Omer (00:11.600)
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 talk to Rob Schall, the co founder and CEO of cn, a product that helps sales teams get an edge using AI to enhance the quality of their data and improve their productivity.
As every founder knows, building a SaaS business is really easy.
And if you're doing it for the first time, it can be particularly hard.
And you can often wonder if you should keep going or not.
So can we learn anything from a serial SaaS founder who's built and sold several companies?
In 2001, Rob Schall and his co founder talked about starting a SaaS business.
They liked building websites and were interested in real estate, so they decided to build websites for realtors.
They didn't put much thought into it.
It seemed like a good idea and they figured they could build better websites for realtors than the ones they'd seen, so.
So they started a business.
Three years later, they sold that business for $80 million.
Rob says he was lucky.
He had a great idea at the right time and sold the company at the right time.
But then he started the second SaaS business and sold that a few years later for 15 million.
Was it luck again?
Was it really just about being in the right place at the right time?
Rob is now building his third SaaS business and he seems to be a natural serial entrepreneur.
And on the surface, it seems like it's been smooth sailing from one company to the next.
But when you look below the surface, you start to get a picture of how tough it's really been for Rob.
It's the same rollercoaster ride experienced by first time SaaS founders.
At every step, you're faced with one big problem and then you find some breakthrough and then you hit another big problem and another big problem and it just goes on like that.
It never stops.
While luck plays a factor, it's really about your mental resilience, having faith in yourself, and the ability to keep going.
Those are the factors that create a successful founder and company.
So in this interview, we talk about that journey, some of the challenges that Rob has faced along the way, and what keeps him going through the tough times.
Rob Kall (02:43.500)
So.
Omer (02:43.810)
So I hope you enjoy it.
Rob, welcome to the show.
Rob Kall (02:46.690)
Thank you so much, Omer.
Omer (02:48.770)
Now, do you have a favorite quote that helps us get inside your head and just understand, like what drives and motivates you?
Rob Kall (02:55.570)
Yeah, I live and die by action, not words.
It also happens to be the Flapperd song and I'm a huge hair metal fan, so that's my motto.
Omer (03:10.060)
I like it.
It's a good one.
Before we get started, I'd like you to clear up something important for me now as I understand you're from Sweden.
CN is based in Barcelona.
I've read that you're from the Miami area and your LinkedIn profile says you're from Dallas Fort Worth.
So where are you from?
Rob Kall (03:33.580)
I am what you call an international man of mystery.
We have our business office in Dallas.
It's get into a little bit more of the reasons why we ended up selling our last business to a company there called RealPage.
And one of my co founders is based there.
We also have our data Science center of Excellence here in Barcelona.
That's where I'm calling in from today.
It just happens to be an excellent place to find data science talent and it has some benefits from raising money in the US and then deploying them in a place like Barcelona.
Omer (04:11.870)
Got it.
Okay, great.
I'm glad we got the gut cleared up.
Rob Kall (04:14.950)
And Sweden is a very cold place in the winter, so I'm not going to go there until the summer probably.
Omer (04:21.390)
All right, now before we talk about cn, I want to talk about the startups you worked on before.
You're a serial entrepreneur.
You've built a couple of startups that had successful exits.
And so I want to tell the story about that as well.
Maybe let's start by going back to like what were you doing before you started your first company?
Rob Kall (04:48.950)
That's what I call my office space days.
I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen that movie.
We were in an enterprise software company.
My co founder and I, Ben, and we just one day said, we can't do this anymore.
He ended up going to grad school in New York, Columbia.
I went to start or join a startup and it was perfect timing.
It was spring of year 2000.
In other words, it was the end of the dot com boom and beginning of what became the dot com bomb.
So things not working out exactly like I had planned.
Omer (05:28.930)
And so like, how did you guys come up with the idea for your first company?
Rob Kall (05:33.260)
Well, we were working in a startup and we realized that this was not going anywhere.
There was no money to be had in terms of investments and so forth.
And we said to ourselves, maybe we should just make a company that does not rely on any external financing, that just provides a service and people pay for it right away.
And that's what we did.
Omer (05:54.380)
And what kind of research did you do?
Rob Kall (05:57.820)
So you know, we did not have a lot of, you know, thought or we didn't make put a lot of thought or analysis into it.
My co founder, I think, said I always liked real estate.
And I told him, me too.
And we ended up creating a business that provided websites for real estate agents.
Omer (06:17.370)
And that was it.
Rob Kall (06:18.570)
That was it.
But it was a fortunate decision because it was the beginning of what later became the real estate boom.
And and there was a second thing that happened that year and it was that the associations of Realtors started making them MLS data, the system data that contains all of the properties for sale available through a program.
And because they made that change, we could make a much more sophisticated real estate website that you could also search for all the listings that were on the market at that time.
And that was kind of the key ingredients that differentiated our product at that point.
Omer (06:59.150)
How did you get started?
Like did you go out and try to validate the idea or did you start building a product?
Rob Kall (07:08.030)
One of those things that when you start a business, you probably just have an inkling that whatever you see out there is not the best it can be.
And like I had built, you know, software before.
I felt like the websites that I saw out there providing real estate information were not very useful.
They provided some listings, but it was only the realtors or the brokers own listings.
So I was like, well, you know, if I'm in the market, I don't want to see 5 listings or 20 listings.
I want to see the 10,000 listings that are available.
So there was not a lot of research that went into.
It was just an intuition that 10,000 is better than 20.
Omer (07:53.340)
You said you started building websites for Realtors.
Was this initially a service or was it a product that they could come up and sign up for and have a sort of a website out of the box?
Rob Kall (08:05.980)
It was originally a service with a couple of product components to it.
It was a service in a sense that every single Realtor wanted to customize website with their logo and their photos and so forth.
So we were able to collect professional services fee for that.
That essentially fueled the company and allowed us then to build the underlying technology which was the ability to sync all of these MLS feeds, which was very tricky at that time because there was no standardization, there was hardly any xml.
JSON was not invented and we could start building that underly technology while funding it from the professional services fees.
Omer (08:49.040)
And like how did you like start Finding your first few customers.
Rob Kall (08:54.480)
So one of our co founders, his mom was a Realtor at the time, and she became our first customer.
And we ended up putting that website into a competition for the best real estate website in Florida.
And we won it because it was much more sophisticated than the competition, even if it just had normal design and so forth.
And that was kind of like the starting point.
When they saw the other realtors, saw what she had, they wanted it too.
And we started selling it to all the people in Miami.
And then from there it kind of grew.
And the thing that was different from us compared to some other companies that tried to do similar things was that we kept investing into our underlying technology and scaling up the ability to actually process these data feeds and provide a more sophisticated property search and so forth.
And that became the thing that allowed us to go national.
Omer (09:58.950)
Got it.
And so although the way you were selling it to the Realtors was you can have your own website for a relatively low price cost, and it can be branded the way you want and help you in terms of getting clients and working with clients.
Really what you were focusing on was your secret sauce was basically the data that you were trying to build underneath that.
Rob Kall (10:24.990)
Exactly.
And over time, the level of sophistication of our platform became much higher so that we were able to handle larger corporations.
A few years into it, we were lucky to get a national account.
And they're all of a sudden we were for to not work with one or two or three data feeds.
We were working with hundreds of data feeds at the same time.
At that point, having the software engineering background that we had, we were able to do something that our companies perhaps were trying to do, but did not have the sophistication to do at the time.
Omer (10:59.370)
And then so what sort of growth did you see?
Because you guys worked on this business for about three years before you sold it, right?
Rob Kall (11:07.810)
Yeah, we sold it three years and then we joined a second company that had a complementary product and then we grew it for another three years.
And it just shows how important it is to work with the right people.
So my co founders in the second business, they had fantastic relationships with some of the largest brands of real estate brokerages in the US and we ended up actually servicing four of the five largest real estate website brokerage.
And we ended up hosting the second most trafficked website for real estate in the country.
And we did that by combining business relationships and sophisticated technology.
And then we had a successful exit with that business.
Omer (12:00.000)
How much did you sell that for?
Rob Kall (12:01.600)
Around $80 million.
Omer (12:03.840)
Wow, that's not bad for three years work.
Rob Kall (12:06.640)
Well, it was three plus three, so it was six years.
Omer (12:09.840)
There you go, it's still not bad.
And did you through, through the process like before you sold it, did you ever go back and say, okay, now we're getting some, some traction here, let's go and try to raise some money and accelerate and add some more fuel
Rob Kall (12:25.400)
to growth with that business.
We did not do that.
With my next business, the story was a little bit different.
We ended up selling that business right at the right time in 2007.
And that was, as I'm sure most of your listeners remember, the end of the real estate boom.
And it was fortuitous.
Again, I knew that I wanted to do a business that was more global.
I had a huge interest in travel.
I had the experience from real estate and I said, what's real estate and travel?
Well, it sounds like vacation rentals, right?
So we said, can we create a better website experience for vacation rental companies?
Can we provide additional sophistication there in terms of how they're marketing the properties and so forth.
So I was full of confidence.
In the last business I had been the cto.
Now I wanted to be the CEO and have all responsibilities in terms of business and so forth.
So that was where we started, self funded it from beginning.
And of course like everything, it's a lot harder and more complicated than you think.
Omer (13:37.300)
And so that business was called Booked.
Rob Kall (13:40.020)
That's right.
Omer (13:40.820)
So book with a T on the end.
Rob Kall (13:43.060)
Exactly.
Omer (13:44.660)
Yeah.
So tell me about that.
So again you've got the idea, you probably got a lot more confidence now because you've gone through, built one successful business and had a, had a great exit.
And so now you see another opportunity.
Did you do anything different this time in terms of doing research or validation or was it again sort of a intuitive kind of decision based on where you felt there was an opportunity to make an improvement?
Rob Kall (14:14.590)
No, I felt much more sophisticated at that time and more confident as you said.
And one of the things, I don't know if you heard this expression, generals always tend to fight their last war.
And that was a little bit what I wanted to do with this business.
There was a lot of problems with that first business, a lot of it around an ever more complex business environment.
I think I told you.
We started servicing individual realtors and ended up servicing for the five largest brokerages.
So I wanted to make a platform and a technology that could scale right off the bat.
And I think thinking back on it, we over engineered the solution in the beginning.
So we put in a lot of effort into making this thing enterprise ready when we didn't have any enterprise customers.
And we were just starting out.
So it was a little bit different from the prior problem.
Omer (15:17.020)
So tell me a little bit about that, because there's a lot of founders, a lot of us, who make those kinds of mistakes, because we're often just so caught up in what we.
We anticipate.
The issues are going to be that we start over engineering or over designing solutions.
And for you, you know, you'd kind of been through that experience once, and I guess maybe that's what was driving it in terms of I probably.
I don't want to go through that pain again.
Rob Kall (15:48.630)
Right.
Omer (15:49.350)
But, like, what was.
I mean, apart from, you know, do things that don't scale early on?
Like, what was the biggest lesson you learned from that?
Rob Kall (15:58.950)
It is very, very hard to anticipate what needs your SaaS platform is going to have three, four years down the road.
Chances are that there will be opportunities that you have never thought of, regardless if you have done research or not.
This time, they did do a lot of research.
And I looked at all of the offerings that were in the market at that time, which made me very confident that this was going to be easy.
And guess what?
It was.
Of course not.
But I knew what the market had.
I knew that I could build something more sophisticated, something that was more useful, that was more complete.
And then we set out to build that.
And then, of course, we still had issues around reaching customers, satisfying their specific needs and so forth.
Omer (16:49.480)
So how were you reaching customers?
Like, I'm just sort of thinking through, like, okay, you've got this, like, how do you find customers?
Because I guess they're going to be people who are using other sites today.
Rob Kall (17:00.400)
Right, Right.
So this was more of a SaaS platform for vacation rental managers.
And this was before Airbnb had become big.
And there were a handful of sites out there, like HomeAway and TripAdvisor and so forth, that were providing the marketing piece.
We wanted to provide the back office system, and we also wanted to connect the back office system with the marketing channels.
So that was what we started doing.
And for the first couple of years, we were just, you know, going to trade shows, trying to find customers and so forth.
And the customer acquisition rate was very, very slow.
And we were surviving by doing professional services in the sense that we still had a website product that brought in design fees and so forth.
And the thing that changed all of that stuff was we started doing partnerships with some of these marketing sites, and all of a sudden they started referring us business, and that just changed everything.
Omer (18:02.870)
Tell me what you mean by a marketing site, like, who are we talking about?
What were they doing for those customers?
Rob Kall (18:08.550)
Right.
So the typical SaaS product automates the workflow.
So we automated the workflow, taking reservations, handling payments, paying out to owners, and providing an online reservation for the customer's own website.
What sites like HomeAway, TripAdvisor, and now Airbnb are doing is that they are reaching an audience through their portal, which aggregates a lot of different properties.
Right.
And that brings the customer business, new business, in this case, new bookings for their properties.
What we were doing then was that we were integrating with those sites so
Omer (18:54.630)
that
Rob Kall (18:56.670)
the process of managing all of these reservations, coming in from different channels and taking payments for them and keeping all of it synchronized, when you had maybe 100 properties for each company and so forth, that that became seamless.
And the solution that had all of those pieces together was much better than having to manually do each one of those things.
And that, you know, that became a much more useful solution, what we called an all in one solution.
And because it was a symbiotic relationship with those marketing sites, they started referring us business.
We were small, they were much bigger, but that fueled our growth.
Omer (19:36.770)
Okay, so you had great success with E Neighborhoods and the exit there.
You start the second company initially, acquiring customers is slow.
And then you start doing these partnerships with these marketing companies and getting customer referrals and more, you know, customer growth becomes a lot easier.
And I know you had a great exit with this company as well.
Yeah.
So it sounds like smooth sailing.
Right?
Rob Kall (20:10.580)
No mistakes along the way, as always, because the companies really liked our technology.
One of them put in their agreement a right of first refusal.
In other words, the right for them, under certain circumstances, to buy our company.
At the time, it seemed like a good idea.
It allowed us to get access to all of these customers.
It allowed us to tout this very lucrative partnership.
And for one or two years, it all worked great until I decided that I wanted to raise a Series A.
And we had a fast growing business, and we had interesting business metrics and we had a huge market in front of us.
But when visas came and started doing due diligence and they saw this right of first refusal in our paperwork, they said, no, we can't do that.
I ended up not being able to raise money because of that, which became
Omer (21:14.960)
a big, big, big, big issue.
So let's just explain that issue.
So it Basically, it was like this company that you did the deal with was saying, hey, we want to have the option to be able to acquire you.
Rob Kall (21:27.520)
Exactly.
Omer (21:28.720)
Which sounded great, right.
In terms of, wow, we're going to.
You know, that could be a potential great opportunity for us if things go well.
When you then start to go out and raise money, investors are like, well, why would I invest money in a company that somebody else gets to choose first whether they want to acquire it or not.
Rob Kall (21:44.980)
Exactly.
So that was a little bit of a hard lesson to learn.
In the end, through relationships and through trust, I was able to renegotiate our agreements so that that cost went away.
It was a huge relief for us, obviously, to kind of be able to reset that thing.
And it then paid away for a successful exit later on to complete a different type of company.
Omer (22:15.390)
This company you worked on for about six years as well, right?
Rob Kall (22:18.350)
Yeah.
Omer (22:19.150)
And how much did you sell this for?
Rob Kall (22:21.150)
15 million.
Omer (22:22.670)
All right, so now we've got two successful exits under your belt.
So let's talk about CN like, how did that come about?
Right.
Rob Kall (22:33.120)
So what was interesting about the second business was that we ended up selling it to a public company, and we ended up merging it into a second business that was based here in Barcelona.
And all of a sudden, we had gone from two to 100 salespeople in a period of two to three years.
And what we found was that we were not selling 50 times as much in our revenue numbers.
And I was fortunate.
I was the general manager for that business, and I was fortunate to work with some excellent sales leaders.
And we were trying to understand, why is that not happening?
I could never figure it out.
So when I left that business, I said, what were the real reasons why we couldn't scale this thing?
And I realized that the reason why we couldn't scale that business further was we hadn't measured all of the things that really mattered.
And that became the slogan for CN Measure what matters.
And we basically set out to solve a whole new set of problems using AI and help companies that are in this process of scaling their sales team and not seeing the commensurate return actually get much better sales productivity.
Omer (23:49.560)
All right, so how do you do that?
Rob Kall (23:51.160)
So it comes down to what we try to say is that we need to understand the entire sales environment.
So there are tools out there today that are looking at things like lead scoring, trying to sort out the best leads and make salespeople go after those.
But that's just one part of the story.
The other two pieces that we found Are equally important are the people factors, your seller attributes.
So we're looking a lot at things like product knowledge, closing ability, engagement ability and even team to see how your salespeople are actually working and how productive they are.
And thirdly, we look at what we call macro factors, which are things that are affecting your ability to sell but you have no control over.
So that would be things like seasonality or competition.
And when you take all three of those things, you have your lead and pipeline factors, you have your seller factors and you have your macro factors.
You have the entire view of your selling environment.
And now you can start understanding exactly what it is that drives success.
Omer (24:58.259)
Now, this time with cn, you decided to raise money, right?
So I mean today you guys have raised just over $2 million.
Why did you decide to do that with this company?
Rob Kall (25:07.380)
A couple of reasons.
One, we felt like this is a huge opportunity.
There was a research report that came out last year that says that adding artificial intelligence to CRM is over a trillion dollar opportunity.
It's rare that you see those types of very, very large numbers.
We also felt like we could build a team as opposed to just bootstrapping it with two or three people and essentially create a great company culture, create a faster go to market strategy than if we were just doing it.
Just two, three people in the garage.
Omer (25:46.600)
I'm curious if we kind of sort of look at your step back and look at your story.
People can say, well, Rob and his co founder had this idea for making websites for realtors.
They didn't do much research or anything and they kind of got in there at the right time and, and got lucky with that and sold it for $80 million.
Then they basically self funded another company, sold that for $15 million.
And now you're in your third company, you've raised $2 million.
You're very clear about the problem that you're solving and you're starting to get traction there.
It sounds like this is another sort of success story in the making and things have been really easy for you.
And I know it's kind of tough to tell a story of what's happened in the last 15 years in like, you know, 45 minutes.
But, but give, give, give our listeners a sense of like when you look back, like what are some of the times that were really some of the tough times or the things that you wish you had done differently?
Rob Kall (26:50.660)
That's, that's not a 45 minute, I know, two, three days of psychotherapy.
Omer (26:56.820)
But
Rob Kall (26:58.900)
the most important thing to remember for early, like first time Founders is that it's never going to be smooth sailing.
It never, like you look at all these founders and you hear my story, it sounds like I had a lot of success and so forth.
It has not been easy.
It hasn't been smooth sailing.
It has been problems, breakthrough problems, breakthrough.
And I think the only thing that sets really, you know, founders that have success, apart from the people that don't, is that they are able to roll with the punches and just get up and do something different and try that instead.
And as much as possible, try to have a little bit of optionality every single time.
And it can be in terms of having reserve funds, it can be in terms of being able to kind of be flexible on your original vision and understand that perhaps that is not even if it's a good idea, it's not possible to do it like that right now.
And so.
And it just happened over and over with every business.
And if I was to start another business tomorrow, I'm sure it would happen with that business as well.
Omer (28:12.760)
You know, one of the things I love about your story is that when you started E Neighborhoods, you guys didn't put a lot of thought into was more about what you, you know, the quote that you.
You shared with us at the beginning, in terms of actions, not words, that's exactly what you did.
And so I wonder, like, if people are listening to this and, you know, either they're.
They're kind of just starting out and sort of feeling like, I can't go and build a SaaS business because, you know, fill in the blank, I don't have the money or the time or whatever, or even people who have a business right now, but who are sort of struggling and, like, what advice would you give to them?
Rob Kall (29:05.440)
Well, the one thing that I've had, I touched on it a few times, is luck.
I have had luck, in a sense, that I have created businesses at the right time that had macro tailwinds, if you get my drift.
I started a real estate business in 2000, and I had seven years of tailwinds because the real estate market was going crazy.
I started a vacation rental business in 2008, and that was a year or two after Airbnb came on the market and became the most valuable startup ever.
Now I'm in an artificial intelligence AI first startup where we're trying to do something slightly different.
We're no longer just trying to automate workflows, trying to augment decision making.
And I feel like we have a lot of tailwind because of that.
So you Know, I have, through luck and hopefully a little bit of skill, picked the right areas to work in.
If you're trying to start a startup in the printing business, you're not going to have that tail, you're going to have a headwind, and that's going to make it a lot harder.
So that's something to kind of give a little bit of thought to.
Am I going into something like, and this is a little bit trite, but that expression from Wayne Gretzky skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is right now.
If you can have a sense for where things are going to be three, four years from now, when your product probably have matured and you're going to have some customer validation and so forth, try to do that.
That would be the thing.
Rather than trying to analyze to the nth degree exactly how your business is going to work, because chances are that that's not going to be the case anyway.
Omer (30:57.740)
Yeah, I think that's really good advice.
One of the dangers with that, though, I guess, is you could potentially end up building something which is just too early in the market.
Rob Kall (31:07.180)
Absolutely.
And then you have to see what is too early in the market.
I'm having this issue right now.
Sometimes people are saying, well, can I trust AI to make decisions?
Can I really use this stuff to improve my sales team?
And the analogy that I'm using is, you know, especially if it's someone my age, in mid-40s, I say, well, I mean, if you go into a new city, you're using Google Maps and GPS to get from, you know, the airport to your hotel or to the business meeting.
And so using the Google Maps ETA to see when you're going to arrive there.
And you would never dream of pulling up the rental car map or trying to figure it out some other way.
So you're trusting AI today to take you somewhere and potentially your own safety.
The same exact thing is going to happen with using AI to make decisions around your business.
That's the type of analogies and the type of explanations that you have to have handy when you're trying to do something brand new.
And if you can't back that up with real results, obviously people are going to be skeptical.
But once you can start showing them, hey, this is actually making money, this is actually giving you sound advice, then you have a clear business case.
That's always the thing.
You have to have a very clear value proposition that is beyond, oh, this is cool and new.
It has to be.
This saves you money.
This makes you Money.
This makes your process more efficient or whatever, especially in SaaS, right?
Omer (32:57.420)
Yeah, totally.
I'm curious, what is your perspective on AI and for people who are not skeptical, but maybe have the fear of what the future might hold and people are going to not have any jobs and AI is going to kind of take over the world and like, what's, what's your perspective on that?
Rob Kall (33:21.410)
Well, I think it's extremely important to understand that AI is probably the most powerful technology that's come around.
It is more powerful than the web, it is more powerful than just mechanics in general because this affects how we are interacting and they can do a lot of damage.
At the same time.
It also has tremendous amount of promise, especially when you're looking at AI in the next 10, 15, 20 years where it's going to be used to augment your decision making process.
It's not all about replacing a human.
It's about giving you a much better understanding of what's going on.
Because with AI you can analyze things that you as a person can have intuitions about, but you can never do at any kind of scale or, or have with any type of precision.
And with AI you can do that.
I liken our AI as having the best sales leader you have ever hired times a thousand that are running around and checking every single thing that's going on in your sales organization and then reporting the best course of action for you to take.
And then if you want to take that action or not, it's still your decision.
And I think that when you're thinking about it like that, you're going to realize there's going to be a whole bunch of new jobs that are coming because of the things that are possible using AI.
So while there's certainly going to be some automation that replaces human labor, there's also going to be a lot of new jobs.
Just like all of the whole SaaS revolution, the whole online thing has created a ton of new positions that did not exist 10, 15 years ago.
Omer (35:07.410)
Yeah, yeah.
Can you give me one example?
Maybe a use case of like a problem that CN is solving for a salesperson today?
Rob Kall (35:18.130)
Sure.
One of the things that we have that is unique is that we can measure the value of your activities, not just what you ended up measuring the value of a sales team.
At the tail end of it, you sold for a million dollars this quarter.
That's easy.
But we can measure the steps that are, are taking midstream.
Like when you're creating an opportunity, what's the value of that activity when you're bringing in some leads from SEO.
What's the value of that?
And how does that compare to the leads that you sourced from some industry list and so forth.
So when you have that value, then you can easily make decisions on are we, for example, giving all our reps equal value or some of the reps just successful because they have received a lot of value from existing accounts or, or from specific territory and so forth.
So when you can realize that, then you can all of a sudden understand where the true productivity of your team is and you can then adjust that and make the team run much more efficiently.
Omer (36:22.820)
Got it.
Okay.
So in many ways, like that's a good example of if you're running a sales team, being able to.
It's almost like having somebody who can advise you to make smarter decisions.
Rob Kall (36:36.380)
Exactly.
And that's why I use the Google Map analogy.
Just like the Google Maps gives you a turn by turn instructions on how to get from point A to point B, we give you turn by turn instructions on how to make more money using your existing sales resources.
That's what we call increasing sales productivity.
And then of course, once you have that, if you really want to grow your team fast, just like we did in our last company, went from two to 100 people, you don't have that same problem of you adding a lot of people but not getting the commensurate return from it.
Again, that is one of the most common SaaS problems.
SaaS is such a fantastic business model.
So there's just new businesses coming out all the time, which means that the competition keeps increasing and that the noise from the potential buyers is.
Sorry, the noise that the potential buyers are receiving is very, very high.
So unless you pay attention to your sales effectiveness or sales productivity, you're going to end up spending a huge amount of the money that you have at your disposal just on sales and marketing.
Omer (37:50.210)
Yeah, we should wrap up, I think.
I kind of feel like we've just scratched the surface with you, Rob.
Like we could talk for two days.
Maybe one day we should.
Rob Kall (38:01.420)
Absolutely.
I'm going back to that psychotherapy I
Omer (38:04.980)
talked about earlier, but yeah, but no, let's wrap up for now and you know, maybe we'll, we'll find a way to get you back and we can deep dive into some of these topics.
So let's get into the lightning round.
So I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
So you ready?
Rob Kall (38:22.240)
Absolutely.
Omer (38:23.600)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Rob Kall (38:27.520)
Don't follow business advice.
Listen to a Lot of people, but most of the time you get advice.
It is your situation is not the same as the person that's giving you advice.
So listen to five people and then synthesize your own decision.
Omer (38:41.840)
Very true.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Rob Kall (38:45.360)
There's a book called how to Get Rich which sounds like a very cheesy, you know, self help book, but it's actually written by a guy named Felix Dennis.
He was an entrepreneur.
He unfortunately passed away.
But it's extremely entertaining and it's also very insightful in terms of not how to build a SaaS business per se, he was in printing, but how to create a very successful business and the things that can go wrong when you do that.
Omer (39:13.750)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Rob Kall (39:20.430)
But they don't suck at any of the most important things.
This is something that we have found when we are doing analysis of successful salespeople, successful entrepreneurs, successful anything.
It's not so much that you have to be great at this one thing, it is that you can't suck in any of the important categories, attributes that you have to have.
Because when you suck, that becomes a zero and the attributes multiply, they don't add up.
So if you are, if you're very, very lazy, for example, you can't be a great entrepreneur and then you have to fix that before you get to that.
Omer (39:51.280)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Rob Kall (39:55.200)
This is boring, but I like inbox zero.
I go crazy if I have 50 emails in my inbox.
Omer (40:03.600)
Did you used to follow who started that?
Was it Merlin man?
Who started that?
Rob Kall (40:07.120)
I don't know who started.
And when I heard about it originally I felt it was silly and just formulaic, but now I use it.
That allows me to respond very quickly to a lot of emails and also to move away and think about the important answer that I need to follow up and provide more insight into.
Omer (40:28.260)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time.
So,
Rob Kall (40:35.540)
and I should have done it here.
Like we spend a lot of time looking at natural language processing and voice recognition and stuff like that.
And I like to kind of create a tool that allows you to do better public speaking or better podcasts, that detects all your O's and ows and likes and whatnot and essentially zaps you every single time you do one of those so that you, through Pavlovian effects, stop doing it.
Omer (41:02.470)
I like the idea.
I'm not sure I'D like getting zapped.
Rob Kall (41:06.870)
Something that is unpleasant.
Omer (41:10.690)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Rob Kall (41:14.210)
I was a guitarist in an ABBA copper band in Sweden.
Omer (41:18.290)
Seriously?
Rob Kall (41:19.410)
I don't know if anybody remembers ABBA anymore, but they were very popular a long time ago.
Omer (41:25.730)
Okay, well, this is going to show my age, but the first LP I ever bought was ABBA's Greatest Hits.
Rob Kall (41:31.970)
Awesome.
Omer (41:33.730)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Rob Kall (41:37.850)
I love skiing and I'm fortunate to be spending a lot of time here in Barcelona.
We were two hours away from great skiing and, you know, 10 minutes away from the beach.
That's a perfect place for me.
Omer (41:49.850)
Yeah, I think you're in a great place.
I love Barcelona.
Yeah, awesome.
Thank you.
Rob, thank you for joining me.
Thank you for sharing your story.
As I said, there was a lot to cover, but so thank you for sort of taking us through the sort of the last 15 years as sort of concisely as you could.
Now if people want to find out more about cn, they can go to cn.
That's C I E N AI.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Rob Kall (42:21.170)
Love to connect via LinkedIn.
It's ianrobertkal.
One word.
Robert K A L L And you would have to put in my email address, which you can see in the summary.
Love to connect with anybody that has listened to the SaaS Podcast.
You can also check out my Twitter page.
It's Robert Cal, one word.
Omer (42:44.310)
Great.
We'll include a link to both of those in the show.
Notes for people.
So Rob, thank you again.
I know it's probably what coming up to like almost 10 o' clock there in Barcelona.
10pm yeah.
So yeah, sorry for keeping up so late.
Appreciate you making the time.
No worries.
And yeah, I wish you all the best with CN and look forward to sharing another success story.
Rob Kall (43:11.440)
Thank you so much, Omer.
I really enjoyed your show and again, thank you so much for having me on.
Omer (43:19.520)
My pleasure.
Cheers.
All the best.
