A fresh perspective on the stages of building a SaaS business

August 4, 2021

EP24: June Analytics SaaS from Idea to Seed and Enterprise SaaS “Fun”

Josh and Nate discuss two topics of interest. We dive into how June.so (the analytics company) went from idea to seed round and chat about all the fun Josh and his team are having with enterprise SaaS selling.
Searching For SaaS Podcast
Searching For SaaS Podcast
EP24: June Analytics SaaS from Idea to Seed and Enterprise SaaS "Fun"
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Transcript

Josh: [00:00:00] Hey Nate, how are you this week?
Nate: [00:00:01] I’m doing good weather. It’s beautiful. Over here. I just had lunch outside on the porch. It’s a pretty good day.
Josh: [00:00:07] Nice. Are we ever not doing good?
Nate: [00:00:11] yeah, this is true. Now sometimes, you know, the slog of, you know, despair when nobody cares about your idea or, you know, the world falls apart.
Josh: [00:00:21] Yeah, but I don’t think maybe those days where aren’t recording
Nate: [00:00:24] this, this is true. This is true. How are things with you?
Josh: [00:00:27] Pretty good. I just got back from lunch to actually met up at a product manager from another company, which was interesting. So I bet I met there was, there were two guys asking in a slack channel about referral stuff. Yeah. We kind of serendipitously serendipitously met like the three of us on the zoom maybe a month or two ago.
And I think one of them ended up becoming a customer. Cause I was like, I’ll just brain dub, kind of how I see the industry, which was fun. And also like I’m in the position where I don’t feel like I have to sell. I’m just like kind of explaining the landscape. And then I realized. Actually we jointly realized one of the guys was in Maryland and I’m like, wait, what you’re were like close by.
So then we scheduled, Hey, let’s just actually meet up for lunch and have kind of a, more of a, you know, get to know each other type of thing. So that was pretty fun. I haven’t really done as much of that, you know, post COVID, so was nice.
Nate: [00:01:23] Yeah, that’s awesome. I almost forgot what, like meeting in person is like,
Josh: [00:01:28] And then got some brownie points, brought my my wife home, some, some carry out from there too. So,
Nate: [00:01:35] Oh, nice. Nice, solid.
Cool. So what did you want to talk about today?
Josh: [00:01:41] Today I thought we’d kind of mix up the format a little bit. I know we’ve been having some interview episodes and we’ve had a couple like Nate interviewing Josh episodes. But I think kind of doing a little bit of a check-in on how we’re doing. And also we thought it’d be a nice idea to each of us to bring some topics we’d be interested in talking about.
So I know we listed a couple in a Google doc and my topic for the day is we’ll call it the slog. Since you already mentioned slog the slog of enterprise SAAS and sell it. What’s there. So got a little bit of rant and a little bit of insights and experience there. And obviously you can, you do a good job kind of pulling on those threads and asking good questions about it.
So did you have a topic as well?
Nate: [00:02:30] Yeah recently I read a article that you actually, you suggested which was about June the analytics company and kind of their launch from their story. And they did a nice article on it with trolling to in the show notes. And thought maybe we could chat about that.
Josh: [00:02:44] Yeah, that was one that definitely teased my brain out and thought it was a good, a good kind of almost self case study story, but they really got into some nice details that hopefully we’ll get it to discussing it.
Nate: [00:02:58] That sounds like fun. Yeah. So so where are things that for you, right.
Josh: [00:03:02] So for referral rock things are going well. We got a big release coming up soon. So a lot of things that we probably have been in designed for almost a year now, if that makes sense, a lot of big UI changes, but due to, as you know, in software development, there’s still a. Certain amount of dependencies or pecking order, that order of operations, that things need to happen to finally get it all out the door.
So we do have a lot of pent-up energy of the product that is a lot of them are like dark features that haven’t been released well tested, but just like over the next few weeks is going to be a, hopefully a big game changer for us. But, but it’s it’ll be, it’ll be fun. I think we’ll, that could be another topic.
Dig a little bit more into, on another episode. So
Nate: [00:03:51] That’s that’s exciting, especially when you have like, I’m sure as a founder, you’re like, oh, I’ve got all these ideas. This is So
awesome. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. And then it’s like, okay, now we don’t wait for six months for development. And then really, you
Josh: [00:04:02] you never think it’s going to be six months, right? So,
Nate: [00:04:06] yeah. There you go. How hard can it be?
Those famous last words.
Josh: [00:04:10] But yeah. How about, how about you? How has your Few trips and a little bit of time off, but how stuffing.
Nate: [00:04:17] Yeah, I’ve been doing a little bit of camping and I’ve got a few days of the cottage booked with some family. So having a bit of relaxation, which is which is really nice been doing a lot of consulting work lately. That’s really been ramped up, but now I’m kind of an all again. So I’m really thankful for that so I can keep focusing on ideation and yeah, I’ve been trying to work on working on, on validating new ideas and.
Yeah, that’s been making some progress and I think we’ll have some things to talk about that down the road a little ways.
Josh: [00:04:44] Cool. Cool. Why don’t we, I know we kind of talked about which topic we want to cover first. I would say let’s cover June 1st because. I would say enterprise SAS headbanging, or as we call it be of less interest to the general public. It could be somewhat interesting, but I think the June thing might be a little more topical for our audience.
And so if they don’t care for the enterprise SAS off stuff, they can cut out. Right.
Nate: [00:05:14] Yeah, there you go. Good call. Yeah, So we’ll link to the, the, the June article in the show notes. So you can see what we’re talking about, and it might actually be helpful to read that before you listen to the rest of this. But basically. They kind of went through their whole history of like starting, starting till today.
And I think today they’ve got around race for 2 million or something like that. Sorry.
Josh: [00:05:37] that sounds about right.
Nate: [00:05:40] Yeah. And so they kind of talk about like how they, how they make made that transition from idea to getting started and all that. And I know there’s a kind of a few interesting things that I thought of that. The one thing that I saw was they, they actually never built a landing page until they had their first 10 customers.
Josh: [00:05:58] do you want, do you want to back up for a second and explain at least in your words of what they, what they do to cut it right. Have our audience habit, paint a picture, a bit of it. You, you did mention analytics, but analytics is pretty wide.
But, but,
Nate: [00:06:10] Yeah. This is true.
Josh: [00:06:11] so how would you describe them?
Nate: [00:06:14] I’m probably going to butcher it. They’re going to cringe if they hear this, but it’s basically, from what I understood, it’s really simple analytics that you can like you could plug into segued metrics and pull out All the data from there and have nice reports without any code.
Like it’s tailored for like a project manager type person and You, can analyze like funnels and feature, feature rollouts and stuff like that.
Josh: [00:06:36] All right,
let me correct. You,
Nate: [00:06:37] Did I get that?
Josh: [00:06:38] Pretty close, pretty close. So segment not segment tricks. So so segment, which is bigger and as a Twilio company. And I think segment, if our audience doesn’t know is I think what they describe as a CDP now, these days, like customer data platform. So where you’re sending essentially.
Like user data user like attributes in addition to event data they, some of them more advanced ones have like company entities. So a lot of it kind of mirrors kind of, kind of CRM types of entity and objects with, with the beds and stuff like that. So yeah, w what I, what I found really interesting is how they just already buttoned down and only focused purely on segment and just like, Hey, We’re not going to try to reinvent the wheel everywhere.
Let’s just attach onto something. I think that came up in their product discovery or customer discovery kind of practices. And like what I found really interesting about the article as a whole was one it’s very recent. So it’s like the recency bias of, you know, even me telling a story about referral rock from when I got started five years ago.
My brain has shifted. Like it’s probably, you know, I’m telling myself a story that may or may not be as exact as it was to the day. So I feel like this one was pretty recent. In addition to it being like very detailed on the kind of dusk customer discovery front, that’s what dawned on me as like something interesting to send to you.
Nate: [00:08:15] Yeah, I found that really useful because a lot of people don’t talk about those early days. Or at least they don’t talk about it in a meaningful way. It’s like, oh yeah, we did hard work. And then we got customers. It’s like, well, that’s great. Which hard work did you do?
Josh: [00:08:29] Right. And I, how I even found this was I don’t think I found the article first. I actually found the product first. I don’t remember exactly where I found actually I might’ve found it on Twitter,
honestly. So I think
Nate: [00:08:41] Hmm.
Josh: [00:08:42] Nick Franklin, who’s the CEO of ChartMogul, which I do follow on Twitter and, and I think.
He actually even tweeted about being like an angel investor or something in it. And I was like, Ooh, this looks interesting. And the way he even endorsed it was, he’s like, Hey, like my belief in, you know, the data and the analytics and side of SAS and things like that. And then of course I, like, I was like, okay, he invested in what, what makes this thing so interesting.
So I dug in a little deeper. Saw what they were doing. And it honestly has hit a perfect chord to what I’ve been sort of doing with referral rock too. Like we’ve been digging more into the onboarding analytics. We don’t use segment. But I actually might start using segment just to use June. So it kind of hit from a business case.
Like it resonated right away with me, the pain of trying to get these, these types of dashboards and why reinvent the wheel.
Nate: [00:09:39] Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of interesting. It’s like their initial thought, like their initial pain that they were looking at was just getting proper analytics proper customer analytics and people like actually use it. That information in a meaningful way. They didn’t go into it being like, let’s add something first Sigma metrics.
So Segment tricks. Am I saying it wrong segment.
They didn’t go into it saying we want to integrate with segment. They went into it saying, we think that people are having trouble getting data out of their analytics platform. You know, what can we do about that? And then customer interview said to them, you know, we should focus on this particular.
Josh: [00:10:19] Right. And the interesting part too, is the I think, I think both co-founders were previous Intercom. Employees. So I think that also in this space, like it gave them a lot of insights to sort of the data that was collected inside Intercom, because Intercom does have those same entities, like in terms of customer data can relate or a user data that can be under a company entity and also have events on the, on these, these sort of records.
Honestly, that was, that was even the impetus of some of the questions I had for him because I signed up for their trial and then got the nice Foundry would you love to love to chat with you too? Which I was like, I think I will, which doesn’t happen as often when you sign up for things.
Nate: [00:11:09] Yeah,
Josh: [00:11:09] I got to talking to him and talked about the early days and I was like, yeah, I’ve been an Intercom user for so long.
And I was like, why haven’t they. Like built out more of these things. They have the, they have my data, they have like my event data. Why can’t they, they tie these things together. So I think with the founder, I kata, we both sort of lamented in the, in the, the pain of it. He’s like, yeah, they just, you know, inner, calm, never prioritize really sending the data anywhere else.
They were only using it for their own internal purposes in terms of, yeah. your messaging do all your things, which makes a lot of sense. But obviously something like segment their whole business is collecting and moving the data. And so, yeah, it just made a much, much better match for something like adding the analytics layer on top.
When you have a compatible partner that actually is in the business of sending the data out.
Nate: [00:12:05] Right. And that, that probably is what kind of limited their options too. Like if I’m not sure about the Intercom’s availability, but it sounds like they’re, they aren’t exposing that, that analytics. That cause they originally saw the problem at Intercom. So you would think that they would integrate with Intercom if they could.
Right. And maybe that was part of what guided them towards
Josh: [00:12:26] Yeah, I think so. Because even looking at, cause this was the problem I had. Like I have all my stuff in Intercom have not started using segment yet, but at the same point, I’m like, Oh, man, it would be great if they could just pull it out and then even looking at Intercom’s API, there isn’t an easy way to do it.
So I even kind of monkeyed around with the API a bit and it’s like, ah, this is going to be a pain, like,

Nate: [00:12:49] Okay.
Josh: [00:12:50] so.
Nate: [00:12:52] Hmm, maybe there’s an opportunity there who knows. Another thing that I thought was kind of interesting was that like I said earlier that they, they didn’t, they did all these customer interviews and they didn’t ever build a landing page or anything like that until they had a number of paying customers.
I found that really interesting. Like they actually managed to get 10 people to sign up without having any marketing budget.
Josh: [00:13:16] Yeah.
Nate: [00:13:17] You know, maybe that’s maybe that’s just better validation. I don’t know.
Josh: [00:13:21] I, it probably, I mean, I guess I could see two schools of thought, like kind of trying to find the people. And, but I think you’ve experienced, you’ve personally experienced this as well with like landing pages. You’re trying to, it’s sort of a chicken and the egg type of thing. It’s like, okay, can I write a landing pages that compelling and send it out?
Or can I more easily recover and talk to a person about their wants and needs? Try to almost walk back into what are those, what are the pain points? Let me talk to 10 people and find out what just what’s what’s the commonality and the pain point in this kind of subject matter area. And then now if I, let me see if it, I got it correct by distilling it down to a landing page and then even sending it back to them and saying, Hey, like, is this what you meant?
You know, maybe the words weren’t exact. person, but could have been different versus, you know, the other nine people.
Nate: [00:14:21] Yeah. Yeah. And it seems like it would be a lot more efficient, like, especially if you. If you found a way to get, I think they are saying they got a hundred people to talk to them. If you found a way to get those a hundred people to talk to you I feel like you’d be so much farther ahead when it comes to actually building the product or in terms of like coming up with a marketing material because you’ve after a hundred people, like, unless it’s all noise, there’s gotta be some themes in there that you can pull.
Wow.
Josh: [00:14:48] Yeah. I mean, D helped me with the article. Did it, did they have the idea first was the first like thesis OD just, Hey, there’s all this. Data and you want to get more analytics, product analytics out of it. Now tell me about your pain with that. Is that, is that how it started? Okay, so they did start with that thesis.
It wasn’t just like, Hey, I’m going to talk to 50 product managers and try to figure out their pain. It’s like, okay, now I’m really trying to find a needle in a haystack and commonality.
Nate: [00:15:21] no. Like, I think, I think you’d have a hard time getting people on a call, like getting a hundred people on a call to just talk about who knows what I think it’s, it would be a lot easier if you come at them with a pain that’s at least somewhat relevant. Right.
Josh: [00:15:34] Yeah. So it’s almost like a dead, so it’s like you at least had a thesis. Now let me test this thesis with who I think is the target customer. And now let me. Refine it down to in their words, refine it down to where the real pain points are and where the opportunity really is.
Nate: [00:15:52] Yeah. Yeah. And I guess what I really appreciated about the way the article presented it was that it was very much like we haven’t even, we haven’t written any code. We haven’t done any product planning. We’re just testing out a thesis. And it was like that for their first. It sounded like it was like that for their first hundred.
Interviews and they just kept track of those interviewees. And when they finally did come up with with an MVP, then they emailed those, you know, those people that it resonated with and kind of started the second phase at that point.
Josh: [00:16:23] Hmm. Yeah, that’s interesting. Cause like I, what’s funny, I’ve been on the receiving end of being interviewed for different things. It’s seldom that I actually get followed back up with, if that makes sense. Like they, even with, you know, maybe there’ll be a few additional questions here or there. But, but what’s funny is you spend a lot of time on that interview, establishing a rapport and building a relationship.
And sometimes I’m like, I don’t even hear what happened and it’s sort of annoying, like on the backend, like, Hey, I expressed some time. And even if I almost want to know what the answers are, right. Like, cause it’s like there. I feel like it’s a, it’s almost a missed opportunity to get some evangelists early on.
And I mean, maybe I was just on the flip side, maybe I was the anomaly that there was no cheese down that tunnel with me. So maybe it’s just me, but I’m not sure everyone viewed. It seems like they did a really nice job with that too.
Nate: [00:17:20] Yeah. That is a good point, actually, because like, it sounds like from what you’re saying, it sounds Like you want to be part of the jury. Right. Like, and like, know that your, your contribution helped them in some way. And so almost the, the, the building public type of mentality would really help there.
Josh: [00:17:37] Yeah. Like I’m already a little vested in it at this point. Like I’ve, I’ve spent some time, I put some thought and Headspace into it and maybe it’s just an ego thing, but I want be like, Well, whatever one else think like which side am I on? Am I in the anomaly? Am I the 10%? Or am I, or did I help drive that insight?
Or I’m just like everybody else, which is fine too. So.
Nate: [00:18:00] Yeah, well, maybe, maybe they’ve gotten feedback from our people. Maybe they thought like, people might think that you know, founders are busy, they don’t have time for this. You know, I don’t want to spam them. They’re already nervous and jerky already at that point in the, in their company building phase.
But I think you’re right. I think that’s a, that’s a missed opportunity.
Josh: [00:18:20] Yeah, that’s true. I can see, I could definitely see the other side. I could see you being on the other side and being like, Hey, I’ve already wasted enough of your time. I don’t want to bother you any further, but Did you find anything else? That’s that stuck out for you?
Nate: [00:18:33] Yeah, So that was, that was kind of at like the, I think maybe just to close it off, just like the 10 They got the 10 customers before they built any marketing material. And then they, they built out the marketing material only after they had those 10 people. And they kind of felt like they knew their sales process and then they went even further and automated it.
And then that like had disastrous effects. So. Just the I think that was just neat. How they sold it before working on the marketing material. I always kind of liked to work on the marketing material because I think it makes me feel good or makes me feel like I make it helps me work through the problem in my head maybe, but definitely could save a lot of time not doing that.
Josh: [00:19:10] Yeah, because I feel like the marketing stuff has to be refined and concise and really to a point. So you really have to have a strong point of view then. If you, if you do that too early, it could be polarizing to the people that it’s not for. Cause you’re not going to hear, you’re only going to hear the signal from the people that, that, you know, resonate with that.
Or but yeah. Okay. Last thing I would note is just like, again, just reverbing on the, on the recency of this that I thought was really interesting because they even have some things like. Their product hunt launch, and some other things that some of this information is, is, is really insightful based off of time.
Like, because it was so recent where if you went and re read a, how someone did a product hunt launch, like two years ago, it’s like, yeah, I don’t know if that applies anymore. So,

Nate: [00:20:04] Yeah.
Josh: [00:20:05] so yeah, I thought that was really, really interesting as well. And then helpful.
Nate: [00:20:11] Okay,
Josh: [00:20:12] Cool. Do we want to
move on to our second topic?
Nate: [00:20:17] Oh, sure.
Josh: [00:20:18] Yup. Yup. So yeah, this kind of came up a little bit. We don’t have to spend a lot of drudgery on it, but you know, referral rock has, you know, when I categorize enterprise SAS, I also. I mean in general, more of like big contracts. SLA is like everyone that is going not going to just click checkout and buy with a credit card type of thing.
So and we’ve had different levels of it. Like, you know, essentially we try to steer people into being as frictionless as possible for us and for them. But, you know, with some of these companies, They just need, they need to go through legal. They need to go through a procurement. They need to go through all of these things.
And yeah, it’s been, it’s interesting because we try to hold the line on it. It’s easy to kind of want to be like, oh, there’s a customer. That’s interesting. And they’re willing to pay a lot more. But what, what happens in reality is. For us, it makes more sense to try to not spend too many resources on that.
So if the, if the, if the champion over there, the person that wants to buy the individual is really strong. Like letting them drive the process and hopefully you know, not, we don’t have to do anything outside of our normal scope, but, but it does have.
Nate: [00:21:45] Right. Like, I guess, I guess what I kind of see from the outside is it seems like if you get a big enterprise client yeah, sure. They’re going to pay you lots of money, which was great. But. I feel like they just take up so much of your head space with all of the nuance and, you know, special requirements and not to mention if they put constraints on your development and that sort of.
Josh: [00:22:06] Yeah, and I think that’s an area where you have to. Essentially be more prescriptive on that and really think it through and not get all eyes, get big at the size of the potential check. Like for us, we do have the resources. Like we do have a sales team that is built out that knows this and knows how to do it.
Knows how to work with these types of customers. You know, we’re not, we don’t have a legal department, but I do have a. And a strong operations side of our team that can go through contracts. And again, like, first of all, thrown after, okay. You’re not going to pay for credit card is like, okay. Use our contract.
And we try to get them to use our contracted muscle as much as possible. But if the dollar value is big enough, okay. I guess we can use your contract, but then it’s going to require a lot more. Back and forth with lawyers and then you get into insurance and you get into all kinds of other things, but like, which we, we don’t, there were times we’d definitely added some custom dev for certain features, but
Nate: [00:23:10] Okay.
Josh: [00:23:11] it’s probably a different story for another day.
But remind me about that one. That’s a, that’s a good one. There are all kinds of other things like security checklists, and a lot of it, I think is just, you have to be cognizant of your resources cognizant of what you’re willing to do. And again, not get blindsided by the value, because what’s funny is you can go back and look at it and be like, well, that’s just, that’s really only as big as like five.
Normal customers, and those are so much less painful. And then you kind of go, let me make sure this number is big enough so that if I do go through this pain, it is worthwhile.
Nate: [00:23:47] Yeah. Have you like had one of these enterprise things kind of go bad where you committed to something that you look back on and you’re like I shouldn’t have.
Josh: [00:23:57] Now I don’t think we’ve had too many of those. I think in those moments, I think I did at least have the foresight enough to know what potential pain there could be. And then either one ratcheted up the price or said no to very specific things like where I would be concerned and thought about kind of mitigating that risk up front.
And some people walked away and I was fine with that. And other ones signed and it was like, From the negotiation and the pricing standpoint, you have to be like, I feel like high enough that you’re going to be happy if you win, but not really upset if you lose. That’s like my mentality going into setting these numbers.
Nate: [00:24:42] Yeah, but I guess if you’re well aware of the pain that you could potentially have then I think that probably helps to inform you because like on some level you could even just say for my, you know, my sense of wellbeing, I just don’t want to deal with this level of craziness. Like I don’t care how big the check is.

Josh: [00:25:00] Yep.
Nate: [00:25:01] No, there’s, there’s probably some, there’s probably some thing that if somebody asks you for you to say, yeah, no, that’s not going to happen.
Josh: [00:25:08] Yeah, no, they’re definitely times for that. And there’s, again, it comes down to resources is like, how much do I need that cash?
Or, or on the flip side, like how much of my time and resources is this going to be brought in where I’m not going to enjoy it. And I’m going to be getting dragged through the mud on this and I’m going to hate it for it.
But You know, I feel like there’s a, there’s a balance that you just have to make that call on and it’s different for everyone, right? Like some people don’t ever want to do it and there’s some indie indie hackers, you know, and they’re just like, I want to stay self-service I never want to give that level of support.
And I don’t want to build out a team that could help that. And that’s, that’s fine too. I mean, there’s no harm in it. I think the biggest part is thinking it through and recognize it. Your individual situation and the resources you might be in, because let’s say you have a mortgage and this is the only way money’s coming in.
And it’s like, okay, I can, I can get 50 grand for this contract. And yes, it will be, you know, it’s a little divergent from our roadmap or it’s a little other things, and that might be the right call for you that day versus, you know, shelving the project, putting it more on a side project and having to go back and find consulting or, or full-time.
Nate: [00:26:24] Yeah, Yeah. You’re, that’s totally true. Like your situation can really make a difference. You mentioned kind of having like a pre-canned contract or things like that. Do you kind of have like a process that you use when someone says I don’t want to pay by credit card? You’re like, oh boy, here we go. Do you have a kind of a process that you’ve take them down to kind of ease that or to try and steer them away from being overly sweet?
Josh: [00:26:49] Yeah, there’s definitely things like that. So once, once the dollar values are big enough, you actually want to go away from credit cards because the fees like
you,
Nate: [00:26:58] oh, yeah.
Josh: [00:26:58] it definitely opens up options for checks and ACH and things like that. But then also, you know, even the, the company paying for it, doesn’t want to write you a check every month.
So you’re like, okay, well, I need six months or I need a 12 month or I need to annual type of thing. So that’s kinda nice cause you get the big check up front as soon as like contracts are signed and everything else and you got a big check coming on. So I th I, I think that’s, that’s helpful and you don’t have the percentage.
But you did ask like basically there are these just different levels and notches that you slowly move down from for different reasons. Like we talked about you know, the payment. The payment options, but there’s other ones in terms of, like I said, the contracts it starts out with when you check box our terms and conditions.
Great. The next level down is okay. You’ll use our standard contract. And even within our standard contract, here are the couple of clauses that we are okay with bending on.

Nate: [00:27:52] Yep.
Josh: [00:27:53] and then the next level, the final level, the most painful one is like using their contract. So And I think there’s other ones in the enterprise selling space that get to that, like the other one that comes to mind that I did want to chat a little bit about before we wrap this episode is is on security, right?
So like cybersecurity, all these other things. So these often come in a similar I guess pecking order or, or stair-step approach where the first one we always get, which is like, You know how you’ll get a here’s our questionnaire, fill this out, or do you have SOC two compliance or do you have all these other things?
And our first response is usually like, well, we have these standard security docs that we’ll send you and feel free to fill them out.
Nate: [00:28:38] Yeah, we don’t want to do that
Josh: [00:28:39] right. Essentially it’s like it’s fulfilling a, an RFP type of thing. It’s all these questions spoken in their language, kind of like their contract and. Again, you have to be confident enough that like, Hey, I don’t want to spend hours trying to like fill in their blanks.
But at least let’s see if they bite on this. Let’s see if the internal champion is strong enough or they have the teams or the means internally to like, okay, I’ll take those and then I’ll fill it out and maybe I’ll send it back to you. Can you check it?
So that’s one step. And then the interesting one that I thought.
You know, I sent out to his slack group was like, got some other interesting ones back. And, you know, there’s obviously all kinds of scanning software, all kinds of like reports you can give. And those are helpful to give, like we use detective and a kind of can show some that we are diligent about scanning and doing vulnerability assessments.
And here’s our grade. We’re not telling you the details of it, because that would probably be a security risk.
that was interesting. And one of the ones that came up more late that I’ve had some other friends use is security scorecard. Have you seen that one?
Nate: [00:29:48] Okay. Yeah, I’ve heard of it.
Josh: [00:29:51] So just before we wrap, it was an interesting business model that I thought was kind of worth talking about a little bit, which is so as a. Vendor, right. As a person that is providing services, like you can use the security scorecard for free. So I, I haven’t filled it out, but essentially it’s like a questionnaire free to use gives you an assessment, gives you a score.
And I think it does have some scanning software. So it serves as a purpose for me to say, Hey, Nate hope you trust referral rock, but I filled out the security scorecard. And here’s all the details and maybe that’ll help you sleep better at night. Maybe that’ll help you help us win the contract with you.
Nate: [00:30:36] Yep.
Josh: [00:30:36] that’s free, which is interesting because a lot of things charged for scanning and some things like that. But when I dug into it, cause I looked at their website, I’m like, how does this work? This is really interesting. And what I did find out is what someone has to pay for is on the line. Your side of the equation.
You’re the one that is vetting a dozen vendors or trying to keep like, Hey, I’ve got to report up to my vendors because I’m using AWS and Azure and SendGrid and Twilio or whatever all these other services are, but I’m, I’m the person in the middle that is using all these other services. And I also might use some other ancillary ones and what I could do.
Send them the security scorecard to fill out. And now I, as a, as a vendor, one level up that is using other vendors can now manage all of my risk because I forced everyone to fill out the security scorecard. So it was like the security scorecards are free to fill out. And then what they really want to do, what they’re really selling is the management of someone managing multiple scorecards.
If that makes sense.
Nate: [00:31:50] Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, that’s clever.
Josh: [00:31:54] so I thought it was a really interesting, smart kind of freemium business model because it’s like, Hey, we’re giving away free. We’re giving value to a vendor. That’s filling this out. That wants to prove they’re there, you know, risk, risk, like risk like low level of risk or whatever.
So,

Nate: [00:32:11] And, but they don’t charge the customer like the customer that’s evaluating your software. Like if someone came to you and you filled out the free card, your client could view it for free. It’s only when you have a middle tier that they
Josh: [00:32:22] Well, the client would be able to view it for free, but they want to get that client to really subscribe to the service. Or maybe they’re the ones that even sent it to me in the initial place. Fills a slot in their book as they’re managing risk across multiple. So anyone that’s doing one to many, like one, I have mine and I’m managing the risk of multiple vendors.
One for my own internal needs, like my own, let’s say security officer needs or for the people buy from me that want to know that I’m managing risk because in any one of these in any one of like any of these contracts, it’s like, okay, Are you managing your risk and are you keeping track of any vendors that we might be also being managed by?
Because by proxy you’re exposed by them. So it’s kind of this, this, you know, weird dependency and pecking order thing, but it is the people that end up paying are the ones that essentially it’s like, I’m sitting here and I have 10 scorecards demanded. Any individual vendor I bring in to fill out one scorecard back, end person is not paying, but I’m paying to manage 10 or 20 of them or manage like the risk across multiple vendors that I’m dealing with.
Nate: [00:33:41] Yeah, that’s really cool.
Josh: [00:33:44] So yeah, it was an interesting closed loop model where they’re incentivized because Hey, I’m already paying for the platform now. Just get other people to use it. And now I, and now I can see it all, like in my own space.
Nate: [00:33:56] Yeah. So you have lots of lots of different requirements for these enterprise SAS people. It sounds like sounds like fun and by fun, I mean, not fun.
Josh: [00:34:08] Yeah. Yeah, fortunately I have a great team that is happy to kind of bear more of the brunt and, and the details of it. And I’m also happy to say. On to them. Like let’s just charge more. That sounds painful. Let’s charge more. Does that feel better? Does that feel like it’s worth it for us?
So
Nate: [00:34:28] Yup.
Josh: [00:34:29] yeah, so anyway.
Cool.
I like this format. What do you think?
Nate: [00:34:35] Yeah. Yeah. This was cool. This was
Josh: [00:34:37] Okay. All right. Hope our hope our listeners enjoy, but yeah, I’ll see you next week. Thanks.
Nate: [00:34:42] Yeah.