Omer (00:11.520)
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 talked to Mikita Mikado, the co founder and CEO of PandaDoc, a SaaS product that lets you create, deliver and manage your team's quotes, proposals, contracts and other sales collateral.
Before launching PandaDoc, Makita and his co founder Serge were running another business together in Belarus and they had to send out a lot of sales proposals and contracts.
It was tedious and time consuming for them to create and track all these documents.
And after investing hours into putting together a document, they had no idea if their prospective customers had even looked at it.
So eventually they decided to solve this problem not just for themselves, but also for other people running similar businesses.
They built a SaaS product called Quoteroller and launched it in 2011.
The business helped to create and track sales proposals.
They got lucky when they launched and got some initial traction.
But soon they realized that they hadn't quite built the product the right way and that they were spending way too much time arguing with each other about the features in the product instead of talking to their customers.
And that was the wake up call for them.
A couple of years later, they built and launched Pandadoc and took it from zero to over 10,000 customers.
So in this episode we talk about the lessons and the mistakes they made in the early days and we dive into the growth strategies that have helped them to grow into a $10 million plus business.
You'll also hear a great story on how Makita's sense of humor helped them to find an investor in the most unexpected way.
I hope you enjoy the interview.
Mikita, welcome to the show.
Mikita Mikado (02:16.770)
Hi Amar.
Omer (02:18.610)
I'm going to start by a tough question.
Is there a favorite quote that you can share with us?
Maybe gets inside your head and lets us know what kind of motivates or inspires you or helps you think about your business.
Mikita Mikado (02:32.370)
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
I picked that one.
Omer (02:37.570)
Why is that the first one that came to mind?
Mikita Mikado (02:40.790)
Because it suggests that every hurdle and struggle is an opportunity to learn and get better and stronger.
And that's how I think about it.
About this particular quote, that's the sense that I put in it and this is what I try to live by.
Omer (03:00.070)
Good.
So let's talk about PandaDoc.
It would be great if in your own words, you can kind of help us understand what does the product do and kind of what problem are you trying to solve?
Mikita Mikado (03:12.900)
Penndoc helps to streamline sales documents, things like quotes, proposals, contracts, getting those documents signed, getting those documents generated out of your CRM system, as well as all kinds of other workflows that are handy to sales, to marketing, operations, finance.
That's, in essence, what our software is about.
Omer (03:36.790)
And who are your target customers?
Mikita Mikado (03:39.190)
We target companies that have anywhere from five to 500 employees.
We focus on sales teams.
We help them to present in a much better way.
We help them to make it very easy for their buyers to buy us and negotiate on whatever quotes or proposals or contracts they send out.
So we make it easier for the sellers, and we make it easier for the buyers to do deals as well as, say, for marketing to enable sales with the right collateral, with the right templates for those essential documents, and for upper management to track the performance of the sales team and utilization of the content.
And how many proposals have been sent out, how many deals are closed, how.
How quickly do we close the deals, and so on and so forth.
Omer (04:32.110)
So you launched the company back in 2011.
How did you come up with the idea for this business?
Mikita Mikado (04:41.870)
Internal pain.
Very simple internal pain.
My co founder and I were running a different business at the time, and we had to do a lot of quotes, we had to send a lot of proposals and sales contracts, and the process was just way too tedious.
Took too much time.
After investing hours and putting a document together, we had no idea if our prospective customers even looked at it, how much time they spent on it, what bothers them.
So we decided to solve that problem for the owners of the type of businesses that we were running at the time.
And we built a different product.
It's called Quotroller.
Put it out there, we built it, they came.
We sort of say, kind of got lucky with that.
And then we learned that A, we've not quite built the right thing in the right way, and B, the opportunity in the market is much greater, much bigger.
So that was the story behind getting on the journey with Pandadoc.
Starting to work on Pandadoc.
Omer (05:50.470)
What was the product called?
Initially, I didn't catch the name.
Mikita Mikado (05:52.710)
It was called quote Roller.
Yeah, like roll out a quote.
Omer (05:58.230)
Yeah.
Actually, that sounds familiar.
Mikita Mikado (06:00.550)
Well, maybe you used it.
We had a few thousands of people using it.
Omer (06:03.750)
Yeah.
Who knows?
Now, what did that first version of the product look like?
I mean, obviously today Pandadoc does a lot of things, but when you guys started, what was the one problem you were trying to solve and you kind of mentioned, hey, we didn't quite get it right.
Well, what was it that you didn't get right initially?
Mikita Mikado (06:25.920)
A lot of things.
I think conceptually what we didn't do properly is.
What we didn't do right at all is we didn't talk to prospective customers.
We thought we knew all the answers, and that was just not the case.
So instead of spending time on the phone with the prospective customers, we were spending time arguing with each other on where to place a certain button, that kind of stuff, you know.
So, yeah, so that was like fundamentally wrong.
And the result of this process was not quite what people were ready to pay for, quite frankly.
So, yeah, launching that product and then seeing that only a fraction of people that sign up for an account are ready to swipe their credit card was failure.
I guess that's.
That's how you can call it.
Omer (07:18.240)
Yeah.
How did you come to that insight?
So you, you've kind of launched the product.
You're seeing people signing up, but not as many are converting into customers as founders, you're very focused, by the sounds of it, on the details of the product and, and getting it right.
But at what point did you realize we need to go and talk to customers?
Mikita Mikado (07:42.250)
I think few months into was a long time ago.
So a lot of things I'm gonna say may not be correct, and my co founder might scold me for that, but I'll still try to recollect the memories.
I think the first reaction was that, well, yeah, you know, the conversions into the.
Into paid customers are really low and the customer feedback is not that great.
But maybe just because that box button we argued about was still placed in the wrong spot.
So let's try to rearrange things and mess with the product.
But then finally we came to a conclusion that, hey, first we have to start talking to people.
And I think we were forced into that.
Maybe because you launch something, you start dealing with support, right.
As you deal with support, start acquiring a lot more information.
So that was probably an easy way that led us to engaging with prospective clients.
Omer (08:44.310)
What kind of feedback were you getting?
Like, what was it that didn't click with them about the product?
Mikita Mikado (08:51.990)
All kinds.
On the conceptual level, we just didn't have something that they absolutely need, and we had no idea that people might need that kind of stuff.
On the feature set level, on the way the workflow was designed level, all over the place.
There were so many things that weren't quite right, and we had to go ahead and fix Them and we did fix them.
Our first product grew to about 3,000 paying subscribers.
And as we were scaling that product and business behind it, we were also learning about the space.
And we figured out that, hey, we created a quoting tool.
But companies that we're serving need a lot more than just a quoting tool.
They also have contracts throughout the process, they have collateral, they have proposals.
They need to get those documents signed.
And there is a life cycle for those documents past the point customers sign them, and so on and so forth.
So basically from being a very simple tool, we decided to become a full blown platform that takes deals from offers.
From the first time you send some kind of case study or white paper or a presentation to, to the money in the bank.
That's the footprint of PandaDoc today.
Omer (10:23.250)
Okay, so let's talk about like the kind of the journey you guys took to grow and acquire customers.
And it sounds like there was a lot of iteration in terms of talking to customers, figuring out what they needed, how to make the product better, and kind of continuing to do that.
But from a marketing perspective, what were some of the key growth strategies that helped you go from kind of where you were in those days to I guess today?
I believe you mentioned you're at over what, 10,000 clients or customers?
Mikita Mikado (11:01.860)
Yeah, about 10,000 accounts.
Omer (11:04.420)
What were some of those growth strategies that have helped you to get there?
Mikita Mikado (11:08.020)
In the early days, I tried everything that I can think of or I've heard of.
My strategy was to throw as many things at the wall as I can and then see what sticks.
Honestly, that was my strategy, which is an old strategy, but some of those things truly stuck.
They worked.
And then I started to building on top of them.
To give you a few examples, partnering with CRM systems worked pretty well for, for us, a lot of those CRM systems grew and we grew with them and we helped them out, right?
Like we helped them, they helped us, they got us leads, we got them leads, we extended their workflow, they helped us to streamline the input into our system.
So it worked out pretty well.
There's also a natural virality to our product.
When I send you a Panda doc, you get exposed to its magic and wonders and all the functionality and you can interact with me on it, you can sign that document, legally binding electronic signature and yada yada yada.
So there's a good number of recipients that become subscribers and then finally just basically trying to be active in the sales community and all kinds of groups in the early days I believe really helped us out those are some of the things that we've done.
But there were a lot more.
Like a lot, a lot, a lot more.
Omer (12:54.180)
So you said that you tried a lot of things in the early days and just kind of threw everything at it to see what would stick.
It kind of sounds like it still worked for you if you were able to get to 3,000 paying customers with quote roller.
When you talk about the sort of the CRM integration, can you give me an example of that?
Like how would a typical partnership like that work?
Mikita Mikado (13:20.640)
Sure.
And by the way, I mentioned things that weren't dumb.
There were a lot of things that were literally dumb that I tried.
Obviously didn't work, but yeah.
So CRM integrations say you're a business owner, you're a sales team that utilizes a CRM system.
You're going to have opportunities and deals and customers in that CRM and then you move that deal from prospect to opportunity stage and your customer asks you to send more information or a case study or a proposal, maybe they're ready to buy a quote.
You got to generate that document somehow.
And we basically sit on top of CRM systems.
Take data out of the CRM system, take client information, merge that data with templates for your sales collateral so you don't have to copy and paste and allow you to send that document while associating the document with the records inside a CRM, be that a deal record or a contract record company record.
That's what our integrations do.
And from the go to market perspective, we do the integration work.
Sometimes we do the integration work, sometimes CRM vendors do the integration work.
It all depends.
Omer (14:40.970)
So in the early days, you know, I guess when you're, when you're still trying to figure out what kind of, kind of marketing channels are going to work, a potential integration with a CRM partner could be a lot of time and effort if you don't know if it's going to work.
Mikita Mikado (14:55.670)
Yep.
Omer (14:56.790)
How did you rationalize that?
Like how did you decide who to work with or how much effort you were going to put into it?
Or did you ever just consider saying let's just do kind of like a cross promotional type partnership where we'll promote each other's products, but we won't necessarily do the integration until we know that there's more interest?
Mikita Mikado (15:15.630)
You know, Omer, I think doing like a blog post swap or join webinar and then advancing into building an integration and integration is, I think this is the right way to approach this type of stuff.
But I can't assure you that this was the path for me and controller and Pendadoc.
I think in some cases we just built it and it happened and we got lucky.
So it was driven by gut.
Would I do it the same way again?
Probably not.
Omer (15:51.720)
Yeah.
I mean, that's always really interesting where you kind of look back at some of these things and it sort of seems like a great strategy and well thought out.
And you sort of start talking to founders and you realize, well, not always.
Like, a lot of the times it was just kind of an intuitive decision or maybe just some luck that kind of helped you get a breakthrough in a particular area or with a particular problem.
Mikita Mikado (16:14.970)
Yeah.
And I don't necessarily believe in luck.
I don't recall a single event that was like, oh, my God, this is it.
We got featured somewhere, I don't know, somewhere in blah, blah, blah place.
And then that created a ton of traffic and.
Or some kind of celebrity picked up our product and that just made the day.
That didn't really happen for us.
It was all very, very incremental.
So I don't think this has to do anything with like.
But I do believe that the number of iterations and attempts you make contribute to successful outcome.
We're in the Internet business, right.
Like, or software business.
There's an infinite number of things that you can try to bring customers in.
Okay.
If it's not infinite, then it's very, very large.
So if you can figure out a way to just maximize the number of tests, then I think that increases your probability of winning.
Simple math.
Omer (17:26.840)
Yeah.
And that's kind of how I get the sense from this.
I mean, obviously a lot of this was a long time ago, and your company is a lot larger now.
But the impression I get is that this wasn't all smooth sailing.
You guys were doing a lot of just continuous experiment trying things and just keep iterating until you kind of figured out something that would work.
I want to talk a little bit about.
I know you told me earlier that SEO and SEM was also an important part of growth.
But before we get into that, I can't move on unless you give me one example of one of those dumb things that you mentioned you tried.
Like, what were they?
Mikita Mikado (18:10.870)
Okay.
Would a dumb thing that kind of worked out play well?
Sure.
Omer (18:15.590)
Yeah.
Mikita Mikado (18:16.630)
Okay.
So there was a startup competition in Russia, like startup of the year.
I'm from Belarus.
We started the company out of Belarus.
It's like next door.
And there are like, absolutely no value in us going to that show and taking a part in it.
We wouldn't get any leads whatsoever.
All of our market was English spoken, but we still decided to do it for whatever reason.
And in order to participate in that thing, I shot a very pretty dumb but funny video about where we work and how we do it and how we think about the business.
And it was very not serious at all.
It was just a stunt in a way.
And then that thing kind of went viral.
Like, a lot of people in Belarus started sharing it.
Then we presented at this show, There were like 20 startups, great companies, fantastic products, but really boring video presentations.
Everyone had to do a video presentation.
Everyone was like, very boring.
Oh, we're the most innovative, we're the best.
This and that.
Our product is going to change the world, make the world a better place and yada, yada, yada, yada.
And then there's us with this like, pretty much stunt, kind of like making fun of ourselves.
Everybody's laughing, the whole room was pretty much having fun.
And then we get a price.
We become the startup of the year based on in the category of like, audience love, whatever.
So the audience voted us to be the best startup of the year.
I don't know, maybe the audience was bored to death with other videos and they just decided, okay, those guys are funny, at least we're gonna give it to them.
But that's what we got.
And we had absolutely no leads from that, just the award.
But here's what happens next.
That funny video goes viral, and then a guy who lives in Silicon Valley, but originally from Belarus sends me a message saying, hey, I've seen that video, it's pretty funny, I want to invest.
I go like, okay, let's talk.
So we start talking to the guy.
It turns out he was going to invest in one of our competitors, but then he seen the video, got curious about our product, signed up for an account and discovered we have a better product and we're from the same country he's from.
And we made that funny video.
And then another thing that happens is that with this award being the startup of the year in Russia, I make part of my case for O1 visa to come to America.
That basically works out because for immigration you have to win something to get that type of visa.
And we won something.
We did.
So that worked out.
That worked out pretty well, even though it was pretty dumb.
Omer (21:30.680)
Seriously.
So you got your visa partly on the merits of winning this competition?
Mikita Mikado (21:35.000)
Well, it's like one of six things.
And within one of six things, it was probably one of 10 or 20 things that the case was made out of, but it was there.
The Startup of the Year in Russia award.
It was there.
That's a big deal.
Omer (21:52.490)
I mean, love it.
Mikita Mikado (21:53.610)
Come on, Like Startup of the Year.
Omer (21:57.330)
Nikita, that's a great story.
I'm so glad I asked you about that.
Mikita Mikado (22:01.330)
Yeah, there's a bunch of those.
There's a bunch of those.
Omer (22:04.690)
And it sounds like if you ever get bored of PandaDoc, you have a promising career as a YouTuber from the sounds of it.
Mikita Mikado (22:12.310)
I don't.
Yeah, I'll give you another one then.
This other day I was walking down the street and I just talked to my co founder and we had such a hard time hiring for hiring Python developers.
So I decided to make a rhyme and I read that rhyme on a video, just shooting a video of myself doing a pretty dumb rhyme that was kind of funny, but more dumb than funny.
And then the thing gets shared like 20,000 times.
Omer (22:46.240)
Wow.
Mikita Mikado (22:47.280)
And it gets shared by HR people and recruiters in Eastern Europe, where, you know, where we have our product organization with like comments.
Yeah, this is cool.
Like, keep it up.
This is the way to recruit.
So guess what?
They have a lot of friends or the developers that we need.
So basically we start getting inbound inquiries from really good engineers.
So that worked.
And that was pretty dumb, but it worked.
Yeah, and there were a lot of other dumb things, but I prefer to forget those if they didn't work.
Omer (23:29.040)
All right, so you also mentioned, as we talked about SEO and SEM, and it sounds like that was also a kind of a big part of your growth.
Now from kind of talking to you earlier, it didn't sound like your blog or content marketing specifically was kind of the SEO part of it.
So what exactly were you doing?
Was this kind of like more traditional SEO link building, blah, blah, blah.
Like what were you guys doing there?
Mikita Mikado (23:57.250)
Yeah, early days, definitely.
Lots of link building and whatever you would imagine a marketer from Eastern Europe would do.
Yeah, a lot of SEO, a lot of partnerships with other sites, a lot of third party content placement, that kind of stuff.
We do have a pretty good blog and we do generate a decent volume of visitors through that blog.
But I think we're still in our early days on the journey of becoming a thought leader and this pioneer that explains and tells the world that there's a much better way of sending sales documents.
So yeah, I'll brag about it a couple of years from today.
Omer (24:50.630)
So these days, I guess with the size of the company that you are, 10,000 plus customers, maybe you think about this less, but Maybe over the last few years, as you were still trying to get traction, how much did you or your co founders spend thinking or worrying about the competition?
Mikita Mikado (25:11.990)
Well, we consider the competition, but we have to be the best.
We have to execute better than anyone else on this planet.
And if we can't, then I wish them the best of luck and lots of wind behind them.
So we obviously again, we like to be informed about what's happening in the market and what competitors are doing.
But I don't remember competitors driving our strategy or impacting our strategy way too much.
In fact, we're kind of like an odd duck.
There's a quote to cash space and CPQ space and sales enablement space and digital transactions management space where you got like a myriad of different companies that are all focused on enterprise and mid market and we don't.
We focus on SMB and everyone else is having a hard time figuring out how the hell are we doing it and why are we doing it and how's it possible we're able to make money in that market, but we can and we're pretty happy.
Omer (26:27.360)
So why are you focusing on SMB?
Let's get it out there.
Mikita Mikado (26:30.640)
We like to play on our strengths.
Our strength is in building software that the end users enjoy.
Not admins, not CIOs, the end users.
That's our Persona.
This is who we like to please.
And we can do that better than I want to say everyone else.
And therefore that's through Refocus.
We're not the best at enterprise sales.
We don't have any field sales reps. Like we don't have sales reps that drive Porsche and wear a lot of gold.
It's just not us, you know.
So we play our strengths, we play where we are comfortable and where we are very passionate.
I'm very passionate about helping small businesses to be successful.
I'm a lot less passionate about decreasing the number of companies out there and so to say making the rich guy richer.
I want to help the small guy and I love being the underdog.
So does my co founder, so does a lot of people at PandaDoc.
So that's why that's our answer.
Omer (27:47.400)
That's great.
So focusing on SMB and you don't charge a huge amount for the product.
I mean you can start using Panda Doc at what, like $19 a month and then I think it works up to about $50 a month per user, so on.
So that seems to be kind of like the core focus for you there.
Mikita Mikado (28:10.080)
Yeah, three Frappuccinos.
That's it, Three frappuccinos and you get a fantastic software application and a lot less sugar in your blood.
Isn't that great?
Omer (28:21.280)
You should put that on your website.
Mikita Mikado (28:24.240)
Yeah, right.
One day.
Omer (28:27.520)
But it's obviously working.
I mean, you guys have raised what, $21 million to date?
Mikita Mikado (28:32.400)
It's complicated.
We raised a lot less than that because you know how it works in the venture world.
You can buy some of the nodes back and this and that and yada yada.
We raised less is the short answer, and I hope that suffices.
But enough bullc.
Omer (28:51.280)
When you started the business, were you guys kind of self funded?
Bootstrapping?
Like how long did you go before you raised money?
Mikita Mikado (28:58.750)
Yeah, we were bootstrapping the company until we got profitable and completely broke and then we decided to take funding.
Omer (29:10.830)
So how long was that?
Mikita Mikado (29:12.590)
I want to say we hit profitability within two and a half years.
And before that we were self funding the business.
Omer (29:21.650)
Cool.
Okay.
I know we're in kind of a.
We need to wrap up soon and get onto the lightning round.
And I am going to try to get you back at some point because I think there's a lot more stuff that we can talk about.
If nothing else, how to make cool videos.
But before we talk about, we get into lightning round, if you could kind of go back to when you started this business or in the early days, what's maybe the one piece of advice that you'd want to give yourself or maybe something that you kind of wish you had done differently?
Mikita Mikado (29:54.210)
I do a lot of things differently, but I think I'd start my list with people.
I went to a computer science university, got an engineering degree.
Always thought of myself as of a product guy versus a salesperson or people person.
And I think when it comes to the job of a CEO of any business that exceeds like 20 employees, being a people person is hugely important.
And having those skills is very, very important.
I'm still working on those skills.
If I was to go back, I probably start working on them a lot earlier.
That is what I would start my list with.
And then talk to customers more.
Make sure that the customers you have is where you spend more of your attention versus the customers you can have.
That's probably going to be the number two item.
Test and learn.
Try to validate your ideas before you build.
That's another one.
I can go on and on and on.
Amer, let's just have three for today.
Omer (31:10.160)
That's a good start.
All right.
Okay.
Let's get onto the lightning round.
I'm Going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Mikita Mikado (31:19.120)
Ready?
Sure.
Omer (31:20.960)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Mikita Mikado (31:26.080)
Don't follow every business advice you receive.
Omer (31:29.450)
Perfect.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Mikita Mikado (31:34.010)
How about what Doesn't Kill Us?
That's a great book.
Yeah, I started with that quote, and that's the same exact book I'm going to recommend.
This is a book that helps to keep me physically and emotionally somewhat stable.
Not completely stable, let's be honest, but somewhat stable.
Omer (31:52.970)
All right.
I will include a link to that in the show notes.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Mikita Mikado (32:01.670)
We don't give up.
Omer (32:03.590)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Mikita Mikado (32:07.350)
My favorite productivity tool is a calendar.
My favorite productivity habit is following that calendar and managing it at least a week in advance.
And that is a habit that I'm trying to develop for the existence of Pandadoc.
I'm working on it.
Omer (32:33.510)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Mikita Mikado (32:37.830)
Let's see.
I started my career in sales selling car wash.
I was 7 and I both sold and washed the cars.
Then that career continued when I was 11 and I sold berries on farmer's market.
And that was illegal, but that worked out pretty well.
What else is fun?
I surf.
That's kind of cool, right?
Omer (33:05.380)
It is.
It's very cool.
Well, the final question is, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Mikita Mikado (33:10.980)
Oh, here we go.
Yeah, I surf and I love spending time with my family and kids.
Just like anyone else who got family and kids, I would do anything that gives me adrenaline and some sort of control and involves some kind of boards, whatever it is.
Kite surfing, wakeboarding, surfing, skateboarding.
I'd be down to do that.
So if you guys want to hang out, let's go surfing.
I'd always say yes.
Omer (33:45.320)
All right.
Before I want to thank you, Makita, but before I do that, I want to thank your team because before we started recording, there was a lot of background noise, a lot of energy, a lot of people talking out there, and you kind of very politely kind of asked them to keep it down.
And I don't think I've heard one voice during this entire recording.
So I want to thank them.
Mikita Mikado (34:08.320)
I have an amazing team and Penadoc would not be where it is today if not for all the wonderful people that joined along the ride.
That's for sure.
I have a fantastic team.
And becoming quiet.
Getting quiet is not the only skill we have here, but we have a really good team.
Omer (34:33.290)
That's awesome.
It's been a great conversation.
I really enjoyed our chat.
Makita now if people want to find out more about Panda docs, they can go to panda.
It's not docspandadoc.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Mikita Mikado (34:49.530)
Let's go surfing in Pacifica, California.
Or just shoot me an email@mikitaandadoc.com awesome.
Omer (34:58.470)
Thank you my friend.
It's been awesome.
I wish you all the best.
Mikita Mikado (35:01.030)
Thanks a lot Omer.
Hope it's going to come out nice and I hit your expectations.
Omer (35:07.910)
Oh absolutely.
It's been awesome.
