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 episode is an interview with a founder who built a product to scratch his own itch.
He figured if it helped him, it would help a lot of other businesses too.
But when he started talking to potential customers, he realized he was solving the wrong problem for the wrong customers.
He eventually figured out who his ideal customer was and then started selling his product for about $50 a month.
But he didn't stop there.
He kept asking his customers what problems they had and he kept figuring out how his product could solve those problems.
Today he doesn't charge $50 a month anymore.
On average, his customers pay him $1,000 a month.
He's a great guy who's very transparent and it's a terrific interview, which I hope you'll enjoy.
Now, for all of you who emailed me or sent feedback, you'll be glad to know that this interview isn't split into three episodes.
It was an interesting experiment which I thought would make it easier to digest content in this bite sized format, but the vast majority of you told me that you didn't like it.
And in fact, I only had a couple of people who said that they actually preferred the three parts format and wanted to keep going with that.
So I'm going with the majority here.
So from this week I'm switching back to the old format.
Woohoo.
All right, today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Saucedo, a platform for sales teams that helps them generate relevant leads based on social media data.
The company was founded in 2012 and has raised $1.5 million to date.
Before launching Saucedo, my guest founded and ran Uptown Treehouse, a digital marketing agency for Fortune 500 brands that focused on social media.
So today I'd like to welcome Aseem Bacha to the show.
Aseem, welcome.
Aseem Badshah (02:36.660)
Thank you so much for having me.
Omer (02:38.420)
Cool.
Now, first thing I always like to ask my guests is what.
What drives or motivates them?
Some people like to share a quote, some people just like to talk about what drives them.
So what gets you out of bed every day to do what you do?
Aseem Badshah (02:50.560)
You know, at the end of the day, I love building things.
It's something that was in me from a very early age.
You know, I was kind of the kid that was bugging the neighborhood and knocking on doors, trying to get people to let me mow their lawn for five, ten bucks or selling Pokemon cards, lemonade, all those types of things.
So it's just something that I find fun is building something, providing value at the end of the day.
And within that, you know, I've kind of grown up in a social media age.
And so really looking at social media, seeing the progression of that, and finding innovative ways for businesses to reach their customers on social, both of those combined just kind of creates a huge passion in me and gets me up every morning.
Omer (03:29.910)
So I told the audience a little bit about Saucedo, but tell us in your own words what problem you guys are trying to solve and how is CEDO different to maybe other alternative solutions out there on the market?
Aseem Badshah (03:45.650)
Absolutely.
So, you know, we, we specifically are really focused on B2B companies.
And if you think about a B2B marketing organization, almost everything is justified by ROI.
So unlike in B2C marketing, where you're really kind of putting things out there for brand and for exposure, in B2B marketing, everything is looked back to lead generation, conversion to revenue, and really tracking ROI on your marketing channels.
So what's ended up happening with social in a B2B context is that people got really excited about it and then it kind of got regulated down to, you know, the PR segment or some corner of the organization and justified kind of as a keeping the lights on strategy because people really weren't able to see that ROI coming out of social.
And the main reason for that is because social media marketing was built in a B2C context.
Right.
Really kind of taking that context of, you know, buy eyeballs and broadcast a message, build as many followers as possible, schedule out those messages, and then kind of respond to people as they come in.
That mentality just doesn't work for the B2B marketer to really get true ROI out of social.
So really where we're coming in is filling that gap in the B2B marketing organization between the system of record, the marketing automation system and the social media management system, like a hootsuite, a sprinkler, a sprout social to really enable one to one targeting for B2B companies on social one to one nurtures and then syncing all that data back into your marketing automation and CRM systems.
Omer (05:20.520)
How did you come up with the idea for this business?
Aseem Badshah (05:23.320)
So for me, it was a relatively kind of a personal itch that I had to scratch.
And believe me, at the time, this wasn't as clear as how I can look at it five years later, with 2020 hindsight.
But in college, I kind of had this really lucky opportunity to fall into Microsoft and actually start managing their official social media presence.
Facebook was just being opened up from just being for students.
This idea of branded pages was just coming around and social media marketing was just kind of becoming a buzzword.
As a 19 year old, I kind of fell into this at Microsoft and started managing their social media presence and just saw how excited executives started to get as they saw how many impressions we were driving and how much engagement we were driving.
And then two, three years later, that excitement really kind of started to wear off.
You know, the team that we were working with over at Microsoft was really focused on getting Windows Phone apps into the marketplace.
And that's a little bit of a B2B problem, right?
You're looking for somebody that spent a lot of time with working on an application and then the conversion is actually getting it into the app store.
And within that context, social just wasn't working.
So I kind of witnessed the budget starting to go to on the ground, in person events, digital advertising.
And so at the time I was running an agency called Uptown Treehouse, we were working on the social properties for Microsoft and we decided to kind of try something new.
So instead of seeing social as kind of a B2C branding and broadcast channel, we, we switched over to a little bit more of a demand generation mentality where we would just go find the 5000 developers on Twitter who we thought were most likely to convert and then had a one to one conversation with them over the matter of three to six months as they actually put together their apps.
And what we found is that it worked.
We actually generated more apps into the marketplace than the on the ground events, than the digital marketing.
And we were tracking all of this in an Excel spreadsheet.
And so we kind of said to ourselves, well, why not automate some of this?
We have access to the APIs, we don't need to be doing all this data entry.
And that was really kind of where the idea for Socito was born, was as an R and D project within the agency to really solve this problem around how do we drive true ROI and conversion in a company that really has kind of a B2B objective at the end of the day.
Omer (07:56.120)
So a lot of the times entrepreneurs will come up with an idea and then they'll spend time trying to, to validate that idea in the market.
It sounds like you almost did that the other way around because of your agency.
You spent all these years almost kind of validating the idea by seeing the opportunity and the need and then kind of that automatically led to the product.
From the sounds of it, yes.
Aseem Badshah (08:28.110)
Which was good.
Cause that got us to the first kind of the initial idea that was actually really kind of the right pain point.
The problem is that the agency really distracted us.
We were building this for ourselves.
The bulk of the agency was really focused on B2C marketing.
And so we kind of really had this idea that every other agency, every other social media manager and B2C companies would be, want to do, want to do this one to one engagement and that we would become the next hootsuite.
And so because we were actually scratching our own itch and so focused on the way that we operated, we weren't really actually building a product that would, you know, kind of go to market in a big way.
Right.
We really didn't know who that ideal customer would be because we were kind of operating in this fog of war of building something for ourselves.
It's a good place to start.
But what we didn't do is very early on validate that what's working for us is actually working for the rest of the market and that the rest of the market behaves in the way that we behave internally.
Omer (09:38.170)
So I guess two questions.
One is what led you to that outcome?
Like what problems did you face?
And then secondly, how did you go about figuring out who the right customer was?
Aseem Badshah (09:52.740)
So for us it was techstars.
We decided that we were going to join techstars up here in Seattle, that we'd kind of pull this R and D project out of the agency and then really start to look at it as a standalone product.
And one of the most valuable parts of that three month accelerator was really being forced to go out and do customer development.
So we had to go and talk to 10 prospective customers or people in the audience, ask them questions and understand if this was a real pain point and a possible solution.
And by going through that exercise, we very quickly realized that social media managers at B2C companies do not care about driving one to one engagement and driving conversion.
Their task was to get as many followers as possible, put content out there to drive engagement and then respond as that engagement comes in.
And so that's when we actually identified that, wait, this is a B2B problem.
And oh wait, the people who are focused on sales leads are the ones who have this problem.
And we really then started to refine the way the software worked, what our value proposition was, what our messaging was, what functionality we actually needed.
But it was that opportunity for techstars to really pull us out of the weeds, go and force us to do customer development that allowed us to learn that.
Omer (11:13.400)
I want to kind of get a sense of like, what a typical customer development interview for you look like.
Were you trying to do these face to face?
Were you trying to get into your door?
You know, into the door and companies around the Seattle area?
Were you doing this online?
Aseem Badshah (11:26.780)
I think all of the above.
Right.
I mean, you know, again with the objective of doing 10 per week, we wanted to talk to social media managers specifically.
And so we tried to talk to as many people in Seattle as possible and do as many face to face as possible.
And then we did some over the phone as well.
So I would say about half were in person, half were over the phone.
And they were really trying to understand what's your biggest challenges.
What are you not getting out of your social media management systems today?
What are your goals?
How do you go about your day, really understanding who that customer is?
I think we kind of split them up into problem focused interviews and then solution focused interviews.
So once we had a better idea of who that Persona was, how they operated, what their problems were, and their pain points, then we started to kind of put our solution in front of them and try to understand how much of a need it was.
And that's where we kind of learned.
And it was a little tough to suss out, but people were excited.
The problem was that they were excited because it was cool and it was interesting.
But to us, there was nothing in those interviews with these B2C social media managers that clearly said we would be the system that they would be working in every single day.
Right.
It was.
It was kind of this, oh, yeah, that's cool.
Like, once I get done with all my other stuff, maybe I'll kind of get to that.
It feels like maybe I'll pay 10, 20 bucks a month for something like this.
And I think that's when we realized, like, oh, maybe we're not really solving a core pain point for this audience.
But with these salespeople and these folks who really need real sales leads, they started to lean in and they're like, yeah, that's pain point number one.
I got to find prospects.
You know, I'm thinking about how I can do that on social media.
And it really seemed like the conversation changed as we moved in more of that B2B direction.
Omer (13:14.480)
So I'm curious because when you were Talking to potential B2C customers and having these conversations, it doesn't sound like, you got a clear no from these people.
It wasn't like, no, I don't.
This product doesn't work for me, or this isn't right for me.
But it was kind of more like, as you said, it was like, yeah, they seem excited.
It's kind of seems like a cool idea.
Yeah, I think I would use it.
And quite often, those are exactly the things that you have to look out for.
Because those are almost like the danger signs, right?
Because you can kind of fool yourself into thinking, yeah, I have something here.
Right?
I mean, people seem.
People seem interested.
We sort of sometimes spend so much time trying to validate an idea that versus maybe trying to find people who will tell us why it's a bad idea.
Right?
Or sort of is there unvalidated idea?
I don't know if that's a real word or something, but you understand what I mean.
It's like for someone going through that process, it's very easy to think, yeah, I have something here.
Because people seem excited.
Aseem Badshah (14:19.880)
No, I totally agree.
I totally agree.
And that's the challenge, right, Is that when you're an entrepreneur in the very, very early stages and you're going around and talking to people about your idea, like, people don't want to hurt your feelings.
You know what I mean?
And they're not thinking about it from a business perspective.
They're looking at it and they're saying, yeah, this is neat.
This is cool.
I could imagine myself using this, but they're not really thinking through what I pay for this thing.
Is this solving a top three pain point in my life?
How many hours would I spend using this product?
You have to be diligent in that.
And I think, you know, in many cases, you're not looking for people to say, this is a bad idea, or, I'm not interested, or give you a reason why they're not interested.
Instead, you're looking for, like, this very subtle.
Is somebody leaning in, or are they really leaning in?
Right.
Like, as you talk about this problem, this pain point, are they almost getting out of their seat?
Are their eyes opening wide?
Are they really starting to ramble on about their personal pain points in their daily life?
Because as you start to uncover that, it's hard to detect, but you'll see it.
You'll see when the conversation changes.
For us, the way techstars does, is we try to validate on two sides.
So the customer side, where you're doing kind of customer development, but then also, at the end of the day, you want to make sure that the market you're going after is big enough that this is an investable company.
And so we validate with mentors, advisors, potential investors as well.
And the questions that investors were asking is like, how much is someone going to pay for this?
Right.
How big of a pain point is this?
And so I think coming from both of those sides allows you to be a little bit more diligent with the customer interviews to recognize is this something that somebody would pay a lot of money for at the end of the day, or is this just going to be another free app that's on their phone or that they log into once a month because it's something cool and when they have free time, they'll get to it?
Omer (16:18.140)
Yeah, I think that's a great kind of lesson from this, is it's not always easy to do, but if you can kind of make that distinguish sort of differentiation between people are not going to be as kind of black and white about this idea sucks.
And this idea is great, but it's going to be much more about, as you said, people are not going to want to hurt your feelings.
They're going to want to say nice things.
They're going to say often things that they think you want to hear.
And you have to be really tuned into distinguishing between somebody who's doing that versus somebody who really feels that this is a.
Solving a real potential pain for them.
Aseem Badshah (16:57.770)
Right.
And I mean, I think 1.
One hack to make it a little bit more clear, and we didn't do this in the techstars phase, but we started to do it about six months later, is ask for money, right?
When somebody says, oh, that's interesting or that's cool, ask them how much they're gonna pay and even go further than that.
Ask them to sign an sow or a letter of a tent.
You know, get them down to that crisp level of saying, yes, you guys are solving a big enough problem for me that I'm willing to sign on the dotted line and actually say that, you know, this is valuable because it's super easy for people to say they're interested.
But as soon as you ask them for money, that's when you'll get a true answer of how interested and how big of a problem you're solving for them.
Omer (17:39.020)
If we can kind of go back to the time when you guys were looking for your first 10 customers, how did you go about finding them?
Aseem Badshah (17:46.140)
So, you know, we were talking a little bit about the customer development process and interviewing customers and understanding whether or not they had a Pain point, and then really trying to suss that out by actually asking for dollars and asking for people to actually pay you for the application.
So that was kind of the natural transition for us to go from, you know, doing investigation and research and kind of having a free beta to actually landing our first 10 customers.
I wish we would have done it a lot sooner.
I think, frankly, you know, when I was kind of growing up in the startup space, there was this kind of trend along the lines of, hey, just build something and get people to use it and worry about monetizing later.
And so I think we kind of took that mentality to socito.
We kind of looked at it and said, oh, yeah, we'll be freemium, and, you know, we'll get 5 million people to use this thing every single day, and then we'll ask a subset of them to pay us $10 a month, and we'll have a great big business.
But as we kind of went through the investment process and we tried to get those first angels, that's when the hard questions came into play, right?
It was, how are you guys really going to monetize this?
How are you going to make money, and how is this going to be a big business?
I think to our investors, our potential investors, they couldn't see us getting this thing to be 5 million active users, right?
This isn't a consumer product.
You know, it's not like Facebook or Twitter or something like that.
And that's when we started to really think hard about, okay, how are people going to pay us and starting to ask for money.
So we started small.
We kind of asked for, what would you pay?
50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month?
And we started to kind of sign people up.
We very quickly kind of built a credit card system into the application.
But then it was all about, like, how do we ask for more, right?
And as we had these conversations with folks and bigger companies, and we kind of realized, oh, they might have $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 budget.
Basically, we just asked ourselves the question, and frankly, we asked ourselves the prospect, like, what would it take for us to get to $1,000 per month instead of being $100 per month?
And that's really when we kind of got off to the races in terms of getting those first 10 customers and really starting to build a revenue base.
Omer (20:01.280)
So did you actually ask your.
Your customers that question as well in terms of what it would take for them to spend more with you, or that was something that you guys were kind of thinking about internally so it
Aseem Badshah (20:12.840)
wasn't necessarily that we asked the direct question, but I think it was more of a hey, you go and sit down with a prospect and you try to sell them on this thing and you're kind of hearing, okay, cool, maybe we'll think about it, maybe we'll think about it.
And as you're walking out of that meeting room and kind of heading down to the lobby, you're making some casual conversation.
And this prospect is telling you about the new campaigns that they need to run or the product that they're launching and what metrics they need to hit.
And all of a sudden an idea pops in your head and says, wait, if we could do this to help you get there, would you pay $1,000 a month for it?
Right?
Kind of casual conversation.
They're like, oh yeah, that'd be interesting.
I actually have this budget specifically set aside for this thing.
And then you kind of go back to the engineering team and say, hey, can we do this?
How long would it take?
And then you're kind of off into this process of actually angling your product towards something that's going to be more valuable because you're just kind of listening, right?
You're listening to what are the priorities.
And I think it is a part of just key sales learning, right?
Is at the end of the day, I think we just jump into trying to sell our product and then we kind of get to the answer of, oh well, think about it versus really listening to like, what are the priorities on your plate?
What are the things that you're trying to do?
If you could, you know, do one thing this quarter, what would it be?
And then really trying to mold your solution around that, whether you have it built or you don't have it built, and then, you know, trying to get to a higher value from there.
Omer (21:38.760)
So generally, what is kind of the pricing plan or range that a typical customer pays you guys today?
And I assume it's not like 20, $50 a month like it was when you guys started out.
Aseem Badshah (21:52.530)
Exactly.
So today, on average, we're closer to $1,000 per month in terms of what our customers will pay us.
Our pricing is basically a volume based pricing.
So as you want to find more prospects or get more contacts or match to more prospects in your database, you kind of scale up with us.
And then we also have some kind of functionality tiers built in as well.
In the early days, it was really kind of throwing darts on a wall and seeing what sticks.
And I mean, I think for some of these bigger customers, when we didn't have things built and we were trying to get to that thousand dollars per month.
It was really just kind of based on functionality.
Hey, if we built this thing, would you pay this amount for it?
But now we're kind of in a place where we have a little bit more standardized pricing.
And it's always evolving, we're always changing it because our goal is to continue moving upstream.
Right.
And get that $1000 a month to be $2000 a month and then $4000 a month and continue to move up that average as we provide more value.
Omer (22:50.350)
How are you finding these, these pro, not how are you finding them?
I assume you were using Cedo to find a lot of these prospects as well, but like, was it all face to face?
Were you, were you trying to just get kind of in front of these people and pitch and sell the product?
Were you doing any inbound?
What did the early days look like in terms of the marketing?
Aseem Badshah (23:15.110)
Yeah, so, you know, obviously we had our own system.
Right.
And that was kind of our secret weapon to go and do lead generation and prospect off of social media.
And that's where we found a lot of our early customers.
We did, you know, thought leadership and blogging and just trying to get out there in the community and have our message out there, which brought in, you know, a good deal of inbound leads.
But I think in person meetings go a long way.
I think there's always this hesitation with, you know, entrepreneurs, especially when it's, you know, two or three people to stay in the office and try to get that scaled marketing approach where you've got pay per click working, you've got inbound working.
But the in person conversations are where you learn a lot and you can build a relationship.
You can really get under the covers in terms of what people's real needs are.
And that's, I think the in person conversations are the ones that really led us to the higher deal sizes.
Whereas the online and kind of inbound conversations helped us to validate that some of our existing pricing packages were something that we could actually convert on.
And the nice thing about thought leadership and kind of getting some content out there is that you tend to put a magnet out there that will bring in some more of the early adopters who will be really good at kind of not worrying about some of the bugs that might be in there or that the product isn't fully baked because they're just excited about the idea and the space.
And those are going to be people who are going to give you a Lot of really good early feedback, even though they may not pay as much as some of your kind of more pragmatist customers and the bigger companies.
Omer (24:51.200)
Were you going out and meeting with these customers and selling the product yourself or did you have like a salesperson on the team doing this for you guys?
Aseem Badshah (25:01.200)
So probably for the first year, year and a half, it was all me.
And you know, I tried to take myself through some sales training and really build out the process doing it myself.
So for every lead that comes in, this is the email that I'm going to send them.
This is the follow up cadence, this is how many touches I'm going to do.
This is what some rough sales stages would look like.
I would track that in Excel and then eventually pipedrive.
Then as we started to see it, there was a process there and that was working.
Then I hired one sales rep and then that became two or three sales reps before we hired a VP of sales, moved over to Salesforce and really started to scale out the sales team.
But you've got to do it yourself first.
I mean, you have to validate that the process is working because you as a founder are going to be a better salesperson than anybody else because the passion is going to be there.
The prospect on the other side is just going to listen to you more because you're the CEO.
And so if you can't do it yourself, you really can't expect even a very seasoned, experienced sales rep to come in and do it better for you.
So you got to start yourself, validate it, then get to two sales reps, validate that somebody else can do it.
And it's kind of important that it's at least two or three, because if it's just one sales rep, you don't know if the process is broken, the product is broken, or if it's just that sales rep.
So once you validate it with two or three sales reps, that's where you bring in a VP of sales and then start to really accelerate and scale out the sales team.
Omer (26:32.090)
Was this something that you had been doing with your marketing agency?
Were you, were you comfortable at that stage going and meeting with prospects and pitching the product, or was this something new and something outside of your comfort zone?
Aseem Badshah (26:49.140)
It was definitely outside of my comfort zone.
Right.
I mean, and you know, one thing that you'll find in agencies and service businesses is that it's not true, like sales.
Right.
A lot of it is relationship based, it's inbound, it's conversations that you're having.
It's not real like blocking and tackling.
I've got to send out X amount of emails today.
I've got to do X amount of nurtures.
This is the stage.
These are the qualifying questions.
So all of those pieces I had to learn in order to actually see that there was a process and then build that out for the sales reps that were coming in in order for them to have a process and kind of work on that together before a VP of sales got here.
So, you know, the agency and the selling that we did was just so different.
It was so much more organic.
Growth, inbound reference, more casual conversations.
You weren't necessarily selling a product.
People were more coming to you with a specific need already, and you were just putting services attached to it.
So there was a lot of learning there to do.
But the biggest point was just to do it right, just to start that process and then iterate over time.
And every week you learn something new and say, oh, maybe I need to ask these questions, or maybe that's not the right definition of a stage.
And you would kind of tweak things as you go.
Omer (28:05.180)
So to wrap up on this part of the discussion, I want to try and get one key takeaway or lesson from you.
So if you think about what you were going through back in those days, it sounds like you were doing a pretty good job at finding customers and pitching the product.
But what is one lesson that you learned along the way that you wish you could go back and tell yourself about kind of going through this process?
When it comes to growth and selling the product?
Aseem Badshah (28:34.770)
I mean, you know, and we've been talking about it, but it all comes down to asking for money.
As soon as we started doing that, we took the approach and said, there's one metric that matters in this business, and it's revenue.
And everybody in this company will be graded on that.
We'll be looking at that every single day.
It'll be up on the board.
We'll be looking at it every single week, every single month.
Because especially in what we do in B2B, if you're providing value, then somebody is willing to pay for it.
And I'm starting to believe the same in B2C as well.
So I think that should resonate across the board.
And that's what helped us make decisions back then, and it helps us to continue making decisions today.
It's how do we grow our revenue 15% every single month.
And even today, when a customer comes in and they ask for something or we see that there might be some new functionality that we can build.
We go ask somebody to sign on the dotted line first and we ask them to say how much they're going to pay for it.
So we can prioritize that functionality in our roadmap and we can put the right engineering resources behind it, knowing that our goal is revenue.
It's the one metric that matters here, and I wish we would have done that earlier.
Omer (29:41.780)
Now you guys have raised $1.5 million.
Had you kind of gone through that process before in terms of raising money or was this something new for you?
Aseem Badshah (29:51.830)
No, this was the first time.
This was the first time.
And I think you definitely feel like a fish out of water when you're doing it the first time.
Omer (29:59.590)
So how did you go about learning what to do?
Aseem Badshah (30:02.470)
Lots of conversations over and over and over again over a very long period of time.
It all came down to just talking to as many potential investors as possible and learning why people are saying no and what their objections are and then trying to fix those along the way.
We talked about this a little bit, but for us, what really got us over the hump is that when you're a first time founder, you have to have some level of traction there.
People have to feel very confident that you understand how this business is going to grow and make money.
For us, that's where we started to take that philosophy here at the company, that there's one metric that matters and it's revenue, because that's what investors were looking for.
And so we started to look at it and say, hey, we can have better conversations with investors and we can own our own destiny if we just get focused on revenue.
And so that's what we did.
And as we did that, the conversations with investors started to get a little bit more interesting and a little bit more interesting.
And then we kind of just said, hey, we're going to focus on revenue.
And then folks started to call us up and say, hey, we're interested and let's have a conversation.
And then, you know, we kind of eventually close out that round.
Omer (31:16.940)
So, yeah, I think that was really interesting because it sounds like that's where you got the insight that maybe the B2, B2C space also wasn't going to get you the kind of revenue or kind of, I guess, revenue per customer that you could get in the B2B space.
And I really like the idea of having this clarity around one metric and saying that revenue is the metric that we choose and we're going to kind of focus on.
You also talked about kind of increasing the lifetime value of the customer, not just by things like retention, but also having these conversations about what else you could do or build into the product that people would pay more for.
What are the problems that they had that you could help solve.
What's the plan for Suseto?
Do you kind of feel like you're at a point now where you've figured out the product and you've kind of optimized the revenue per customer, where you think it's going to get to, or do you think that there's still a lot of room to keep finding these, as you kind of talked about, these kind of corridor conversations where you uncover problems that people still have.
So are you still finding those kinds of opportunities?
Aseem Badshah (32:30.160)
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I don't expect that it'll ever end.
I mean, we've gotten much closer.
But as we saturate one market, then there'll always be a new one to uncover and a new use case and a new scenario.
So I think it's something that we do today and it'll live on for a very long time.
But I'll give you a couple examples.
So originally, when we built the product and we kind of moved from this B2C space to the B2B space, we really latched on to this whole social selling movement.
And the product kind of went from being for social media managers, which were kind of heavily skewed towards B2C and then went actually to the sales rep as our end user.
And those sales reps, they needed prospects, right?
And they love the idea of going to social and grabbing prospects there.
But, you know, salespeople know what their metrics are when they're on the phone and on email, and they don't necessarily have time to manage social media.
And so, you know, the first step was to say, well, what if we included automation and we went back to the marketer and actually automated the process of getting in touch with prospects first so that we could warm them up before sending them over to the sales team.
Oh, interesting.
People are willing to pay a lot more money for that from those conversations.
As we started to go down that path, we started to realize that, wait a second, Marketing automation systems are the system where all of the funnel is kind of, you know, landing into.
Right.
So as a B2B marketing organization, many of these companies are using a system like Marketo or HubSpot or Salesforce, and all of the contacts and the leads are coming in there first.
So customers started to ask us about integration and what it would take to integrate into Marketo or into HubSpot or into Salesforce.
And as we started to explore that, we realized, wow, we can double our average revenue per customer, triple our average revenue per customer if we're integrated into those systems.
Because it means our leads actually become more valuable.
Because then people are following up with them right away.
They can get scored, they can get routed to the appropriate people.
And that was something that we uncovered by again, one of those kind of walking the hall conversations, just understanding what that next need is.
And even today the same thing continues to happen, right?
It's what data do you need to make these things much more valuable?
Oh, you'll spend a lot more money for that.
Okay, we're giving you new leads today, but it seems like you have this problem over here with your existing leads that might actually even be a 10x, you know, value sized problem.
And we start to then venture into that space and kind of start to do proof of concepts and get again people to sign on the dotted line to really understand that there's value over there.
And we'll continue to do that.
Right?
I mean, in order to really become, you know, a company that's doing $500 million in revenue on a yearly basis, you've got to have big customers, right?
I mean, you know, it's super, super hard to get there on SMB customers alone.
And so we want to have more and more six figure customers.
And it's going to be these walking the hall conversations that are going to uncover that and send us in the direction that's going to help us get there.
Omer (35:33.920)
Give me one example of something.
Maybe an opportunity that you found with a customer that you invested time in, you built into the product maybe.
And maybe it didn't work out.
Aseem Badshah (35:43.280)
That's a good question.
So a lot of those have been kind of smaller features, especially in the early stages.
Like, you know, somebody asking, hey, can I see the amount of followers that this prospect has on the on the card grid?
Or you know, I'd love to know what their clout score is.
And all of those were like really nice to haves.
And we started going down that path and kind of building it out and then, oh, it doesn't really provide that much value or there's not a huge amount of adoption there.
We tried this, you know, with a recent product where we would go in and actually build out a report for people once they've connected us into their Marketo or HubSpot or Salesforce databases that will actually show them what percentage of their existing leads are on social, what percentage of them have already engaged with the brand so that you can start to get an understanding of how can you actually take your existing leads and nurture them through social media.
And what we learned and what we didn't really kind of realize up front is that it's super hard to get companies to give you access to their database of all of their customers and their prospects.
And so that wasn't going to be a report that we could run early on in the sales cycle and there's still value there.
And we've kind of found it more with existing customers and have started to go a little bit more down that route.
But it's those types of things where you kind of fail on your and kind of fall on your face.
And I think if we would have again, kind of gone in it with the approach of just asking somebody for money first and getting them to kind of put an sow in place and really say that, hey, this report is going to help me for these reasons and this is what I'm willing to pay for, then we just would have figured some of those things out sooner and not maybe kind of spent the engineering resources to do things that we thought were going to work but weren't really proven.
Omer (37:39.800)
All right, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and just I'd like you to answer them just as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Aseem Badshah (37:47.040)
Awesome.
Let's do it.
Omer (37:48.160)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Aseem Badshah (37:51.800)
So this one's tough.
I mean, I'll just kind of, you know, say it's the just do it mentality.
You know, I don't know that it's one person that's really kind of, you know, given that to me.
I've got a bunch of mentors and advisors who help me, and I think along the way, every single person has just encouraged me to just go out there and make it happen and do it tomorrow.
Get started, don't hesitate and start to research, build and build the business.
Just do it is probably the best piece of business advice.
Omer (38:22.400)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Aseem Badshah (38:25.200)
Crossing the Chasm.
Great book.
I think it really helps you understand who your target audience is, what problem you're solving for them, and how you're going to bring something to market in a very large way.
I wish I would have read that one earlier.
Omer (38:39.160)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Aseem Badshah (38:43.640)
Confidence.
Right?
You've got to have confidence in your idea, in Your vision, you've got to exude that to employees, investors, customers.
You are building something out of thin air.
And if you don't have the confidence around it, nobody else will.
Omer (38:58.680)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Aseem Badshah (39:04.290)
You know, it's pretty standard stuff, right?
I mean, the calendar is where I live and email is where I live.
So those are my productivity tools.
Nothing fancy there.
But I think it's the way I go about it, right?
If it's not on my calendar, it doesn't exist.
There's certain time slots for internal meetings.
There's a cadence of one on ones and planning meetings with the different departments.
There's normally time slots that I have for external meetings, and then I just fill that up and that becomes my roadmap to the day.
And then on email, it's kind of that attitude of getting to inbox zero, but then also being really diligent on what emails do you not have to answer and what emails can be delegated to other folks to take care of.
Omer (39:43.280)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Aseem Badshah (39:49.920)
This is a hard one.
So I will say none.
I think that one of the main things that you have to do as an entrepreneur is let those other ideas kind of, you know, sit in your mind and don't really act on them.
Finish one thing, come to a conclusion on it, and then really go for the next thing.
Because an idea is just an idea until you go and validate it and have the time to talk about it and really research it.
I don't know that there's much point in getting excited about it.
So for me, it's less about what is the idea that I'd like to do, and it's more around, man, I wish I would have gotten more crisp on the value proposition and the target audience that we're going after with societies today.
I wish I would have gotten more crisp on that two or three years down the road.
And I think if I took that stance of, hey, I've got an idea, let's go validate this very, very quickly and not think about other things, then we would have gotten there faster.
Cool.
Omer (40:45.180)
What's an interesting little fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Aseem Badshah (40:48.780)
Ooh, this one's a tough one.
Let's see.
I was the youngest ever person to get a Microsoft certification.
So, you know, it's.
It's a quirky fact, you know, something I did in middle school and something that really set me on the path to learn more and get passionate about technology.
Omer (41:09.330)
Wow.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Aseem Badshah (41:15.890)
You know, I'm a thrill seeker.
I love, you know, snowboarding or you know, jumping in a car and heading to a race track, surfing, skydiving.
I love thrills and it's one of the reasons why I'm an entrepreneur because a startup is a thrill ride in itself.
Omer (41:35.060)
Awesome.
Aseem, I want to thank you for joining me today.
If folks want to find out more about Cedo, they can go to cedo.com, that's s o c e-o.com if they want to get in touch with you.
What's the best way for them to do that?
Aseem Badshah (41:52.110)
You can email me aseemocedo.com a s e E M awesome.
Omer (41:57.470)
Cool man.
Thanks.
This has been great.
I appreciate you making the time and all the best with continuing to grow.
Aseem Badshah (42:03.310)
Saucedo thanks so much.
This was fun.
Cheers.
