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
Conquering the Desperation Mindset in SaaS Pricing with Apurv Bansal, CEO of Zenskar
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Dan speaks with Apurv Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Zenskar, about revolutionizing finance operations for B2B companies. Apurv discusses how businesses can significantly increase revenue by adjusting pricing models and emphasizes the importance of transitioning from a desperate to a confident mindset in pricing decisions. He shares insights into the challenges of revenue recognition, the impact of AI on financial operations, and the need for a flexible architecture to address evolving market demands. The conversation highlights the organizational changes required for successful adoption of the billing system and the critical role of cross-functional collaboration.
01:51 The Journey to Solving Billing Infrastructure
06:51 Challenges in the Market
12:47 The Role of AI in Modern Billing
16:57 Early Warning Signs for CEOs and CFOs
22:02 Common Pricing and Billing Mistakes
27:00 Organizational Changes for Successful Billing
31:08 Impact of AI on Billing and Monetization
Guest Links
Every business needs to collect money to get paid every business issue, recognized revenue to stay compliant. And it just, like funnily enough, was not a solved problem. Increase your revenue significantly more by just changing how you price than having to add more customers. That transition companies make from a desperate mindset to a more, confident mindset which reflects on how you price is not something every business is able to do. not transitioning to a confident mindset at some point is a mistake a lot of businesses as they start to make pricing decisions. They just continue to live with what they make decisions they made back in the day when they were more desperate. many of our customers. As they introduce new AI capabilities, they need to be able to monetize these AI capabilities. you have two lives now. You had a subscription life and now you also have a consumption life and you have to live both those lives in parallel business
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Welcome 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 Bakowski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to welcome AUR Bonsal, co-founder and CEO of Zens Scar, a New York based SaaS company helping finance teams automate manual finance operations. A perv is an IIT deli graduate with an MBA from Harvard Business School Safety School, unfortunately and has previously worked at Bain and Company Google and Elevation Capital. He's a second time founder focused on building enduring category, defining companies. A perv. Welcome to Sask Secrets.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Excited to be here.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327I'm very excited of course, S-G-L-K-A little bit by intro. For listeners who are familiar with yours, Edgar, give us the quick elevator pitch. What do you do? Who do you serve?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326We serve finance teams at B2B companies. Our vision is that business should be able to scale without having to scale the finance team. The day-to-day grant work regarding correcting money, reconciling revenue, reporting on your metrics should be handled by agents so humans can focus on more strategic activities inside a finance team.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327I know that every little kid grows up someday hoping to solve billing and infrastructure issues for finance teams. But I think you were a little different. You and your co-founder explored several different startup ideas before you started Zs ccar. Walk me through the process and what made billing infrastructure the one worth committing to.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Honestly we were so first of all, me and my co-founder decided to start a company together and we were clear that we wanted to build something that was easing the lives of finance teams. That was mainly driven by my co-founder, like if you ever speak to him, you'll realize that he is an accountant in the body of a computer scientist. And he had a very opinionated point of view on how software can be rewritten to make the life of finance teams and especially accountants easier. But with specific problem to solve for finance teams was not something we were, super opinionated on. And that process for us involved a lot of iteration. We spent about a year just narrowing down on the exact problem statement to go after and the right product to build to solve the problem statement. So essentially the characteristics that we were looking for, where before deciding to double down on a particular business, and we were very clear that, hey, it takes time to build a business. It's gonna be a. Long journey. So we wanna make sure we picked the right problem to go after. I think the number one criteria on our mind was it should be a hair on fire problem. I'm not sure if that phrase rings a bell, but. In other words, it should be a problem that is a painkiller for the end customer and not a vitamin they should be struggling with, with the problem so badly that they're looking for ways to solve it as opposed to, Hey, this is a good to have. Or, this makes my life marginally better, but brought significantly better. And I think the work we were running into was a lot of. Ideas that we were juggling with. They were good to haves, but not really must haves. And that process for us involved just like talking to a lot of finance leaders. We spent more than six months, close to a year, actually spoke to about 500 odd finance leaders. Started the initial problem statement that we had picked was, Hey, how can we make. Book closing a Faster Activity. We realized that there was a very vague problem statement. You wanted to narrow it down a little bit because people are like, Hey, what do you really mean by book closing being zero days? There's so much to do within book closing. What specific sliver are you talking about? And I'd say over a period of time, just as we spend that year talking to finance leaders, visiting them, sitting with them. Sitting with accountants and finance teams we just got to know their lives much better. And it organically became clear that one of the biggest pain points that these teams were facing was with collecting money and recognizing revenue. Every business needs to collect money to get paid every business issue, recognized revenue to stay compliant. And it just, like funnily enough, was not a solved problem. People were spending a lot of manual effort. All worst case, they were having to rely on the CTO's mercy to loan them, a few engineers to build something more in-house like an in-house piece of tooling to automate what they would have to do manually. And that just wasn't something that nobody, had access to and nobody wanted to also spend manual effort as they were scaling the business. It just became a very hard problem to solve manually. And that was a clear problem for us to go after.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Got it. A lot of due diligence, a lot of conversations with finance folks. And I don't think anybody listening to this podcast would be surprised of, going from vague to specific. Right. As you're closing the books is not exactly, maybe that painkiller doesn't resonate exactly with the day-to-day. But I'm curious, if you think back to those conversations, what were the biggest surprises? You'd mentioned, there's. This isn't solved yet. There's a lot of manual effort. What did you learn, about the world, the day-to-day? I mean, there was a lot of conversations for folks. Were there things that you thought you knew going in that were absolutely contradicted? Tell me more, a little bit about what the aha moments were during that process.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326I had say the biggest aha moment, honestly, was the fact that this was still an unsolved problem. Like it was mind boggling to me that people were still spending manual effort trying to solve this problem. I would've imagined that, collecting money, recognizing revenue would be a solve problem given how critical it is to any business. And it turns out the reason why it was unsolved was there was a fundamental change happening in the market. And because of the change that was happening, the solutions that were built a few years ago, they were not able to evolve with how the market was evolving to be specific. What was happening was, a lot of businesses were moving away from a per seat per month or a per user per month, a pricing model to more of a. Transaction or a consumption based pricing model, charging based on tokens or credits or number of minutes of compute or amount of data being stored. So that shift in pricing I'd say that coupled with the fact that a lot of sales teams were getting more and more creative with how they went and closed the deal, they would add any and all kinds of, creative clauses inside a contract. Go close the deal, stuff like, hey. There's an early payment discount, or there's a late payment penalty, or there's some kind of a minimum guarantee, which you oversee in the new pay, an overage fee. Anything that, helps closer deal sales teams for getting more and more creative. And the tooling built a few years ago just was not built to handle these kinds of complexities that finance teams were having to deal with because of how sales teams were evolving and that shift in the market was causing this problem to be unsolved. So I guess in some ways we just happen to be at the right place at the right time.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327So that shift in the marketplace and I've never heard of creative sales teams doing a bunch of additional contract clauses, that's completely unheard of. I would never imagine it would be a real thing. So I'm curious though so you'd mentioned there were other billing companies, people have been collecting revenue for businesses for, as long as businesses have
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327There were subscription billing companies. Why do you think that they, maybe this is getting a little ahead of ourselves. Describe to a layman what made it such that, those. Existing companies couldn't just add on a capability to just do this as well. It's oh, okay you were building this way and now you wanna build this way. Sweet. We'll just add on another feature
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Right.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327as a person who does, is an interested observer, but doesn't really understand the complexity, like, why didn't that happen? Why was this an opportunity?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326That was, by the way, the first question we asked ourselves before deciding to build a company that why aren't the legacy guys able to do this? Because if they were able to do it, then there wasn't any scope for us to build a company or a business over here. I'd say the biggest reason is to, it boils down to the architecture of these older businesses. When I talk about architecture, I'm talking about the technical architecture. So let's dive a little deeper here. Every product has a fundamental atomic unit, which is the underlying data model on top of which you build the entire product. So think of, a building being built, so you have a foundation. And on top of the foundation you build, different floors you, and then you layer on the glass and the paint and the tiling and whatnot. But the fundamental foundation is the core of the building. Similarly, for any software product, the underlying data model is the core of the product. And anything that is being built on top of that data model. Now, the data model of any other billing company out there, any other legacy billing company out there. This was not built to handle this kind of complexity in pricing. They were all built under the hood. All these other companies, they are like, their data model is like a spreadsheet, so think of rows and columns in a table. It's all meant to store structured data. Sales contracts, by definition, are unstructured. Sales contracts by definition, are not structured. It's not like you can describe a sales contract in an Excel in a row and a column. It's all free form, text free form English. To, have a software product that can deal with complex sales contracts. You need an underlying data model that is not like a spreadsheet. And as a result, the legacy guys had, to order to truly solve this problem, what they would have to do was rip out the entire building, go to the foundation, change the foundation, and then rebuild the building, which nobody wants to do because your building has so many customers living inside it, you don't wanna displace them. And as a result, that became the opportunity for us.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327I don't know if you have any familiarity with this market, but it's reminding me of the switch from like traditional CRM. Take your salesforce.com. Versus as companies have moved, especially in enterprise sales to like account based marketing. That model, that like Salesforce or CRMs are built on where I have a lead and there's, a contact for that lead that doesn't really work in an A
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Not.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327cause there's usually a distributed campaign to an entire bar marketing committee. And representing that in an existing CRM is quite difficult. I don't know if that is a example that paints what you're here,
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326It is. It is, absolutely. Yeah, because it's the fundamental, Atomic unit is no longer the contact, it's in the BM World Atomic Unit changes, and as a result, the CRM no longer is fit, so it's absolutely right.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327You mentioned, this was one of the first concerns that, you and your co-founder had to answer to understand if there really was an opportunity. But I know you guys also got a seed round led by Bessemer. When they were looking at writing you a check, were there other concerns that they had that you guys had to make sure that you had your story buttoned up around?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326I think the main concern that any investor had was. Every business out there prices themselves differently. Every salesperson structures contracts differently. How will you build a product that can be that can handle the custom nuances of any customer you are serving out there? How does your typically people end up building in-house tooling? Because they feel like their use cases are so complex and so custom that they need to build something more in-house. And the challenge really was how do we build a product that can serve the use cases of almost any business out there? And that was circumvented with, the innovation on the data model, which made sure that, finance teams no longer need to push back to how sales is structuring the deals. Finance teams can continue to do their job. And honestly, a lot of, again it became. Pretty clear to us very early on in our journey that anything that we were doing would just be better. 10, would be 10 x better with ai because AI was just taking off at that point. So we were lucky enough that we were able to build out fundamentally what we call an AI native architecture. And that ensures that the finance teams that we cater to are able to do their job relying on AI agents not having to have people operate the software. So that really becomes the stickiness factor for us when people start to use our product.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327So let's focus on. You guys have been in market now for what, six, six years?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326No, four years.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Four years. Four years. Apologies. Still signing my checks. 2025. So you've been in market four years. Help me understand what is the reason or the, what makes a typical customer realize they have a billing problem? What's the trigger that finally makes them pick up the phone?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326I had say there's not one trigger. There's a couple. One is you the, you'll see a business is launching new products. Sales teams are. Going and acquiring bigger customers and your sales contracts are becoming non-standard. Your sales contracts are starting to get to a place where every contract is looking different. And then what happens is finance teams find themselves having to push back to sales saying, Hey, please don't sell this'cause we lack. Infra to be able to accurately bill or recognize revenue for what you have gone and sold. Now what ends up happening is sales usually gets upper hand because they drive revenue and they're, then finance has to figure out how to deal with what sales has gone and sold. So the trigger is once this starts to happen over a period of three to four quarters, where month on, month, quarter on quarter, there is just this constant back and forth between finance and sales where. Every board meeting finances, asking sales to be less creative and sales is saying, Hey, we are doing what we have to do. But you figure out a way to deal with it. After a few quarters of that back and forth, people realize, okay, this is not this, this tension is not ending and we need a way to solve it, which is one big reason for them to pick up the phone. It doesn't happen overnight. It happens when the tension builds over a period of time. I'd say the second one, what happens is when people are, applying a duct tape solution, what they end up doing is they throw people at the problem. They'll hire people, they'll hire humans to go and run the billing and the rev rec manually. And in that scenario, they will start to make billing errors. They will start to do under billing, they will start to send incorrect invoices. They will start to hear back from customers saying, Hey, you, you sent us the wrong invoice. Or they will recognize revenue incorrectly. They will start to have problems clearing audits. So when those accuracy or compliance issues start to hit home, that becomes like a major trigger for them to pick up the phone, to start to fix this.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327This might, so you outlined two scenarios there. One, creative sales creating tension with the office of the CFO. And then the other is more this audit compliance risk is the who in those scenarios, raises the alarm first. Who most acutely. Feels the pain.'cause the CFO is responsible for a lot of things. Is it the CFO directly? Is there a specific part of the organization that you see really bearing the brunt of this accumulated
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326It is usually not the CFO, it's somebody in the CFO's office. So it ends up being the financial controller, the chief accounting officer, the director of accounting with the VP Finance. In some cases occasionally it could be the CFO, but usually it's somebody else in the finance team.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327I. Let's maybe you know that. So that's when companies
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Mm-hmm.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327to make this useful for the audience. Maybe let's walk the clock back so folks who are listening can understand, this, we haven't hit crisis mode yet, but I wanna know if I should be. in my antenna for some early warning signs that maybe our infrastructure isn't keeping pace. What should CEOs finance leaders be watching for? If you were dropped into a company, you'd be like, oh, it's not a problem. Now that's gonna be a problem in about 12 months, we're gonna hear from you.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326It did. So you asked me two questions. Should you ask me, what should a CEO be looking for and what should a finance leader be looking for as warning signs? I'd say the warning signs are different for the CEO or the or for the CFO. For a CEO, the warning sign could be that a product launch is getting delayed. It's delayed because the product needs to be priced in a certain manner. And the company doesn't have the infra to bill for that pricing. And now the launch is stuck because you. don't have the ability to be able to bill for how you anticipated pricing you're offering. The CEO starts to get worried when they're seeing that sales teams are constantly hearing from finance teams, so not to prize in a certain way. That starts to be a trigger that, should serve as a warning sign for the CEO that. Our sales could get affected If we didn't solve this problem. Today. I think what matters for the CFO is when you start, in audit, start hearing questions from auditors on your revenue being recognized incorrectly or you start to see early signs of revenue leakage because your customers didn't tell you that you send them an incorrect invoice. Because you send them an under a lower invoice than what actually should have been sent. Those are early signs.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327you're a petty over, if you're a petty over, you'll
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Exactly.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327A thousand under, you're not
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Exactly. So those are warning sign for the CFO.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327If you're a thousand under, you're not gonna hear anybody except for someone like me who has anxiety. It's are they gonna figure it out in 12 months and then send me an unexpected bill to get that money back?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Exactly.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Got it. So seeing infrastructure delay, new product launches and then being seeing the other part was seeing the impact of some of these sales plays, causing friction in the, being able to meet compliance auditing
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326That's correct.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Is
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Exactly. Okay.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327yeah. What stage do companies d does this typically become painful enough to address is this something that folks need to be, think company needs to be thinking about it all the time. From day one. For, is there a certain like level, either by revenue or number of products that really, this kind of gets to a breaking point.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326It really depends. Honestly, in some cases this will be a problem even before you launch because you want to price your product in a certain way. And the launch is get just getting stuck on you having the right billing infra. That's for, I'd say that's a smaller subset of companies. I don't see that being a larger fraction of the market. When you talk about recognition of revenue. That typically starts to become a problem once you've crossed a certain revenue scale, like 10, 20 million on the lower end. When you've crossed that, you've started to become a little bit more meaningful as a business, and at that point, you're starting to hold yourself or all others are starting to hold yourself accountable to recognizing revenue the right way. You have to, be compliant with 6 0 6 or if IS 15. You no longer can do cash accounting. You have to do accrual accounting. So that's when rev rec starts to become a problem. I'd say billing is a problem. To me, that is a function of the scale of, in terms of number of customers once you start getting past the 50, a hundred customers, mark. That is the point. at which this becomes a challenging enough problem where you need a software to be able to manage all this. Below that number, you don't really you can live with spreadsheets, you can deal with manual processes. You don't really need a software, but once you cross, let's say 50, 200 customers, at that point it's very hard to manage on a spreadsheet.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327And ask you this, is there thing I see a lot in my work is this idea of commercial debt. So I was a former engineer and product leader, and so in that world we always talk
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Mm-hmm.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327debt. An example being what we talked about before of like the data model, is is technically is technically tech debt because like you made a decision a while ago to optimize for certain use case and that prohibits you from making, you know, or you know, there's other, i implications of that, but commercial debt. Is
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326So.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327for businesses. One case I run into a lot where causes my phone to ring is, Hey, we acquired these five companies and we didn't rationalize their pricing and packaging models when we acquired them. And so now we have a giant mess on our hands and a 60 page price list that nobody could sell or understand, let alone our customers, even our internal team. What are the early pricing or billing decisions you see companies make that are almost always a mistake in hindsight?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326I had say those are two different questions, pricing and billing decisions that companies make. Let's talk about pricing first. I think what ends up happening is when you start a business, you the easiest way to price is. You're a little desperate to close deals to win customers, and you're like, okay, how is my customer used to paying? Let me just price in the same way as how my competitors have been pricing because, the customer is used to paying in that particular manner. I can always make the argument that you pay a legacy customer X dollars, you pay me the same, you get a better product. And it makes it easy for the customer to satisfy, to make the purchase. I'd say it's okay to start that way. It's not the worst decision in the early days, but if you truly think that your product has more value than what the, legacy alternatives out there are offering, then at some point you need to start monetizing that value. Otherwise, you're just losing money on the table like you could. Increase your revenue significantly more by just changing how you price than having to add more customers. And that transition that customers companies make from a desperate mindset to a more, confident mindset which reflects on how you price is not something every business is able to do. And I'd say starting with a desperate mindset is okay. But not transitioning to a confident mindset at some point is a mistake in my opinion. That's what I see with a lot of businesses as they start to make pricing decisions. They just continue to live with what they make decisions they made back in the day when they were more desperate.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327So you separated the beginning pricing from billing. What's the billing decision side that you see is usually a
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Yes, billing, honestly, when a company decides that they want to run away from manual billing and they want to automate their billing at that time, you really only have two options. You have one option is to go buy a vendor that can automate your billing. Another option is to build something more in-house and some kind of an in-house tooling. That helps you automate your billing workflows. The, when people build something in-house. They're almost shooting themselves in the foot if they are not solving for the future, because you, here's what happens. You will go to your CTO, you will tell them, Hey, I need an engineer. I need some time up there, because as a financeer, you'll tell them, please loan me an engineer who can spend some time automating my billing workflows. Now this the way the CTO makes a decision is okay, this engineer will no longer be building my core product. They're gonna help the finance team. So let me give them not my best engineer, let me give them someone who's who. I'm okay to not have built the core product. So not only is this engineer not the best on the team, they're also not a finance expert. And as a result, once they've started to build something, they've built it very reactively for yesterday's needs without considering the edge cases and scenarios that we come tomorrow. When you launch new products and you launch new pricing models. Then what happens over a period of time is you start to live with what was built six months ago, or 12 months ago by this engineer or a couple of engineers. And then as your business is evolving, that building system has not evolved, and now you're adding more people on top of it to be able to do manual workarounds outside what you built, three, four quarters ago. So you are like almost stuck in a limbo where you're like, okay, I built something in-house. This is not great, but I have to live with it now because this was built, I made a decision to build in now three, four quarters ago, and now that this is not working, let me add more people, have them do work arounds on this. So you've never really built something that's more future proof and that then starts to. Eventually show up when you are like realizing that hey, you're failing an audit. Or you have some kind of under billing issue, or you're having to push back to sales on how they want to close. And at that point you then start to invest. So in my opinion, that is the biggest billing mistake? that companies make.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327I wanna expand the circle here because, you've already mentioned this tension between finance and sales. If there's one thing that I've learned in my work, it's that is a team sport. Often painfully cross-functional. So, there's the CEO as well, product and engineering that you just mentioned. Bring an engineer to maybe build a homegrown solution. I'm curious there's. Many books and postmortem's been written, I'm sure, about a company that bought a tool and expected it to solve their problems. I'm curious about what is the organizational changes that companies need to make to really successfully adopt a new billing system?'cause it's, it probably implies a new. New way of working or thinking about the problem. Cross-functional collaboration. I'm assuming, I've not with Z scar customers specifically, but I know from my work with other companies, where sales. is not uncommon for sales to be unhappy with whatever the billing situation is.'Cause maybe sales lost some flexibility. And so, there's a negotiation of there's a power dynamic, not only a new tool, but oh, I used to be able to sell whatever I wanted and now'cause the billing system wasn't supported, I can't do that. So like, when you think about that cross-functional group, right? Maybe the champion is this person in the finance office, the chief accountant or controller whoever's bring you in, but what has to. Be successful at an organizational change level to really make that customers get off the ground.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326I think there's a few things that need to happen, right? First of all the finance team needs to accept that sales is selling a certain way. That this acceptance, now that you have acceptance, you are figuring out how to,
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327the zen and zen scar, right? It's
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326exactly. So now that you have that acceptance, now you're not, okay, we have to live with this. How do we solve? This. So that's one fundamental mindset change. At that point, it's a cross-functional decision that needs to happen and a cross-functional change. that needs to happen. The change that needs to happen is first of all, product and engineering need to be bought in. That, Hey, this is how we are pricing, and as a result. First of all, do you agree with how this is as a product team, do you agree that this pricing model makes sense because product is what built it? There's somewhere responsible for monetizing it product once they bought into how it's priced. Then the decision of where does engineering bandwidth need to be spent? Should it be spent on building the core product? Or should we spend automating financial operations? That is a I won't call it an organizational change. It's more of an organizational decision that has to be made that should we continue to hire engineers only to build the core product and let other, departments figure out how to deal with their workflow separately. Or should we allocate a portion of engineering bandwidth? To be to helping out other teams, whether it's the finance team or the marketing team, or the sales team with their workflows. And then if as a business you decide that, Hey, you know what my engineers are better suited to build my core product, then the change that you make is you say, okay, today onwards, I'm not dedicating any engineering bandwidth to supporting other functions. And you can go buy best in breed solutions. That deal with your use case the best. So that's the change that really happens at the engineering level, at the finance level, the big change is really adapting to a new technology because it's like change management. I have heard finance people tell me, Hey, you know what? I love my spreadsheet. Why are the, why is the management, or why did the CFO decide to automate my workflows? Why can I no longer live with my spreadsheet? And training the full team on the merits of automation versus having to, do some kind of a spreadsheet based workflow adapting to the mindset that automation is beneficial. That is something that of course, the decision maker sees. The controller will see it, the CFO will see it, but the full team who needs to be using. Whatever has been brought in needs to be trained on that. And that to me is a big organizational change having buy-in from people on the ground so that whatever change you bring in is adopted successfully. So across divisions and of course the CEO's job is to bring all these guys together and make sure that everybody's bought in with the right, the decision that's being made. So it ends up being a fair bit of change across different departments.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Speaking of change I don't think you can you definitely can't have a podcast without talking about ai, and I think AI is changing the entire software
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327What are you seeing about the impact of your customers bringing AI capabilities to market and how it intersects with, your world? What are the challenges you see customers running into from, billing and monetization angle as they try to introduce new AI capabilities?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326See, we've seen this with So many of our customers. As they introduce new AI capabilities, they need to be able to monetize these AI capabilities. And the way you monetize them is somewhere related to how you, what your cost structure is like. Now typically the cost structure for an AI product is, based on the underlying model or underlying LLM that you're using, which is, and as a result, your pricing can no longer be C based. So your pricing model changes. Let's take an example of any company. Let's take Zendesk, right? Zendesk used to have a seed based pricing model, and then, they have these new AI offerings that they've launched. And those AI offerings don't have a seed based pricing model. They are charged based on, number of tickets being resolved, a number of queries being answered. So now suddenly the company has two different businesses, the AI business that is charging based on usage or value, and the legacy business that is charging based on seats. And if the business that was the legacy business was using some kind of a billing or a revenue infra. That was not able to handle this new way of how AI needs to be monetized, then you get, you are stuck because either you no longer, you can no not launch these AI offerings, but if you do, then now you have to manage the billing and the revenue for it. Outside your billing and revenue system, you have to do it on a spreadsheet or you have to build some kind of in-house tooling. So you are living two lives, essentially. And we see that so often with almost all of our customers launching some kind of AI offering today. And as they launch these AI offerings and need, better ways to price these offerings, that's how we see them. Requiring someone like us to be able to deal with the billing and the revenue.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327So is the implication there that, they've got a existing sort of subscription and then they're creating an entire, they're adding an entire operational model for this. Pay as you go, or, hybrid approach as well. So is that where you're seeing customers struggle is standing up an entire
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326It's like to you have two lives now. You had a subscription life and now you also have a consumption life and you have to live both those lives in parallel business
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Given what you're seeing, what are the mistakes folks should about or what are the traps they should avoid as they go into that world?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326into the AI world.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Yeah. What you just implied was, not only, obviously you're introducing a new technology. That new technology has, some any, innovation has adoption
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Mm-hmm.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327right? But now not only are you investing in that from an r and d perspective, your costs are contained in engineering that's now leaking into. rest of your
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Mm.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327All the way from sales.'cause now your contracts are different. Finance now needs to bill in arrears, which maybe is not a situation anymore. As you see companies make that transition, what are the things that they should have their kind of eyes, open to, those aren't easy changes right? For any company. So I what, where do you see companies stumble? Like where should they make sure that they. Got their headlights pointed in the right direction to make sure they don't end up, running off a cliff at some point in that transition.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326I think honestly most of it is just realizing that this will require a new way of doing things, realizing it, and accepting it. I think companies, given that they're so used to the older way of doing things, now suddenly the market is forcing them to go the AI way. They don't realize the downstream implications of what it would entail. To, let's say, launch an AI offering. You get it'cause you're a pricing expert, but most people actually don't get it. And once they start to launch an AI offering, they're like, oh, holy crap. Our pricing model is no longer sorry. Our cost structure is no longer fixed. Our cost structure is now transactional. And as a result, our pricing model needs to be transactional. It needs to be usage based. Okay. Now that a pricing model needs to be usage based. We need a different way to do billing for this and we also need a different way to recognize revenue for this. Our reporting needs to change the way we look at a RR needs to change the way we look at churns to change and all of that. People don't really realize before they take the leap into ai. I think just knowing that. Because of ai, the way you will have to price and consequently the way you will have to recognize revenue or report on the revenue and Bill will all have to change, can set you up for success better than having to learn it the hard way.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Yeah, I think it's a similar parallel to what happened in the Perpetual license to subscription, where people are like, oh, I just host my thing in the cloud and then, divide my, annual fee divided by three and then like everyone. And it's no, this is an
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Yeah, exactly.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327this point. And the companies who went in with Eyes Wide open, made it across that chasm and a bunch of'em.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Exactly.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Perfect. I could talk to you all day, but we are running up on time, so I wanna close segue out to some rapid fire closeout questions. You
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Yeah, let's do it.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Awesome. What do you think about all the spectacular people that you've had a chance to work with over your career? Is there anyone that just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect on the way that you think about building, leading, growing companies now?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Building, leading, growing companies. Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327could be any of the above.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Yeah, there is a mentor of mine from back he, he's a successful entrepreneur. He runs a company called, it's a lending company. And yeah, he's 10 years senior to me from college, and he is been a guiding light to me. It made me realize what it takes to build a company. So yeah, I would call him out.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327What is the most impactful nugget he's imparted to you? Oh, this many years.
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326It takes time. Things take time, right? Don't be in a rush and don't expect results tomorrow. It'll take time. Everything will take time. Everything will take longer than you think it will.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327It will take twice as long and four times as much money. I think one of my other, one of my other guests gave that. Jim. If I gave you a billboard, you can put any advice on there. For other B2B SAS CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would it say?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Be in it for the long haul, so it takes time. That's my biggest learning.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327Be in it for the long haul. Absolutely there are no overnight success stories. This has been great. If listeners want to connect with you,
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Okay.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327about zanskar, how could they do that?
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326ska.com. Follow ska on LinkedIn. Follow ska on Reddit. I would say those are the three main areas, LinkedIn, Reddit, and our website.
dan-balcauski_1_01-06-2026_131327I will put those links in the show notes for listeners. Thank you so much to perv that wraps up this episode is Ask League Secrets. Thank you perv for sharing your journey and insights. For our listeners who you've found a Pervs Insights valuable, please review and share this episode with your network. Really helps the
apurv_1_01-07-2026_004326Thanks.
