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
From HBS Dropout to Successful SaaS Exit with Palash Soni, CEO of Goldcast
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Dan Balcauski hosts Palash Soni, CEO and co-founder of Goldcast. Palash shares insights on how Goldcast, an AI-powered video content platform, helps B2B marketers efficiently repurpose and distribute video content. They examine the potential and limitations of AI in marketing, emphasizing the importance of preserving the authentic human element to prevent commoditization. The discussion also covers the evolution of SaaS, the intricacies of implementing AI in marketing roles, and the strategic decision-making behind Goldcast's acquisition by Cvent. Palash offers valuable advice on managing company values and HR, reflecting on his journey from startup growth to acquisition.
01:07 Meet Palash Soni and Goldcast
02:30 The Role of AI in Marketing
08:43 AI's Impact on SaaS and Software Development
16:37 Adopting AI in Marketing Teams
22:46 Marketing Metrics and AI Adoption
24:26 Communicating ROI Effectively
28:30 The Acquisition by Cvent
33:42 Reflections and Advice for Founders
Guest Links
But what AI should not do is take away the part of that visionary or be the face of the brand and things like that. So, we don't want to take away the authentic. Human aspect in marketing because that is what makes marketing different, right? If everything is the same, then it's not good for anything. I think that will, that is a higher risk of commoditization with AI than. Than authentic videos. anyone who has built any kind of software, either the founder or product person or anyone knows that a software company is not just the code, right? The code is, I feel like it's the easy part and it has been easy for a while. It's not code, right? Code is only an enabler. The software is only an enabler of that. So I do think that it, SaaS is not gonna die. It's just going to uplevel itself.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Welcome 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 Palash Soni. CEO and co-founder of Goldcast. Goldcast is an AI powered video content platform that helps B2B marketers turn webinars and events into multi-channel content. Palash and his two co-founders made a bold bet in 2020. All three dropped out of Harvard Business School together to start the company. During COVID, that BET paid off Goldcast ranked 180 ninth on the Deloitte technology. Fast. 500 attracted customers like OpenAI and Intercom, and was acquired by Cvent in December. Plush. Welcome to the show.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Hi, Dan. Great to be here.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I very excited for our conversation today. Before we dive into your scaling journey, give us the elevator pitch. What does Goldcast do? Who do you serve?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah. Goldcast is a video content platform for B2B marketers, so we help B2B marketing teams. Create video content using webinars, virtual events, recordings like these podcasts, et cetera, and then use AI to repurpose and distribute that content. So we'll help them generate short form clips, edit that full video create like blog posts that IE optimized, any derivative content from that and then distribute them on their website, social media and everything else. So completing the end to end of video content supply chain for marketing teams to get their story out more effectively and efficiently. So,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Area that you focus on?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205wanna start, all podcasts these days, they take away your ability to launch a podcast if you don't talk about ai. So we're just gonna jump right into it, so don't get in trouble. You've been building AI powered products at gold, cast content repurposing video editing, but you've also pushed back on some prevailing AI narratives.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205what shaped your perspective on AI either can and can't do, or should and should not do. Take that any of those directions.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes. In general, Dan, in, in marketing since that's where we were operating, right? Marketing software, our big sort of thesis for what we were doing was that, hey the, in traditionally in marketing the one who was the visionary leader, the creator, right? It could be the CMO, it could be anyone in the team, it could be the CEO. They were different from the people executing it. So someone will think of a campaign, then someone else will do the text work, someone else will do the video work, and so on and so forth. And I think with ai the visionary and the creator will all became, become the same, right? That funnel will get crunched. But what AI should not do is take away the part of that visionary or be the face of the brand and things like that. So, we don't want to take away the authentic. Human aspect in marketing because that is what makes marketing different, right? If everything is the same, then it's not good for anything. And if you use AI, then it will AI for everything. Then it will kind of be the same or more of the same. Our goal was to empower the visionaries to create more and faster and better. And that's what we think should be done in marketing. So let me give you like a a point in our journey itself where we had to make this decision when we were trying to get into. Video ai, we said, okay, should we do avatars? That's all ai, uh, or should we do tools to help authentic human videos be better and more engaging using ai? And we chose the latter because we think that is going to be the future. Like no one will want to see an avatar of me or you instead of the real me and you. And that will only come at a premium, right as everything gets commoditized, that people will want to see the real me and you.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I wanna go back to something you said at the beginning. So you said,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205AI shouldn't be, the face or brand of the. Company, was there a firsthand experience you had where you saw that happening? I guess like you speak about the, that part specifically, like what were you seeing in the marketplace of either other companies doing, or maybe some early iterations of where Goldcast was doing? You're like, no, that's wrong.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah, absolutely. Dan the few things, right, some were shaped from our own experience running a webinar platform that had a wide adoption, right? Almost 150 companies were using our product when we jumped into ai. And so what we realized is that people. There's no good reason to come to a webinar, right? If you are just wanting to watch a video. People came to a webinar or a virtual event because they thought highly of the speaker and what made that speaker different, and then the ability to interact with that person, right? Can I ask them a question? Can I, be in the flow of that interaction, can answer a poll and get their commentary on it live and all of that. And that, that is how like great brands. Stand up, right? Today. If you look at B2B brands, the companies that have the most connection with people outside of having a great product are the leaders are very visible on LinkedIn, right? And this is something we did as well and we saw a lot of fruits from it. We were out there talking about things and building connection with people on social media. And same in B2C, right? That's done through influencers. But the influencers have a personality, a real. Human edge and quirk to them. If you just commoditize all of that with ai, uh, then I feel like you're kind of diluting your own brand because you, you miss the fact that there's a human who is unique and has the ability to interact like a human with the other person on the other side, which is what makes this valuable. And hence we thought, hey, that, that has to always be the truth. Like my ability as a human to act as the face of the brand. Can be multiplied maybe by AI or can be made more efficient, but authentic videos will always be, or authentic content will always be the bedrock of good marketing, I think.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I totally understand that in the context of a live webinar, I can't
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205anybody, webinars are already hard enough to get people to show up for it. I can't imagine anybody wanting to show up to see an AI avatar give a webinar.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Right.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205maybe a bunch of AI avatars would show up to watch that AI avatar, right? And juice your marketing numbers.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Did, does that same point of view carry over to either, recorded long form video or other types of content? I know there's a lot of discussion, obviously there's a whole world of like, what are we gonna do about, deep fakes and all of
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205actually try to be deceptive.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205we put that aside, right? That's not what we're talking about. But then if we think about. There's been, the world of vibe coding and using AI tools. A lot of the feedback has been, well, if you ask GBT or any of these models to build, you go front end for a website. They all look like they're running from the same template. You're like, oh, that's
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205So is it, does it extend into, is your perspective extend into that area as well or was it more focused on the live sessions, given that's what Goldcast was focused on?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah, my point of view was more focused on video content and which is what I meant by face of the brand. But I think websites, et cetera it's much harder to classify because there's no, like, it is, it's built by human or maybe by an ai, but I think that will, that is a higher risk of commoditization with AI than. Than authentic videos. Videos are different because they, there's almost an aspect of personality there, right? It's also a high engagement thing, right? Like, you, it's not like watching a short form video is not the same as just reading a post, right? It's more you have to invest more time into it. So people want. Commensurate a return and AI slop there, I think will probably not, uh, not work, uh, especially in B2B. The other thing also is that B2B is a game of relationships, right? Everyone has a ticket size where you are, you want to make an impression on the buyer and really want to build a connection with them. And so any hint of an AI avatar or something showing up there will dilute that for you.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Yeah, definitely breaks trust, and that's a
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205a B2B relationship. Sale. Building on this idea of vibe coating, there's this whole narrative out there that AI will make software trivial to build that barriers to
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205and SaaS will disappear. As someone who's built and sold software in, in the SaaS world for, five years, how do you rack that?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203That's great, Dan. That is, I think, somewhat true and also overblown. Because anyone who has built any kind of software, either the founder or product person or anyone knows that a software company is not just the code, right? The code is, I feel like it's the easy part and it has been easy for a while. Vibe coding definitely makes it ton easier, but I feel like coding ceases to be the barrier to entry in SaaS business much longer. Back since AWS and Cloud and all of these, like out of the box things started coming out.'Cause what makes a software business is all the stuff around it, right? Like the customer data and context that you have the processes that you set up to deliver value to customers through your sales team, to through your customer success team, through your support organization. All the best practices and knowledge around it that, that help the customers. It's a, it's almost a whole machine, right? That's built around business that. It's not code, right? Code is only an enabler. The software is only an enabler of that. So I do think that it, SaaS is not gonna die. It's just going to uplevel itself. So if you are, who is at the risk of disruption in this narrative is I guess, point solutions. So you'll see a lot of point solutions kind of getting super commoditized or disrupted because they don't own the workflow. The opportunity to do all of these things that require humans, right? Like deliver value through. Support organization success, best practices, all of that are more of the domain of like bigger workflow platforms, right? And not point solutions. So I guess that will be a risk to point solutions that they'll face a lot of tougher time getting through. But, uh, I do think everything else, uh, especially anything that can build off persistent context over time of a company. Will succeed. So, so for instance, very quick example. Like we we would typically end up owning the entire video repository, video content repository of a company in our product because of so many things that we used to do and that had so much value, right? We would know more about that brand. We would know about what topics they talk about and what they're likely to talk about, and all of those things that, that are outside of the code. That and then we owned that because we owned the entire workflow and we had. Uh, services organization and support team and everyone kind of supporting the customer in their journey. So yes and no.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205two. Yeah.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205there's definitely a lot. Yeah. You definitely give a very nuanced answer there.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205something there, but it's not nearly as much as the Twitter or LinkedIn thread boys would have you believe.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Totally by that.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205also, maybe I'll just make a distinction.'cause I think there's two very different arguments going on in this space that are getting conflated. One is, everyone is going to cancel their Salesforce CRM license because every company will just vibe code their own CRM. I think that argument is stupid because there's. No, if you know anything about comparative advantage, like if you have any engineering time, you should be spending it on what your company does best about your
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yep.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205not what some other company does all day, day in, day out.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Correct.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205get that when it comes to this. maybe it's not vibe coding, but it's just this general trend of I'll make the statement this way, software businesses. traditional moat has been the pure scarcity of qualified software engineers.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205was even a lot of memes around this during the COVID Runup where you saw the mega corps, like Amazon, Google, Facebook, almost hoovering up all the talent available just to. Defensively prevent any competitors from hiring those engineers, even if they weren't gonna do necessarily much with them. Now, I don't know that
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205their explicit internal strategy, but it certainly felt that way to a lot of people in the technology space.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205But imagine not Salesforce worrying about, Hey, my customer's not gonna renew their$50,000 contract because they're gonna vibe code their own solution. But another competitor in the space, say a, there's a pipe drive or a streak or somebody else who says, Hey. Salesforce just implemented this really cool new capability or feature or workflow probably based upon some in-depth understanding. Now, doesn't it become easier for those companies to copycat them? Is like what is wrong in
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Ha.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Or is that, hey, IT software doesn't go away. Everyone just is in more of a bloody red ocean now. Like, or do you just think like that doesn't exist?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203No, great point. And I was more talking about the latter. So, and there are like multiple nuances to this argument, right? There's, and the reason I picked point solutions is because AI has more threat to them from a competitive point of view. So for example, if I'm using a point solution, it's unlikely. That I am going to white code that and then put the effort to maintain all of that, right? Because while vibe coding is easy and getting things set up is easy, if you have to use something day in and day out, and if it has any meaningful complication it's unlikely, right? That you are going to be able to maintain that and do all of that. It's tough. Like no real organization is going to do that, in my opinion, even though coding is super easy. But what could happen is that 10 entrepreneurs could come into that space where only two could in the past, right? Because there was scarcity of software engineers. And it does take venture capital and everything to kind of build that company, uh, which is a scarce resource. So there can be a lot more perfect competition in many more domains than there was in the past. And that kind of crunches your pricing that makes retention poor, which takes away the, the goodness of that market. That's definitely going to happen, I think in point solutions like Salesforce. Yeah,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205oh. I was just gonna say, and I think if anybody's, I don't know when this would be released, but in the last, well to say in Q1 of 2026, if anybody's paying attention to the basket of public SaaS company stocks, all of their valuations appear to be getting reset again, I think as part of this broader concern. Of,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203totally. Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205zero, but you know their terminal value of unlimited cash flow. There was a narrative for a long time that, hey, SaaS companies have a incredibly large fixed cost to build it, but then there's just this flywheel of renewal that happens, and if we just fired all of our sales and marketing teams tomorrow, we'd still have this annuity that would pay us for years. I
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205people are starting to realize that A, with some of this new sea change, maybe that's not as viable anymore.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Totally. Yeah, there will always, there. There's definitely going to be pressure even on the Giants like Salesforce, et cetera, but to, to your point, I think it's incredibly hard to either vibe code Salesforce or something of that complexity, or even like one 10th the complexity or. Or build a competitor and replace it. Because even if you had something that was as good as Salesforce and some smaller competitor by coded it, the change management of a getting your data into that, which might be, you know, AI might be able to do that, but then you have to train all the people that are using that product and reestablish some of those workflow links, et cetera. Which is the value that software companies deliver, right? Through, through humans.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Yeah.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203hard, and I think it sometimes is not worth it, right? And many times not worth it for organizations.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I would just ask, executives, if you know you're sitting at a company, right? A non-tech company,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205well, should we renew this or should we have our internal IT delivery team? Build or CRM. Just think back to the last time you asked your BI team for a new Tableau or Looker dashboard and how long it took you to get that request done.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Right.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205alright, do we want this as part of the gears of our revenue operations every time we need
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205to our business?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203That's.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205so I wanna pivot a little bit, so still on this AI topic, but Goldcast. Sold to marketing functions and built, for marketers. I'm curious about your perspective, what you saw deploying AI enabled technology into marketing organizations where you saw it actually replacing work versus where maybe people who aren't as close to it as the technology as you are overestimating. What it can or will do.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Dan, so the, on the latter, it, AI has been moving at such a pace that I would never bet against it. So I think that the latter part is in the, in, in a phase where. Anything that we think is not possible today, might be possible tomorrow. Right? In, in many ways. But
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205we frame it.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205understand the tension and
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I hear, Dario or Demis get asked about a GI, the first thing is like, what timeframe are we talking about? If it's
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205years? Yes. If it's within one year. No.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203No.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205so maybe we just frame it with we're maybe the. general consensus is how, what it will do today versus, yeah, in three years it'll still be the same. I don't know if that helps.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah, it does. It does. So let me start with marketing and I'll tie it to the macro narrative that's going in the Valley, which has some merit to it. In marketing, what we saw is that even though what Goldcast did was it would. Take away the job of video editing, right? If you have a full webinar and you have to publish five clips on LinkedIn, you would have some editor doing it for you and, uh, and then you don't need that'cause Goldcast can use AI to create those clips and edit them and polish them. Now the, what we saw is that it seldom ended up replacing someone internally or even the external agency. But two things happened, either it enabled a lot more people who were not doing it to do it. So there were a bunch of companies including the, you know, the workdays and GitHubs that were not doing it, or were doing it only selectively and then now they were doing it much more. So that sort of expanding the tam, so to say, did happen in our case. And then the work of the internal editor or the agency just got up level, so they were. Pre doing it for a webinar now they'll only do it for like a CEO's keynote. So that is something we saw happening in front of our own eyes. And which kind of ties to the narrative that Mark Andreesen has been talking about, right. That, hey the job loss fears are overblown in the long run because people will be doing a lot more with the, you know, tools they have available that, uh, then, you know, then only replacing the stuff that they have currently. Uh, and this kind of ties back to the first thing that I said, right. The job of the creator and the and visioner is becoming the same. And we saw it happen that, hey, the person who was the speaker on the webinar and awkward doesn't have to rely on that video editor to, to do something. They can just do it themselves and then just post a clip from their web profile. But it didn't necessarily take away the job of that video editor.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I think one question that. leaders are struggling with right now is how to effectively get teams to adopt AI technology. Given your experience with the customers who you sold to in Goldcast, did you see any patterns maybe success or not success of the teams that were able to sort of Their impact and output with the tools, like how they, I dunno, maybe how they thought about, separating a person's job into, different, separate tasks or thinking about spreading the work that was current. Usually farmed to a specialist and spreading that more broadly across a team. Like where did you see, like what were the kind of the big. you saw where teams were, oh man we're getting a mile a minute out of adoption. Versus folks who are maybe trying to just add a new tool to the way they had always done things.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah, great. Great question, Dan. So it always comes down to the change management and what is the cost of that change management versus the. The benefit you're getting. So the two ways, two places where AI has actually had measurable impact the last two years is support and coding, right? Because those are high cost centers and the single KPI that most leaders or CXOs in those areas have is reducing the people cost or the per person output. In marketing, however, marketing teams are so efficient after the, you know, the post COVID onslaught of SaaS already that. It wasn't trivial to cut headcount in, in any reasonable way. Right? Like a content marketing manager does so many things, it's hard to build a product that can replace them in full. So where we saw adoption was companies that had the most need to go faster. Right, and higher. So high growth companies, which where the incentive of the line that, hey, if we do. Five webinars and then generate like 10 x more content on LinkedIn. It'll help us grow a lot faster and build more pipeline versus people who were bringing it as a cost cutting tool in our case. Uh, and that's what I've seen as a trend in marketing in general. Like anywhere where a marketing product or AI SAS or whatever is promising pure cost saving, it generally doesn't cut it because those teams are already so efficient. You have to be able to generate more stuff and help them build more pipeline. So that's what, that was our value prop at the time.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I don't remember who it was exactly. I think it might've been Andre Carpathy who was talking about, there's a big difference in the world of coding in how useful these tools have been because there's a lot of sc. Scaffolding that developers have built over time. So, for those of you who are not, developers or past developers, there's the idea of when you edit a file, you could diff two files to see what's changed. Things have been added, removed, changed, take that same idea to an app like. there's no equivalent. Like visually, show me what changed between these iterations of a slide. And so I imagine that as well was some friction that could, can end up in the marketing spot. Now, whether it's specific to Goldcast or not, but it's like, okay, we generated 10 x more pieces of content. The with code you have an immediate signal. This is why a lot of the. Large language model foundation companies are focusing on.'cause if they use reinforcement learning, Hey, did the code compile? Does it run, does it pass the unit tests? We can reward the model, but in marketing, I generate a piece of content. put it out. What was the reaction to the market? Did that generate new m qls? Did that generate engagement on my LinkedIn platform? Just because I created 10 new pieces, maybe before we were only creating one piece of content first. Now we could do 10, but maybe that
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205actually. Was better.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Could I don't know, like, did you run into difficulty of folks trying to adopt a ai, uh, workflows because of the closed, like the lack of a closed loop nature? Or is it just well, that's just the way things are today, so this is better than it was?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203no, a hundred percent. And the two examples that I gave, there's a very clear like report function there in software that's like number of prs that you are able to do in a day and support. It's the number of tickets. And so it's very clear, and that's why the adoption was much faster in our case. Uh, it's not right. You can see some metrics on LinkedIn, but you can never tie them directly to your pipeline. Generally I've seen that good marketing organizations do have a, do have an understanding that, hey, more of X will lead to more of y. They don't know exactly how, or like they cannot. Draw a, a straight line to both of them. So we found success again. That's why with high growth organizations, because they knew that more likes and engagement on LinkedIn will convert into more eyeballs for them, and they are in a phase where more eyeballs will mean more business.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Falling on the thread of those two points we just touched on.'cause you know, I, I spent all my time in the pricing world and so, pricing and value are inter intricately linked. And so, you mentioned, hey, savings. There's generally B2B, there's two, two value propositions. I'm gonna, I'm gonna save you money. I'm gonna make you money, right?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the two,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205so cost savings, usually, a pretty easy ROI story to tell to a customer.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203right.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205make you increase revenue story a little bit tougher
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Tougher. Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205of what we, these points we're talking about. What did you learn about. to effectively communicate ROI to customers of adopting your platform? Like I imagine that
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205just single shot, out of the gate. What did you try? What worked, what didn't work? Like, where'd you guys land?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah, that's a great question, Dan. And then I think something we discussed about before also in our case, in marketing, the challenge always is that attribution is. Hard, and I also sort of don't believe in going too overtly into attribution and just, you know, getting lost in that. And so what we have done multiple things, right? We had metrics inside the product to communicate, okay, X or Y increased. And hence you should get more value. So we found that there were some metrics which were, which we were clearly able to impact, right? There was there was the. The attendance of a webinar. So from how many registrants are you able to convert into attendance? That's something we excelled at. Uh, how many people from inside a webinar were you able to get engagement from? That's something we impacted. And then what is your time to content, right? Time to publish of the content, and then how much engagement that content has. It's like a cycle, right? But none of that is tied directly to pipeline. You can see that, right? And uh, what we saw the most helpful, Dan, is to just get customer testimonials. So anytime we see a customer gives me a nine NPS, we would ime someone from my team would immediately write to them saying, Hey, can you give us more numbers on why you gave us a nine NPS out of 10? And in many cases we did found numbers of customers giving those kind of things, right? And when people hear other customers validating that, hey in a setup which I can see myself operating in. Goldcast was able to make an impact in a RB, and then hence we saw OC go up. That is what worked the best for us. I think customer testimonials.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I love that story and I'll outline a little bit why, because
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Thank.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205calculators are, pretty wide use, widely used sales tool. Sometimes marketers put them on websites. Generally I think. Buyers are pretty skeptical of them. Even using a sales conversation, there's a certain way that you need to use them in order to make them valuable. I think that one of the core problems, and what I liked about your approach is that when people build those, it's usually some product marketer or sales leader go into a room somewhere, devise a spreadsheet
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205this is the thing. And that's really an ROI hypothesis, right? Find first step. But it ain't ready for prime time yet.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205you know what you did was, hey we have customers who are successful. Let's talk to them about why they're successful and actually get their data and use that. Because, you know whether or not you even had an RI calculator sort of beside the point. But I think it's a very appropriate viable practice to go that direction. Straight
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Right.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205mouth, right? Then
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205calculator in front of someone and people roll their eyes. They're like, ah,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205gimme a, a 40 X return in year one on my purchase price. Right. Even if you put like a risk discount in there it's a difficult conversation to navigate. Not that they don't have their place,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205they're, I think they could be a, use a useful framing exercise. To have. But I think this is an underappreciated direction that you've outlined. So really love that. I do wanna
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Thank you.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205And you have, obviously been leading Goldcasts for five years making big decisions. But I think one of the largest decisions you faced is you guys got acquired by Cvent recently.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Right.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205You were. Growing, you'd raise, millions of dollars of institutional capital ranked on the Deloitte Fast 500. You had options. How'd this acquisition come about?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah, Dan, great question. I'll be as candid as I can be. So the acquisition came about we, because we, obviously we knew of cve C even knew of us, we were, CWE is a, the largest player in the. In-person event space. Right. And we were in the virtual events webinar space, and they had a product that was somewhat competitive, although newer than ours, so knew of each other. But semen reached out at about, six months before, I would say end of July. And, uh, at that time we were in fundraising modes. We were like, okay, we'll go out and raise money and keep scaling. But in a lot of ways the combination made sense. Right. Cvent already is. Embedded in so many companies, right? Probably they have a vast majority of fortune thousand already as customers. And what we needed was we knew that we had the product market fit, right? We were the innovation leaders in the category, and distribution was a big bottleneck for us, right? Like it is for every SaaS company.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205you As well. I didn't ask you before, but
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes, our main targets became mid-market enterprise. So any company with more than 500 employees, but a big focus was on companies with more than 2000 employees, which is where our enterprise segment started. There was, there's definitely a lot of synergy there because we were both, events in some way, but then we would help get more out of those events through our AI product. So there's a lot of product synergy. And then there's a lot of distribution synergy as well, right? We were selling to the same persona, same audience. So it would have been an immediate amazing handshake. And the third thing, Dan, candidly is is the valuation, right? Like if you, when we had the option to either go the acquisition route or take money from an investor the latter means. Extra dilution and then, you know, a few more years of the treadmill that you have to be on VC money. Versus when we looked at the time value adjusted returns that we would, we would get from this acquisition our investors and our employees would, uh, it just made sense to say, okay, uh, you know, this is probably the, in the best interest of everyone, like customers, employees and investors. Um. The third is just the history, right? If you look at the history of B two P, MarTech, there haven't been many acquisitions actually, or many exits. So in the last, I would say in this decade, the big ones that we can count are, are Drift qualified, which happened just after US Chorus. And then, um, it was one other that Braze acquired. Those were the only, I would say, meaty exits in the B2B multi category and. And we thought, okay, if we have one at our hand, why not take a bird now then, then lose them in the bush. I, sorry, I'm misplacing that.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205no, no. Absolutely.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I guess you, you painted it as a kind of a two path fork of raise additional capital dilution, time to, an exit liquidity event
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203right.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205acquisition. The arguments you made make perfect sense. In terms of, all both of those one conversation I've had with previous guests was taking institutional capital, but using that as a Secondary to take, chips off the table.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205part of the conversation? Was that a third path in there as well? Because I can imagine that would maybe allow you to dip your feet in both worlds. Like at least we end up, at least I don't have to worry about my house payment anymore,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205and I said, could stop eat me and my co-founders could stop eating Ramen. But.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205know, we still have a chance for a longer term. I'm just curious, like
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205that and quickly discarded it, or was that like a serious option that was also on the table, while you were debating the other two paths?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah, Dan. So we had, we didn't go that far with the investor conversations'cause this thing happened very fast. But that would definitely was on the table, right? If we had done a venture round, we would've thought of secondaries, not just for ourselves, but for our team as well. That's always the option, but it sits a, not the same as a full exit. Uh, and then second thing done also is that candidly. For like very awesome long-term compounding to happen. The retention characteristics of the business need to be. Very strong, right? So Goldcast in its own category was probably the best player, right, in terms of GRR and NRR. But the category mechanics itself didn't allow for very high retention because we were working with marketing teams, right? And marketing teams work on campaigns and plans change frequently, and the teams have a very high turnover versus say, dev teams, right? And uh, and so when we did the math, uh, it. Felt like this was the better decision and it would probably result in better retention if we are part of part of Cvent for both of us, right? We both can compliment and have, you know, deeper roots in a company. So we, we just thought that the long term compounding probably has some risks to it, right? Because of the persistent retention challenges that present in any MarTech businesses.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I'm curious when you're going through this perspective, who, how do as far as I, I know you haven't sold a company before, have you? This is this
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203No, this is my first here,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205so look, I being a founder of a scaling business is always full of, I have no idea what I'm doing. This the first time I did it so like. and your co-founders probably talked to each other, but like how did you think about, broadening that circle of advice? Because I imagine, you've got your board.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yep.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205the, all the board members aren't a hundred percent aligned on the direction, maybe some of
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205are like, no, we want to take this as this is a rocket ship, right? You should sell. Right. So, I've also, I've talked to plenty of CEOs who, have differing opinions, shall we say, on m and a advisory firms, right.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205They're like, yeah they reach out to me all the time on LinkedIn and I just tell'em to stop. Bugging me. I don't, I would never use you. And some people have absolutely a wonderful experience. I don't
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205about those interactions specifically. So like, how did you and your co-founders think about who do we trust in the situation? Who do we get advice from? How do we structure this such, it's one of those things that like if you're extremely lucky, you get to do this once in your life.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205it seems like a difficult decision to prepare for.
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203It is difficult, Dan. So we had all of those usual cast of crews that you're talking about. Right? It was our board and we really have a lot of respect and love for our board members. And then there was our m and a advisor, right? Bankers who were with us. And then there was the law firm, but ultimately who we spoke with a lot were our. Pre-seed founders. Pre-seed investors, sorry.'cause they had known us for the longest. Right. And they were probably the closest to what's happening today on the ground. And that is more of a reflection of what the future of the. The market could be given how things are changing right? In the world. That's one. And and second is fellow founders, right? Other founders that we have come to know who are one stage ahead of us who have done this before. And in all of cases, I think we heard the same things there, right? Like for a particular value maybe the time adjusted value that you're getting right now makes sense above a certain amount. And so we had, going into the process, we knew that hey, we'll only entertain, an offer from anyone if we get above a certain value. And then it depends a lot on terms and things like that. And fortunately we were able to get there.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205So I'm curious, I really hate the question of, if
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205back, would you do anything differently?'cause I get asked that question a lot and it, I am always like, well, I wouldn't have ended
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I am if I did anything differently, but that didn't mean we had to suffer through what we went through. If you could go back and maybe give your self, say rewind six months, some mindset advice of Hey. these are the things maybe you need to be focused on. You're worried about a bunch of things that don't matter. What would be the, what would be that advice to yourself to make you sleep better through that time period?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Oh, God, that's a great question. Dan, so I think that there are a few things that I did wrong that I'm not going to do again. One is that there is, a startup always is scaling so fast that there's often not a great time to sort of set up the base, right. The system, the foundation of the company, which which in a SaaS company is mostly people related because that's SaaS companies, mostly people. So I, what I did wrong was that I didn't have a full-time good HR leader until like, I think one and a half years back. So I was at the center of all people issues, people fighting with each other, managers not getting along with their reportees and stuff like that, which was extremely draining to be able to sort issues between people, right? And that's a part of any people organization, right? And so that's one. The second connected thing is that we didn't have really operationalized good value. So we had some values, but they were on the, you know, on a. On a document that no one looked at and they were arrived at by consensus. So we did that after discussing with our like first executive team. And so we got an HR leader we just topped down and said, Hey, these values are not, you know, out of the door. Just let the founders define the values and this is what we care about. And, uh, and we just said, Hey, we'll go and operationalize these values in every way possible. So we started who was using Slack emojis and awards and everything else, and talk about those values and com compliment people and all of that. That made a huge difference actually. And I wish I had done that from day one because that made obviously the whole like, people system work much better. It was more cohesive and it made my life a lot easier. I could actually anchor on something to say, Hey, this behavior is okay versus not okay. And so earlier I used to kind of poo poo the values thing, but I'll not do that again, so Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205some help in the HR people space and get your values aligned. Oh, Palash,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205great. We are gonna be running up on time. I wanna be respectful of yours. So I want to,
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes,
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205to some rapid fire closeout questions if you're okay
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203yes. Let's do it. Yeah.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205All right. What's your favorite business book or podcast right now?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203My favorite business book is actually this book called The Model Animal. It's not a business book, but it's like evolutionary psychology by Robert Wright. It's on the nineties, but it's the best if you have to understand humans.'cause ultimately we are selling to humans.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Awesome. If I give you a billboard to put any advice on there for other B2B Sass CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would it say?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203If you are not expanding your TAM every year, then probably you have not done your job as A CEO. That's the first job as a CEO after PMF?
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205Expand your TAM every
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Yes. Yeah
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205this has been fantastic. Your listeners wanna connect with you, learn more about Goldcast or now Cvent. How could they do that?
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very active, so hit me up on LinkedIn and let's chat there.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205I will put a link to your LinkedIn and the show notes for listeners, everyone that
palash_1_02-04-2026_111203Thank you.
dan-balcauski_1_02-04-2026_101205episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. Thank you Palash for sharing his journey and insights. For listeners found Palash's insights valuable. Please leave a review. Share. This episode with your network really helps the podcast grow.
