SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
Breaking Down Product-Led Growth Myths with Eric Boduch, co-founder of Pendo and CEO of 24andUp
Dan Balcauski talks with Eric Boduch, co-founder of Pendo and CEO of 24 and Up, about his experiences scaling SaaS businesses. Eric shares insights from Pendo's rapid growth phases, including the importance of culture, product-led growth, and brand building. They discuss the transition from startup to scale-up, the role of data-driven decisions, and how AI is transforming strategic approaches in SaaS companies. Eric also delves into the venture studio model used at 24 and Up and its advantages compared to traditional fundraising methods.
01:05 Meet Eric Boduch: Serial Entrepreneur and SaaS Expert
01:49 Scaling Pendo: Key Inflection Points and Challenges
04:12 The Importance of Culture in Rapid Scaling
06:42 Defining Product-Led Growth (PLG)
12:05 The Power of Brand in SaaS Success
18:53 Venture Studio Model: A New Approach to Startups
24:01 Leveraging AI for Performance Management
24:54 Launching New AI Products
25:32 Revenue Optimization Strategies
27:42 Adapting to Macroeconomic Changes
32:57 The Role of Product Managers in AI
36:56 Challenges in Scaling Startups
39:27 Closing Thoughts and Future Plans
Guest Links
we quadrupled, then we tripled, then we tripled. We had one time where, after doing our first fundraising round with battery, we went from. Like 20 people to 40 something people, in 45 days. I don't think you really understand how important it is until you go through these rapid scaling events, right? Where you're hiring a ton of people or making a ton of decisions quickly. And I look at it like, Hey, let's just drop growth word for a minute here, and think about things as product led, right? Because product led organizations can impact more than just growth. It's how you build product, it's how you market, it's how you approach things. I think it's like we're entering the golden age of product management.
Dan Balcauski:Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up. B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to welcome Eric Boduch, CEO, and founder of 24 and up a venture studio that's re-imagining how early stage companies get built. Eric co-founded Pendo where he spent eight years helping scale one of SaaS' biggest success stories. He's a serial entrepreneur, former host of the Product Love podcast, which I had the honor of being featured on at one point, and someone who brings a systematic approach to the challenges that trip up most Scaling companies. Eric, great to have you on SaaS Scaling Secrets.
Eric Boduch:Hey, great to be here. Thanks, Stan.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I am very excited to finally get. To have a chance to talk to you on the podcast. We've been known each other since that episode of Product Level, which I think was probably three, four years ago now. Time goes by so quickly.
Eric Boduch:I would guess
Dan Balcauski:yeah. Yeah. It's wild. Wild. I, I wanna start with a little bit of your time at Pendo. You spent eight years there Scaling Pendo through different stages of growth, and I guess as you look back now, were there kind of. Key inflection points or eras where you really realized, Hey we can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them. Those moments where you had to change your approach as the organization got bigger and you faced new challenges that you didn't as an early stage company.
Eric Boduch:Yeah, absolutely. Dan. I think, first the zero to one is a unique time in, in the existence of a company, right? Because you're really scrambling, you're scraping, you're trying to get those early customers, those early advocates. You're trying to prove that you have something that delivers value. So that's a unique time in getting to that traction point. Once you have some semblance of product market fit, arguable that, that term even exists. But once you have some semblance of happy customers revenue and ideally renewing customers, right? Or customers, are we gonna renew? I think it changes a little bit into like, how do you grow the company and then you're trying to put in place, things like, the beginning of processes and people and. And then it turns from, say five or 10 million up to more scalable processes and building leaders in the organization and handing out responsibility more broadly across the organization. So things definitely change a lot from the zero to one, from like, and then from like one to five, and then five or 10 and up, things change rather dramatically. I think. For all the entrepreneurs out there that are struggling to get that foothold, the zero to one is probably the hardest time.
Dan Balcauski:As you think about that journey which of those transitions maybe surprised you the most or caught you most off guard.
Eric Boduch:We had a pretty experienced management team. I don't know that I would say any part of them. Surprised us the most, or caught us off guard. But there's definitely unique challenges in each one, That you have to think about. And I think there's certain aspects to how you build a company that helps you navigate, that scale, especially that rapid scale. Like we went from, we quadrupled, then we tripled, then we tripled. We had one time where, you know, after doing a fundraising our first fundraising round with battery, we went from. Like 20 people to like 40 something people, in 45 days. Right. It was like,
Dan Balcauski:Wow.
Eric Boduch:growth, right? So, what helps you through
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Eric Boduch:I, I think having people that work well together, really strong leaders, but also having a really strong culture and a sense of what the company's about and why it exists, because you can always fall back on that when making decisions.
Dan Balcauski:Say a little more about culture.'cause culture is one of these things that is kind of a fluffy term. I think you might, maybe have an advisor to say, Hey, culture is important, but you're like, okay, yeah, I agree. What do I do now? Were there things that, rituals that you or Todd and the other management team did explicitly to help reinforce or set that culture?
Eric Boduch:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think. Well, you mentioned the word fluffy. Let's talk about that a little bit because I also, I did a startup right out, while I was in college during the.com times, right? So like culture, there was often things like, well, it wasn't kombucha at the time, but it was something equivalent, right? And, a pool table or a ping pong table or whatever in the office. And that's not what I think of as culture, right? Like culture isn't like perks. Culture is like how you think about the business like. Obsessing over customers being customer focused, like that core value that was part of Pendo was a big part of our culture being data driven, right? That was a big part of our culture and people might The word driven versus focused or Or whatever, those are pieces of our culture that I think was very important. And it was part of what was part of Pendo, so you could go back
Dan Balcauski:mm.
Eric Boduch:and it was like, is this in the best interest of a customer or are we doing this because it's easier for us? Right? Like, and if you have guiding principles or core values there, then I think it's very helpful in how you approach problem solving, how you approach challenges, how you approach whether people are quote unquote a cultural fit. And, hiring people who shouldn't be cultural fit isn't. I like'em cultural fit is like, do they fit in with. How the company views the world, how the company approaches things.
Dan Balcauski:So having those principles there for, decisions both around kind of what is, what to do in maybe strategy, but then also in the hiring practices as well, is what I heard.
Eric Boduch:I always thought culture was important. We had an early head of product, Shannon Bauman, rockstar ex-Google guy, really smart, love him. And he really hammered us on the culture side of things to keep that consistent. And I always knew culture was important. Todd and I knew culture was important. I think the whole founding team did, but I don't think you really understand how important it is until you go through these rapid scaling events, right? Where you're hiring a ton of people or making a ton of decisions quickly. It can give you some of the principles, some of the guidance that you need.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I know Pendo played a big role in either coining or at least popularizing the term product-led growth. I'm curious what your definition is of PLG and walk us through how that concept came about and how it became instantiated at Pendo.
Eric Boduch:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say as a whole we were a big. for the role of product management. Right. And we are we happened to be at a great time where I think product managers were starting to get the respect in an organization they deserved. It, it changed a lot from, product managers being, there, listening to some older friends that had been doing it way back in the day. Like even going back to my.com times and talking with people that were 20 years older than me, they would talk about product managers as like. This guy wasn't a great coder, so we made him a product manager or like everyone liked him, but he couldn't really sell. But the customers really liked him. He just didn't know how to close deals. So we made him a product manager. Like that was kinda like the old thing is like, well, where do they come from? They're like engineers that customers like, but don't write great codes, salespeople that customers like and like to talk to, but can't close deals, and product management just changed a lot and got elevated and because product is like, if software's eating the world, like Andreessen coin back in the day. It's very much so that product. It is what is driving the software that's eating the world and having good skill sets and good processes and good fundamentals in how you drive and build a product organization. I. Super important. And then so product led growth just built upon that. And I look at it and I gave a number of talks on this as more of like, Hey, let's just drop growth word for a minute here, and think about things as product led, right? Because product led organizations can impact more than just growth. It's how you build product, it's how you market, it's how you approach things. It's your mentality to capturing data. It affects a lot of things.
Dan Balcauski:Are like like any term that goes out in the wild. And you kind of hinted at this before, right? What you said, product market fit, which I have very similar feelings I think to product market fit of like, you could create these type of terms, can create the illusion of communication where we both say use the same words, but we're kind of talking past each other.
Eric Boduch:Mm-hmm.
Dan Balcauski:And I've found that a bit with PLG to a certain extent where some folks, for example, will say, well, PLG means you have a freemium offer, or, PLG means X, y, Z. Right. Are there ways that you think about it sort of in its I guess your original framing or your framing that you think maybe folks don't understand today? And like, what it, like, I guess the core of what it means.
Eric Boduch:Yeah, I mean, I think if you think about product led growth, and you think about it from a Freeman lens, you're missing a lot of opportunities, especially if you're an enterprise company, right? Like, and don't get me wrong, I, we spent a lot of time, looking at. The freemium kind of offering, right? We would do things like, hey, use analytics to understand your process, right? Your free trial process or your freemium process. And then map what you know successful either upsells or conversions to a paid offering look like. Like what do they, what products do they use? What do their interaction habits look like? You know what feature sets are being used and when, by what type of people. And then use things like guides in product like Pendo provided, or marketing outreach to drive people to things that, is gonna move them up a tier from the free tier to a paid tier, or move them from a free trial to, a paid engagement. So I think there's a lot to be said there, and I think that's a big piece of product led growth. I think the second piece, if you put all enterprise lines on it and you have these existing customers. How are you understanding what they're doing in the terms of retention? Right. And while that's not product led growth, it is very much product led. Right? What are the habits, what are the usage habits of customers that are likely to renew? And then also you, if you're in an enterprise situation and a lot of'em are land and expands, or a lot of'em have additional product offerings to cross sell or upsell, think about product led from that standpoint. How does your product data help you inform. Targets that should be upsell targets or cross sell targets. There's a lot of great data in your product and how people use your product that can be used to better drive everything from outreach marketing campaigns to, targets for your sales team, prioritize targets for your sales team. It can affect a lot of pieces of your business. And I think we're barely touching on how product data can be used. I mean, I think there's. All the Pendo customers out there, there's probably a hundred other things you can be doing to getting value out of your Pendo instance.
Dan Balcauski:Well, one thing I heard in that response was kind of hearkening back to that cultural underpinning of data driven, right? There's a lot of capabilities in the product data in your marketing data especially when you're doing things at volume that maybe cut against the grain of how maybe traditional B2B. Either product management or development was done, which was like, Hey, the, JP Morgan wants this feature, right? And so we build that based upon the last conversation the salesperson sold, right? And this is very much cutting against that and using data to really support those decisions, both in the acquisition and the retention side of things
Eric Boduch:PP
Dan Balcauski:and the monetization piece as well.
Eric Boduch:The data you have. And now with ai, it just accelerates that right now because now you can look at all of this data and use AI to sort through and find patterns, really effectively. I. So.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Well, and it's interesting that, you had such a data-driven culture, this focus on product-led growth, but I guess one thing that always really struck me about Pendo is how distinctive your brand is in the tech space, from the pink color to the overall kind of brand personality. I, how intentional was that brand building during those scaling years? And I guess, did you feel like it had a key role in the Pendo success?
Eric Boduch:Oh, absolutely. It had a, absolutely had a key role in our success and it was absolutely intentional. Very much intentional. I mean, even from the color, from the get go. I know when Todd and I were talking about colors, he mentioned pink, and we had seen. And we had some relationships with the Marketo people and seeing the effectiveness of Marketo's Purple. So when we went through Pink, I think, Todd was thinking about it as a secondary color, as a highlight color. But we're like, Hey, let's, am I, if we're gonna go pink, we're gonna go pink. We're gonna go big. Right? I think we even had a website design that was called Big Tank at some point, right? It was big. It was in your, it was in your face. We had a name that helped us support that too. Some of it was happenstance, but Pendo, which we started to value to measure, in Latin was all about
Dan Balcauski:Oh, I didn't realize that.
Eric Boduch:Yeah. But, and then we found out in Swahili it means love. Right? So like there was a tie into the pink color there ended up being a tie into taglines. We used in a philosophy we had about building products that your customers love. Right? There's a huge opportunity that we can just keep building on that. We had a heart as some imagery, made in North Carolina with Love by Pendo, right? Like there was a lot of stuff we did to play on that. We had some great marketing people. It started with me running marketing. It was extended by Jake who was a great marketing leader and Joe's turnoff and now there's a new guy there, grad, everyone says is gonna be amazing, in a line of great marketing people that, or great marketing leaders that Pendo Hass had and great marketing people that Pendo has had. I mean, I, even looking back, to my team, they've all gone on to be successful, both at Pendo and elsewhere, in, in leadership positions. So it's great to see Pendo continuing to push brand. It's great to see the people that worked on the early brand continuing to do great things at Pendo and other places. But yeah, brand was a big piece. We always wanted to punch bigger outside of our weight. I mean, my marketing budget when we started was tiny. People had no idea We were spending that little and getting that much bang for the buck, whether it's
Dan Balcauski:Well.
Eric Boduch:a big pink dinosaur disaster whether it's just, the pink boost, the pink imagery, the pink t-shirts. And we had people that would go to conferences we weren't even at and be like, Hey, I saw you guys at x, Y, Z conference because they saw. A person or two in pink. Right. Like we own some of that. We, even, like when we did a website redesign, we called up a dozen of our customers and had them working with us around, understanding who they felt Pendo was, and at the time, I think one of our customers, I can't remember who I was, describe, described to us as like their best friend or their girlfriend that. Gives you the straight scoop and helps you make the right decisions and helps you and is like always there to support you. So we saw ourselves as like trying to be that best friend of product managers and really not only through our product, but through our outreach and our community and our give back. Try to elevate the profession of product management.
Dan Balcauski:Well, we've, I. Brand like, culture or product, market fit could be one of these fluffy terms. I guess, how do you think about the difference between like an authentic brand or brand story versus just good marketing? Like, is there, like, how do you think about it? Like as a marketing leader?
Eric Boduch:I think some of it is like culture. It's like do you live it? Like is it part of you? Right. Is it part of who you are? Is there excitement around your brand? Do the employees believe in it? Do the leaders follow it? And it extends with a lot of things in companies. Like, do they use, do companies use their own product? I remember when Google had their social network, I don't think any of their executives were using it. Right. Like, so you knew that wasn't gonna do very well. Right. Or their employees using it. And I remember in a Windows phone day, I walked through Microsoft and everyone's using an iPhone. Right. You know there's gonna be a problem there. And I think it's an extent you can take that same extension to brand and other places where you know it. Does it feel like it's part of the organization or does it feel like an artificial bolt on? Right. It's not like, just like culture, putting a saying on a wall doesn't mean people are gonna live it. You, you have to make sure they live it and are part of it and feel part of it and wanna be part of it.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, I mean throughout kind of what you're saying there, right? Is it a tie back to this culture? Is it really grounded in who you wanna be as a company and also some of these really decisive bets going with pink, really like leaning into that versus just the secondary color making it kind of owning that. And also, making sure there was customer involvement in making sure it resonated with them and what you're building with like the website,
Eric Boduch:but that all
Dan Balcauski:I guess.
Eric Boduch:around the product too. Like we had a great product, right? We really concentrated on building a product for product management and all those things were supporting functions, like how can we bring the product in front of more people, right? It was a great product that we had built and brand just helped us get that product in front of more product managers. And it helped us sell more effectively and it helped us get great feedback more effectively. It helped
Dan Balcauski:well.
Eric Boduch:build a better product. So,
Dan Balcauski:Well, lemme ask you this, like, when you look at the SaaS landscape today compared to when you were building Pendo brand, like how do you think, most companies are approaching brand and brand storytelling? Are they getting it right?
Eric Boduch:wow. I think there's companies that are getting it right. I mean, the world has changed a lot, right? Like. I used to do a lot of outreach directly on Twitter, where I'll just be like finding product managers. I'll be like, Hey, we're building this cool, or We just built, or we are now launching, or it's in beta, this product for product managers. Will you take a look? Will you tell me what you think? Like, or like, we just launched this. We'll have to show it to you. I think it could help you. These are the three things we do, right? Like that I think are important as as someone that, that has a product background, right, from a Background. I think brand today is like different. Like we're in a weird world right now with ai. There's a lot of chaos out there. Not to say like, not to say you can't build a strong brand. I think, a lot of companies think brand is all there is, and they're rotating to that because it's been hard doing demand gen and lead gen and I always think there's a balance, right? We ran an Lead gen operation in the early days and I think probably still do, it was very good about like, this is what we do. This is why you should sue it. This is the value prop. Let us show it to you. Like there was a lot of really strong messaging for product managers and I think the brand and our lead gen efforts and our content efforts all played together, to make a really strong marketing presence and really, enhance the work. People like Chaz Guino, our original sales leader, was doing right, like he was a rock star, still is a rock star. Great guy. Just saw him last weekend. I mean, it's a tough time to do brand, but brand is part of a bigger puzzle, and it's a
Dan Balcauski:Yeah.
Eric Boduch:do brand these days in some parts, just because there's so much noise in the market today, even more so than there was before.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Well, kind of, after exiting Pendo, you, you chose to build a venture studio, which you're doing now rather than kind of go to the traditional angel or VC route, I guess, for folks who maybe aren't aware, I guess what, how, what's fundamentally different about the Venture Studio model? Why did that approach appeal to you? Why would to go that direction?
Eric Boduch:a lot of, like venture studios is a term that is maybe not well defined.
Dan Balcauski:We're hitting a lot of those in these conversation, which is like what I like to do.'cause I feel like there's a lot of fluffy conversation out there. So.
Eric Boduch:And I think like, like venture capital, it's a two and 20 model, for those who don't know, it's like 2% fees every year. 20% carry, meaning 20% of the profits go, back to the out the. The partners in the venture capital model. So it's pretty well defined. And you might see like a one and a half or a 2% fee, or maybe a two and a half percent fee or whatever, so there's some variance on that model. And it might be things like they take 20% of the profits until they return three x and then it's 30%. Like, so there's some small variances on the model. Studios are a lot different, because, there's a lot of different models and a lot of different ways to approach the studio, and there's been no standardization. And we could
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Eric Boduch:talking about different studio models and what I think of them and the ones I like and the ones I don't. But the way we work is, really hands-on. We work with two companies a year to co-create'em with entrepreneurs. You can think of us as unpaid co-founders, right? So I have a team of six that we're gonna grow up to a team of eight once we raise a little bit more money for the studio here. And, we work with companies really for 24 months, for each company for 24 months. So you think of it as like, you're gonna get two full-time people for the first, the equivalent of two full-time people for the first 24 months of your existence. You're not gonna have to pay'em. Where we get paid an equity as an essence of co-founder, right? And we're really focused on can we add a ton of value in those first two years that, our make and break years for pretty much all startups. I think if you can get through those first two years in a great position. You're probably gonna be successful, if
Dan Balcauski:I guess, yeah, no, that makes sense. Without having to dive into all the different sort of ways Venture Studios run, I guess if you just look at like how you guys have set up 24 and up are there advantages you see to, incubating companies in that approach versus your pure bootstrap vc, other potential models. Are there advantages that you see in terms of like, potential for company success or like anything else?
Eric Boduch:Yeah, I mean you could think of us in some ways as replacing that kind of friends and family round that little tiny bit of money. So like Put resources you don't have to pay for right in play. From the get go. So when you don't have any money or have very little money, you can stretch that a lot farther. And that helps get the companies to a point where they have early design partners where they have an early prototype or maybe even a beta of a product, and now they're going out and maybe raising a pre-seed round from a much stronger position. We're
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Eric Boduch:at enhancing that. I'm raising a venture capital round now that I'm, I guess I'm officially gonna announce somewhere. But we're
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Eric Boduch:a little$10 million fund so we can put that first half million to a million into the studio companies and even get them a little bit farther than we could, separate deals, separate structure, but, we'll do a fund with a separate group of investors to put that first million in.'cause we got asymmetric knowledge. We know a lot about the companies where we've been working with them. We've been able to work with the CEO. We, in essence, have a lot of due diligence. More than, a pre-seed fund is gonna be able to get in 99% of the cases. Or at least 90% of the cases because we've been working with them that long. So why not take advantage of that? Put that first check into companies that we have a high degree of conviction behind that we've alleviated a lot of the risks that we have, the asymmetric knowledge and help our vs help our entrepreneur partners not have to worry about that, that first check in the door and can get it from us and maybe a couple VCs that. That work with us or, bring a partner into that deal at a price point that's probably a little bit less than market, but we're making, we're doing it at at a stage where they don't have to worry about chopping it. And it's really early. So, yeah,
Dan Balcauski:Makes sense. Well, so you've I believe you've launched four companies now through 24 and up, but Rev, rev cast.
Eric Boduch:is a tough word to define. Like what, what's the startup that's launched? But if you think about launch as like a, we have customers using the product, and B, we have external money outside of the studio investment in the companies, then yes, we have a, a company troop that goes after brand story. So like we talked about, like, as a company scales, how do you enforce and make sure and force maybe is a strong word, how do you oversee and make sure that you know all the salespeople, all the support people, all the marketing materials, all the landing pages. Are consistent with your brand story. So we're able to consume, all of the external communications, map it against your messaging rubric and other company documents and show you where things are going off the rails. Maybe it's a sales person that needs to be retrained, and how to sell to this particular ICP, or maybe it's a customer service person needs to be, taught about how to better support this product. Or maybe it's marketing materials that are out of date. And because you've changed the messaging or launched a new product. So we use AI to identify all of that and help the product marketers, the brand storytellers, understand what needs to be updated and what needs to be fixed. It's probably a problem that could not be solved without AI and if it was solved, like we had to do this once at Pendo it just took a huge amount of effort to go through and find everything, train everyone. There's just a lot of dollars going into that. So we use AI to tell people understand. What needs to be fixed? What's working well? I think that second part is interesting too, is like you can find little interesting nuggets, right? When you're looking at things at scale, like, hey, there's a salespeople person that is not giving the pitch the same way everyone else is, but he's really successful with people in the financial services industry. What's he saying? Right? And then you can
Dan Balcauski:Yeah.
Eric Boduch:that and be like, oh, here's some things that he's doing that actually we should incorporate into our messaging. Right? There's some secondary impacts of that that are
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Boduch:so
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. I, I got a,
Eric Boduch:excited about that because it, like,
Dan Balcauski:yeah, I, I got a chance to look at it as well. It's very, really a neat, really neat product. For sure. So, but you were saying you're, you're, you're delineating these differences between launching and not launching. And so I guess yeah, if you wanna correct me on how many you, you say were launched.
Eric Boduch:I would say that are launched today, another three that are in the works
Dan Balcauski:Okay. Okay.
Eric Boduch:at varying stages, troops, one that's launched. We found that those performance managements for ai helps you understand how well your agents are actually working. I would say every software company that's out there is building agents should look at incorporating something like we found into their product, right? We help them, make sure that the agent pieces of their product that they are launching are actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. So help them manage that performance. And then the third
Dan Balcauski:So.
Eric Boduch:cast is in the revenue space, helping people think about revenue in a different lens. We've moved into a world of efficiency. So how do you make sure you're applying every dollar in the right way? How are you thinking of forecasting? Not just for deal forecasting, but do you have, are you forecasting people and pipeline and performance? Are you really thinking about your organization like a sophisticated manufac or thinking about your revenue organization, like a sophisticated. Manufacturing plant would think about building product, right? Like, do you have the right set of resources? Where are your bottlenecks? What are your assumptions? Are you tracking to them? Are you managing risks? And if you do that right, then you have a lot of, like, the revenue leader now can go to the CEO with a lot of confidence saying, I'm gonna hit this number and if I don't, here's the areas of risk, right? That I need to keep an eye on. Here's why we would miss if we're gonna miss and. And if they do hit their number, they can say, this is why we hit. If they exceeded, they're like, this is the metric that we actually did better. If they missed, they can be like, Hey, this is where we struggled. It was on, a win rate in the enterprise and this is what we're doing to fix it. Or we struggled because we thought we needed three X pipeline coverage for our new, group in amea, but we really need three, five to deliver. Or we struggled because, we didn't hit our hiring goals for this new team in apac. Right. So bringing a lot more visibility and accountability and making revenue a shared activity. I, I in the organization, like a collaborative activity between finance, the CEO and the revenue leader to understand like how to build the revenue organization so that it can scale because it's not about this quarter, it's about this year. It's about building something that has the, that the CEO and the board has confidence will grow the company to where it needs to get. Maybe that's an IPO. that's from 10 to a hundred million, are you building the right org? So those are the three that have launched an agent company a company that helps you build your revenue organization and then a company around brand story and storytelling. So
Dan Balcauski:Got it. Well, and just I wanna put a pin in the revenue thing and just come back to it in a second. But, obviously you've now been doing this enough to, launch three and got kind of three more in the works, I guess. Is there anything that's been surprising you've learned about the studio model that you didn't expect when you started?
Eric Boduch:Woo a ton. I mean, some of it's macroeconomic changes. When we started Rev cast, it was, interest rates are still low. So we started with a segment of like, Hey, our wedge into that marketplace was quota capacity because the reason people miss is like they're not managing their sales hiring properly. So we helped them manage quota, sign better quota, look at how they're thinking about quota and hiring and people going out on paternity leave and calculating that and promotions how that affects their ability to hit the revenue target. And then what, interest rates went up, SaaS changed, and it quickly became an inefficiency story. So we had to build a lot more. So like the macro affects a ton of things. And on the positive side too, we started troop looking at how we can build a platform for product marketing, right? And for storytelling in an enterprise in that messaging space. And then AI came and we're like, holy shit. I hope I can say that on your podcast. But we were like.
Dan Balcauski:Oh, say whatever you want. We're.
Eric Boduch:imagine what we could do with ai. Now we're not even giving people guidelines and help, but we can actually take in and consume all their communications and tell you what they're doing right and what they're not doing right. Who's doing things well, who's doing odd things, which we, those renegades, they're doing things that are off the rails, but are closing deals and how we can incorporate those in. So like that was a positive on the macro side, right? That all of a sudden, like makes, makes us able to solve problems in product marketing we couldn't solve before. And then there's new opportunities coming outta macro too, that we learned, like we found, is all about managing the performance of agents. That market didn't exist, two and a
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, that wasn't a thing.
Eric Boduch:open AI and things, there was very few people building, and using agents and now all of a sudden that's probably gonna be the biggest thing. I mean, all these people that are building agents and then they're rolling them out and they're like. Oh, it shouldn't say that. Oh, it shouldn't do that. Oh, it, how do you manage that in production there? Like there's no way to manage that in production and like you can't expect your IT to team to do that. like a great plugin into anyone building software. I mean, they have to use something like Wave found to do that. You have to manage agents in production. It's inevitable. I mean, people are just gonna run into that problem and then it's gonna be like, okay, how do we do that? So like those macro things have had huge impacts. And then I've just learned, there's like some inside baseball things like we, we changed some of our, ways we think about our due diligence because of ai, right? We can do due diligence a lot faster. We can build internal tooling around ai. So we're spending a lot more time building internal tooling in the studio to help our companies. Like we, we built an agent that will take all of your phone calls that the sales team has done and then look for trends and threads and. Things that come up, objections that are common across, say not just one customer, but in the aggregate across, say, a hundreds over months, right? So we have an agent that'll consume, whether it's a grain transcript or recording that way, that's great for, the hop ons on the one case, but now we're aggregating'em all together and giving you that feedback. And that's like an internal agent tool we built at the studio. So there's things that we've learned, because of the environment and then there's other things that. We, we've learned just from doing, like, it's still painful to, to incorporate in startup companies, like a lot harder than it feels like it should be. Even with all of the startups that are out there or have started to try to help you in that space. And maybe that's because there's not a lot of money in the early stage startups. The zero to five people, but it's still a painful process. It's painful hiring people across multiple states, like all that kind of stuff. You didn't realize how painful that was because. I hadn't done it in eight, nine years. Right. Since the beginning of Pendo and working on that. And frankly, Raul handled most of that. Thank you, Raul. So all those kind of things you learn as you're going through. There's so many things we
Dan Balcauski:Well.
Eric Boduch:this.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. What I heard there is that like it's hard enough to scale one company. It sounds like as you're dealing with macro effects, you're feeling that multiplied across all these companies simultaneously. So, I, I,
Eric Boduch:like you talk to like one of these big multi-stage VCs and they're like. I'm on 20 boards or I have 20 investments. I mean, like I have, we have six companies in total and say we're really active with four at a time, right? Like four seems like a lot to me, right? Like
Dan Balcauski:yeah.
Eric Boduch:trying to add value about four. So like kudos to the near edge of the world, from battery that are adding significant value to a ton of companies. But I think that's the difference on the studio side is like near Edge can give great board oversight and advice. I can actually dig in and. Jump into Google Console and be like, oh, this is why SEO is like going down on this search term, right? Like, so I
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Boduch:and help people. And that's a lot of fun. Or I can go through, Figma designs and be like, what if we thought about things this way? So I think that's the great thing about four. But time still disappears, man. Woo.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, yeah, for sure. If you figure out that you let me know.
Eric Boduch:Tough. I've, I've found the
Dan Balcauski:yeah.
Eric Boduch:math.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, the math on math on that one. Well look, there's obviously a lot of hype in the SaaS world and worldwide right now. I guess I, I am curious,'cause you mentioned, obviously, Wafa is purely in that AI space. You're building a lot of tools internally to help you, like, I'm curious like how you evaluate whether a. Use case AI use cases worth pursuing. Like, how are you sort of sorting through the noise and like trying to figure out, okay, where's the state of the technology versus what is feasible? I mean obviously you mentioned all the things with like, I think everyone who's building AI agents is kind of realizing there's one story that you might hear on a keynote stage in our story when you get a thing in production and maybe there's a gap in between. Like how are you approaching those?
Eric Boduch:Yeah, I mean, you mentioned something that's really interesting, there's some people on LinkedIn that are saying like, oh, it's the death of product management. And I think that's crap, right? Like I think it's like we're entering the golden age of product management. But there's a caveat to it, right? Because like product managers should be good with empathy with customers. They should be good about understanding a problem. Like that's their core skill set. If you go back to pragmatic and you look at their own like laminated one sheet that we all used to have at our
Dan Balcauski:Oh, I, I have it. I have it on my wall here. Pragmatics marketing rules.
Eric Boduch:Love like some great people out of there in that
Dan Balcauski:Great stuff.
Eric Boduch:And that was awesome back in the day and really was a great foundation for product managers. I mean, if you go back to some of those fundamentals and think about that, like if product managers are following and are trained on those fundamental aspects, it should be the golden age of product management. If product managers are not thinking about things that way and don't, and are weak in the fundamentals, like maybe some of'em have gotten, in the later years of the golden era of sas, right? May maybe that makes things a little bit harder. But I think first person principles, the ability to empathize with customers, strong sense of empathy, working with customers to understand their problems. Those are all core skills of product management. So we should be entering that, that golden age. And I would say the caveat, which goes back to what you talked about, you mentioned something about what models can and can't do, right? So there's a skill set for product managers in the AI space and software in general that they need to have, which is like the willingness and the ability in and understand what models really can and can't do. Like what can AI really can, what can it do today? And not only that is like a little bit of skating to the puck, right? Like early on we're like, hey. Tokens were kind of expensive. It was expensive using AI to do a lot of things. But we made an argument we had a hypothesis, maybe more than an argument that token costs are gonna go down significantly, as the,
Dan Balcauski:And they have, I think it's like a thousand X in two years, something like that. It's crazy.
Eric Boduch:So you can't, you need to understand a little bit of what the models can do today, but we made decisions knowing that token cost is gonna go down a thousand x right. Then we're gonna get more out of'em. You know that. So there's a balance, and I think product managers really need to dig in and understand what models can and can't do what the costs associated with them look like now versus the future. How to get the most out of'em. I think that's the, if there's a caveat to the golden age of product managers, if you're working in an AI space, and I would say 90% of the people out there are touching on AI in some way, you need to have a good understanding of what the models. Can and can't do. You don't have to be a coder, you don't have to be a PhD, working on neural nets, have to have written
Dan Balcauski:Yeah,
Eric Boduch:about attention none of that kind of stuff. But you do need to understand what they can and can't do. And I think having that kind of background, and so, so my background, even though I haven't written code in a long time, is, computer science from Carnegie Mellon Computer Engineering technically, but computer
Dan Balcauski:I was computer engineering as well. Hey, I didn't know we had that in common, so.
Eric Boduch:Like, thank you to the Tartans and Carnegie Mellon. Such a great education, thinking about things logically, probably the biggest thing outta that. But, I was writing neural nets back in the day. Like, I actually in one of my courses, like, working on a neural net to help identify whether mushrooms would kill you or you could eat'em, right? Like, like stuff like that. Now that all coming around, a little bit different with,
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, you don't wanna, you don't wanna get that wrong, right? Yeah. You don't wanna get that identification wrong.
Eric Boduch:My point
Dan Balcauski:Cat. Cat, not cat or hot dog. Not hot dog, right? Those are a little bit less risk.
Eric Boduch:is pretty funny. For those who haven't
Dan Balcauski:That was good.
Eric Boduch:Valley stuff yeah. I mean they're, need to, they don't need to be I'm not a big believer that even though I have a CS background by education at least that. PMs need to be technical, but they need to be technophiles. They need to be able to dig in if they're working on software, understand things like how models work, what they will or won't be able to do. And more than anything
Dan Balcauski:It.
Eric Boduch:be willing to have those conversations with people that really do know, right? Like be
Dan Balcauski:Well, it.
Eric Boduch:be always learning.
Dan Balcauski:And I'm curious'cause I, obviously with Wafa, I wasn't planning on going here, but obviously you may be a little bit more in touch with this. Like, are there obviously people are trying to put this stuff into production. Are there mistakes that you're seeing companies make as they try to put these things out into the world that like other people should be aware of? Right. As you've kind of seen, what we found has kind of gone through.
Eric Boduch:Anyone building software and agents should be talking away found, even if they're not using it, just to see some of the things they've run across and some of the problems they can help them solve. On the performance management side, I mean, we're not talking about analytics like Pendo does, like checking to see how often people are using your agents or clicking on'em. But we're talking about like how the agents themselves work, how they perform. I think both of those things are important, where Pendo will go on the analytics side and what we found is doing on the performance management side. But I do think like if you're rolling out agents, whether it's in your product, it's in the enterprise, you really need to be thinking about performance management and and part of that will, probably will evolve to be things like governance and compliance. But we haven't seen that yet. And. Usually people don't
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Eric Boduch:compliance and governance until they're forced to. But performance management becomes really important because you wanna make sure your agents are effective. They are answering questions, they are giving a great, user experience to whoever their users are. And without a runtime, performance management infrastructure in place to do that, you just can't do it. So, I mean,
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd mean just,
Eric Boduch:that something like that, you
Dan Balcauski:yeah, I mean just what. One of the things I'm surprised I haven't seen as much noise in is I just think the entire world of QA is gonna be disrupted, right? Because you had these deterministic systems that you could write, very simple sort of scripted tests for, and now with these probabilistic models, the, that entire model of how you would, create a testing plan, enforce a testing plan over automation, right? It just it kind of blows up that paradigm and I just don't think the world has kind of caught up to that, in full full amount yet. But,
Eric Boduch:there's a testing startup called MOOC that does some outsource testing, MUUK and I'm like, Hey, if you guys can tie in with the ALS of the world and generate testing plans, right, for the vibe coding world and, or even, cursor windsurf, what have you, there's a lot of interesting opportunities there. And I think in the testing space that are pretty wild and. And I think it's a hard problem to solve, but if you do it maybe with a man in the middle, right, where, where someone like a MOOC is providing qa, people that are using the AI to be way more effective, even if it's not AI doing all the testing you have a great solution. I think a little bit of that, AI to make people better is really where we are today as opposed to using AI to replace people. I don't think in a lot of environments we're quite close to that. But using AI to make people better we're definitely there.
Dan Balcauski:Well Eric, I could talk to you all day, but we are running up on time. I wanna be respectful of yours and the audiences, so I just. Yeah, no, you absolutely come back and do part two. It's up time in the future. We would love to hear more, especially some of these companies get escape velocity and I'm sure you'll have all new lessons to share.
Eric Boduch:side forever too, because I feel like revenue organizations need to change, right? Like if you're not hitting your numbers, you need to think about like how to build your revenue organization. Differently. It's
Dan Balcauski:Well, well,
Eric Boduch:quarter, right? Like so talk to the rev cast people like Dustin's a rockstar there. Jeff's been doing rev ops forever and they're like, Hey, we can help you if you're missing numbers and aren't sure why. That's like, talk to the people at Rev cast. And even if you don't use'em, you should get great ideas about like, here's how you should think about and track the key metrics for your revenue team. Right? I used to tell people this at Pendo. I was like, here's what you should think about free trials. You don't have to use Pendo for it. You can. Do all this yourself, but these are the things you should be doing with freemium or free trials or product led growth at the enterprise where you're looking at upsells. These are all the things you
Dan Balcauski:Yeah.
Eric Boduch:You don't have to use
Dan Balcauski:Well, I,
Eric Boduch:it, but have those conversations. There's, it's such a fun time to build companies right now. There's so many awesome things we can do. And I know
Dan Balcauski:yeah.
Eric Boduch:through your time. You have like a lightning question or something you wanna end with. Right.
Dan Balcauski:It's all good, man. No, it's definitely an exciting time, for sure. Yeah. I want a couple, close it out with a couple rapid fire closeout questions. First, when you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to work with over the years is there anyone who just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect on the way you think about building companies now?
Eric Boduch:Oh wow. Like trying to give an Oscar speech or something. I mean, there's so
Dan Balcauski:No, no. I mean, you don't need to think your agent, your mother, like
Eric Boduch:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:cast characters. If you just pick one.
Eric Boduch:my, my agent, who's my agent is that Todd Olson, the CEO of Pendo. I mean, my, my agents, Dustin, the CEO of Rev cast, or Tatiana, the CEO of Wave found, or Austin, the CEO of truth. I don't know. I mean, like, but no, in all seriousness, I mean, like, it all started with fundamentals in education, right? Thinking about things a little bit differently, thinking about things in problems, logically, being able to break'em down, so. Invaluable education. I got outta Carnegie Mellon, one of my early professors there who since passed. Jack Roseman was a great mentor to me. And just, working with amazing peers is always invigorating, right? Like it's always fun talking with interesting people. I mean, you can probably tell from my enthusiasm today, I am enjoying this, right? But, similarly, like working with people like Chad Burnett, who is an early studio engineer and is now over, as the CTO of way found like. Those conversations. I love to have, I mean, I'm a guy who loves to geek out over that stuff, over dinner or coffee, or drinks, like, so, know, those things dramatically affect me. I love to talk with smart people that love to learn, love to question things, love to bring up interesting ideas. So, I mean, it's like, it's, is there a fundamental, like, people had influence on my life, my parents gave me a great education. Carnegie Mellon did. Early professors and mentors, but I think the ongoing of just meeting with people that like to make the world a better place and talking about how we do it is just awesome. So I love to do that.
Dan Balcauski:Well, well, yeah. No, this has been fantastic. If listeners wanna connect with you, learn more about 24 and up or any of your companies, how can they do that?
Eric Boduch:LinkedIn's great. I'm the only Eric Bodak on LinkedIn. It's really kind of odd, I think, but I'm the only one there, so you can't really miss me. My email is Eric ERIC at 24 and up.com. Feel free to email me. I try to get to that. I know of an, we're building a we're building an AI agent that I'm gonna commercialize for, helping in essence EAs, right? So I, I have an agent now looking at my emails also on my calendars and recordings and everything. It's pretty wild. So hopefully I don't miss anything. But,
Dan Balcauski:well, I'll put I'll put a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes as well as links to your companies we've discussed for sure. Thank you so much, Eric. Everyone that wraps up this episode of Sask Scaling Secrets. Thank you to Eric for sharing his journey and insights. For our listeners, we found Eric's insights valuable. Please leave a review and share this episode with your network. It really helps the podcast growth. Thank you so much.
