Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I took to Alex Yassin, the founder and CEO of Parabola, a collaborative data automation tool that helps non technical teams to automate complex data processes.
As a consultant, Alex noticed that many non technical clients often hired analysts to tackle manual data tasks.
He envisioned a tool that one day could help automate this work.
In 2017, Alex launched Parabola.
But he struggled for years to find product market fit.
Even though he attracted initial customers who were very enthusiastic about the product and during that time the business didn't generate a ton of revenue.
Alex eventually had a breakthrough years later when he added collaboration features to the product.
This was when he realized that he'd stumbled upon a much bigger opportunity.
Focusing on collaboration sounds like a minor pivot, but when Alex repositioned his product as a collaborative data automation tool, the business finally got traction and revenue started growing much faster.
Today, Parabola is a seven figure ARR business used by thousands of teams and the company has raised just over 34 million doll.
In this episode you'll learn how Alex identified early false positive customers who loved the product but didn't have recurring needs and how Alex figured out who his ideal customer really was.
Why Alex believes that vertical focus is crucial for horizontal products to cut through the noise, even when it means turning away interested customers.
The important insights Alex gained from tracking collaboration feature requests that got him to pivot Parabola from a solo to to a team tool.
We also talk about how being patient with capital enabled Alex to take the time needed to find product market fit without prematurely scaling growth.
And why Alex sees empowering underserved roles like operations as an opportunity to create outsized economic value beyond just growing revenue.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex Yaseen (02:23.750)
Thanks Chris.
Great to be here.
Omer (02:25.480)
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Alex Yaseen (02:29.640)
Yeah, I think maybe slightly cliche in tech world, but I really like the quote about the future's already here, it just isn't evenly distributed.
We think about that a lot at Parabola.
We are really in the business of empowering people who historically have been left out of the true benefits of working with and kind of deploying technology and trying to give it to them and help them be self sufficient and implement their best ideas.
So hoping to make the future more evenly distributed.
Great.
Omer (02:58.630)
So for people who aren't familiar with Parabola, can you tell us what does the product do?
Who's it for?
What's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Alex Yaseen (03:06.230)
Yeah, Parabola is a collaborative data tool that helps non technical teams, usually people on operations teams, sometimes finance or marketing, to automate the really manual repetitive things they do in spreadsheets.
And we usually call that manual process.
But specifically the type of manual process we love to focus on are things that are manual for a reason.
It's not because you haven't wanted to get out of doing manual stuff.
It's not because you love doing manual stuff.
It's because structurally it's really difficult to automate a process that's so bespoke you can't buy off the shelf software for it.
It's so complex and logicful that you can't just use simpler tools.
And most importantly is so dynamic changes so regularly that even if you had engineers on your team, you can't write custom code for things where the incoming data changes every week.
You want to be experimental, tweaking the logic every week.
And you ultimately need the subject matter expert or the operator or however you want to think about the kind of non technical end user who is so in the weeds on the actual process to be able to tinker and change the process themselves.
So we help them automate those types of things they didn't think were previously automatable.
Omer (04:17.090)
Give us a sense of the size of the business.
Where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers?
Alex Yaseen (04:21.890)
Yeah, we're in the seven figures of ARR at the moment, have a few thousand teams using us and about 100 of those are kind of our larger, what we call our advanced tier accounts, like larger companies engaging with us in kind of more the enterprise type of way.
Omer (04:36.370)
Great.
So the business was founded in 2017.
What were you doing just before that?
And how did you come up with
Alex Yaseen (04:45.540)
the idea to go back slightly further?
I guess I grew up technical.
I taught myself to code when I was younger, built computers, have always had the experience with technology that I really enjoy working with it and get to feel really productive and empowered working with it.
I've always had a bit of a cognitive dissonance that I think about a lot of most of my friends and most of my family not having that same positive relationship where they frequently describe computer acting up, browser taking them to someplace, something like fighting with technology to get it to work.
And I've always thought about what are the best Ways to describe to somebody how to think about a computer or technology in a more deterministic way.
There's a set of inputs that you do and it has a predictable set of outputs and you can get to that predictability.
It's not magic.
I think there's something really empowering when people realize, oh, I can use technology as a tool to actually achieve great things.
It's not a frustration that I'm forced to use.
It's actually an awesome, exciting, rosy version of the future.
I was working in strategy consulting out of undergrad, having studied finance and computer science.
I went into strategy consulting world and I had a really sharp version of this cognitive dissonance where I was working in Fortune 100 companies essentially a lot in CPG, retail, a little bit of E commerce, helping people essentially do data analysis, business case models and data analysis where they knew their process really well.
They were some sort of, we called them a subject matter expert, we now at Parabola call them operators.
But they didn't have a way to actually deploy that idea themselves.
And so I got excited about, hey, rather than paying a fresh out of college consultant a ton of money to do Excel analysis for you, what if we built tools that actually empowered those people to express their most creative ideas, their most drive actual company revenue and company ideas forward ideas and in the process become self sufficient.
So I spent a couple years thinking about this idea and noodling on prototypes and just figuring out what's the right paradigm to make that possible.
When I started Preval, it was because I had really landed on the specific subset of the manual repetitive getting data ready to work with and think about processes that were the most painful and most limiting of these operators kind of exposing their creativity.
Omer (07:05.040)
So I mean, how does somebody go about even building a tool like Parabola?
I mean I can code and a lot of the times if I have some kind of data problem, I could probably write some Python code that'll solve the problem for me.
But even that is a pain in the butt.
Just having to just the whole thing about having to figure things out and what's the data structure and what's the best way to handle this and get it from this place to that place and whatever kind of going another layer up and saying yeah, I'm going to build a tool that does this and handles all these use cases.
It's like, oh my God, that doesn't sound like an MVP type product.
What was it?
Alex Yaseen (07:49.800)
Well, so I think definitely the path we've taken with Parabola is a bit of A hard one.
Trying to build a very robust tool that can solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.
The way I thought about that early, building out of things.
So I have enough of a technical background, I was able to build first prototypes myself.
I had recently learned React from front end UI framework.
It's all about reactive functional flows that are deterministic.
We could talk more about that at some point, if interesting.
Probably want to get into some of the actual go to market pieces.
But basically it's all about taking complexity and having a predictive set of outputs come out the other side.
And so I started thinking about when you're describing writing some of those Python scripts to work on data, the easiest way to think about them is every time you get data coming in, there's a really pure function, a consistent function that does the same.
If you give it the same data in, it'll have the same data coming out.
And so the early paradigm for Parabola was can you assemble what looks like a flowchart?
That's basically describing step by step, how you take those little small transformations and turn them into your overall process.
And conveniently, that's how people actually tend to think when they describe a process to another person.
So if you are on your team, you're about to onboard somebody new to help you do this manual process that you currently run yourself, you'd probably just write down on a piece of paper the 24 steps you follow to download three CSV files out of these different portals, copy and paste them into a spreadsheet, write a vlookup, do a find and replace to get rid of this prefix you know always exists.
There's a bunch of stuff you know, you have to do.
And if you describe each of those steps, it turns out that that is the same set of like, it's a deterministic process that you follow no matter what data is coming in.
And those 24 step lists turn really nicely into a Parabola flow where every, we call it a step, but every node in the flowchart that you build in Parabola ideally speaks to that same level of abstraction that one person would describe their process to another.
We've tried to build Parabola in this very human type of way where you're saying this is a column that just a step that just removes columns, and this is a step that combines two data sets, and this is a step that connects to your data source.
And more recently, this is a step that lets you leverage a large language model to standardize or normalize your data In a way that doesn't require you to actually know what a large language model is.
Omer (10:07.030)
Got it.
Okay.
So you start building this product.
It sounds like a lot of this was driven by just vision and how you describe your background and ideally what you wanted to make technology more accessible for everybody.
Were you going out and talking to potential customers and trying to validate your idea, or were you just driven by the technology and what you wanted to build?
Alex Yaseen (10:34.860)
I mean, a little bit of both, I think had very clear vision for I had been the person doing a lot of this data work, so I knew the high level problems that needed to be solved, but I think have always that cognitive distance.
I was talking about of why people have so many amazing technology tools at their disposal, but still feel scared about them or daunted by them, or unwilling to jump right in.
That is a very difficult problem to solve.
So I spent a lot of time talking with people specifically about what is going to make you feel comfortable to be experimental and to feel like you're the one in control and not that your computer is kind of controlling you.
And I feel like people frequently describe working with new tools almost as like a feeling of claustrophobia where you don't know how to do the thing that you want to do.
And that's really frustrating for people.
And so we spent a lot of time on what's the right level of abstraction to build Parabola to that speaks that just feels really natural and fluid.
One of the most important insights was in a spreadsheet.
One of the things that spreadsheets are awesome at is every time you make a change, you see the entire set of data, you see the final result right in front of you.
And so even if you don't know in that 24 step process, even if you don't know all 24 steps, you can kind of step by step get your way there just by putting one foot in front of the other.
And that's really important for our type of user.
And so in Parabola, it was a technical challenge, but every time you make a change to anything, the entire set of data calculates.
No matter how big your data set is, we make sure you can see your entire set of data and you're able to kind of guess and check your way to your solution.
Omer (12:03.450)
Okay, so let's talk about the first 10 customers.
How did you find those first set of customers and how easy or hard was it to get them to start paying you?
Alex Yaseen (12:21.290)
We've always had a challenge and an opportunity at Parabola.
I think where we're horizontally applicable.
We can solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.
And hopefully if I've been doing my job explaining this well, most people should be able to think about either a manual process they have or somebody at their company has that could probably be benefited by something like Parabola.
But solving everything for everybody is kind of hard to communicate.
And also it's not always somebody's number one top priority.
It could be buried pretty deeply down there.
So we've always had an easy time getting people excited hypothetically about Parabola.
And whenever we have put up pieces of content or early on launching on Product Hunt or Hacker News or those kinds of things, we would always get a huge amount of interest in signups and people who were aspirationally interested.
But finding the use cases that were truly hugely value driving for them and for their companies was more difficult.
I'm trying to think of for first 10 customers specifically.
I think it was a bit of a mix.
We had some people who found us totally.
They had such a strong problem they needed to solve and they'd been looking for so long that we made it really hard to find ourselves.
We didn't have much marketing going on.
They saw us on Hacker News or they googled to the sixth page of Google search pages when Google still was paginated and found something that sparked their interest.
Or there was a little bit of we knew companies, we knew people working in E commerce and retail and CPG who had a lot of operational complexity, complexity that results in a lot of this manual process.
And we were able to connect with them and say, hey, why don't we see how hard it would be to automate this process you thought was going to be really difficult to automate.
Omer (14:07.820)
I think this point about a horizontal product is important and I assume it's still a challenge today because the more you add to the product and the more it can do, the bigger your potential market gets in terms of people who could use the product.
And so maybe we can talk a little bit later about the sort of the go to market challenges in the recent years.
But back then I think you get similar challenges there in terms of who are we talking to, how do we position this?
Should we niche down?
Is there a particular segment, you know, like somebody like me?
I could see myself using Parabola because I get these random things and it's like I don't really want to waste time coding and debugging and blah, blah, if someone's already thought of this and I can go and use that.
But I'm probably not your ideal customer because once I've solved that problem, I might not want to do something like that for another six months.
And so getting people like me who are super excited about the product is a bit misleading because I'm not going to be that customer who's going to be paying month after month after month.
And so you need to look within that and figure out who are the people who actually need this on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and have these continuous problems.
And I'm wondering, how long did it take you to figure that out?
Alex Yaseen (15:40.270)
Yeah, this has certainly been one of our biggest challenges that I also frame regularly as one of our biggest opportunities.
Agree that the addressable market for something like Parabola is stratospherically large, like almost dauntingly large.
And especially early on if we found someone like you who is really passionate and excited to solve one of those use cases.
It was really exciting to us.
We love hearing from customers how they had this really painful thing before and there's this way better new future version that they can do with Parabola.
And we enabled them to be self sufficient for the first time and build something and create something for the first time.
But early on, in pursuit of building a tool for those people, we attracted a lot of people who were interested in building things more aspirationally than actually created value.
Totally happy to have those people, but they obviously reasonably so don't want to pay a lot of money or at least consistently pay money for a thing that is not actually driving a lot of value.
But once we got to a place where it was clear that we had built to that right level of abstraction and had people who previously before were not building automated process or building with technology, doing it for the first time.
And we knew that the tool we had kind of like a precursor to proc market fit of I don't know if it's proct individual fit or that we could coin some term for it.
We started looking at who are our customers who actually were getting a lot of value and who were not just doing something as a hobbyist, but really were driving, had an ROI number they could talk about.
And for the most part those were people who were trying to use us in the context of a team and they were asking us for features like how do I present the results of a Parabola flow to somebody?
How do I show my work and collaborate with somebody else on my team?
I'm actually leaving the company, but we're hiring a backfill.
How do I transfer this to them, things like that.
And what those were actually asking for were, I think those were collaboration features that were just different from the canonical figma2 cursors on a screen.
Collaboration.
They were asking for collaboration features that were more like how an engineer or an engineering team collaborates of having some idea of version control and the ability to have some sorts of shared logic that's helper functions in software engineering world and our world.
They're shared components, shared cards that are subsets of a flow that you can share across multiple flows and they all stay in sync with each other.
And there's ways that we can help a operations team team or a team of these non technical people to start to work together maybe for the first time to collaborate amongst themselves and share with their stakeholders and in the process elevate themselves from being kind of keep the lights on people to a team that is just as technical and empowered as an engineering or data team that's helping drive revenue and helping drive top company goals.
And if we're able to do that, which we this was about two years ago when we were really asking ourselves some of these questions about which of our users are truly driving the most value and how do we start being a little bit more commercial and looking to grow ARR not just growing our user base.
If we're able to help those teams go through a little bit of that process or digital transformation to start to think about themselves in a more up leveled way that creates a huge amount of value for them and for their companies.
They get really excited working with us, they evangelize us within their companies and maybe ideally beyond their companies and then ultimately are willing to pay us money.
And so as we started shifting our focus to those collaborative features and building a bit of a go to market motion to help sell to an entire team at a time, even if it's just a small team rather than to an individual.
We've seen some pretty explosive revenue growth over the past two years and quite clear I think vision of how we go from here.
Omer (19:15.180)
So we talked about the business being founded in 2017 and it took you five years to get to the first million in ARR.
Roughly around that.
And it all happened when you figured out this collaboration need and started to respond in terms of what you were building in the product.
Since then it's been like revenue's growing faster.
We've raised 24 million Series B and you know, things that are kind of day and night in many ways compared to what they were like in the first couple of years.
If you were going back like, do you feel you could have done something differently to get to that pivot, like sooner?
Alex Yaseen (20:02.150)
Yeah, I think so.
I think it's kind of this double edged sword of being customer centric that I was talking about where it feels great to have customers be passionate and want to give us feature requests and want to use our product and all those things.
But any company, and I think particularly a startup, just has to figure out how to focus.
And the saying no to customers early on when every customer and every bit of attention is so precious and it's so hard to fight for anybody to care.
When people do care, you really want to really want to lean in and listen to them.
We had been really diligent from early on saying no to some of those types of customers.
And those were the people who wanted us to be more of a behind the scenes type of data tool.
And so we had a lot of larger companies really early on saying, hey, we'll pay you stratospheric amounts of money to be kind of like a behind the scenes ETL tool or automation tool that we can set and forget.
And if you want to go down that path as a company, we could do some.
There's a lot of interest.
We really wanted to build a tool for end users, for humans to touch and feel and use on a daily basis and help each of those individuals build their own things and create their own value along the way.
Omer (21:10.030)
Just one quick question.
There is why?
Why did you want to focus on the individual and humans if someone's saying we'll give you a crapload of money if you do something else?
Alex Yaseen (21:20.670)
I think this was a thing that started out really important to me and has become very important to the team that now exists at Parabola, where the individual users we've gotten to know, these operators who are today a little bit behind the scenes, are so incredibly passionate about their problems and about their companies.
They usually are so in the weeds in all the process.
They know all the gaps and where all the skeletons are buried and I think get a little bit overlooked as just these keep the lights on people when if you actually really talked with one of them.
The two processes they currently support manually are just scratching the surface of all of their best ideas for how they could actually help drive top company goals.
It's just that they had to stop at number two on their list of 1,000 because they could only support two of them manually.
And if you give them the ability to build their own things, to tinker on their own things, to support more and to create more, they can get way farther through that list and start actually driving some of the most important goals in the company.
And so really felt excited early on and I think that started to pay dividends quite recently of empowering those people to themselves be self sufficient to kind of step out of the shadows and as a company, not just create economic value, the 1x economic value of the company growing, but help each one of our users create their own economic value off into the world as well.
Omer (22:39.700)
The other question I had for you was around when you started to double down on these collaboration use cases, did your ICP change?
Did you go after a different type of end user or was it really the same people just using the product differently and bringing other people into the mix?
Alex Yaseen (22:58.240)
I think it was more of just a narrowed slice of the people who are already using us.
So from an ICP perspective, our favorite users are the broadest slice is just going to be people who have a lot of operational complexity.
So they're not just shuttling data from one system to the other.
There's 15 different data sources, including three CSV files that get emailed to you by a vendor.
And you have a human who has to go in and download something out of a portal and you copy and paste stuff into a spreadsheet, then you ready vlookup and all of these crazy things that you do manually.
The companies that tend to have a lot of operational complexity therefore will gravitate to those industries.
So E commerce and retail and CPG tend to have a lot of operational complexity and fewer technical resources.
And then similarly, they're like freight logistics partners that we've gotten to know quite well also.
And so those were some of the people who were already users of ours who also were trying to use this in the context of a team.
And so that intersection of operational complexity, trying to use this in the context of a team, is our absolute favorite.
There's no reason why you can't use us if you're outside of those verticals.
We have SaaS companies using us and real estate property management companies using us.
But we're trying to stay focused in terms of the density of integrations we build and also the way in which we go to market against those ICPs we know well.
And the benefit of that is then our customer success team and our sales team and our launch team and our product team get to know those use cases really well.
And we can not just build the best product for those customers, but we can also in supporting them, say, hey, we've actually seen this thing happen 15 other times other companies, some smaller than you, some larger than you.
Either you're doing it the exact same way.
They are in great full steam ahead.
Don't even spin your wheels trying to think of something else or you're the first company we've seen do it this way.
Are you sure you should be the one innovating or would it be helpful if we helped connect the dots and introduced you to somebody else who's doing this in a different way?
Omer (24:49.490)
So you mentioned in the early days people would find you.
Maybe you did a product hunt Launch or page 6 of Google or whatever.
Because it strikes me as what are people searching for?
What do they look for when, when they're trying to find a solution like this?
It's not like, you know, you know, project management software, right, that's pretty easy to find.
So one, how did you start to solve that problem to make it more, you know, easier for inbound traffic to find you?
And then also then how did that evolve into what you're doing over the last couple of years?
Because it sounds like you become a lot more focused on sales.
So maybe let's talk a little bit about just kind of discoverability of the product.
Alex Yaseen (25:43.700)
So I think yeah, certainly people are not searching for the most part for a collaborative data tool to solve their problems.
They have a really specific problem they're trying to solve and they're looking for solutions to it.
And for a lot of those problems, if you're a freight forwarder like Flexport, one of our bigger customers who is trying to calculate how many customs duties one of your shipping customers needs to pay, you're not searching for a collaborative data tool to solve that problem.
But our strong belief is actually that a collaborative data tool that helps your operators all work together to crowdsource the best ways they do this, handle exception cases and document their process along the way, actually is the best solution.
And so we have to find them in their moment of need and help them understand that this slightly more general purpose tool that helps them solve that problem and it perfectly bespoke way and also 10 adjacent problems all in the same tool is the best solution.
So we have a few different ways of capturing that intent.
Sometimes it's searching for that specific use case.
So we try to have some amount of content either for those teams specifically or for their longer tail specific use cases.
And that's where the bit of artificial vertical focus constraint right now helps us.
Omer (26:57.010)
Like how people searching for how do I export data from Airtable and do xyz.
Alex Yaseen (27:02.880)
Yeah.
So it could be that mechanical thing.
It could be an E commerce company trying to figure out how to do a return on ad spend analysis.
And there's maybe a specific thing that trips you up the most.
Vanilla return on ad spend.
You can just get straight out of an off the shelf tool.
But as soon as you need to integrate a weird data source or like a CSV file or something.
So we understand a few of the places where off the shelf tools start to break down and you need to do something custom.
So we try to find you in that moment or a lot of the time it's looking for alternatives to the way they've done something.
So I tried to use one of these simpler tools.
What are alternatives to doing that?
So we try to create some service area to find us that way.
And then we also have, as you were saying, we have a sales team so they'll grab a lot of those people who come inbound and talk with them.
But we do reach out to companies that are similar to other companies we work with where you have a lot of of confidence that they're running into problems that we can solve.
And we're usually right.
Most supply chain teams at most e commerce companies, over 250 people have a very similar set of planning, demand planning, use cases.
And we can just tell them that we're good at solving these things and if they're interested they can talk with us.
And we get a quite high interest rate as a result because we're not pushy, we're not trying to sell somebody something they don't need.
We're very focused, our whole team is focused on creating value and if we can create value it's a total win win and if not no problem at all.
And then I think probably the magic of Parabola today is our customers become self sufficient for the first time.
They usually get elevated within their careers.
Their whole team starts to have higher profile within a company and so they really become evangelists.
And so we have fantastic net dollar retention and upsells within existing teams.
Truly crazy net dollar attention.
And then our best customers start just referring us to other people in their space, past companies they've worked at or other groups they're parts of.
And I think these operators don't really have a spotlight shined on them very often.
And as we shine a spotlight on them I think they get really excited to pull others into the spotlight with them.
Omer (29:12.500)
Let's talk about product led growth.
Every SaaS company wants to do PLG sounds like you were no different, but you discovered that there's not just one way to do plg, I guess might be a fair way to describe that.
So maybe tell us, what path were you headed down?
What problems did you start to experience and then how did you go about solving them?
Alex Yaseen (29:38.510)
I think a lot of people, when they say product led growth, a lot of the time what they're just talking about is product LED acquisition, where there's some sort of growth lever that gets people to come in the door and self serve, sign up and just start using on their own.
But there's a lot of pieces of a growth funnel acquisition, just being one of them, even all the way to the other side of a closed deal, you have a lot of expansion happening within a company.
And so as maybe described in that journey we've been on, we've focused efforts on different parts of that funnel.
Early on, we had a lot more of people signing up and using us for as many random ad hoc use cases as they could.
What we realized is that the place where the product ledness most resonates is once we've already landed within a company.
Our first few customers have become power users and they come to an all hands meeting and they show off how cool Parabola is and they screen share the crazy flow that they've built and how much rich context is in there.
And all of a sudden people start raising their hands saying, how do I do this?
Can I use it?
Can you put me in contact with the Parabola team?
And then ideally, in the best case scenario, that person shares their flow, shares the output of their flow with those people, they start to engage with it, they start to become viewers of the flow or of the data on the other side, and then slowly start tinkering and become builders of new flows themselves.
And so there's a really fantastic product loop within companies and that's where our product led works best for Parawa.
I think off into the future we have some opportunities to do an increasing amount of product LED acquisition and we have a lot of cool growth ideas there and have already tried a few experiments.
But I think I would encourage other companies pursuing product ledness to think about where for their company and their type of users, where does the product LED piece make most sense and where do we want to not have to innovate too much and still rely on the things that traditionally work really well in SaaS.
When you're selling into a team, especially a larger company sales team, is really beneficial in helping them widen their minds about what's possible, understand the best workflows for equipping their team with a new capability, break through some barriers around procurement or other things like that.
And so having a sales assist motion on top of a product led company, I think especially in 2023, when everybody's scrutinizing budgets and everybody's making sure that there's a lot of ROI behind what they do, having some sales involvement can be a turbocharger on PLG as opposed to a rate limiter.
Omer (32:06.330)
Can you give me one example of where maybe you were trying to be product led but it wasn't working?
Alex Yaseen (32:15.930)
I think this is kind of the early days in product LED land.
A lot of the time it's an individual product LED acquisition land.
A lot of the time an individual is the first one to discover and sign up.
And there's a lot of tools that have been made with that workflow where you start using it yourself, then you over time invite your team.
I think unique to us, what we found is that people who use us in the context of being an individual, it stays a little bit siloed.
It's kind of one weird tool that one person is using for one use case.
And that's great until that use case is no longer relevant or that person leaves the company.
But once we break into multiple users and multiple use cases, that's when we start to see this amazing net dollar retention and great expansion.
And jumping over that hurdle frequently requires a little bit of sales assist of some kind, sales or customer success or even product support, a little bit of a human touch.
And so the difference between an individual and a team for us has been very similar to the product led acquisition versus product led expansion.
Omer (33:17.120)
One of the things that strikes me about Parabola and the types of customers you're going after is you've described how important it is for them to get to that aha moment where they build something and not only can see the value for themselves, but also can share it with their teams.
But it also strikes me that you're going after people, probably most who can't code.
And so they might not be the most technical of people.
Did you find at some point that people were just overwhelmed or confused when they sign up?
Alex Yaseen (33:59.160)
I think can part of the large period of time we spent building the initial product was to get around that issue and really help people feel at home and feel comfortable?
It depends on the person though.
So our best initial user is going to be somebody who, if you're in a marketing team meeting or an operations team meeting and you have Everybody close their eyes and point at the data person in the room.
They kind of all point at the same person, even if it's not on their resume.
So it's usually somebody who's a little bit more data savvy, has dabbled in a few of those things before.
That gravitates to us first.
But then as soon as there's a little bit of a foothold, there's a few things built.
Our collaboration tools make it easy for other people to jump in so that first power user builds a few flows.
Everything in Parabola is incredibly transparent.
So if you're looking at a report that's been built on top of Parabola, you can kind of flip it over essentially, right, and see the underlying flow where all the data is coming from.
All the logic that got built in.
We have a lot of documentation capability.
So you add a lot of basically like you can, you can group transformation steps into cards that kind of look like little mini notion docs.
They're like a little bullet points of documentation why you're making this decision.
And so it becomes easy for people to either come in and contribute to an existing process or to kind of copy and paste parts of it out and make their own thing.
And especially within a company, when you're already familiar with some of this process, it's really easy to tinker on top of somebody else's work.
And that's usually the entry point into Parabola.
Omer (35:23.750)
So you said we've done a lot with the product to make it incredibly easy for, for people.
Can you share one or two examples?
What does that mean?
Because the reason I ask this is because we hear this a lot, make it easy for people.
But in terms of execution, it's not that easy to figure out how to make it easy.
Alex Yaseen (35:45.570)
And this is mostly just about meeting people where they are.
So most of our users are already doing something manually today.
Their first use case in Parabola is usually not aspirational.
It's usually something already happening.
Today they probably have a standard operating procedure that's a bunch of bullet points written down and they're able to usually port that over.
Either they literally have a Google Doc that says do these 24 steps and build a Parabola flow or they at least have this in their head where every time they onboard something to the team, they sit somebody down and you walk through.
Here's the 24 steps you do to download this data and write a vlookup and do a command F, find replacement to get rid of a SKU and all of the messy manual stuff somebody does in a spreadsheet or downloading data out of tools.
If we've done our job correctly, every step within Parabola maps really nicely to one of those pieces of the process.
To remove a column or to do a find and replace, to join some data together, to leverage a large language model to categorize data.
Whatever the thing that you would do manually, there's a Parabola step that can do it.
And so we actually find people are able to get started quite easily.
We also have an amazing support team that's available via chat, so if you run into some issues, we can quickly help you.
And when we're launching with a larger customer.
So we've recently been working.
I mentioned Flexport a lot.
We've been working with Sonos quite recently is another cool company.
We've been working with Uber Freight.
A few of these are ones that currently we're spending a lot of time with.
And we'll help them build out their first few use cases together where we kind of pair program with them for an hour or two just to get them familiar with the paradigm so they can then go off to the races and build things on their own.
Omer (37:21.540)
Cool.
It's a fascinating product.
It's like, it's one of those things that I think it's.
I don't know how you would describe it.
I mean, I know you said it's a collaborative tool that helps you manage data and all that stuff, but it's like, what's the category?
What's the thing that you can say to my dad and he will get right?
It's like it's one of those, those, those things.
But I, I can, I can certainly see how.
I mean, this thing has, has very broad mass appeal.
But regardless of what the, you know, the TAM might be or how you see it, it sounds like you have got a lot more focused in the last few years with the types of users, your ICP and the types of companies that you're going after.
And I think that's part of, probably one of the reasons why you're starting to get so much more momentum here with this business.
But yeah, it's a fascinating situation.
And I had a founder a couple of weeks ago with a very similar situation.
We're talking about a horizontal product and it can be really hard to figure out where to focus.
Alex Yaseen (38:42.100)
Yeah, I think focus has always been a challenge for us that is important to overcome.
I think it's important for any startup when you have finite resources, you have to focus on something I think with this type of horizontal product, there's an interesting.
Somebody was giving me the analogy the other day of a doctor on the street.
So if you're walking down the street in New York or San Francisco and a doctor came up to you and said, hey, I can help you live to 300 years old, you'd probably think that didn't sound credible and you'd be like, get away from me.
Or you just would totally ignore them and walk past.
But if instead somebody walked up to you and said, hey, I know this is weird, but I see you walking with this really slight limp in your left leg.
Did you happen to play basketball in college?
Because I work with a lot of ex college athletes who have the same thing and I help them get through and become functional again.
If that person was correct, you'd be like, oh man, that's weird that you stopped me.
But I'm so intrigued and I need to talk to you and get to understand more.
And so clearly, I think the first thing is never going to work.
We do everything for everybody.
It's just nobody's going to stop by and take us seriously, even if it's true.
Instead, we need to figure out how to speak really specifically to somebody's pain.
And in 2023, I think that pain needs to be something that is a top company goal.
Driving revenue, supporting more revenue without having to grow costs or without having to grow headcount has been a thing that's really important for companies in 2023.
And in general, just equipping an operator who we speak really clearly to at one of these companies to say 2023 is the year of the operator.
We can kind of step up and be that team that helps get our company through this scary 2023 time.
Omer (40:15.240)
All right, we should wrap up.
Let's get onto the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've ever received?
Alex Yaseen (40:26.850)
Stop adding value.
Meaning if somebody's coming to you with an idea, they are really excited to go chase it down.
Even if you could tinker on it and make it 25% better, you're probably reducing their motivation and morale to work on it by much more than 25%.
And then some cases, if you really have a high trust aligned team, just kind of let them run with the thing and let it be theirs.
Omer (40:48.210)
Interesting.
What's one book you'd recommend to our audience and why?
Alex Yaseen (40:52.560)
If I could do one of each category of nonfiction and fiction.
I'd say nonfiction.
I really love the Conscious Leadership or the Principles of Conscious Leadership book all about how do you operate either above the line and things happening via you or below the line of things happening to you was really game changing for me to read.
And then fiction.
I really like a book called Nexus category of sci fi books that I like that are grappling with potentially scary versions of the future but ultimately think about how they can be really optimistic and positive and how the future could get to a better place instead of some of the more just like doom and gloom dystopian stuff that I think maybe is also frequently out there.
Omer (41:31.090)
Good, that sounds interesting.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Alex Yaseen (41:36.290)
Perseverance.
Omer (41:38.130)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Alex Yaseen (41:41.730)
In my to do list I have a list of all the people I meet with on a regular basis and when I think of a thing I need to talk to them about rather than pinging them in the moment, I can write it down.
So then the next time I'm with them I have a list of all of the things that have popped in my head over the past few days.
Good.
Omer (41:54.380)
Love it.
What's in your crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Alex Yaseen (41:58.540)
I think about these all the time.
I think one that I would love to see personally, but I think business model wise is really difficult.
Is some kind of micropayments thing where when you encounter gated content on the web, like article on New York Times show on Hulu or something, it would be awesome to be able to pay like 10 cents to see that thing and not have to think about it rather than signing up for a full subscription.
And it would be great if more content on the Internet was kind of like electricity where as long as it's valuable, you'll consume it and won't bother if it's not valuable.
Omer (42:29.430)
Yeah, that's a great idea actually.
And it's like I've lost count of the number of times I've seen somebody try to take a crack at solving micropayments.
Alex Yaseen (42:37.830)
Yeah, it's a ton.
It's a really hard structure.
You have to have like a whole.
I don't know, it's a network effect problem essentially, and you have to somehow overcome that like a chicken or an egg.
And I don't know how to solve it for that, but it would be really cool if somebody solved it.
Omer (42:50.610)
What's an interesting or fun fact about
Alex Yaseen (42:52.290)
you that most people don't know until very recently.
I made it over 30 years without ever going to a Benihana, and I just recently had my very first Benihana experience.
And so that used to be something I could say I had never done.
Now I've done it once and it was nice to finally see what everybody was talking about.
Omer (43:06.610)
That's funny.
And what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Alex Yaseen (43:10.420)
I used to play a ton of tennis growing up and had dropped it for a few years.
What I used to really love about it was, especially in singles, the mental game of, yes, you have to have good muscle memory and good strategy.
But a lot of it was just being stronger mentally than the other person.
And tennis players talk about this a lot.
I've recently gotten back into tennis over the past year and just been really enjoying that as both athletic outlet, but also the psychology of it I find so interesting and kind of in many ways similar to both starting and running a company.
Omer (43:42.400)
Yeah, yeah.
That's really.
I mean, we just saw Wimbledon just wrapped up and you see some of those players there and it's like when you're playing like five sets for God knows how many hours, it's not just about skill anymore.
Right.
There's so much more happening up here.
Alex Yaseen (44:00.000)
Yeah.
And you can see people can play.
The variance in how they play point to point or even like match to match is incredibly high based on where their head is at.
And you can kind of see when.
When a dark cloud kind of passes over their face versus when they're really in the zone seeing the Matrix.
And it's quite fascinating.
Omer (44:18.490)
Okay, great.
Well, thank you for joining me.
Thank you for sharing your story and some of the insights and lessons you've learned along the way.
If people want to check out Parabola, they can go to Parabola IO and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Alex Yaseen (44:33.210)
Yeah, I think definitely reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you're interested in Parabola and want to either learn a little bit more or get a demo.
We have a really fantastic team who loves to talk, share what we've learned and very aligned on.
If there's value to be had, they love to help.
And if there's not, they're never going to pressure somebody into spending more time with us.
So feel free to reach out on our website, sign up for a demo, and we'd love to talk to you.
Omer (44:58.820)
Yeah, all companies should do that.
It's like everyone thinks I'm going to go on a demo and I'm going to be pitched, and if somebody just said, hey, let's just see if this works for you or not, it's like, maybe more people would do that.
Anyway, I appreciate you.
Thanks for taking the time to chat, and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Alex Yaseen (45:20.510)
Thanks.
Great chatting.
Omer (45:21.950)
My pleasure.
Cheers.
