From Kansas to Silicon Valley: Jon Darbyshire, CEO's, Journey with SmartSuite {replay}

This week, we’re talking to Jon Darbyshire, CEO of SmartSuite, who’s making waves in work management from Kansas to Newport Beach. Learn how he's reshaping business operations with an all-in-one platform that’s turning process management on its head.

#Entrepreneurship #WorkplaceAutomation #SmartSuite #TechInnovation #BusinessLeadership #MillennialFocus #GenZ #FamilyBusiness #MakingDataSimple  #DataDriven #Startups #JonDarbyshire #ProcessManagement #BusinessSuccess

Show Notes

• 03:28 From Haysville to Newport Beach
• 07:18 Why start a business in a pandemic?
• 08:48 Who needs venture funding. Not Jon.
• 09:26 Workplace automation defined
• 14:12 SmartSuite capabilities
• 19:30 Targeting Millennials and Gen Z
• 20:45 Slack built in
• 21:54 SmartSuite differentiation
• 23:07 Sharing data
• 25:28 The sales pitch
• 28:56 All in. all the time
• 31:00 Passion with preparation is king
• 34:04 Running a family business
• 41:26 Target client profiles
• 44:15 Definition of success
• 46:25 Building a culture
• 49:00 Vision or Grinders?

Find Jon : https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondarbyshire/
Find SmartSuite : https://www.smartsuite.com/

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple?  Reach out to us at almartintalksdata@gmail.com and tell us why you should be next.  The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun. 

Transcript

You're listening to Making Data Simple, where we make the world of data effortless, relevant, and yes, even fun. Hey, folks. Welcome to Making Data Simple. Al Martin here.

I am so lucky to be able to talk tech with leaders in the industry. The great news is I get to ask the questions. I I take the easy chair and, I learn a lot. Today's topic or category is data startup leadership workload management. I have John Darbyshire with me today.

Let me give a little background on John. John, in 2021, John and his team launched SmartSuite, which is a management platform that manages any process for many industry on one platform. If I give the company line and, John, you'll have to correct me if I mess anything up here. But SmartSuite is transforming how organizations get work done by providing a collaborative work management platform that enables teams to plan, track, and manage workflows. And that's whether it's a project, ongoing process, or routine everyday task.

Prior to SmartSuite, in 2000, John founded Archer Technologies, and they provided enterprise governance, risk, and compliance software. And Archer Technologies was purchased by EMC Corporation in 2010. And then prior to that, John held leadership positions at both Ernst and Young and Pricewaterhouse. Now I just gave that a high level. I understand you went to to k state.

I went to k u. We're gonna have to chat about that, but, we've got some common threads. Thank you for being here. Oh, thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

So let's just go right there. Kansas State, graduated are you are you from the area of Midwest or what? Yeah. I grew up in a small town in Kansas called Haysville, just right outside of Wichita. I think maybe on our best day, it was maybe 8,000 people that were there.

And, pretty much everybody where I grew up, if you went to college, and you had a choice between K State and KU, you were a K Stater. So, I eventually made my way to to K State. I I made my way to k u because I'm from Kansas City. Yeah. Same thing here.

Go to k u. If you're Wichita, go to k state. I got that. I was gonna show you my, my championship flag over here, but I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll leave that alone. I'll leave that alone, the basketball championship.

At least we got something in common. My, my middle daughter went to k state. Okay. And, look, I'd been to k state for a few parties, Aggieville. And, and look, I think it's a great school.

I could even wear a KU shirt, and they treated me well. Yeah. I have a similar situation. My son, we he grew up in Kansas City and was a KU guy. So he went to KU.

So I had my full dose of, I I had the k u, k State shirts that were kinda splitting in half that I would wear, to most of the games. Well, the good news for me is, obviously, we have a basketball team, a college basketball team. We have no football team. So when I adopted K State, I had a football team. Exactly.

So it worked out. It worked out well, man. So now you got a basketball team. For sure. Can you even vote for KU though, being from K State even though your your money went there.

Right? It it did. I I still have a hard time watching KU, but, but, yeah, I pulled form in the last championship. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I gave a quick intro, but please talk to your experience.

Give us some history here. Yeah. For for sure. So like we said, I grew up in a small town in Kansas, went to k State. When I graduated k State, I just packed up everything I had that I could fit in my car, made a couple car payments in advance, and drove to Southern California.

Never been there. I had a friend that that lived in the area that I talked to about 6 months prior said I could, sleep on his floor when I got there. I showed up at his apartment, and, he had moved out, but he had told the person that had moved in I might be showing up. So I met somebody new and slept on their floor for, probably 2 months before I found a job in, Newport Beach, California. That's what kinda kicked my career off.

I thought I wanted to get into real estate development at the beginning, and I went to work for a accounting and tax firm that did the tax work for the one of the largest, real estate developers in Southern California. So for about 3 years, I kinda cut my teeth on understanding real estate development, how he's how he made his money, and what was happening during that time as I was was slowly moving into tech. So I began to take over the organizations or build their 1st, network and bring them online and just automate things, and that kind of started my journey, from a business process automation standpoint. And, after, I don't know, 7 or 8 years in Southern California, I had the chance to actually run the Midwest practice, for what was at the time called cybersecurity for Price Waterhouse and, moved back to Kansas City at that point in time. And then 3 or 4 years later, Ernst and Young, came calling and asked me to, run their global cybersecurity practice.

So I stayed in Kansas City. They wanted me to move to New York or Cleveland, but, I was I was kinda entrenched in Kansas City, and they allowed me to stay there and kinda build the team in Kansas City even though we we had a pretty, a global footprint. We had about 1500 people in the practice, globally. So pretty good pretty good sized practice. You know, during that time, I had the chance to kinda travel the world, meet with lots of great clients, and kinda listen to, and, you know, provide services to them and kinda listen to their concerns, around cybersecurity and had an idea to, build a product that would help organizations manage governance, risk, and compliance inside an organization in the same way that you manage, you know, accounts receivable, accounts payable, HR, those types of processes.

So looked at security as a process and founded Archer Technologies. And, yeah, I'll let you jump in and ask some questions, but that's kind of the story of how we got started. No. That's terrific. And now you're in SmartSuite.

You you just launched SmartSuite. 2021. Backing up for a bit. So you're still in Kansas City now? No.

I'm in, Newport Beach, California. So so So you moved back? We we did. The weather is too good to be true. It's about 73 degrees where we live, on the beach almost every day year round.

So yeah. So how long you've been in Newport then? Couple years or just after the sell? After the sell. So we've been here now 8 or 9 years again.

8 or 9 years. So you always kinda wanted to get back. So a Kansas kid heads to California and stays in California. I did. I did.

I I think we we we love Kansas City. You know, we we love the Chiefs. I see the helmet set behind you. Yes. We make it back for a lot of games.

You know, a lot of all my family's back in that region, but home now is is Southern California. But your son went to KU. Did he stick around here, or is he, interesting that he he did KU, then he was out here for about 5 or 6 years, and he just recently, in the last year, moved back to Kansas City, to be closer to some of his, high school friends that he grew up with. So I wanna talk about Workplace Automation, but, I wanna talk about SmartSuite just for a second. 2021, well, that's kind of a interesting time to start a a new business.

Right? What made you say, hey. This is the right time? Yeah. You you know, when we were at Archer Technologies, we built this no code platform to kind of manage security processes.

And what we found is that, and we had 29 of the top 30 financial services companies were customers, you know, 75 of the Fortune 100. And what we found is that in addition to manage security processes, they were using our platform to manage other business processes in their company, and some of them over a 100 other processes. And that's always been on my mind to eventually build a platform that can manage any process in any company. And the idea actually kinda came back in 2019 when I understood that the technology kinda caught up with the vision that we have, where we could really build out everything that was needed to solve this problem for the first time. And we started that journey almost 3 years ago now, and we had a 100 developers for about two and a half years.

We were very silent, and we just started building the platform. And it's very different than most software companies that work for 6 months and introduce an MVP product and then go to market and refine it. We felt like we needed to solve this full problem all at once, and we couldn't go to market, which it has solved, or customers would would view us as not being able to, you know, solve their problems longer term. So, a little bit different story, but we spent a tremendous amount of time with a lot of people to build the core technology. We did a soft launch in January of this year, and we're we're doing our our big march market push, starts in July of this year.

So let me make sure I understand this. So you were actually investing or developing the product a couple years prior to launching SmartSuite. Was the company the company exist you were investing? Was it your own money, your venture capitalist, or how'd you get started? Yeah.

No. So SmartSuite existed. We just didn't announce it. We didn't put anything on LinkedIn or website or anything until late January of this year. And, I personally put in about $15,000,000 to to kind of build the core piece of where we're at to date, and we're just in the middle of kind of raising our our our first series a.

Sounds good. So let's talk about workplace automation. Let's get everybody listening on the same page. Can you define it, you know, just outline what it's really about? Sure.

Yeah. Most people think of of business process automation as helping manage the core processes in their business from sales and marketing and customer success and HR and, you know, on and on among those core processes. And what we're doing at SmartSuite is we're allowing you to have a single platform to manage all of those processes in one place without the need to maybe purchasing 6 to 8 other products that you would need. Maybe you have Salesforce for sales and HubSpot for marketing and Zendesk for HR and, you know, you kind of round out your suite. Our our thesis is that, it's gonna be better for people to manage all of that on a single platform.

And what's really happened in the last 3 or 4 years is you've seen products in the project management space that have really taken off and doing well managing projects, and they're starting to creep a little bit into the process. So I have, like, a Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp, and Airtable, but they're really not process management centric tools. So SmartSuite is meant to set on top of those tool sets, meaning to be just like a level or 2 above. We do project management as well just like those tools, but we're closer to, like, a ServiceNow, a Mendix, and OutSystems with our capabilities of really managing large enterprise processes, inside of organizations. But I do know there's a lot of players.

I mean and I'm trying to figure out how all these players hook together. You talked about monday.com. I know about them. So I'm interesting you say you sit on top of that. I'd be curious as to how that work.

There's NetSuite. There's Scoro. Are those in the same ballpark? I mean, there's a lot of players in the business right now, but may maybe they're solving a different problem. I don't know.

Help me. Yeah. You you you kinda have 2 categories of companies. So you kinda have these legacy companies that have been around 12 plus years, right, with the score that you're talking about, the Open Pages, Mindex, ServiceNow that are really heavy, what you call low code platforms, meaning that you can drag and drop and configure processes. But in most of the cases, you have to have to actually write code.

So you have to hire developers and have large teams of consultants to actually manage, you know, and set up those processes for you. Then you've got these new entries into the market that have happened in the last 4 to 5 years around project management, like Monday.com that you're familiar with, that are really good at managing task and projects. Right? But they really weren't built to manage processes. They're really good at at just individual tasks and projects that's there.

But what's nice about those platforms that they're all drag and drop, very intuitive, interesting user interfaces. It's kind of the next generation of user interface. Very easy to use. SmartSuite wants to provide that type of capability. It's it's easy for anybody to set up and manage things inside of SmartSuite, but we give you the capabilities of these enterprise products that are built in so that, any organization, rather if you're 2 users to 5000 users, you have the ability to come in and use a single platform, to manage things.

A good example would be maybe you need to manage sales in your organization. We allow you to download a template, in 3 seconds that's a best in class process for managing a CRM inside of a company. You can tailor that, for your needs. It typically takes a couple of hours to tailor a pretty large process inside of SmartSuite. And then you can start inviting users, managing permissions.

You can integrate with other products if you need to. Again, all of that in one place. And that's what's different in the space that's happening just in the last few years under work management is one place to manage work that gives you all of the features that you need to manage any type of process, that you have in place. And many people think about that as really a business operating system. Just like you have, like, an iOS, you have a iPhone, and you have iOS, and you have things built on top of iOS.

SmartSuite is like a business operating system where you just configure and build things on top of us in one platform. And there's a lot of value, to be gained from that and that you only have to train employees in one place. There's a big ROI ROI on the cost savings that are there. I don't have to pay for 5 or 6 products. I can pay for 1 or 2.

Our entry point pricing is $10 per user per month. So we give you those enterprise features at a very low, price point, and our enterprise pricing is $35 per user per month. So pretty economical. Like, when we were at Archer and we were selling a very similar type product just for the GRC space. You know, our average customer was paying in the 350 to 400,000 a year versus our average customer's gonna be in the 25 to 30,000 range, same size customer.

You say you incorporate project management, but that's only one element. Could you explain that or elaborate? Yeah. So we we look at we can manage any process or any project inside of a company. And, you know, managing a project is a project to us is just something that has a defined endpoint, a defined time frame that I'm doing these things over this period of time.

And when they're done, that project is actually complete. That's kind of project management. We do all of that and give you the capabilities to, manage and report on projects that are happening, to do different types of reports, whether it be, you know, timelines or calendars and share that information with people. There's dashboards so you can chart and graph all the information, you know, that that's happening as well all in one place. A process to us is something that's more ongoing over a period of, you know, you know, it it it never stops, that's there.

Like, your, customer relationship management solution that would have things that are like accounts and contacts and opportunities and deals. Those aren't necessarily tasks. Those are just things that need to get done inside of an organization very different from our project. I wanna ask you about use cases in terms of how you put everything together. But if if I am a customer smart suite, this is my essentially my dashboard.

Is is that the word I'm looking for? I'm I'm and, like, in other words, I come into the business every day. I open up SmartSuite, and I've got a lens into all my business process, my workings, whether it's CRM, whether it's my sales platform, etcetera? I mean, is it end to end? It is.

Now, most of our customers have other systems that they wanna continue to use, whether they're internal or just systems that they don't wanna move into SmartSuite. So we provide, what we call an automations, capability that allows you to share information between our product and any other product that's there. We have a connector through a company called Zapier that gives us access to about 4,000 other products. So when you connect to Zapier, you you automatically connect to us as well, that's there. So our our goal is not not to have you have to have those 6 to 8 typical, products, you know, to kind of run your business, maybe cutting that down to 2 to 3 products with SmartSuite kinda being the main hub for that.

But when a user would log in, you know, my dashboard, my home page would show me what which we call a workspace, which show you, you know, here's all of our sales processes. I can click to go in to do my work there. Here's all of our marketing processes. Maybe here's our customer care, our HR. It's all just in that one one place for you.

How much of it is automated versus customized relative to a customer's business processes? Yep. So we out of the box, we provide 200 templates that are really best in class processes that can be used. So let's say you're interested in marketing. We just had a a call with a marketing agency this morning.

They were interested in just those processes around mani managing marketing across their clients inside of their agencies. So they download the template, and we show them how to drag and drop and move the information around the different fields that they wanna collect and invite their people, and all that happened in about an hour and a half for them to begin to transition and to use a new platform to manage, marketing for them. So there's no in in our product, there's no custom code. Everything all of our customers are on the same, code base. They're just configuring the information, differently from company to company.

And I have to say no 2 companies are ever a 100% the same, that's there. They wanna view the reports maybe a little differently. The information that they're collecting might be a little different, but the core process itself is the same. This may be a bad example. But if I'm using Salesforce as my, my sales tool and, you know, I don't know what I'm using something else for marketing, etcetera.

Do you got a a plug in for Salesforce or so that it just, easily integrates as part of the template as you you describe it, or what would I do in that case? Yep. So you have 2 options there. You could continue to use Salesforce, or you could move that same information into SmartSuite. The value there for somebody is gonna be the cost of of, of Salesforce versus SmartSuite that's there.

But if you wanna keep your information in, Salesforce, but maybe use some of that information in different ways inside of your company and other processes, We just have a connector that just connects to Salesforce. You decide maybe the account information is already in Salesforce and you don't wanna duplicate that. You just sync that back into SmartSuite as well. Is is SmartSuite going straight to the data, or it doesn't bring any widgets to to give you, like, a a pane of glass that looks like Salesforce within SmartSuite? You're using your own view just leveraging the data in that case?

It is. But our our the the way you visualize data in SmartSuite is similar to what you would see in Salesforce. It it's it's it looks a little better than what Salesforce looks, but it's the same type of visualization, that you would see. And when I say looks better, what I mean by that is, you know, the Salesforce platform was built in 2002, the core platform, that that's there. It's hard for them to make a change with the 100 of thousands of customers that they have, to kinda move forward.

Our technology was built just 3 years ago on the latest, greatest technology that's available. And we spent quite a bit of time working with millennials and Gen Zers to understand the way that they want to work inside of a platform. And our interfaces are tailored to those people. And we feel that those are the people that do the majority of the work in a company. So it's gonna feel much more collaborative and interactive than what you would see inside of a field Salesforce.

Just a little, you know, updated kind of UI and design. And it, what we found, especially with the millennials, is that not only do they wanna be able to collaborate in real time and share information like they do in Facebook and Twitter and Insta and and such, all those capabilities are built directly in the platform, but they also wanna be able to see what their team members are working on through activity feeds where they could just see a listing of all the things that are getting done across different teams, just to kinda stay connected with the team. They also wanna have, you know, member profiles that are similar to Facebook where each person in the company can can complete their profile and share both professional and personal information together. So they're kind of building that more collaborative culture inside of an organization where I can, you know, not just do my work, but I have a sense of what's happening with work, not in in my team, my department, but maybe even the company. So does that mean to say that you have a personal, like, social feed within smart speed as well that's being shared across the business?

It is. So are are you familiar with Slack at all? Oh, yes. I'm very familiar with Slack. Yeah.

So we have, you know, we have Slack capabilities that are built in natively. What you probably love about Slack is that it's very easy for you to talk to anybody at any time. What you probably don't like about Slack is sometimes you lose the context of a conversation that you had because it's not tied to something. Well, in SmartSuite, everything's tied to the work that you're doing, but you have a Slack channel just for that that work. And by work, it could be a particular task.

So if I need a I'm working on something and I'm like, I need that one more piece of information, I can just open up the conversation. I could at at mention a person, ask them for this information. They can respond back. It all stays in the context of the work that I'm doing. Seems like you've used Slack before.

But, yeah, I guess, you know, I need to just kinda visualize it myself in terms of how all this is integrated together. I mean, going back to Salesforce, because we can use another example if you like. But going back to Salesforce, what's the ROI I get? Why not just use Salesforce as a as a an app itself? Sure.

So the the first thing that you might look at, and we have a lot of customers that move to us because of just the cost. Right? If you are on the full blown version of Salesforce with all the bells and whistles, it's 300 plus a year per or per month per person, that's on there. SmartSuite starts at $10 per user per month with the same feature set that you're gonna see inside of Salesforce. All the same capabilities with with being able to track and and manage anything related to, you know, customer relationship management that's there.

The real power that starts to happen in SmartSuite, though, is I have my sales information in SmartSuite. I have my marketing information in SmartSuite, and maybe I have my customer support or, you know, customer success information. All 3 of those need to share information in regards to accounts and contacts, and the sales team needs to know if there's any open tickets, you know, for customers with an unhappy customer, before they, you know, they talk about an upgrade. The marketing wants to know what customers are converting, what customers do we have. So you see this interconnection of all this data between that you're sharing between these three processes now as opposed to maybe having Salesforce and HubSpot and Zendesk as separate products that are doing all those same things.

How is the data shared amongst those, different elements, and how do you protect privacy at the same time? Are you you know, I guess, just the whole thing around data. How's data used? How's it shared? How's it, maintained?

And are you moving data to make this work? No. If you're inside of SmartSuite, we don't need to move data. If you are are working with SmartSuite and Salesforce, there's there absolutely, there's data that's moving between, the two products. Inside inside of both products, SmartSuite and and Salesforce, we allow you to have different levels of permissions and roles for people to actually, to control that data.

So say in Salesforce, you have in your CRM, you have a list of accounts. Right? And the first thing you could do is you could say, here's a list of people that have access to see this information in accounts. But then you could you can take it down a level and say, maybe I only want John to see accounts that are assigned to him. So maybe there's a 1,000 records in there, but I only have 10 that I can see.

So I can I can very quickly narrow that down? We can also narrow it down by field type. So maybe, I want you to be able to see 10 fields of information, but when I pull up the same record, I only see 5, that's there. So that's very easy to just, to set up the permissions, and then that follows you it follows that data anywhere it goes. So if you're looking at a report, you're looking at a chart or a graph, you're sending this information to another product, you can't do any of that unless you actually have access to, to the data.

So it sounds like you have personas, if you will, within SmartSuite for data access. And, sure, you're moving data when you're gathering data, but you're not, like, moving data from 1 repository like Salesforce to another. It stays in that central location. You're just given permissions to access it in within smart speed. It is.

Yes. Correct. If if we take a step back, what's the sales pitch here? I mean, there's gotta be a return on investment, scenario or use cases that work best. I know I'm using, Salesforce just because I use that every day.

I use Slack every Slack's on the left screen over here, so I use that every day. I've got Outlook over to my right. I got OneNote. I mean, I got a mess. So what what's the sales pitch, and what use cases work best?

Yeah. I think that there's 2 different, kind of main pitches that we have. The first one are, small and medium sized businesses that are really managing their business using spreadsheets and documents and email and Slack and OneNote and their mobile device. And and maybe they have some HR stuff, and maybe they have a a little bit of Salesforce, you know, a a sales or someone. Those are the easy ones because we can show them how we can solve all those problems and put all their information in one place.

I'll give you a great example. We work with a a classic car garage here in Southern California that has about a 150 classic cars that they manage for people, meaning they store them, and then the customers can come get them from the location and take them out. They they manage their entire business on their mobile phone from the owner. And the people that were in the warehouse with the cars, every time a person would call and say, I need to check out a car, he would have to physically call somebody in the warehouse and say, pull this car out. Right?

And he tried to manage some of that on spreadsheets and QuickBooks. In in 2 hours, he put everything in SmartSuite, and now all he does is is is the customer does a request that automatically goes to the people in the warehouse. The people in the warehouse pull the car out. They can see if the car's been checked out. Like, it's all a 100% automated, and it's allowed him to actually grow his business now because he can get more done because he's automated.

It's not he's not the single point of failure for them. So that's a good example for, like, a somebody that's, you know, that's running their business, and then he's making really good money, but he's he's not formalized any of these processes. And then we have, you know, more enterprise accounts, you know, into the Fortune 1,000 that have very defined processes over time, but they need, you know, more efficient ways to get things done with more automation. The user interfaces, for the people that they're working with need to be more dynamic. You know, if you're gonna work in a product for 8 to 10 hours a day, you know, you don't wanna look at something that's not visually appealing, you know, to get you you would prefer not to if you had a choice, that that's there.

And SmartSuite gives you the ability to to do both, to automate those processes at a level maybe you haven't done prior and to and to, you know, show a new technology that's available on both mobile and web. You got reporting, visualization, analytics, even AI built in? It is. Yep. All that's built in.

And that's a lot. To do that in a new application with quality in 2 years, man, how'd you do it? Yeah. So it it's closer to 3, and we've had about a 100 developers that have been just working, working, working, you know, to to kinda pull it off. And it's just we we basically took a set of features that typically goes across 7 or 8 different product categories, you know, starting with form builders and project management and process management and the collaboration, the business intelligent, you know, the integration.

Like, we put them all into a single platform. So now I could do all of those things in one place without needing to have all these other products. I I have to say it it's fun now because it's done, but the last two and a half years has not been a lot of fun. It's been a a lot of stress to kinda get to that point where everything fit together and work. How do you survive the last couple of years?

You're $15,000,000 in. You don't add a product. You're just trying to get there. How do you stay true to your and maybe you should talk about that, your mission statement, your values so you don't lose faith and you you, you know, you're all in all the time and and end up achieving your your ultimate outcomes. Yeah.

I I think you just said it. You have to be all in all the time. It's not a this hasn't been a, you know, 40, 50 hour a week job. It's been a, you know, 7 day a week for for a couple of years, you know, to make it to to make it a reality, that that's there. And we again, we felt that we couldn't deliver piecemeal what we needed to.

We had to bring everything to market at one time to to solve the problem that we felt people had, you know, that needed to be solved. And, we started, you know, pre COVID and thought we had a pretty novel idea in that we didn't we wanted to hire people the best people we could find anywhere in the world and not limit ourselves to 30 miles from a particular geography. Right? When we started Archer Technologies in Kansas City, you know, the majority of our 160 people live within 30 miles of that office, right, and came to the office every day. So we we have people in 9 different countries working on, you know, 24 hours a day with all the time zones, that we kinda have in place.

Very different model. And then when COVID hit, everybody kinda moved to that had to move to that model with remote work. And it Right. It's it's more of a norm. But at the time, it felt kinda novel, not so much, you know, today.

But for us, we're a 100% remote company with just a few exceptions. We have 5 or 6 people in little offices in key places that just happen to be grouped together. But, we're a remote remote first company. Your values before are your values now where everybody else had to change their values or at least revisit them. Some of them are going back to in the office, etcetera.

But let me play this out. You get bought out by EMC in 2010. I presume you could have made a decision then to ride off into the sunset, retire, enjoy life. Instead, you decide, no. Let's start a new business.

Let's go through hell yet again. Tell me how that decision was made and why you think you're doing something that no one else is currently achieving right now. Yeah. I I think the the reality is I did retire for seven and a half years. We started a family foundation in Kansas City to do some really cool things around youth programs, women's initiatives, and entrepreneurial programs.

We had a, what we call an incubator, a 15,000 square foot office in Overland Park, where we would bring in, entrepreneurs to work on their ideas, that were there. What I found after time was that, played as much golf as I could play. I traveled as much as I could travel. Like I was, I didn't have a passion, and I missed having that passion. I was just kinda getting up and going through the motions every day, and I thought that that was gonna be fantastic to retire and to do that.

But I found that I I just I I love building software. Like, that's my my passion. I love working with young, energetic people that have a passion to do that as well. And that's what got me back into it. I it was 2018, and a team of people from, Archer and Kansas City were at a meeting in San Diego, and they asked me to come down and meet them for dinner after their conference one day.

And I left that dinner just realizing that I I miss working with these types of people. And I feel like I'd never I'd never finished the vision that I had at Archer to manage any process in any company. And I the first thing I did was I I came back home and I I spent the next 3 months analyzing all the players in the space. I came up with 400 data points, and I analyzed those 400 data points across 20 some companies to kinda see where the market was at. And I found a need right in the middle, you know, from the project management and the and the really large process management companies to to manage things in a different way that hasn't been done before.

You know, a a new UI, more simpler to use, more collaborative, bring all these different capabilities into one platform. And the reason I felt like I was the person to to bring this forward is, you know, we built one of the very first no code platforms at Archer that, you know, you can argue if we were first or Salesforce was first, but we both started in the same, you know, 2 or 3 month span of each other. Archer, I think, does around 750,000,000 a year in reoccurring revenue now in Overland Park. And, you know, Salesforce has killed it. They're in the billions, of revenue, but both have been very successful with the no code platform.

So I felt like I had the experience in in understanding what a no code platform was all about. So when we went to build it this time, I took all the lessons learned from the 11 years building Archer to kind of build it the right way from the beginning, that was there. I presume you had a a pretty strong support system. Was your family ready for you to go back to work? Well, at Archer, I don't know if you you know this, but, you know, I founded that company with my wife, Tara, and my mom.

And Tara ran sales and marketing for us, and mom ran all operational pieces, and I was everything else. And I I got the bug to jump back in, and my wife was still kinda retired in, come January. It was about December. She started getting really excited when she saw the product in action, and she said, I'm I'm back in with you. So she runs sales for us again.

So we're back to, you know, a family run business. Nice. So how does that work? Is that is that it'd be kinda hard to, negotiate with your wife on a business sense, but, you must have figured it out. You you know, when we were at Archer, we had offices on opposite sides of the company on purpose.

It's that, you know, we wanted to have something to talk about when we went home. And Yeah. We would just interact as we needed to at work, and it it's similar here. She's really good at sales, and she does her thing. I just kinda get out of the way.

And then, you know, I'm really good on the product and the design and solving problems for the customer side. So the 2 of us team up, pretty well. And then we there's a third founder, Pete Novosel, who was our CTO and VP of product at Archer. I reached out to him 2 years ago and said, hey. We're doing something really interesting.

Do you wanna look at it? And he took a peek, and I said, we didn't want you to just look at it. We want you to join us as a founder. So it took a few months, but we talked him in, to join us as well. So it's the 3 of us that have been we've worked together for, you know, 20 years.

Very good, man. That's that's you're you're amazing to be able to balance all that. So speaking of of sales, you've been out since January. How are we doing? We're we're doing well.

So our formal launch actually happens here in July. We have a couple 100 customers, ranging from mom and pops up to, I I can't say their name, but the largest real estate hedge funds in the world over, you know, 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars and, you know, and everything in between. So, our our our big launch happens here, you know, like I said, in July, but we've we've crushed it here in the 1st, 4 months as well. Is this a case, John, where given you, you know, you ran Archer, do you bring out that old network, that index, and start calling folks? I mean, is that how it works, or or do you do it different this time?

Yeah. We're doing it a little bit different this time. I think, you know, the new, the new approach in SaaS software companies is this product led growth strategy where everything is sold online through your website, through a free trial. It allows users to come in and actually start a free trial with no credit card required. They can take the product for a test drive and see it's for them.

If it's if they're still not sure, they can we'll increase their, trial from 14 days to 30 days. And if they're still not sure, they can move to our free plan forever, which limits them to just 3 users, but with the core of the capabilities. So the the thought process around product led growth is to let users try your product, and and and until they perceive value, they don't have to purchase. So, we've sold that all the way through enterprise customers that way that have found us with no sales touches, just coming to the website, downloading templates, playing, watching videos to get going. And then on the the other side of that, we will have a direct or we do have a direct sales channel more for the large and enterprise accounts where we're reaching out directly to them, you know, to educate them on what's available and inviting them to webinars and things to kinda set the hook, that's there.

We we do have a pretty large network from from the Archer days. We haven't tapped into that per se yet, but that's something that will happen towards the end of the year. I presume is this all SaaS? Is all on cloud, or do you can you can you get it on prem? Nope.

It it's all SaaS based. So how do you handle security? I mean, you were a security guy at one point Uh-huh. Taking data from, you you know, behind the firewall, throwing it on the cloud to get to your some of your analytics. And and do you have performance considerations?

So we partnered with Amazon through AWS. So everything is offered through the Amazon Cloud service offering. We have all the bells and whistles on the, you know, security compliance side attached to that, through, their network offerings that are there. And, you know, performance wise, with the new technologies that you have compared to technologies just 8 or 10 years ago, they're much more efficient, much more performant, than they were. Most of our our our pages that you access are gonna be sub second to a second and a half, would probably be the max that's there with very large datasets.

So that's one of the first things that people notice when they start using our product is it feels faster than products that they've used in the past, and it's because of the Amazon relationship and just the tech stack, you know, that we've built the platform on. In the security piece? Yeah. Everything is everything that you would expect to be built in is is built in. All data is encrypted on the fly.

You can run VPN if you want to, you know, where HTTPS, you know, come into the site. And then there's a whole host of things, you know, on the Amazon side that we're checking for viruses and file downloads and uploads and, you know, we're set behind firewalls. You know, we're we're tracking for intrusion events. That that's a part that Amazon has done just a great job of making that easier for SaaS companies to you have to pay for it, but they can help manage that for you, in most cases, in a much better way than you could manage it yourself. You talked about, hey.

Like, I did the research, you know, somehow 400 different, other companies in the space. What haven't they figured out that you figured out that sets you apart? Yeah. I I I think that there's really 2 big pieces. Right?

There's the ease of use of a platform that provides this type of capability, and then there's the extensiveness of the feature set that's inside of there. Meaning that, you know, I told you we took the 8 or 9 different product categories or products, and we provide 90 to 95% of those features in one platform. And that would start with, like, a form builder. I don't know if you use, like, Wufoo forms or type form or, you know, something to collect form data. Then you have the project management tools, then you have the process tools, the collaboration tools, the integration tools, the BI tools, the dashboarding, like, and access control.

All of that we put into one platform. So I don't have to think about having all these other products to manage my process. Everything that you need to be able to run your business is right there. And it's so simple to set up that, you know, a mom and pop or an enterprise can use the same technology, to do that. Is there a risk of being everything for everyone on this, or is that precisely the design point?

That's the design point. Like, you think think about the concept of a business operating system, just like iOS on your Mhmm. On your mobile phone and all the technology that's been built on top of that, you know, with all these different apps and different companies. We've done that, what we call the smart suite platform. Right?

So we've built all these capabilities in, and it can not only be used by people to automate processes inside their own company. We have consulting organizations that are building products on top of our platform and selling to their customers like it's from them even though it's on top of us that's there. So our our long term vision is to kinda be the platform of choice for managing any process, you know, in an organization. What I heard you say is you work really with all customer profiles, small, medium, even enterprise. But is there a certain customer profile that should they be listening to this podcast right now?

I mean, they should be, like, excited. I mean, the the I mean, that's your sweet spot. Yep. There there's a couple. Right?

So there's the core processes that are in any business that we've mentioned a few times around, you know, sales and marketing and human resources, software development, customer success, product management, creative design. All of those, we can solve. You know, we have you download one of our solution templates. It's a best in class process. It's it's likely as good or better than what you have today, and now all that information is interconnected.

That's the easiest sell that we have when we can show a company that all of that can be in one place, you know, right now. But then we go across industries as well. We've had really good luck with marketing agencies that are actually using our product to manage relationships with their customers, professional services firms that are doing projects inside of customers, construction industry, real estate industry. We have quite a number of legal clients that have came on board. So that's the beauty of the vision is that we're able to solve all those problems on one platform, and we're not doing anything different.

It's just you're just configuring the information that you want. And in most cases, we work with a great client. We configure it, put things in a template, and we share that information back with all the other clients, that are there. So it's a as long as you're willing to share, we'll continue to update our information so everybody can take advantage of it. The the car garage was a great one that I told you about.

Another really fun one. I don't know if you're into UFC fighting, but one of the the largest, talent agencies for UFC fighters. They have about 300 fighters. They manage everything in spreadsheets and all the contracts with all the fighters and from around the world. We moved them over in just 2 days to a new platform, and it is so cool just to see all the fun stuff that they're now doing because they're on the road most of the time.

They're at fights in different countries, so they use our mobile device to manage their business as opposed to calling back to the office to everybody. Wow. Makes sense. I'm I'm confused now, though. You've got a lot of customers.

Are these just, like, beta customers? Are they live? Are your references? Because I think you said somewhere like in July, you're going live. Well, we we did a soft launch in late January, so we've got a little over 200 customers.

So, yeah, they're we're live with it's not beta. They're they're actually customers. Okay. We're we're doing a a a marketing, you know, push that happens here in July that is really gonna announce us to, to the world globally. We're in 15 languages, the product is already.

So most of the things we've been doing about 80% of our customers right now are US, 20% outside the US. We'll be doing a bigger global push, on that here in July. As we kinda wrap up here, what is the definition of success as you would define? I mean, is it evaluation? Is it the number of references?

Is it just getting revenue in the door? I mean, what kind of outcome are you looking at the horizon, like, 1 year, 2 year, 3 year? Yeah. I I think success for us is customers and processes, you know, problems that we can solve. That will determine the long term success of the company.

We're definitely focused on revenue. But the more customers we have, the better our product's gonna be long term. You know, as we understand all these edge cases and special ways that people need to manage processes. Because once we build it, it's available to everybody, that's in there. So our core focus as a company right now is we're bringing on every type of customer.

We don't want just salespeople or just marketing people or just customer success. Like, we want as many different use cases as we can get, that's in. And that that will go on probably for 2 years. And, what you what you're seeing in the market right now is that, the value of SaaS companies is is based more on customer growth than it is on dollar growth, that's there. The the value of the company will come over time if we focus on on the customers.

Pure subscription type of scenario. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. You know, at Archer, in the 9 years that we had it, we had a 97.6% renewal rate across that whole period.

That not just 1 year, that whole time. Right. We would love to have, you know, something close to 90% in in this business as well. So we're really striving to to focus on the customer. We don't push a customer either way or whether they wanna pay for a year in advance or month to month.

It doesn't matter to us. We give them a 20% discount if they wanna pay a year in advance, but we don't push either direction. And as a CEO, I actually like the month to month revenue better because it forces our teams to ensure that the customer's happy each month along the way. You know? And we're we're we're catching those problems and showing them how we can fix them versus even waiting till the end of the year to have that discussion, that's there.

We use our own product to manage every process in our own company. So we eat our own doctrine. Like that. Right? So when customers like, I did a webinar this morning, and we actually showed how we manage that process.

And it it's it's a lot of fun to to see how a product like SmartSuite can help build a culture in a company when everybody is remote because you need to connect all the time and it allows us to stay connected. And that's one of the reasons that we decided to go remote was we wanted to either prove or disprove that we could help build culture. So, culture trust is, you know, it it happens every day. We you know, I told you we're in 9 different countries around the world. We do stand up calls every morning with each person on every team.

It takes me about 2 hours, but I touch every person in that first two hours of every day. And sometimes it's as fast as this is what I did yesterday. This is what I'm doing today. I have this one question. We're on to the next person.

But it kinda it it starts with me and our CTO, Pete, to have those calls every morning. Otherwise, you know, if we're in an office, we wouldn't have to do that as much. But being remote, it's important that we connect with them. Look. I love it.

I'm a fan. I don't do those every day. I did do them every day because I gotta I'm I'm managing technical sales right now. It's a it's a little bit different, but I'm a 100% with you. A lot of people look at that with, like, a raised eyebrow.

I mean, just a retrospective, a stand up every day. You talk about accelerating your business. I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. I mean, just having that accountability, those key accountabilities and commitment to say, here's what I've done. Here's what I'm gonna do today.

I mean, you come back, you end up doing it because you just said you were gonna do it out loud to all your teammates, yeah, your peers, etcetera. I think it's huge. I think it's the right way to manage, man. We we do it in 2 ways. So we verbally do it on the calls, and then we have we can't have everybody from every team on every call.

So we have a Slack channel that's daily check-in, and it's broken out by team, you know, mobile team versus web team, and everybody throws their stuff in there, in that feed. So everybody can see exactly what's happening if they want to. And I tell you what, everybody wants to go look at that to see what other people are working on. Like, it's, it's interesting to them. Well, I'll tell you what, John.

You may not be a millennial, but you certainly sound like a millennial. Where can folks that are listening reach you? What's the best place to reach you? Yeah. Go to smartsuite.com.

You can click on contact us if you wanna reach me personally. Send a message. I'll get back to you. You can also catch me at at, john.Darbyshire or john Darbyshire at on at LinkedIn. It's John, it's j o n, that's there, and and, yeah, I'll get right back to you.

Anything that I always like to ask this before I close. Anything you wish I woulda asked or you wanna get out that, you didn't have a chance to do so? I don't think so. I think we went through pretty much everything I had on my list. Alright.

So I only gotta ask you a couple more before you close. Any advice you'd give to young entrepreneurs? Yeah. That that's hard to single it down into one thing. You know, I've had the chance to I've invested in about 400 different startups, so I've had the chance to meet with a lot of founders.

I can say that, you know, there's there's founders that are that you meet that are, that have great vision, and there's founders that you meet that are just really work hard, and you can just tell they have an incredible work ethic. And the the best advice that I got was from Bain Capital, and they told me to focus on the people first, not the idea. Because even, you know, the grinders can make things happen over time. And if they have a good idea and they're a grinder, meaning they can just work through anything, those are the people that are gonna make it. And I found that in the companies we've invested in, the the ones that have the grinders, the CEOs and leadership team that they you know, problems don't don't defeat them.

They just find ways to work through are different than the guys or the gals that have these crazy visions, but they don't have the work ethic. And Mhmm. I've really been, those companies that I've invested in haven't done great, that had a amazing vision. I go so excited about the product and the vision of the team. And some of the companies that I discarded and said they're just gonna be okay, those those leadership teams have just crushed it.

This year. So I tend now to air on the side if I focus on the people and look for the what I call a grinder. You know, somebody that just they can work through adversity because it's gonna happen as a as a start up founder. So if you had to pick between vision and grinder, I know you want both. Right.

What would you pick? I'm gonna on the side of of pedigree and grinder. I I have another venture, firm that I work with that, they've had amazing success in pulling people out of Stanford that were managers of the Stanford paper. I'm not sure what I can't think of what it's called right now, but the the, you know, the the standard university paper. Right.

And those companies the the prior three people had went on to build some some of the best tech companies, you know, some of the leading tech companies that you know of today. And there was a kid that was in his sophomore year that was 19 years old that I went and met with younger than my kids. And, they kept telling me, John, invest in the people. Like, we he's gonna be successful. It's either gonna be this one or the next one, but you wanna be in at the beginning.

And, I did, and they're absolutely right. Like, it's when you find the grinder with the knowledge, right, to solve the problem, even if they're not the visionary, like, they're too young to have all that, focus on that. And so that's where I tend to invest now is finding people that I I feel are in the right place at the right time and just have a a really strong work ethic. You mentioned, I guess, Slack earlier. They had a different company mission, then they find out Slack.

Hey. This is a pretty good tool right here. Let let's switch and let's pivot. When you have as you term I like the word now. I'm a start using as you have grinders, you find a way to get it done one way or another.

If you pivot the company, you pivot the company, but you're successful. Yeah. I I think that, you know, when you find a grinder that has the vision and can sell it, like, you that's when you have the unicorn company. You know, that's when you see the, you know, the Ubers of the world and and and such that, you know, if you if you look at the history of Uber, they're all about just working to the point of working too much. Right?

That was too bad on the culture. But the vision they had was was something just it was so far out there people couldn't get their head around. John, it's been a pleasure. I learned a lot today, and it was fun talking to a fellow Midwesterner. Not even Midwesterner, a a fellow Kansas guy.

Exactly. Even though he likes California now. Now he's living in California enjoying the fun in the sun. But I I get the 73 degrees. Yeah.

That makes sense. I'm still a big Chiefs fan, though, so I feel like I'm still, connected to Kansas City. Well, thank you for being here. It's a pleasure talking with you. Learned a lot.

I wish you ultra success. And if there's anything that I can do for you personally, please reach out. I'm here to help. I I appreciate it. It's been a great time.

I thank you for your time. And listeners, as always, hit us on almartintalksdata@gmail.com. We'd like to hear back from you. Please rate us. And until next time, we'll see you on the podcast.

Thank you so much. Talk to you next time. Bye bye.