Omer (00:11.840)
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.
This Week's interview is a story about a founder who had a great idea for a startup.
He brought on a co founder and they both got down to business.
But at one point, this founder realized that he'd chosen the wrong co founder.
They had very different visions and different expectations and increasingly they found themselves in conflict.
But they didn't face the reality of the situation until it was too late and one person had to leave the company.
In this episode, we talk about lessons learned from the conflict between the co founders and how it impacted relationships, business and future success.
My guest also shares what he did differently with his second startup, Inner Trends.
To avoid making the same mistakes.
He you'll also learn how my guest is taking data science technologies and using them to help businesses convert more first time site visitors into customers.
It's a great story and a great product.
I hope you enjoy it.
All right, today's guest is the founder and CEO of Inner Trends, a growth analytics platform for SaaS and web products.
InnerTrends uses data science technologies to help you understand every aspect of your user onboarding process and to help you convert more first time users into customers.
The company was founded in 2015 and is based in Romania.
So today I'd like to welcome Claudio Morodio.
Claudio, welcome to the show.
Claudiu Murariu (02:09.180)
Hi, Omer.
Thank you.
Omer (02:10.700)
Now, did I, did I pronounce your name okay?
Claudiu Murariu (02:13.180)
Yeah, that was perfect.
Omer (02:14.220)
Okay, good.
All right, so let's start by one thing I always like to ask my guests is to kind of get inside their head and just figure out what drives and motivates them.
So what gets you out of bed every day to work on your business?
Claudiu Murariu (02:32.890)
It's a very hard question, to be honest, but actually it's easy.
Hard and easy.
What drives me is having building something that people truly need they would miss if it wouldn't be built.
Omer (02:53.430)
That's a good answer.
Okay, so
Claudiu Murariu (02:59.510)
let's.
Omer (03:01.110)
I want to kind of set the context a little bit for Inner Trends.
So I described it a little bit to the audience.
But in your own words, help our audience understand what the product is and what problem you're trying to solve with it.
Claudiu Murariu (03:17.960)
Yeah, I always like to do a play of words when I describe innotrends to people who are not from my industry and basically trying to use a web analytics tool to optimize a business in today's world is like trying to learn to play football by watching tv.
You get to learn the rules.
You can.
You spot a good player when you see one, but that doesn't make you a good player for that.
You need to have a coach.
And that's where Innogen steps in.
Basically, it helps companies analyze, not just get access to data and reports.
Omer (04:03.920)
Okay, now we talked about sort of you guys using data science.
Can you explain to the people who are not familiar with that term what, what is data science?
Claudiu Murariu (04:16.070)
Yeah, so a lot of statistics and math.
So that's, that's where it all starts from.
Basically every time, every time a company wants to take a decision, often they want to look at data and see how they can use it to, to support that decision they want to take.
And the thing is, looking at data is difficult.
It requires knowledge.
It requires understanding it very well and understanding statistics, maths.
And when you have correlation, when you don't have correlation, when things are related one to another and so on.
And it's often, especially in the tests we did initially that we would show a report, imagine a Google Analytics report, we show it to different product managers and almost never two different managers would take the same thing out of that report.
What that causes is people not trusting what they see in data.
They think they see something, but they don't really trust it in a way to take a decision.
So often they go with their guts.
When you have a data scientist in your team, a data scientist can.
Two different data scientists would look at the same set of data and they come up with the same conclusion.
And that's what InNotRends tries to do.
It looks at data and gives you a conclusion that you can trust and use in your business.
Optimization.
Omer (06:03.460)
Inner Trends is not your first startup.
You had another company some years ago.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Like where did you start on your entrepreneurial journey?
Claudiu Murariu (06:16.420)
Yeah, so I started with a job initially and after three years in that job, I think I went to, to a conference in China where a customer.
I was a web analyst back then, and the customer came to me and was really happy for the consultancy I gave him, which earned him, I think $100,000 or something in the three months that we worked.
And that was like, okay, so maybe I shouldn't do the job anymore.
Maybe I should try to build a business and earn that kind of money.
And I a company which at the origin is also a web analytics product, but going rather into behavioral targeting and it Basically helps companies collect email addresses with pop ups but that are targeted based on behavior.
And yeah, I started that company without investment, without grassroots.
We got to break even in the first year and ended up with 300k revenue by the third year.
Omer (07:43.060)
Is that euros or dollars?
Okay.
Claudiu Murariu (07:50.180)
A big chunk of which was profit.
We were only three people working in the.
And the way we managed to do that was by using data and optimizing continuously to get as much as possible from the traffic that we had.
And I remember that I was going to conferences back then and I would basically brag that we do more dollars per month than traffic, how many visitors get to our website.
And yeah, we managed to do that by really understanding what is happening in the product and how people are using it and how to, how to optimize it.
Omer (08:50.360)
Yeah, so, so party code is P A D I C O D E dot com.
Right?
Claudiu Murariu (08:57.440)
P A D I C O D E dot com.
Omer (09:00.040)
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, cool.
And so you were able to do, you were kind of applying kind of what you were selling in terms of better conversion rates to your own product to acquire customers.
You basically had, you know, you worked on getting very high conversion rates with your own product.
Claudiu Murariu (09:19.480)
Yeah, yeah.
The thing is, so our product was targeted at e commerce companies and we've had some very big names as companies from Adidas and Reebok and Orange Vodafone.
Yeah, like we got pretty big names using our, our product.
But what we did was to look at the data that we had collected about our users and we truly tracked everything at that point.
And yeah, we got to the point where we would do proactive support.
So basically we would write from our support channel to users before they would write to us.
Omer (10:15.400)
Wait, wait, wait, say that again.
Explain that to me.
I didn't get that.
Claudiu Murariu (10:21.000)
We were spotting when people were having problems and we would write to them before, like almost in real time.
When we see something happened, we would just write to them say, hey, I saw that this happened to you.
This is how you fix it.
Omer (10:38.010)
So give me an example of that.
Claudiu Murariu (10:41.610)
So like as I said, we were doing behavioral targeting campaigns.
Yeah.
So like a company could come and build a campaign.
We say, I want to target all the people that see three different red dresses on my website to ask them to subscribe to a newsletter with red dresses.
And they would set up these campaigns and we would have an algorithm that looks at the targeting rules and if there is any chance of conflict with other campaigns or with having low conversion rates.
And when that would happen, we would receive an alert automatically and we would go into the customer account, see how that could be optimized to get better results.
So we wouldn't wait for the customer to have one week of data.
Seeing that, hey, my targeting campaigns is not bringing any results.
We would write to them telling them, hey, if you fix this, this is what's going to happen.
Omer (11:43.950)
Wow.
Okay.
Claudiu Murariu (11:46.030)
So yeah, I mean, that's how we managed to get those numbers.
And I think starting with my second year, I kind of got frustrated with the fact that I didn't find on the market a solution, analytics solution that would give me the answers that I needed in optimizing Paddy Code.
Little by little it stuck in the back of my head that it felt like a big problem.
It felt like, hey, every company should do what we do.
Every company should try to make the most out of their users and get as much revenue and as many happy customers as possible.
And it seems there is no solution that makes it very easy to do that.
Omer (12:36.880)
Yeah, I mean, because I think most businesses would have some kind of analytics and whether it's Google Analytics or whatever.
But the question is you can look at that data and you can see how much traffic you're getting and you can see conversion rates and things like that, but how do you actually get to a point where you trust that data?
And two, how do you figure out what are the actions you need to take with confidence rather than, you know, having semi confidence in the data and you know, a little bit of confidence in the, in the decisions you're making.
And I think it goes back to what you said earlier where at the end of the day you do end up making decisions on your gut, which you might do whether you had the data or not.
Claudiu Murariu (13:25.420)
Exactly.
And companies have, when you talk with company, when we talk with companies, they have very good questions sometimes like what is different between the people that pay and don't pay in their first week of activity?
Now try to get that report from Google Analytics.
And I'm not saying it's not possible, but it really requires trained person that knows how to play with data very well to give you an answer.
And CEOs and product managers are not trained data scientists.
However, an answer to this question, what is different between the people that end up paying and those that don't in their first day of activity might make a huge difference to what's the roadmap for the next month?
Omer (14:21.200)
Right.
And was there a.
Was the answer different for different e commerce businesses or did you identify some common trends across the board?
Claudiu Murariu (14:34.720)
Okay, so like when we did that in Padia, in Padica, we did that for us.
So when I started doing that, I did it for the company, for optimizing our own company for the customer.
We just provided them the pop up that they could use on their websites to target users.
At some point, things didn't.
Well, I left Bodycode, I got into a conflict with my partner and I left the company.
I remained as a passive shareholder there and I decided to focus on, on this thing that stuck to the back of my head.
Why isn't every company, why doesn't every company has access to what we did when we optimized Padicode?
Omer (15:27.050)
And that's how you came up with the idea for Innertrends?
Claudiu Murariu (15:31.370)
Yeah, yeah.
And.
Well, that's not really.
Well, that's how we started InNotRends.
Yeah.
And we.
I realized that, hey, my scenario at paddycode was very specific, but I need to get out in the world to truly understand how companies work, how SaaS companies work.
Basically what we did in the beginning was to just build our technology.
It was very clear for us that no matter what we decide to build as a product, having raw data tracking technology, so everything that is tracked gets stored exactly as it is tracked, so it can be processed in the future in any way possible was crucial for us.
I think we spent the first six to eight months building the technology.
In parallel, we started interviewing companies, we started visiting companies, talking to a lot of people to get to the point where we would understand why don't they take data driven decisions?
What stops them to do that when they already have access to lots of data.
That process took four months.
I think we started the interviews somewhere in march.
2015 and we decided on our first version of a product by August.
It was actually, it was very funny.
It was an investor that got us on the direction that we are now, but not because he gave us an advice, but because I went to him.
We were part of a program where we had different mentors talking, which we were talking to.
I was looking for a lot of product managers because I wanted to understand how they use data.
But one slot was filled with investors.
So while I was talking to him, I was telling him what we do and he tells me, hey, there are like tens of companies that I get, web analytics companies that try to pitch me every single month, why are you different?
And I was trying to tell him, like, because we have this technology.
And I was focusing a lot on the technical part and yeah, why are you different?
He was keeping, he was repeating that to me, I got angry at some point and because we answer companies questions and at that moment, how do you do that?
And the thing is, we weren't doing that yet, but he just pissed me off and that's how I answered.
And that's when I realized, hey, I'm up to something here.
And I remember that I had around five or six more people I talked to that day that were product managers.
And I told them this idea, we answer your questions.
And every single one of them was interested.
I went back to my team, I said, it's easy.
We just need to build a product that answers questions.
Our companies need to come into our product, ask a question, and we provide them an answer, an analysis, and we got to work and we built an interface.
We were like, hey, let's just launch this because it's going to get wild.
It's going to be the biggest thing ever.
But then, now let's do some user testing because maybe we can tweak it to have it better.
And I think we did five or six user testing sessions.
None of them were able to use it, not even ask a single question.
And that got us to a point in which, okay, we need to get back to the drawing board.
We need to get back to research.
We need to get back interviewing companies to see why it's not easy for them.
They're just staring at the monitor and didn't know what to ask.
And little by little, we actually got by.
I think in December 2015, we got to the point where we had a good idea and we had success with our user testing of a product.
In January, we launched the private beta.
We stayed in private beta till September.
The main reason we stayed so long was we needed to answer more than just a few questions if people were to buy the product.
So we actually had to build bit by bit and also grew our private beta base.
And then in September, we launched, we already have.
We closed 10 customers and yeah, that's where we are now.
Omer (20:58.940)
So when you say, I'm just looking at the Inner Trends website and one of the things that you guys talk about in the product tour is get answers, not just reports.
And the example you give is somebody asking the question, how are users converting during the onboarding process?
Which you say is often one of the first questions that, that people ask.
And then with your example, instead of just providing data, it's kind of a clearer explanation of what's going on.
So the example here says during the selected period, 12 and a half thousand users finished the onboarding out of 29,000 odd signups, that's a conversion rate of 42.76%.
You are losing most users a step three of form settings which has the highest drop off rate of 37%.
And then analyze and take action and then you provide like four specific actions that they can take to go and resolve that issue.
Yeah, so that's basically the.
I want to make sure that people understand what you mean by the idea of answering their questions.
Is, is that a good example?
Claudiu Murariu (22:23.100)
Yeah, that's, that's a good example.
And yeah, that's true.
That's, that's really one of the questions that most of our users start with.
User onboarding is.
So growth has two components.
New users that come in and start using your product and old users that leave and never to come back.
You can accelerate growth.
So the new users are the ones that accelerate growth and only the onboarded users count.
If a user signs up and doesn't finish the onboarding process, it means they don't know your product yet, so they don't count towards growth.
And also growth is slowed down by your churn by the users, old users that leave the product never to come back.
So if you want to accelerate, you need to look at user onboarding.
That's why it's often a starting point for most companies.
That's where you want to go first if you want to impact growth.
And yeah, that's a generic one of the general questions you start with and that gives you an overview that gives you where you have the biggest problem.
In the example you said is like at the first step of the onboarding process, that's where you need to focus.
So basically in a typical web analytics tool like Google Analytics or anything, you build a funnel first.
The funnel doesn't.
It's difficult to, well, it's impossible almost to segment the funnel only on specific users, like new users.
First thing and second thing, it will be difficult for you to know where to focus.
Where will be the biggest impact.
Top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, where is the biggest drop off rate and so on.
And that's where people look at it, make an idea about it, but they are not sure about, they're not sure what to do about it.
They might share it with their colleagues, they go into a meeting, they discuss it and they might take a decision.
But again, which is often based on guts and what everybody thinks, not what the data tells you.
So in Inner trends.
Yeah, like in the example you said, we say, hey, at step three there is the biggest optimization opportunity and then we give you an example of a question.
See what happens between step three and step four and see if there are any actions that have a negative impact on user onboarding.
So then from this report you go to the next one and we tell you, hey, this action has a negative impact on your user onboarding.
If people do it, the chances are that it's more likely that they will drop off.
So we tell you directly where you need to go and focus to start optimizing.
It's not guts, it's not what you think or what you who's who.
Like I think you call them hippos, the highest paid person in the organization.
It's not about hippos opinions, it's about data telling you where to focus and what to do to optimize a business.
Omer (25:45.000)
Okay, I want to talk more about the lessons that you learned from your first startup party code and how that helped you to avoid making the same mistakes again within a trends or maybe making the same mistakes within a trend again and learning something from that.
But before we get into that, I want to kind of close off a couple of questions about party code.
Firstly, you guys went to around 300,000 in annual recurring revenue.
How did you do that?
How did you go out and land clients like Reebok and some of the other companies that you mentioned?
Claudiu Murariu (26:45.650)
We started working on the product as a side project.
So I was still hired at a company.
So I would develop Padi code as a side project when I would get home.
And back then there's a company that was in big vogue at some point and it's still very well known today in Web analytics called KissMetrics.
And KissMetrics was in private beta and they were having a lot of buzz around them at that point with everybody like saying that their product is going to be a game changer.
It's really cool.
They had a funnel product at that stage and it's much better than Google Analytics.
And they would get a lot of coverage from blogs, a lot of reviews because they gave them early access to the product.
And I think in some August, I don't remember the year they launched their paid versions, which started from 99, which got the community really, really mad because they realized that hey, we were promoting a product that we cannot afford, most of them being small blogs or stuff like that, that wouldn't pay $99 for a web analytics service when Google Analytics is around for free.
And I remember we were working at our product back then and I called my partner and we need to stop working on our product.
And we need to clone kissmetrics with Google Analytics data and launch that because there is a lot of buzz around and that will help us get awareness for our product.
And we bought a team from Team Forest.
We made a clone of KissMetrics in, I don't know, 10 days or something, but using Google Analytics data.
So we would use the Google Analytics API and we would build the exact same report as Kismetics.
And I remember that I wrote an email to Avinash Kawashik, which was evangelist for Google Analytics, and saying, hey, Avinash, we built this.
Let me know what you think.
And Avinash looked at it, said, like, it looks really cool, but I'm not very technical.
I'll put you in touch with the product manager at Google Analytics to take a look.
The product manager came back in one hour.
I think it was 11 in the night.
I was preparing to go to beg and said, your product is really cool.
I want to feature it on our blog.
When can we do that?
And that's how we got featured in Google Analytics blog and that's how we started to get a lot of traffic on our website and blog.
The clone we did on KissMetrics was for free.
KissMetrics grew a great product after that, much bigger than what we did.
But we just used that buzz around it to get awareness on our brand and product.
That got us a lot of links, a lot of, oh, yeah.
And the way I used that was I would start writing to a lot of big blogs saying that I want to post, to do guest posting on them and giving a link from the Google Analytics article.
And I got.
I got accepted pretty much everywhere.
Omer (30:20.890)
That's really interesting.
So, so if I get, if I understand this right, you.
You kind of identified the buzz that was being generated as there was talk about KissMetrics launching.
Claudiu Murariu (30:34.730)
Yeah.
Omer (30:35.210)
And then you identified some of the issues with that and why some people were critical of that.
And then you use that as an opportunity to basically give inner trends a space in that conversation.
Yeah, that's very smart.
Yeah.
And then I think once you were picked up by the Google blog, then I think that gets you a tremendous amount of credibility in terms of if you go out and talk to anybody else, of course they're going to say yes.
Because, you know, hey, if Google.
Claudiu Murariu (31:09.340)
Google likes stuff, then yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
It's.
It's how it worked.
And yeah, we actually didn't.
I think we spent less than $100 on advertising at Bodycode ever.
I think we did an experiment once for something.
Omer (31:31.920)
And then was that strategy of the Google blog posts as well as the guest posting the primary vehicle that helped you drive growth for party code?
Claudiu Murariu (31:47.720)
No, because it was.
So the product, the clone product we built was nothing related to our own product but because what that got us was lots of links to our website.
So that helped us get good search visibility.
And as you said earlier, it was a very good entry point to the places that I needed to grow.
The actual product that we were building and we were selling the kissmetrics clone was free.
We were not charging for it.
So the way I used that was.
And it's something that I'm starting to replicate at Inner Chance as well because that worked very well at that point.
So I started going to.
So we were doing pop ups that were collecting emails.
So we started, we went to, we integrated mailchimp and we wrote an article about success story and we wrote to mailchimp saying that if they want to feature us on their blog.
And mailchimp basically said yes, but then never replied.
We thought hey maybe we are too little for mailchimp but let's use that, let's have mailchimp and let's do Campaign Monitor which was the second largest.
And we did Campaign Monitor and we kind of told them that we were going to have a deal with mailchimp.
We were in the process of working a promotion plan with mailchimp and Campaign Monitor kind of did it, wanted to do it as soon as possible.
So we did it.
They did an article on their blog and sent a newsletter to all their customer base announcing our integration.
And after that was Aveber.
I think that's how we pronounce it.
After that companies starting contacted us, contacting us, saying that they want to be integrated as well.
And we would ask the conditions for the integration meaning newsletter to all your customer base, blog posts, social media promotion and so on.
So that was the main growth engine for paddycode.
Omer (34:17.870)
Okay, all right.
So two things.
One was the guest posting and one lucky in the right place at the right time kind of post with Google which really helped to build some momentum there.
Claudiu Murariu (34:35.790)
Yeah, that helped with being a Romanian company when dealing with, dealing with the other companies.
We were very young, not known, but we had the link from Google.
Omer (34:48.050)
Yeah.
And then secondly in terms of the integrations, you started to identify integration opportunities with companies and products where your target customers already were and there was some kind of complementary opportunity for you to, to work together.
So the integration was obviously beneficial for both sides and instead of just kind of, you know, these days it's so easy that you're, you can be a developer and, and say, oh great, I see, you know, mailchimp has an API.
I'm going to go and register for that and then I'm going to go and build my integration and, and leave it at that.
But you didn't stop there.
You actually started contacting these companies and trying to figure out how you can leverage distribution opportunities whether it was through their newsletter to reach their existing customers or blog posts or social media.
And yeah, and that, that makes, that's, I mean that's really smart and that makes a lot of sense.
And in terms of it's not just about doing the integration, it's also about figuring out what is the smartest way to make the most of that integration opportunity.
Claudiu Murariu (36:07.850)
Yeah, and we actually did one more thing.
There was.
So after the first three or four companies that we integrated, we started using customers to get introductions to the others.
So basically it wasn't me who would contact the next infusion, soft or exact target or software on it would be a customer that would ask the company if they have an integration with us.
And then I would just jump in and saying yeah, we can do that, here's how we do it, who should I talk to about it, and so on.
So yeah, we actually used customers to get, I think there are now close to 40 integrations in the product.
Omer (36:56.060)
The second question I had before we wrap up the conversation about party code and continue the inner trend story is what happened with your partner and co founder?
What was the cause of this conflict that eventually had you going down separate paths?
Claudiu Murariu (37:19.660)
That's a very difficult question.
And to be honest, I think it's the very first time I talk about it.
That might not be very smart for me not talking about it, but being the first time, probably I should have talked about it long ago.
So what happened was the company grew, we would have success after success and we started having different vision about how things should be with the company.
I was a person that from my view it was clear that the company depended on me to make it bigger and to grow it.
And I think for my partner it was always a vision about building a company that doesn't depend on her, that she can sell or exit at any moment without having her part of it.
And I think we even talked about it from time to time.
But I never actually got to a point to say that I don't agree with it, that we should do things different.
I just left things as they were because the company was growing.
We were also in different position.
I was in a position that if the company wouldn't go, I would be bankrupt while my partner had other options as well.
But we got to a point in which I didn't feel comfortable in the company anymore.
We tried for six months to fix things and that didn't work out.
So I took the decision that hey, I'm going to start all over.
Going to be a very difficult process to do it, but that's the smartest thing to do if we want the company not to die right here and now.
And I think it was the smart thing to do because the company is still generating revenue and good revenue.
So yeah, the main problem was turning a blind eye when there's small problems and not discussing them because you fear of what might come out of it.
Omer (39:57.760)
So it all the source of this conflict was that the two founders had very different visions of the business and their role in the business.
Claudiu Murariu (40:16.340)
Yeah.
Omer (40:16.780)
And that led to both of you having or making different types of decisions on a day to day basis
Claudiu Murariu (40:28.820)
which
Omer (40:29.220)
kind of led to more and more conflict.
And, and I think what I'm hearing is that you, you, you knew there was an issue there, but you didn't want to have that difficult conversation.
Claudiu Murariu (40:45.540)
Yeah.
Omer (40:49.060)
Until it was too late.
Claudiu Murariu (40:50.980)
Yeah.
And it's.
And it blew off.
Yeah.
Omer (40:57.780)
Okay, so let's get back to Inner Trends.
And so I think it was important to kind of share the story of Party Code and the process that you went through there and for everyone to understand, you know, some of the lessons that you learn and also some of the, the great sort of tactics and strategies that you use to grow that business and make it very profitable.
So as you went into building Inner Trends and we talked about the sort of the early stage journey where you started having, talking to potential customers and then trying to refine the product alongside that and with the experience of what you went through with Party Code.
What was sort of top of mind for you in terms of these are the things that I'm going to do differently this time?
Claudiu Murariu (41:59.770)
Well, one of the first things that I decided to do different was, well, I needed to make sure that I never again get into a position where I get in a problem in problems with co founders and to avoid repeating the mistake because partycode could have been a very, very successful company.
The vision for it was really good.
But the conflict between co founders ruined that.
And yeah, working for four years or three years in something and suddenly not be part of it anymore.
It's not something that you want to do again.
So the way I addressed that was we actually decided to go through the route of investment because that's one of the advantages I see in investment is that there is someone who would not allow problems to grow like they did in paddycode and to have somebody who is external from the team, external from the company, who just jumps in from time to time and has an objective view of what's happening also and also have a stake in it.
And I think that was helpful for us.
Even in paddycode we actually got investment offers, but we refused them because we really wanted to do grassroots, to not take investment, do it for ourselves, grow and so on.
And I think that was a mistake.
So that's one thing that I decided to do different.
Another thing that I decided to do different was to choose co founders based on skills that are now and not that might be in the future.
My partner in paddycode was a very, was a salesperson, but they needed a product to have a product first in order to be able to sell it.
So their role in the company was very little in the beginning and that's probably one of the cause of the problem.
So yeah, I decided not to choose partners based on what they might help us in the future, but rather on how they can help the companies now.
Yeah, so like these are like in terms of the business, in terms of the product.
There are a lot of lessons that we learned from Padicode.
Paddycode was built from without being a product person, without knowing how to build products, without knowing pretty much anything on product, product development.
And yeah, like we, we are much faster right now.
We iterate much faster and it helps making mistakes in the past and not doing them again.
Omer (45:28.030)
Yeah, totally.
So give me, give me kind of.
You talked about making lots of mistakes on the product side.
Give me one example of a mistake that you made with Inner Trends that you wish you had handled differently earlier.
Claudiu Murariu (45:55.310)
So the problem that we did with Inner Trends was thinking in terms of recipes.
You remember I told you about how we did that Padicode with partners, that we integrated with partners.
And I found that recipe and I implemented it over and over again.
So I said let's do this in your trends.
So let's answer every question about what we can take from let's say an E commerce provider data and let's answer questions on revenue monthly, recurring revenue churn and so on.
And we actually started building that.
We lost I think two months.
It doesn't work the same as it worked with paddycode because what we learned later is People don't have problems that companies have, are not.
Are part of a whole business.
They relate to a lot of things.
You cannot just take revenue data, put it there, and hope to actually give some answers to a company on how to improve their business.
It needs to be correlated with much more data from different sources in order to.
To bring value, to actually give something to the customer that he can say he could definitely want to pay for and get as much as possible of that.
So, yeah, that was a big mistake.
We actually scrapped all that.
We deleted all the code.
And then what happened?
After a new series of interviews, we actually decided to focus on a problem and not on a set of data.
So that's how we focused on user onboarding.
And we said, let's cover everything about user onboarding, every single aspect of it.
Because if we fix that, we actually might get customers, improve business, even if we don't cover other areas, but we need to cover a problem, not a set of data.
Omer (48:18.770)
How did you get to that insight?
Claudiu Murariu (48:23.810)
To be honest, I remember very well when I got to VetInsight.
It was after an event I participated at.
And again, I talked to many, many companies.
I don't know what made it, but I remember the moment I walked the door out of the door from the event.
I called my partners and said, we need to have a talk tomorrow.
I think I know what we need to do next.
We need to focus on a single problem and we need to fix it.
And I remember talking with my partners in that and everybody was on page.
It seemed like all the data that we had before seemed to validate that thing that I came out from.
It wasn't a single discussion.
I'm not sure what was it, but it was at that moment.
Omer (49:19.210)
Yeah, because.
Yeah, because it's kind of ironical because you kind of were trying to ask, you know, saying you're going to answer people's questions and then you're focusing on the data and then the data is not really answering the questions.
Claudiu Murariu (49:39.940)
Yeah, exactly.
It's not a problem of data.
Data is available.
There are many sources of data out there.
That's not a problem and that's not a problem we try to fix.
What we try to fix is what questions to ask and how do you get answers to them as quickly as possible.
And that's the starting point to actually starting using data.
Omer (50:13.840)
So once you switch to focusing on user onboarding, did it also make it easier to market the product and sell it?
Claudiu Murariu (50:27.280)
Yeah, much, much, much easier.
That was in November.
By the end of December, we had a first version of product in first week of January.
We did testing.
I think I worked even on 1st of January.
We did testing of it on 7th of January.
We invited our first user and we focused on how to improve our user onboarding because it was clear for us if we managed to improve user onboarding for a customer and for every other customer, we have the product that we are looking for.
Not a product about data, but about a product about optimization, about insights.
So we looked at a customer, how they use the data, how they were referring to it, and then we took the second customer in February.
There's a lot of manual work that we are doing.
Really not scalable at all.
But little by little things got into the product.
If the tracking for the first customer took two weeks, we currently deploy tracking in less than two hours.
That's what happened in the last year.
To answer your question, it was very, very easy to sell it, but we actually went one step further.
Not a lot of people are looking for user onboarding.
That's a problem.
We started to see, I think in June when we started to work on our blog and content marketing and so on.
And we realized that, hey, we talk about something that people don't look for, but growth and growth hacking is something that people do look for.
So we decided to broaden a bit the user onboarding towards growth, where user onboarding is still the main player if you want, in the product, the main driver.
And when we started the product, when we started the public version of the product in September, we focused more on growth.
Omer (52:47.510)
Now I'm curious about one thing.
Earlier we talked about Kissmetrics and how when they launched they were charging $99 a month.
And there was some criticism of that because a lot of the people who, who thought they wanted to use the product maybe just found that out of reach for them or it was just a little too expensive for them.
Claudiu Murariu (53:12.960)
I'm going to love this question.
Omer (53:14.160)
Yeah, but I look at inner trends and I mean your cheapest plan is over $300 a month.
So the one thing that sort of hit me was number one is what type of customer are you targeting when you think about that?
And also have you considered sort of earliest stage SaaS, businesses who couldn't pay $300 a month today, but maybe could pay less and could become a customer over time as they started to grow.
So just tell me a little bit about sort of the thinking and how you arrived at that planning, the pricing plan.
Claudiu Murariu (53:58.830)
I told you I'm going to love this question.
Yeah, so as you see, we only have one tire.
So basically what we do right now is to focus on the customers that can bring us.
Right now we still learn with our customers.
So we want the customers that have enough data that we learn as quickly as possible so we can iterate very fast.
That's customers that have around more than 500, preferably around or more than 1,000 new users per month.
And that's one thing.
The second thing, so like these companies are beyond product market fit, they're not early stage.
Secondly, the web analytics landscape changed a lot when kissmetrics launched.
It was one of the first well known paid web analytics service because pretty much there was Google Analytics which was free and everybody was using and then was the enterprise products that were very, very expensive like site catalysts from Omniture or Web Trends or Coremetrics and so on.
And there was nothing in the middle.
And KissMetrics came in the middle, advertised in the low end where there's very high interest with the bloggers and yes, the $99 price was very, very high for them.
The landscape is totally different right now.
Companies realize that it is useful to pay for web analytics and they demand more and more.
So yeah, we actually had, we've had people saying us that we charge too low.
Omer (56:00.190)
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean that makes total sense.
I mean you could have started off with a much lower plan to attract earlier stage SaaS companies but if they just don't have enough data there then it's not really going to help you to, to build the right product as quickly as possible.
Claudiu Murariu (56:22.250)
What would happen for many of them would be they would get a small answer saying there is not enough data to drive any conclusion from it and we cannot iterate from that.
However, what is surprising for me is we do have two or three customers who are beyond that number of 500, below that number of 500 signups per month that we've had.
Yeah, we were happy to pay for the product.
So we might learn something new in the future as well from this perspective.
Yeah.
Omer (57:08.490)
All right, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Claudiu Murariu (57:17.280)
Yes.
Omer (57:17.840)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice
Claudiu Murariu (57:20.960)
that you've ever received from one of my mentors?
It was sounded something like plans always change but you always need to have a plan.
Omer (57:31.840)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Claudiu Murariu (57:36.480)
I'm not a big fan of business books, but I'm more fan of fiction.
There is a book that I'm reading now and I love, which is on the Origin of Species, which is neither fiction nor business.
But I love how deep did Charles Darwin go to prove his theory?
And I think he would have made a great entrepreneur.
Yeah.
Omer (58:04.550)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Claudiu Murariu (58:10.310)
I really believe this, that successful entrepreneurs are not really driven by success, but by the meaning they bring to the world and the change they bring.
Omer (58:23.270)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Claudiu Murariu (58:30.720)
I start my day by writing everything I need to do that day, hour by hour.
Omer (58:37.120)
What's a new or crazy business idea that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Claudiu Murariu (58:42.800)
I'd probably invest time and money in education or agriculture.
I know very little about each of them, but it feels like these domains need a lot of help and any help they can get.
Omer (58:57.080)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Claudiu Murariu (59:02.680)
It is almost an accident that I got involved in technology.
My plan was to get involved into humanitarian work.
If a job interview almost 10 years ago would have gone the other way around, I'd probably be today in a conflict area somewhere with some organization called, you name it, Without Frontiers or something.
Omer (59:25.310)
Because I think from your LinkedIn profile I saw that in the early days you'd been working with the U.N. yeah,
Claudiu Murariu (59:32.990)
actually I only applied for a single job in my life and I got it.
If I wouldn't have got it, I would be in UN right now, probably.
Omer (59:42.910)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Claudiu Murariu (59:48.830)
I hope it doesn't sound cocky or anything, but I love to think.
Omer (59:53.970)
Nothing wrong with that.
Claudiu Murariu (59:57.010)
Cool.
Omer (59:57.810)
Claudia, I want to thank you for, for joining me and sharing your.
Your story with us.
And I, I will.
I'd love to stay in touch and follow you and.
And the growth of Inner trends over the coming years.
If people want to find out more about inner trends, they can go to inner trends.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Claudiu Murariu (1:00:26.250)
Twitter and email.
It's claudioannotrends.com so that's C L A
Omer (1:00:32.770)
U T I U I u n trends.com and we'll include the link to your Twitter profile as well on the Show Notes page.
Claudiu Murariu (1:00:42.490)
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Omar.
It was really, really great to have this chat and yeah, looking forward to.
To meet again.
Omer (1:00:51.340)
Yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation as well.
Thanks for making the time.
All the best.
Claudiu Murariu (1:00:55.260)
Cheers thank you.
