUD app that you've just like, you know, it's a simple database and you just add records and update and delete and whatever. You had to build this thing to solve a problem, and then you had to build it for your customers to be able to use with their customers, as you said earlier, and things start to get pretty meta and kind of complicated very quickly when you're trying to do something like that.

[00:19:55] Paul: It does, and it's fun when, you know, we obviously use OnRamp to onboard our own customers and so they're using OnRamp, you know, as that cus you know, as that we call them end customers first, and then they're using it to onboard their customers. It gets, it gets very meta. But, but yeah, to your point, like you know, a Bubble or some, some of these other tools. I think, you know, if it is just kind of a CRUD app and something that can be used internally, I think it would have legs to go further. But what we're talking about is, you know . Onboarding's this like, you know, it's the, your customer, you know, your company's reputation is on the line.

You know when, when that sale is signed and now the rubber actually meets the road and you have to deliver on the promises that were made during the sale cycle. And so we take that responsibility really seriously, and it became clear to us that like, okay, to build an amazing portal and, and end customer experience.

We're gonna have to do it, you know, on our, you know, on our own code base and actually like build our own IP around it and all of, all of that stuff. So that's what really d that's what really drove the decision making around that at the time. And I. And yeah, it was, it was, you know, there was months where we had to like, manage that transition and, and try to still like sell and bring people into bubble, but they were, you know, we were transitioning.

So that was an interesting time. But when we did it, you know, we, we haven't looked back from there.

[00:21:08] Omer: Now, the other thing you told me about the MVP was that you were like, Hey, we built this MVP and we got the v the viable and the product part. Right. But we weren't very good with the minimum piece. Tell us a little bit about what happened.

[00:21:22] Paul: I think ultimately, and, and you know, advice for anybody who's trying to start a business is, you know, it's funny. You, you hear, hear all these things that are like truly like scoped down your MVP as much as possible, right? Don't sell to fire bad customers. And then when you actually get into the pressures of, Hey, we gotta grow at all costs are like, Hey, we're just trying to get people to use this.

Hey, these customers are telling us things like, yeah, let's do it. It's funny. And like those, those actually listening to those principles and actually doing it is harder. And so for us, what, you know, I think one of the, one of the mistakes we made was, you know, we tried to build too much too quickly.

We went, we went really wide as opposed to finding a wedge and going deep and and so as to, to bring it to life for us, right? We're kind of a, we're a task management, you know, we're a task management tool. We're a workflow tool, and then we have this end customer experience. Those are like three separate product categories in one, and we're trying to build all three like at the same time.

And, and you know, our customers came to us and said, Hey, I've used task management before. Why don't you guys have dependencies? Why don't you have this? Why don't you have that? You know, it's, you know, they use all these great, these wonderful tools that, that do some of that stuff. And they're like, well, that's easy to build.

It's like, no. Well, it took another company, 10 years of dedicated effort to go do that. And I, I think we got a little caught up in the like, oh, let's just go, cool. Let's get to feature parody on some of those things, you know, that customers expect. And, you know, reflecting back on that, I think what we would've been better served to do is to say, Hey, let's take one part of the onboarding journey and really Nick 'cause onboarding.

You know, there's, there's many steps and phases within this. This on onboard journey. Let's take one part. Let's take the, the highest kind of pain point part. Really go deep on that and then we can build out from there and we didn't, and listen, I'm sitting here now. I'm glad we have the breadth that we do because it served us well today.

But, you know, I, I think reflecting we could have gone further faster if, if we had taken maybe a different approach.

[00:23:13] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's, I think it's like you, you went through that pain and eventually you came out the other end and you're like, yeah, okay. I'm, I'm kind of happy where we are now, but you probably wouldn't wanna experience that pain again, because now you can see that there was probably a, and, and a less painful path to getting to where you are.

[00:23:35] Paul: Yeah. And listen, I think, I think that I'd like to think we take those learnings into what we're doing today. So like, as we make big, hairy, audacious product bets, right. Which we, we all love to do. We're not, you know, I, I think we got a, and also now it's not just Ross and I, we have a bunch of great, great people on the team that can keep us honest on this, but you know, we do ask ourselves like

Hey, what is the problem that customer's actually trying to solve? And what's the, what's the shortest path to actually solve that? And we may have all these great ideas and all these, you know, ways to think about the future state of it and all of that. But like, let's start with step one. And again, I. Yeah.

Again, you'll, you'll, I'm not preaching anything new, but I think actually putting it into practice is, is, is a skill, is a skill that you have to learn and one that we've learned, you know, over the past couple years.

[00:24:20] Omer: Yeah, yeah, totally. What, what was, in terms of getting to the first million. ARR, what was the most, or was, was there one growth strategy or channel that was the most effective in helping you to hit that milestone?

[00:24:33] Paul: It was, you know, listen, like, and I think for any business depends on your ticket size and all, all of that. But for us, like really just pounding our networks was, was huge. And I think, i, I think you know, if you think about our, our kind of business and you think about five figure, you know, plus contracts, right?

You don't, you ultimately don't need that many of them to get to a million dollars, right? Which is why I personally like selling up market. And it's more, more of my style. I. But, but I think like really, you know, our approach was and it's always a balance, but it's the hey founder asking for advice on something, right?

To start an intro call and then you kind of get someone hooked on, you know, you hopefully bring that infectious energy to the problem you're solving and someone's like, you know what I do kind of have that problem, or I know someone who has that problem and you start, you know, you just kind of build that, you know, that muscle of like, Hey, I'm just gonna go talk to a bunch of people and try to drum up, drum up the business.

You know, I'm reflecting on when we, you know, going from those first 10 customers to the first like 50 I. It was, honestly, a lot of, it was a lot of that beyond any spend money, beyond any ads or anything. It was, Hey, let's go, you know, it's amazing. People just wanna be helpful, which is awesome. And so, you know, if it's not the right fit for them at the time, they'll know someone who it, it could be.

And you know, for us, for Ross and I, we just, you know, pounded the pavement, you know, frankly doing that. And, and you know, we're able to learn a tunnel along the way. Now that's not scalable, right? Like ultimately that network runs out or that, you know, whatever. But I think, you know, getting to your first million that can be a really viable strategy.

Again, assuming you have the ticket sizes to kind of be able to do that effectively.

[00:26:11] Omer: Did you try cold email outreach?

[00:26:13] Paul: We did. We've tried cold email, email outreach a lot, and it is it is dead in my opinion. Respectfully I, I think, I think like we listen, you know, cold email without that, anybody having heard of you is just like,

You don't, the open rates have gone down significantly over the past five, 10 years. Now. You have these flood of AI tools just crafting all of these personalized, they're, but they're not like I, I frankly think, you know, we got a lot of work to do there. I. Messages and it's just this like bombardment. I, you know, I get how many a day, right?

And obviously now people have set up filters, you know, and, and, you know, tools are better at flagging that stuff. And so, you know, for us, I think it became pretty clear that, well, the right type of outbound can be a really good approach. That particular channel for us is, yeah, we, we don't spend a ton of time on it, honestly.

It's just, it just hasn't been successful for us.

[00:27:06] Omer: Yeah. I mean, I know that I, I know people doing cold out cold email outreach who still believe in it and, and, and are having success with it, but I, I agree with you. I think it's become harder and there's so much, there's so much noise with these AI solutions now that

I, I just think there's just too much noise and it's, it's making everybody even more resistant. Like they want, they, they're kind of training themselves to block it out more. I started using this product. What, what I realized was I was getting all of these kind of cold emails, and half the time they're not even relevant.

And you, you can do some level of, of, you know, . Kind of protecting your, your inbox, but everyone is a distraction. And for me, who, who always has somebody who always has problems focusing, right? That, that it's like, it's, it's a, it's a big ding to your productivity. And so I've been using this product called clean email for, for a few months now.

And one of the things I like about it is that what it does is every time you get an email from somebody you've never received an email from, they just park it into a screened place. And then you decide when you want to go and take a look. And you can just go to this page and you can just see a preview of them.

And very quickly you can just tell even without opening or just the first line, oh, this is one of those and with a one click, you can just say, okay, I'm gonna block that. . Never get, never see it again. And, and I think people are gonna have to do more of this stuff. I don't know why this stuff isn't built into Gmail and, and all that stuff, but.

[00:28:38] Paul: Ross's a superhuman and, and they have some of that kind of stuff they're starting to build, as I'm sure you can imagine starting to build in.

Admittedly, I, I don't but, but he, he does. So he showed me essentially a version of that. And I think you're right. And so I think, I think the question you have to ask yourself as you're trying to reach people is, do we want to try to navigate that? Like, like are we equipped to solve that problem? And by that I mean reach those people effectively with all those barriers in the way, or is there a better way to reach the people we wanna reach?

And again, I think it, it absolutely depends on the business and who you're trying to target at a hundred percent does. But I think for us, like instead of wasting cycles and time trying to say like, how do we best navigate that minefield that's super crowded. We're like, let's get out there, get in front of people, let's like go make that personal connection.

Let's go, you know, find the person that will intro us to this next person. And for us it's like that, that hits 10 out of 10 times. And it's like, we just think that's a lot more effective use of our time. But yeah, totally. You know, I totally dependent on the business is, is, is my opinion of it.

[00:29:44] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. So we, we talked a little bit about like LinkedIn ads, but you're, you're doing more than . Just ads on LinkedIn. Just, just explain that a a little bit. And I, I also wanna kind of talk about where your AEs fit in with, with with this and, and what they're specifically doing to, to reach out to customers.

[00:30:01] Paul: Yeah, we take like a bear hug approach to it. So you know, it's, it's, yes, it's ads, but it's also driving, you know, through, through our you know, we use a tool called Dripify, for example. I dunno if you've heard of it, but it's, it's essentially like allows us to make a bunch of connections on LinkedIn and grow, grow our network grow, and all, everyone in the company's involved in that's a full, it's a full effort, but, but what we post. And what we talk about is not just OnRamp. It's not just always OnRamp. It's, it's about our industry. It's about sometimes it's who, you know what, of course, like our best performing post was about like swag, right? Which like is absurd, but what that, you know, has nothing to do with our business necessarily.

But what it does is it drives eyeballs to us and you know, the next time someone, you know, we, we do publish a, a piece of content that is relevant to our space or, you know, again, more thought leadership type content and, and stuff like that. People, people have heard of us, right? We've worn, we've worn them, we've proverbially worn them up.

And so, you know, it's about, it's a lot about organic, you know, trying to drive organic traffic as well for us. And again, content's a big name of the game there. And then our reps are, yeah, they're super active. They're super active on LinkedIn, they're also calling, you know, they're doing, they're doing calling.

And yeah, you can also say, well, Paul, that's crazy. Like you said, email is dead. Like, isn't calling even more dead? We all have filters. And the truth is like, not, that's not what we're finding. And, and you know, yeah, a lot of people will hang up or a lot of people won't answer your call, but I think we find that.

By, you know, targeting someone on LinkedIn with really thoughtful, valuable content, them seeing an ad them, then getting a call, that's kind of this like holistic strategy that gets someone to take action and respond. I, I don't think it's a silver bullet, right? Like you can't just sit there on the phone as an AE and be like, Hey, I'm gonna just call a million people.

And like, I'm gonna get picked up from people who have never heard of me before. But I think our, you know, our AEs take the approach of, Hey, I have to warn, I have to, I have to do a lot of warming. And, and that's just a part of this game. And so for us, you know, it's kind of that, you know, that, that suite of things that is driving, you know, the right people to us at the, at the right time.

[00:32:09] Omer: Sometime in the last year you made the decision to move up market. What, what triggered that and what was the strategy that you decided to, to pursue?

[00:32:19] Paul: The reason that we did it was, as I mentioned, when we started the business, we were selling, you know, other startups. They're great, lovely people. It's people like us.

You know, we were selling other, other lookalikes and then we realized, you know, that the, and that's great, you know, again, for your first, you know, a hundred thousand dollars or whatever it is. We, we realized though, that the problems we're solving are even more acute with bigger and more complex organizations.

And in fact, in particular with what we do, which is automate, drive efficiency and create great customer experiences, . Moving the needle, even five or 10% has potentially millions of dollars of impact with bigger customers. Compare that to a startup that's like, Hey, I don't even know what my business is gonna do next year.

Right? Learn next month, let alone next year. And you know, for us then we had this dichotomy of we had these, you know, fortune 15 customers that were really great customers, you know, of ours. And then we had these, you know, this really long tail of, of SMBs and, you know, unfortunately as, as nice as it'd be as a 20 person company or whatever to serve all of them.

You kind of have to pick a, you have to pick a lane because the product you're gonna build for those, that long tail is fundamentally gonna be different from the product you build for bigger, you know, customers. And, and there's a bunch of, you know, I have a bunch of examples of that, but but, but ultimately what drove that was we can't be everything to everybody and, and we in fact will kill ourselves trying to be everything to everybody.

So let's make a hard decision here and like actually go after the customers we think will, you know, drive, drive the next 10 million of business, you know, rather than, you know, thinking of ev every little dollar that we can get from, you know, somebody just saying yes. Right.

[00:33:58] Omer: Great. So, so that decision drives changes in your, your market motion the kind of product features that you're gonna invest money in, what did it mean for existing customers who, you know, the SMB type customers, are they still around, are they still using the product?

[00:34:14] Paul: Yeah. You know, some of them are, and, and we've been okay with saying, you know, whereas our, our own CS team used to like, we're gonna fight for every single dollar and every single customer.

In fact. You know, maybe, maybe whatever to say, but like, we aren't necessarily taking that approach anymore because again, with our limited resources, we know that they're a much better served serving, you know, our, our upmarket customers now, we still go to those folks support. They write in, you know, we, you know, we have, we don't, we aren't trying to completely ignore them, but, but here's what it's doing.

That I think is great. It is frankly, weeding out the ones that weren't really good fits to begin with. And it's keeping the ones that actually will grow into, you know, a, a meaningful, you know, business for us in the future. And, you know, I think, you know, without being in intentional about that strategy, I think us and our whole team would be stressed out about every, every customer lost, right?

Oh my gosh. Yeah. You know, maybe a small dollar customer, but it's another customer that we lost, whatever. By being intentional about this strategy, we're setting our goals in a different way. And so when those things happen, they're, they're intentional. They're, they're not necessarily, like, caused for alarm or panic.

And, and I think that's a really important thing because, you know, driving a strategy like this, you don't only, not only have to, you know, as, as a founder, right, get yourself behind it, but you have to get your whole team behind it. You have to get your board behind it. You have to get your investors behind it.

And so, you know, by setting the right goals and really saying, this is what we're gonna do, and putting a stake in the ground, it allows you to make all the decisions, you know, around that. And, and for us, that's been, you know, that's been a process here, but, you know, one that, that we're seeing pay off, fortunately.

[00:35:49] Omer: I'm curious, how, how do you disqualify the, the wrong type of leads today. 'cause you know, I mean, people, anybody can come to your website and, and request a demo. Right. And, you know, different, different companies have different ways of, of dealing with that. What's, what's your approach?

[00:36:05] Paul: Yeah. And every every, if you're in business, if you're, if you're a business, you do onboarding, presuming you have customers, you do onboarding.

Right. And so, like for us, it's also like, you know, people say, oh, customer onboarding, I'm gonna go check this out. So it's. You know, we do get a wide swath of, of people at different stages of their, of their maturity journey. I think for us there's a couple things that we do. One is at this point, if you're, if you're, you know, under a certain size, we say thank you.

But you know, you're not, we, we literally say, you're not a right fit for us at this, at this point we are literally saying no. Which is, which is really interesting. Gave me Harper in the beginning. But, but I think now, now is, is, is good. And then, you know, if they do pass the, you know, our, our criteria screener.

For us, like we are very intentional about if you're a customer, that's, again, you know, you have a low volume of customers yourself, or you're trying to figure out your onboarding program, like, you know, maybe someday, but right now we're not a fit for you. You know, we're, we're not gonna help you. And in fact, you're gonna be frustrated, you know, you're, you're buying a Ferrari for like what you should be doing, you know, manually.

So like, don't do that. Right? And we're very intentional about that today. So, you know, we, we treat every, no matter who comes through the door, we treat them with respect and we treat them as like, Hey, let's have a conversation. You know, if they do meet certain criteria, but, you know, if we realize it's not gonna be a fit, much better to say no upfront and early than going through the process, taking everybody's time, potentially them being a risk churn, right?

And I think as we grow the business, we're gonna open that aperture further. Like going back to SMB could be a really great business for us. I firmly believe that, but we need the resources to do it. Successfully. Right? And today, again, it's all about Yep. You only have a certain number of resources to point in a certain direction.

So where can we most effectively do that? Th those are kind of, that's kind of how we think about it.

I mean, yeah, you're right. You have to pick a lane, right? It would be, in, in the ideal world, you, you'd serve all those customers and build the product that keeps all of them happy and your marketing would work for, you know, all of that stuff.

[00:38:01] Omer: But it, it's, it's a, it's a really difficult thing for anybody to . To pull off. And, and I think having that level of focus is like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a question of survival, right? And, and, and giving, like, you, you can do a, a lame job, trying to serve everybody, or you can do a great job just fo focusing on a specific type of customer.

[00:38:22] Paul: Yeah. And I mean, listen for us, like if you think about it, right? If you, if you think about serving a, a much higher volume of lower paying customers, 'cause that's what you're doing. You have, you need to do, you know, you need to think about product led growth. You need to think about you need to think about how do I create the best, you know, user, let's prioritize user experience over everything else.

Right? And for us, yes, those things are important of course, but for us, we're, we're asking like, okay, there's so much great value add product for us to build. I'd rather build game changing features and functionality and not worry so much about . Oh, is this, is this the perfect user journey? And we're gonna go ab test this a hundred times, right?

And have the perfect flow for it. For now. People are paying us high enough dollars. We can, we can help them through that process. And I think we can always revisit, you know, at, at some point. But what, you know. to me it's about who can innovate and learn the fastest. And, and so anyway, that, that's how we think about, that's how we think about those kind of decisions.

But yeah, you gotta pick a lane. You really do.

[00:39:21] Omer: Cool. Okay, let's let's wrap up. We're we're outta time here, so let's go into the lightning round. Seven quick-fire questions for you. Ready? All right. Let's do it. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:39:32] Paul: Put yourself in a position to get lucky.

Seems like people, the people that get lucky tend to you think like, oh, they, oh, how fortunate were they? And the truth is like, we don't realize as the, the months and years of work they did to put themselves in a position to get lucky. So I always try to remember that one.

[00:39:48] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:39:51] Paul: There's a book, the Sales Acceleration Formula, by Mark Roberge.. He's a HubSpot alum. We're from Boston, so we're big, we're big HubSpot fans here. Anyway, great book to help you really put math behind your funnel in a way that was eye-opening for me, you know, starting out the business.

[00:40:06] Omer: I agree. Great book.

What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:40:12] Paul: Being a truth seeker? You, you have to find the truth and you have to ask the right questions to get to the truth. And you know, ultimately if you can do that as a founder, you're gonna be successful.

[00:40:22] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:40:25] Paul: Yeah, I'm not a, there's all these fancy tools and all, and the Twitter sphere goes nuts with all this stuff. For me, I do my best work in the morning. So here's what, so I, I put my hardest tasks first and I block off my time in, in, in the morning first. To me, that's been the biggest thing, is just like recognizing that in myself.

And so. . That's that. My tip is to just, if you're that type of person, get the hardest stuff out of the way in the morning.

[00:40:47] Omer: Oh, what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:40:51] Paul: You know, I am I'm a consumer electronics nerd. I love, I love all things consumer electronics and so for me, I think it would be some version of like, create a business to bring like ai smart home solutions to the masses.

I, I'd love, you know, I have a, I have a home here and I love like, making it smart and doing all that stuff, so I, I'd find some way to weave that passion into, into a new business idea.

[00:41:13] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:41:16] Paul: I'm a twin and my co-founder is also a twin, so I, I don't know what that says about us, but yeah, that's, I think that's pretty rare.

It's gotta be pretty rare. You know, co-founder duos we're both twins.

[00:41:26] Omer: That's a weird coincidence. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:41:31] Paul: You know, these days it's it's really being the best dad I can be to my 2-year-old son and three month old daughter. They you know, they certainly take up, you know, my non-working time.

And so for me just, you know, seeing them grow as a is a joy.

[00:41:43] Omer: That has gotta be pretty crazy having two kids in that age range right now.

[00:41:47] Paul: Needless to say, yes it is.

[00:41:49] Omer: And you're still smiling.

[00:41:51] Paul: I, you know, for now, you know, maybe in, you know, 20 minutes, we'll see. But yeah.

[00:41:55] Omer: Yeah. My, my, my kids are, my kids are teens now, but they, they were, there was, there was a, about a two year difference, so almost the same as yours.

And the, those, those years just seem like a blur right now. And a lot of happy memories, but when you're in the middle of it, it's like you just elude. I dunno, it maybe, maybe what I meant, it was a blur back then, but yeah. Look back, look back at it with fun memories.

[00:42:17] Paul: Totally. I, you know, I'm trying to like, keep myself in the moment.

You know, you only get one chance to be, you know, a a, a parent, right? You only have so many kids. And so, you know, try to balance, you know, that blurriness with . With, you know, being there for them and being present as much as possible.

[00:42:31] Omer: Paul, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Great to just un un unwrap that story of, of you guys starting out with the idea, building on bubble and, and kind of getting to where you are today.

It's, it's it's awesome. Hopefully we, we gave people listening, some, some ideas, some insights, something that they can take away and, and apply. In their own businesses. If they want to check out OnRamp, they can go to onramp.us. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:42:59] Paul: paul[at]onramp[dot]us.

[00:43:00] Omer: I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:43:02] Paul: Thanks so much.

[00:43:03] Omer: Cheers.