Building Enterprise SaaS Features That Win Big Deals

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 with someone I've had on the show before.
He founded a company called Look IO, which sold for several million dollars just nine months after he launched.
He's now building another SaaS business called Replicated, a platform that makes it easier for SaaS businesses to deploy their product into corporate data centers and the private cloud.
He and his co founder have already raised six and a half million dollars and they've been making great progress in growing the business.
So in this episode we talk about what he's been up to since I last interviewed him a couple of years ago.
It's a chance to explore some lessons he's learned from his first startup and what he's doing differently this time.
And we talk about a new project that he's been working on called Enterprise Ready, which has become a great resource for any SaaS business that wants to sell their product to enterprise customers.
Now, when you deal with enterprise and corporate customers, you have a bunch of technical challenges to deal with and your product needs to have enterprise grade features such as single sign on, role based access control, product security and more.
So we Talk about how EnterpriseReady IO, a free resource, has been developed to make it easier for any SaaS business to create enterprise ready products.
And we look at some case studies on how some more established SaaS businesses such as Slack and HubSpot, have designed and built these features into their own products.
I hope you enjoy it.
It's a great conversation and I think you'll learn something.
And even if you have no intention of sell to enterprise customers, you can still learn a lot about how to build a better and more robust SaaS product.
Today's guest is someone who I interviewed back in 2015.
He's the co founder of Replicated, a service that solves the problem for companies who want to install and deploy a SaaS application inside their own firewall.
Previously he was the co founder of Lookio, a mobile live chat platform that was acquired by Live Person just nine months after launch for millions of dollars.
So today I'd like to welcome back Grant Miller.
Grant, welcome to the show.

Grant Miller (03:00.690)
Omer, thanks so much for having me.

Omer (03:02.210)
So how are you doing?

Grant Miller (03:04.130)
Quite well.
Staying busy?

Omer (03:06.210)
Yeah, we were just briefly chatting before we started recording and I can't believe that it was 2015 when we spoke, it's like, has it really been almost 18 months?

Grant Miller (03:15.780)
It's like, wow, time flies when you're working your butt off.

Omer (03:20.140)
Yeah.
And the other thing I wanted to point out is that from 141 interviews that I've done so far, you are the first person that I've had back on the show.
So that's.
That's a milestone we'll have to.

Grant Miller (03:35.860)
Wow.
Well, I really enjoyed.
I enjoyed the first time, so.

Omer (03:40.170)
Good.
I'm glad to.

Grant Miller (03:40.890)
Glad to be back.

Omer (03:41.850)
Yeah.
Cool.
Now, if people want to listen to the first interview with Grant, just check out ConversionAid.com 75 and you can kind of get more information about what he did back with Live IO and kind of building that business and then going and selling it.
So let's talk a little bit about Replicated and just kind of remind folks what problem you guys are trying to solve with Replicated.
And also, how are you guys different to what other solutions there are out there, if there are any?

Grant Miller (04:19.050)
Sure.
So replicated enables SaaS applications to create an enterprise installable version of their product.
And basically what this means is that there are countless large enterprises who are looking to use SaaS applications, but are concerned about the security of the data that they would be sending to that application.
So they prefer to use them in a private cloud or in a private data center.
And basically that's a really hard problem for most kind of cloud native SaaS applications to solve.
GitHub has done it very well.
They have GitHub.com and they have GitHub Enterprise.
GitHub Enterprise is about half of their business, but they have a team of like 15 different engineers working on that product to make it really enterprise Y and solvable and do all the updates.
And.
And so Replicated is a platform that sort of offers all those features just in.
You can turn them on the click of a button.
So it's much easier to integrate with.
And for a company that has that demand but doesn't want to invest 15 engineers into it, Replicated is a great tool.

Omer (05:20.880)
So would it be fair to think of Replicated as like the Docker for enterprise apps?
Yeah.

Grant Miller (05:26.800)
Well, so we actually use Docker as part of the technology that enables application portability.
So we think about ourselves closer to Heroku or AWS for enterprise customers.
So basically, every time that One of these SaaS companies that's using Replicated is deploying a new version to the cloud, to AWS or Heroku, they actually deploy a version to Replicated, and then we help bring that Update down to all of their customers on prem environments or private cloud environments.

Omer (05:56.460)
So when we talked last time, I think you just closed a $1.5 million seed round.
And as I understand you guys closed a $5 million series round a few months ago.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Grant Miller (06:15.400)
Yeah, so actually we announced it this fall, but it would happen in the spring.
And basically we raised a $5 million Series A from the team at Amplify Partners.
And so Amplify Partners, great small firm, about, I think $200 million sized fund, had led investments in Chef and Datadog and Henayo and a bunch of other great, very infrastructure, software focused companies.
So super technical team there.
They really loved what we were doing.
We met Sunil and the other folks on his team and we just hit it off.
We didn't go off and try to raise a bunch of money.
They just saw what we were doing, created a great relationship with us, and then made a preemptive offer to lead the Series A.

Omer (07:03.490)
Did you raise any money for look IO?

Grant Miller (07:06.850)
We did.
We raised a very small advisory round of $200,000.

Omer (07:12.370)
Okay, so you had a little bit of experience with that in the nine months that you were running that business.

Grant Miller (07:18.610)
Yeah, I always like to say that during our first.
If building a company is like, you know, swimming across the ocean during look IO, we basically were just not drowning.

Omer (07:30.500)
That's a good analogy.
So tell us a little bit about, like replicated.
How sort of where are you guys at the moment?
I'd love to kind of get a sense of now that we kind of talked about 18 months ago in terms of, you know, earlier stages of the business.
How has that sort of played out over the last 18 months?
What, what are some of the things that you guys have been successful at and also what are some things that maybe were much harder for you to get done than you maybe anticipated?

Grant Miller (08:01.790)
Sure.
So 18 months ago, we were just starting to go live with our first customers.
So the technology hadn't been deployed by any enterprise IT organizations.
And it was probably being leveraged by one or two SaaS companies who were kind of getting ready to go live.
Fast forward 18 months and we have over 400 different enterprise IT organizations.
These are like, including 20 Fortune 100 companies who are actively deploying and managing applications through replicated.
And there's about 30 different SaaS applications that have integrated their products and are distributing through us.
So the growth has been great.
I think when you we're kind of creating this category so that there was nothing before us that did this.
And it's interesting when you're doing that because one, you see that customers that need it, need it really badly.
But at the same time we're educating the market and helping people understand why this is such an important technology and why they should be even considering offering an installable version of the product.

Omer (09:05.609)
What are some of, maybe some examples that you can share the SaaS applications that you guys are helping to get into the enterprise?

Grant Miller (09:14.540)
Sure.
So we work with a lot of really amazing developer tools.
So the first customer was a company called Travis CI, which is basically a continuous integration tool.
Really amazing team based in Berlin.
Next was npm, which is the Node package manager.
And if anyone that writes code with Node JS would be using NPM packages, but for larger enterprises, they might want to push those NPM packages to a private registry.
And so that's what NPM Enterprise product is.
And so they ship that, they replicate it.
We have some other folks, one called sysdig, which is a application performance monitoring tool.
There's a company up in Portland called JAMA Software, which is used by a lot of very big companies to do product requirements.
You know, the, the companies that are using it are still only 30.
Right.
So it's not like it's been adopted by, you know, all the largest SaaS applications.
We're still sort of grinding out the market and finding early customers and, and helping them become successful with the platform.

Omer (10:23.010)
And I noticed you got cucumber on the list as well.
I was trying to figure out how to use that a few months.

Grant Miller (10:28.090)
Yeah, yeah, it's, they're just kind of getting started and they've had some good success so far.
I think it's really a platform that any SaaS company can just sign up and start using and integrating with, but it requires a fairly technical team to do it.
Right.
This is a DevOps engineer, this is a lead engineer who's going to integrate and basically create an entirely new product line with the replicated version of their application.

Omer (10:57.500)
Now for people who may not be familiar with the enterprise space, can you help those people to understand why is it that an enterprise would not be happy to go to use GitHub.com and would want to use a self hosted version of GitHub inside their firewall?

Grant Miller (11:24.050)
Yeah, that's a great question.
And the answer really, it can sort of depend from customer to customer.
Right.
But generally the way that I describe it is I say it's risk and scale.
So large companies, enterprises have existing businesses.
Right.
And those existing businesses, they want to protect that line of business and protect it from risk.
So they are more risk adverse than startups who are, are willing to take on enormous risk in order to create a new business.
That's one key piece.
And then scale, these are very large organizations who have employees all over the world.
And so that scale you need to have different policies, you have different controls.
And a lot of that ends up playing into just working better in an environment that they can have more control over.
So for the companies that are using enterprise versions, control is a key factor.
And if you are the NSA or the CIA or a large bank or even a very high flying Bitcoin company.
So one of the end customers of Replicated that uses several different applications through us is a company called Coinbase.
And when you talk to their director of security, he just talks about how they're a target for hackers.
And so they would prefer to be able to use the same great applications that are available in the cloud, but manage them in infrastructure where they control the keys and they control the access to those servers.
So they're not actually running them generally in an on prem private data center.
They're running them in AWS or in, you know, Microsoft Azure, but they're just running it into their, in their account.
So they control who can access those, those machines.

Omer (13:17.760)
And I would say maybe like there's still concerns over data and proprietary information and things like that.
And I think maybe that's changing a little bit now with, you know, the Salesforce and, and Microsoft cloud and all of this kind of stuff.
But I think there's still this, this tendency with, with at least some enterprises to be very protective of whatever data they have and not have it sitting somewhere in some data center that they have no control over.

Grant Miller (13:45.400)
Sure.
Data security and who has access to that data is very important.
Ultimately there's other factors too around compliance.
So there are laws that you as a bank cannot have the personal identifiable information of your customers in other people's software, so you have to have control over it.
And there's a lot of consumer protection laws that do that.
And you see that throughout the world where if you're a German citizen, your data is not allowed to leave the country.
So people that want to serve software for German companies need to either have servers that are based in Germany or offer installable versions of their product.

Omer (14:31.780)
Okay, so in the last 18 months you've got 400 IT organizations using replicated.
You mentioned 20 Fortune 100 companies and there are about 30 different SaaS applications running on Replicated.
So That's a good stuff.
But what's been over that time?
What has been?
Maybe some of the harder challenges or things that haven't been that easy to implement, Maybe as you expected.

Grant Miller (15:04.200)
Yeah, I would definitely say that when we first created the company, we thought, we'll launch this amazing platform and we'll go sign up Slack and Dropbox and Evernote and all the biggest SaaS companies will start to use this right away.
Turns out that didn't happen at all.
They were too young, we're too risky.
They have too much of a growing business in the cloud.
They don't want to do enterprise.
You hear every excuse, but I spent so much time trying to get in front of the team at Slack and help them understand why offering this Slack enterprise version would be such an advantage for them, how they could really capture so much market share and it never really happened.
It took me a year to even get a meeting with one of the guys there.
That was definitely a challenge the entire time.
And I think ultimately it's just we were identifying a customer segment that maybe we'll be able to reach in this year or next year, in three years.
But as a brand new company, we were setting our sights a bit too high.

Omer (16:18.690)
What was the process you went through to go and sign up these IT organizations?
Did you guys hire a salesperson or a sales team?
Or was this you and your co founder?
Sorry, I forgot his name.

Grant Miller (16:33.970)
Mark.

Omer (16:34.450)
Mark, yeah.
So was it you and Mark going out there and trying to get in the door with all these different companies?
How did you sign them up?

Grant Miller (16:43.490)
So the way that replicated works is we sell directly to the SaaS vendors.
So, you know, these companies like NPM and Travis CI, et cetera, become our customer.
And then the enterprise IT organization.
Right.
The 400 are people that are buying or trialing their software, but they're doing that through a replicated installation.
So they create the licenses through replicated and help them do the installation with our product.
So we end up engaging or interfacing with these 400 different IT companies and being part of their infrastructure, but we're distributed by these different SaaS applications which as the runtime for their application.

Omer (17:30.050)
Got it.
So every time you sign up one of these SaaS applications onto your platform, they kind of become a VAR, a value added reseller for replicated.
Because they're basically going out there and combining replicated with sort of an enterprise version of their product and selling it to their customers.

Grant Miller (17:53.390)
Yeah.
And replicated really is just the platform that enables them to create their Enterprise version.
So it's kind of the foundation for their enterprise product.
And they're not really, they don't have to sell Replicated, they just sort of are selling their feature set as you can get everything you would get in the cloud, but you can have it privately installed on your data center and you can have it updated and replicated.
Basically provides all that enterprise Y functionality and then we also allow them to brand it with their logo and their colors.
So it really feels like their admin console for their enterprise product.
It doesn't really feel like it's a replicated product even though the layout's always the same for these admin consoles.

Omer (18:35.060)
Got it.
So GitHub Enterprise doesn't use replicated today.
Next year it could.
And theoretically from a customer perspective we'd never know what they were using because it was all we would see is GitHub Enterprise.

Grant Miller (18:51.290)
Right.

Omer (18:51.610)
We don't need to know the.

Grant Miller (18:53.130)
Exactly.
I mean there would be a tiny powered by replicated on one of the pages, but that would be it.
Got it.

Omer (18:59.050)
Okay, so really your focus has been on getting these SaaS applications on as customers.

Grant Miller (19:11.680)
Exactly.

Omer (19:13.120)
And so what is the business model for you guys?

Grant Miller (19:16.720)
So every time that One of these SaaS applications sells a license to a large enterprise, they pay us some licensing fee for that customer.
So generally it's between 5 to 10% of whatever they were charging that end customer.

Omer (19:31.840)
And then is that like a one off or a recurring thing?

Grant Miller (19:35.440)
It's for the recurring as long as that license is live with that customer.
So if they sold a license last year and then they renewed it again this year, we continue to get paid alongside of them.
Got it.

Omer (19:49.000)
Okay.
So one of the things that we were going to talk about was a new project that you've been working on called enterpriseready IO which is kind of related to what you are doing at Replicated.
And it's I guess is a project created by the replicated team.
But it's quite interesting in terms of the history of how you put this together and why you put this together.
So let's talk a little bit about that and if people are listening to this and they want to follow along, you can just go over to EnterpriseReady IO.
So it says this is an enterprise ready SaaS features guide created for people who build SaaS products.
So yeah, I mean, in your own words, tell us a little bit about what this is and why did you create this?

Grant Miller (20:42.430)
Yeah, that's a great question.
So Enterprise Ready is A Guide for SaaS Companies Founders Product Folks engineering teams there to build the features that enterprise buyers will love.
And the reason we built it and wishing we created this guide.
So it's not really, it's not a product, it doesn't have that much to do with replicated other than the fact that we're trying to help software companies sell enterprise versions of their products.
So the more of these features they have, it's kind of like a rising tide.
Right.
We think that the more SaaS companies start to recognize that enterprises have different requirements, they'll start to create these features inside of their cloud hosted versions and eventually they'll be asked for an enterprise version of their product that can be installed and, and hopefully everyone chooses replicated at that point.
So that's kind of the underlying business reason why we did it.
But there's other reasons as well.
Right.
So we see the entire conversation about how to create enterprise software has been very focused on how to sell that software.
Right.
So all of the big blogs in the enterprise SaaS space are about how to close the deal, how to find the champion, how to run the sale, and we're product guys.
And so we think about what are the features that would make enterprises really excited to use your product and to buy it and potentially onboard themselves.
And that's really what Enterprise Ready is all about.
It's a product focused guide to building these different features that will differentiate your startup plan from your enterprise plan.

Omer (22:30.970)
And this doesn't necessarily have to be something that you have to use, replicated for, or that you have to create a version of a product that sits inside an enterprise's firewall.
Presumably these are important aspects of an enterprise ready SaaS application, regardless of where it's hosted or how it's kind of put together.

Grant Miller (23:05.760)
Exactly.
Yeah.
So there's 11 key features that we cover and the only one of them is actually the deployment model.
Like where is it deployed, Is it deployed in their data center or in a private cloud that you're hosting for them?
Or how is it deployed?
So that's only one of the 11.
The other 10 are really deployment agnostic.
Right.
Things like an audit log or how to do single sign on or role based access control or change management.
These are concepts that apply no matter where an enterprise is using that application.
Yeah.

Omer (23:37.800)
So with each of these 11 features that you talked about, you can kind of come here and sort of drill down into each one of those to kind of understand what that feature means, what some of the expectations are with enterprise customers.
There are some examples of what other companies have done There.
So there's a lot of useful information here.
How did you put all this information together?

Grant Miller (24:13.690)
For about a year, I spent random nights and weekends at my house writing this content.
So I wrote about 90% of it myself and my co founder Mark wrote a couple of the pieces around security and a couple other folks from the team contributed reviews for different companies.
But basically I think about enterprise software night and day and started to formulate some of these ideas and wanted to be able to capture them.
Ultimately, it's based off of my experience.
This is something that when I sold my first company, look IO to LivePerson, we came into that organization and we didn't really understand enterprise software.
I still remember being in a product meeting and people were talking about SSO and RBAC and all these acronyms.
I had no idea what they meant and trying to find information about them online.
There was just all these mixed messages about what these things were and they meant different things to different people.
And I just, I was lost.
And so part of what this guide is doing is creating a common vernacular for enterprise IT folks, for product people at SaaS companies, for the sales teams at SaaS companies to actually talk about what they really mean when they talk about these different features and provide the clear definition and clear examples for what those requirements are and then what that looks like when you actually implement it for the business.
So you could see this as a grants guide to my former self.
Right.
This is the guide that I wish I had four years ago.

Omer (26:02.340)
Right?
Yeah.
I think that concept of having a, a kind of a common language is.
It's so important that it may not be an issue.
If you are a startup and you've got, you know, you've got a team of 10, 20, 30 people, maybe it isn't that hard because you kind of all know what you're talking about.
But once you get into a bigger organization or you're talking to an enterprise, it's amazing what different words can mean, what the same word can mean in so many different ways to people, and how that can really slow down getting to a decision, getting to resolution, getting clarity, unless you have that sort of common reference.
And I think that acronyms are some of the worst culprits when it comes to that.
And I remember when I was at Microsoft, there was this story of, of Bill Gates going into a meeting and somebody was presenting to him and they kept on using this acronym, csa.
And later Bill admitted he said he didn't even know what CSA meant, but he thought, well, if he just stays quiet Then after a while, he's probably just going to figure out what it means.
And he went through the whole meeting and he still couldn't figure it out.
And so he stops these people and he says, well, can you tell me what CSA means?
Because I'm not familiar with that acronym.
And they were like, that's your job title, Bill, Chief Software Architect.
And he was like, oh, okay, so it happens to everybody, right?

Grant Miller (27:40.760)
Yeah.
Elon Musk's book, there's a funny piece there where he sent an email, the entire company at SpaceX called acronyms seriously suck.
The acronym for that is obviously ass and telling people to not be an ass and don't use acronyms because they just create confusion.

Omer (27:59.820)
Right.

Grant Miller (28:00.620)
And they also, they do something which I think is actually worse than create confusion, which is they create an in group and an out group where the people who know what it means can talk about it, but it excludes other people from the conversation.
People who probably have a very valid opinion or viewpoint on that thing, they just don't know what it's being called.
So I hate the use of acronyms.
I always try to avoid it, but corporate jargon is rife with them.
So let's move away from that.
Let's create concrete examples for what we're talking about.
My dream for Enterprise Ready is that a young product manager is trying to sell to an enterprise and that IT guy is asking him for an audit log and he's like, okay, well here's what I think about an audit log.
And they can't find the right way to agree on it or even how to term it correctly or what.
They just can't get on the same page and they open up Enterprise Ready and they look at the guide and look at the feature requirements and they come to an agreement because they're able to see examples and able to see the exact requirements they need.
And then everybody gets it built and they get it done and the product guy only has to do one iteration and the end customer is happy because he gets exactly what he wanted and it's a really great version of it.

Omer (29:18.390)
Yeah.
Cool.
Now, we obviously don't have time to go into each one of those 11 features and, and really, if, if listeners want to get that level of depth and knowledge, then you should go to enterpriseready IO and read what's there.
But you do have some sort of case studies and so I think it would be good to pick out a couple and maybe talk about two of those features and sort of how they have been implemented in an organization and maybe some of the what they've done well and maybe some of the lessons they've learned or maybe areas of improvement still.
So one of the sort of case studies here I can see is with Slack and you did some analysis on the Product Assortment, so maybe we can kind of talk about that.
Does that sound good?

Grant Miller (30:17.030)
Yeah, that's perfect.

Omer (30:18.150)
So why don't we start by just what is Product Assortment?

Grant Miller (30:22.070)
Yeah, so Product Assortment, what's interesting is it's actually this kind of meta feature within Enterprise Ready because it helps define a lot of the other features.
And basically the idea is that I listened to your talk with the Price Intelligently guys and they talk about the idea of creating these pricing plans, then adding different features in seeing which features make customers want to buy and spend more.
And Product Assortment is just the idea that you're going to create, you know, your free tier, your standard tier, your plus tier, your enterprise tier, and then you're going to differentiate each of those plans, you know, from $0 a month to $7 a month to, you know, 15 to 30 bucks a month with different features and with, you know, maybe, you know, so there's all these different things that will entice someone to spend more money per user if you include them as a different plan.
And the key to Product Assortment is that it allows you to offer a very feature rich product that a big enterprise customer might want and one make them pay more for all of those features that they're using, but to allow you to offer a simple version that doesn't have to be so cluttered to small companies who don't need, you know, complex authentication systems and audit logs, they can just use the product and its core features.

Omer (31:48.820)
Okay, so I think in terms of like different packages and sort of pricing tiers, I think that will be familiar to most SaaS founders, whether you have a free plan or another couple of tiers.
But how does this apply to the enterprise?
Is this really about thinking about how a enterprise plan would be different to what you offer smaller companies?

Grant Miller (32:19.400)
Exactly.
It's just the idea that you need to create this secondary plan in order to reach these enterprise buyers.
And what are the features that you would find in that plan?
Right, so the things that we defined as Enterprise Ready are the things that create Product Assortment.
Right, so single sign on and audit logging and you know, reporting features.
These are all the features that, you know, if you're, if you are a, you know, a 10 person team, you're not going to look at a bunch of reports and analyze how much people are using your software and try to predict usage.
But if you're a 10,000 person team, that might be someone's job is to analyze the productivity of the organization and using the input from your application could be a really critical data source for them.
So they might need to be able to see those reports and they're willing to pay more to have access to that sort of reporting and analytics functionality.

Omer (33:14.920)
Right.
So let's kind of talk about Slack and how their sort of dealing with product assortments.
So from what you guys looked at, what did you, what were your sort of takeaways or learnings from that?

Grant Miller (33:32.980)
Yeah, so Slack, if you just go to Slack's pricing page, right, you can sort of see perfect product assortment laid out here.
And you know, on the enterprise ready site we kind of categorize each of those different features.
So they have a line item, right?
The things that differentiate the standard plan from the free plan from the plus plan.
They just say it's things like OAuth via Google or SAML based authentication or 99.9% guaranteed uptime SLA.
They're identifying all these different little features that if you want to use them you have to pay more for.
This is a really critical way for them to capture more value from their biggest customers or while still being offered the same great service to small companies who then maybe grow into becoming more, you know, higher value companies over time.

Omer (34:26.319)
Right.
Because presumably when you talk about single sign on, it wouldn't really cost them anything extra to be make that available to all the plans.
Right.
But, but probably if you're on a free plan, maybe you don't care about that.
And it kind of goes back to what you mentioned earlier about price intelligently and the conversation I had there with Patrick Campbell about putting the right features in the right place.
So the perceived value makes sense for the right type of customer.

Grant Miller (35:02.690)
Exactly.
And it's just trying to understand exactly what those features are and then how to feature gate them.
The other advantage again is you don't want to clutter up the experience.
The settings page for your free tier should be far less complex than the settings page for the enterprise plan where there's someone who's literally hooking this thing into a splunk system into their okta single sign on service and they're doing all these different nifty configurations for whenever someone signs up.
They get this specific access to these channels.
You just, you don't need that much complexity for smaller users.
But in order to reach the enterprise you need to have those options and you need to build it really well.

Omer (35:50.130)
Yeah, and I can see on their pricing page they've got Slack for teams and then they've got the three plans, the free, standard and plus.
And then they've got a separate tab saying Slack for Enterprise coming soon.
And then they've listed a bunch of other things there like active directory integration, a unified admin tool for managing security compliance and things like that.
So it sounds like it's not something that's ready today, but they're thinking about how they go beyond the plus plan to specifically addressing the needs of an enterprise.

Grant Miller (36:29.190)
But even the plus plan has features around integrations with SAML based authentication and doing compliance exports.
So that, yeah, I'm sure that they have a lot of happy customers who are paying more and paying that plus plan and those are probably bigger companies.
But yeah, the Slack Enterprise product has been coming soon for quite some time.

Omer (36:49.740)
So do you know if this is a Slack for Enterprise type like the GitHub example where it would be hosted within a customer's firewall, or is this just another higher tier plan that these guys are creating?

Grant Miller (37:03.670)
So I believe it's just another higher tier plan.
Generally, if the enterprise product is going to be available in the way that GitHub Enterprise is, they'll have a line item here that says available on PREM or in your private data center.
So the fact that that's not there makes me assume that this will just be a version that you can roll out with additional security and compliance features.
Their.com version.

Omer (37:32.180)
You also had something in there about role based access control and you kind of had a little mini case study there for HubSpot.
So why don't we talk about that a little bit.
And I think, you know, certainly some startup or SaaS founders will be familiar with the concept of at least some level of role based access.
But it would be good just again to kind of explain to everybody what that means and again sort of how that maybe might be different for an enterprise customer.
And then maybe we can look at the HubSpot example.
So let's start with that.
I mean, what is role based access control?

Grant Miller (38:14.100)
Yeah, so role based access control is basically the idea that you have different team members, people in your organization that need different levels of access to features in a product.
Maybe someone needs to be able to see the reports, maybe someone needs to be.
The most basic example is who's the admin versus who's the user.
So an admin can add other accounts, can delete accounts, can reset passwords, can do all these sort of administrative functionalities and a standard user doesn't have access to any of those features.
So that's like a very basic version.
But within larger applications, enterprise facing applications, there has to be this granularity of what roles and what features each user actually has access to.
So HubSpot, for example, I think they by default have five roles that you can select from.
And so that's things like an administrator which we talked about, or you can be a business analyst, which means you have access to the, to see the reporting, or you can be an author, which gives you the ability to create some content.
So they give you all these different options and basically by doing that it sort of guarantees that, you know, everybody on the team isn't creating new accounts, everybody on the team isn't looking at all of your customers data.
And it allows you to sort of implement what's, what's considered in the enterprise a security concept of like the least privilege.
Right.
So you want to give everybody the least amount of access possible to do their job in order to make sure that your data, your customer's data doesn't go slipping out with somebody who shouldn't have ever had access to it.

Omer (40:02.340)
Yeah, that's a good way to think about it.
I think in terms of leased access because when you kind of start out and you build a product, it's the easiest thing to do is just say, oh, this is a user and this is the admin and that's kind of gets the job done.
But once you start to understand how your customers are using the product and maybe how they're working with their own team and the kind of the workflow that they have in place, or whether they're using, you know, in house full time employees or they're using freelancers, then the pictures quickly starts to get quite complicated and you don't want your primary customer, the one who's, who's paying you for the product, to give the same level of access that they have to a freelancer that they just hired for two weeks to help them on a project.

Grant Miller (40:55.420)
That's a great point.
And that's exactly it.
And you know the.
So the problem is like as a founder who built a SaaS application previously, my previous opinion was like, oh well, screw that, everybody should have access to everything because that's how they can be most effective and we shouldn't try to keep people from being able to do their jobs.
The problem is that while I think that's a really good concept for small companies who have an Openness policy.
There are larger companies where they are legally prohibited from doing that.
They have to implement these, these concepts of lash control.
And my former self, right, the sort of like, screw you, I'm going to make it open to everybody was just making their job harder and it really lacked empathy for what they're actually trying to get done.
So what we're trying to do now is spread the message that, look, you can build role based access control and you can give that functionality to your largest customers and they can decide how to implement it and when they do it, don't build it in such a way that you hate this feature and you're not going to make it good.
You should build it in a way that still feels like you really care about how that IT administrator is using your product.
And then what is the end user experience once someone doesn't have access to something?
So that's one of the things when we talk about in our review of HubSpot and is they seem to have really forgotten about what happens after you've turned off the access to a feature.
Right.
So you know, generally if you turn off access to a feature, you should message that to the end user who can't, you know, who can't do that action.
They can't create that report or they can't do that report.
But HubSpot just sort of leaves the buttons on there and you know, you can see that there's an error at the top of the message or the top of the page but doesn't tell you.
One, it should hide the button.
Two, it should tell you, oh, you don't have access to do this, but instead it just tells you 404error or request not found type error messages that just don't make sense and they really leave the user from having the best experience possible.

Omer (43:11.270)
That's a good point.
I guess.
One kind of role based access control example that maybe a lot of people might be familiar with would be WordPress.
If you have a WordPress site, then every WordPress site has this kind of concept that when you create new user accounts you're either an admin, what is it, an editor or an author or whatever.
And in principle that works well because if you have somebody who is, I can't remember what it is, but yeah, whichever one is, there's kind of like a low, lowest kind of tier one where you can have people come in and, and they can kind of contribute to an existing blog post, maybe that's, that's currently a draft, but they can't create new content and they can't delete content.
So all of that kind of makes sense.
But where I've seen that fall apart really is sort of a really sort of poor execution as well.
And I don't think this is necessarily WordPress.
I think this is kind of more to do with the all these plugins that get developed by third parties for the WordPress platform that I've used a number of these and they kind of have this very little thought put into those that you install a plugin.
And well, number one, it's all driven by those roles that you've defined.
So you can actually go in and pick a plugin and say, okay, within this I want this to be available and I don't, I don't want this to be available.
So you get into a scenario where you install the plugin and either it's available and people at all levels can see everything there, or they just switch the thing completely off.
And so even though you want somebody to be able to do something specific within there, they can't do that unless you upgrade them to an admin.
So that's kind of one example that I've gone through myself, which maybe it's not an enterprise ready type problem, but I think it's still something that is worth learning from.
And if you're ever into WordPress, go in there and try some of this stuff out and do these different plugins with these roles.

Grant Miller (45:22.810)
And it's a great point because I think what's happened there is probably the developer of that plugin thinks about using WordPress as an admin only, right?
Or using it with a team, two or three people, and they don't think, I mean, there are very large enterprises that are running their blogs and their content, their websites on WordPress and I'm sure there's a huge amount of demand for plugins that are actually enterprise ready, right.
That are taking those roles and access levels into account and doing those features because it matters so much to these big companies.
And a lot of times as developers and product people, we just don't understand their requirements and why they want that, because that's not us.

Omer (46:06.660)
Yeah, I'll kind of share.
One example that comes to mind is at one point I ran a sweepstake and I think it was using, was it like the King Sumo Kingsumo plugin or something like that?
And so you have a sweepstake and you know, people can come in, they type in their name, their email address, they kind of enter whatever the sweepstake is and once you go into WordPress and you go into this, the, the, the access this kind of plugin.
You can see this entire list of everybody, right?
All these email addresses, all these names, everything.
Which is great if you want to run the sweepstake, right.
And you want to be able to pick somebody.
But the other thing I found was that if I was letting somebody have access to the same blog, and maybe they were, the only reason they were getting access to the blog was because they were submitting a guest post.
And so all they should be able to do is go into the WordPress site and have the option to create a draft guest post that gets approved by somebody on my end.
But these people were going in and they were seeing all the sweepstake entries and all the email addresses and everything.
Right?
So that was kind of like just one example of this.
This isn't working here.
So I think, you know, as we're obviously talking about enterprise, but I think it just goes to show that even outside of the enterprise there are some very real world examples where you need to be thinking about this with your SaaS product, whether you're going to sell to an enterprise or not.

Grant Miller (47:40.150)
Yeah, it's a great point.
And I do think that these are features.
Single sign on, right?
Like, what's your preferred way to sign into any service?
I would love everything to just allow me to sign in with Google Auth because I find it so much easier than trying to manage passwords and tossing a new username and password into one password every time time and looking it up.
And so Google Auth, it's like you can have, just give them access to who you are and then log in that way and you don't have to create a new credential every time you do that.

Omer (48:10.770)
The worst thing, I used to use Google Auth a lot and the worst thing that I ever did with my Google Apps for business account was I renamed it.
Well, I renamed it and I switched it to a different domain, but it was basically the same account.
And that completely screwed me up because now I couldn't log into anything and you can't change the password because you have to go anyway.
That was a. I could kind of rant on about that for a long time.
But yeah, don't, don't ever do that.
If you use Google sign on, don't change it.
Okay, cool.
So, all right, is there anything else you wanted to kind of share with the audience about Enterprise Ready IO?

Grant Miller (48:53.100)
No, I mean, I think the other important part about it is that it's open source.
Right.
So we created this entire guide and all these different features, but we open sourced it, so we accept contributions.
Anyone can go in there, tweak something, make a pull request, you can fork it, you can create your own version, share it with your product team, sort of use it as the template for how you're going to build these different features into your products.
So it's out there in the world and, you know, we really encourage people to run with it.

Omer (49:23.510)
Okay, cool.
Well, thanks for sharing that.
All right, so we did the lightning round back in 2015, but as it's tradition, I think we should do it again and see if your answers have changed.
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?

Grant Miller (49:40.390)
Think less, do more.

Omer (49:42.950)
What book would you recommend to our

Grant Miller (49:44.510)
audience and why so many good ones?
My favorite early one, good to great.
But then there's so many recent ones like 0 to 1 or the hard Thing About Hard Things.
I mentioned the Elon bio recently.
I thought that was amazing.
The Bezos bio is great.
I think.
Just read about business and you can't go wrong.

Omer (50:03.180)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Grant Miller (50:08.060)
The ability to grind out work.

Omer (50:11.990)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Grant Miller (50:17.750)
This is a weird one.
Basically, when everyone leaves the office, I have a pretty nice speaker system set up that I just crank up a DJ called Mayan Warrior who performs at Burning man every year.
And it's this very kind of tribal, like, Ravey music that just puts me in a zone and I just work for the next five hours on anything that needs to get done.

Omer (50:46.070)
Wow, what's that guy called?
D.J.
what?

Grant Miller (50:48.950)
Mayan warrior.

Omer (50:50.630)
Mayan Warrior.

Grant Miller (50:51.990)
It's the best I listen to it.
It's like, oh, puts me in such a good work mode.

Omer (50:58.710)
All right, I'm going to check that out.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Grant Miller (51:08.340)
I want to enable driverless cars to have exercise equipment built into them.
So instead of ordering an Uber that's a Prius, I want to order an Uber that has a rowing machine or an elliptical or some type of so I can do my exercise on my way to somewhere.

Omer (51:28.660)
That's not a bad idea.
What's interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Grant Miller (51:35.260)
I have a superpower that I can turn on whenever I need and I have unlimited energy.

Omer (51:42.620)
Is that something you've always had?

Grant Miller (51:46.460)
I think it's something I developed in the last 15 years.
I don't know, maybe it's always whenever I need to, I can just go as long as needs possible and hike up huge mountains or do anything.
Put one more foot in front of the other, type one more email out.
That's my superpower.
Sweet.

Omer (52:09.750)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Grant Miller (52:14.950)
My friends call me the Sultan of fun.
And that's because I love to do activities with friends.
Right.
So biking, hiking, paddleboarding, beach football.
Like, I'll organize these things and then I get everyone to be involved and take them seriously and really have fun with it.
Like I.
So that's why it's the salt and the fun, because I ensure and force everyone to have fun.

Omer (52:41.870)
I know who I'm going to look up when I'm in LA next time.
You're still in la, right?

Grant Miller (52:45.710)
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Omer (52:47.070)
Cool.
All right, great.
Well, thank you for coming back and joining me again and kind of updating our audience on what's been going on with replicated IO and what you've been doing with EnterpriseReady IO.
So if, as I said, if you want to check out that resource, just go over to enterpriseready IO and if you want to find about more about Replicated, you can go to replicated IO or replicated.com.
you've got both domains.
Right, of course, that's cool.
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Grant Miller (53:30.020)
Yeah, I mean, just shoot me an email.
Granteplicated.com I kind of use that as my quasi to do list.
I get to everything that comes through there at some point, at least.

Omer (53:41.220)
All right, great.
Well, thank you very much for coming back, sharing your time, and I wish you all the best and maybe we'll get together again soon.
And when you've sold Replicated or something crazy like that.

Grant Miller (53:56.440)
Yeah, maybe after the series B, hopefully.
Thanks so much, Omer.
This is a pleasure.

Omer (54:02.120)
Cheers.