September 30, 2025 • 43 mins
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
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Eric Boduch (00:00):
we quadrupled, then we tripled, then we tripled.
(00:02):
We had one time where, afterdoing our first fundraising
round with battery, we wentfrom.
Like 20 people to 40 somethingpeople, in 45 days.
I don't think you reallyunderstand how important it is
until you go through these rapidscaling events, right?
Where you're hiring a ton ofpeople or making a ton of
decisions quickly.
And I look at it like, Hey,let's just drop growth word for
(00:23):
a minute here, and think aboutthings as product led, right?
Because product ledorganizations can impact more
than just growth.
It's how you build product, it'show you market, it's how you
approach things.
I think it's like we're enteringthe golden age of product
management.
Dan Balcauski (00:58):
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories 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 welcomeEric Boduch, CEO, and founder of
24 and up a venture studiothat's re-imagining how early
stage companies get built.
Eric co-founded Pendo where hespent eight years helping scale
one of SaaS' biggest successstories.
(01:18):
He's a serial entrepreneur,former host of the Product Love
podcast, which I had the honorof being featured on at one
point, and someone who brings asystematic approach to the
challenges that trip up mostScaling companies.
Eric, great to have you on SaaSScaling Secrets.
Eric Boduch (01:32):
Hey, great to be here.
Thanks, Stan.
Dan Balcauski (01:34):
Well, I am very excited to finally get.
To have a chance to talk to youon the podcast.
We've been known each othersince that episode of Product
Level, which I think wasprobably three, four years ago
now.
Time goes by so quickly.
Eric Boduch (01:46):
I would guess
Dan Balcauski (01:47):
yeah.
Yeah.
It's wild.
Wild.
I, I wanna start with a littlebit of your time at Pendo.
You spent eight years thereScaling Pendo through different
stages of growth, and I guess asyou look back now, were there
kind of.
Key inflection points or eraswhere you really realized, Hey
we can't keep doing things theway we've been doing them.
Those moments where you had tochange your approach as the
(02:09):
organization got bigger and youfaced new challenges that you
didn't as an early stagecompany.
Eric Boduch (02:14):
Yeah, absolutely.
Dan.
I think, first the zero to oneis a unique time in, in the
existence of a company, right?
Because you're reallyscrambling, you're scraping,
you're trying to get those earlycustomers, those early
advocates.
You're trying to prove that youhave something that delivers
value.
So that's a unique time ingetting to that traction point.
Once you have some semblance ofproduct market fit, arguable
(02:37):
that, that term even exists.
But once you have some semblanceof happy customers revenue and
ideally renewing customers,right?
Or customers, are we gonnarenew?
I think it changes a little bitinto like, how do you grow the
company and then you're tryingto put in place, things like,
the beginning of processes andpeople and.
And then it turns from, say fiveor 10 million up to more
(03:01):
scalable processes and buildingleaders in the organization and
handing out responsibility morebroadly across the organization.
So things definitely change alot from the zero to one, from
like, and then from like one tofive, and then five or 10 and
up, things change ratherdramatically.
I think.
For all the entrepreneurs outthere that are struggling to get
(03:23):
that foothold, the zero to oneis probably the hardest time.
Dan Balcauski (03:27):
As you think about that journey which of
those transitions maybesurprised you the most or caught
you most off guard.
Eric Boduch (03:35):
We had a pretty experienced management team.
I don't know that I would sayany part of them.
Surprised us the most, or caughtus off guard.
But there's definitely uniquechallenges in each one, That you
have to think about.
And I think there's certainaspects to how you build a
company that helps you navigate,that scale, especially that
rapid scale.
Like we went from, wequadrupled, then we tripled,
(03:56):
then we tripled.
We had one time where, you know,after doing a fundraising our
first fundraising round withbattery, we went from.
Like 20 people to like 40something people, in 45 days.
Right.
It was like,
Dan Balcauski (04:08):
Wow.
Eric Boduch (04:09):
growth, right?
So, what helps you through
Dan Balcauski (04:11):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (04:12):
I, I think having people that work well together,
really strong leaders, but alsohaving a really strong culture
and a sense of what thecompany's about and why it
exists, because you can alwaysfall back on that when making
decisions.
Dan Balcauski (04:27):
Say a little more about culture.
'cause culture is one of thesethings that is kind of a fluffy
term.
I think you might, maybe have anadvisor to say, Hey, culture is
important, but you're like,okay, yeah, I agree.
What do I do now?
Were there things that, ritualsthat you or Todd and the other
management team did explicitlyto help reinforce or set that
culture?
Eric Boduch (04:46):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think.
Well, you mentioned the wordfluffy.
Let's talk about that a littlebit because I also, I did a
startup right out, while I wasin college during the.com times,
right?
So like culture, there was oftenthings like, well, it wasn't
kombucha at the time, but it wassomething equivalent, right?
And, a pool table or a ping pongtable or whatever in the office.
And that's not what I think ofas culture, right?
(05:08):
Like culture isn't like perks.
Culture is like how you thinkabout the business like.
Obsessing over customers beingcustomer focused, like that core
value that was part of Pendo wasa big part of our culture being
data driven, right?
That was a big part of ourculture and people might The
word driven versus focused or Orwhatever, those are pieces of
our culture that I think wasvery important.
(05:32):
And it was part of what was partof Pendo, so you could go back
Dan Balcauski (05:35):
mm.
Eric Boduch (05:35):
and it was like, is this in the best interest of a
customer or are we doing thisbecause it's easier for us?
Right?
Like, and if you have guidingprinciples or core values there,
then I think it's very helpfulin how you approach problem
solving, how you approachchallenges, how you approach
whether people are quote unquotea cultural fit.
And, hiring people who shouldn'tbe cultural fit isn't.
I like'em cultural fit is like,do they fit in with.
(05:58):
How the company views the world,how the company approaches
things.
Dan Balcauski (06:02):
So having those principles there for, decisions
both around kind of what is,what to do in maybe strategy,
but then also in the hiringpractices as well, is what I
heard.
Eric Boduch (06:12):
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 theculture side of things to keep
that consistent.
And I always knew culture wasimportant.
Todd and I knew culture wasimportant.
I think the whole founding teamdid, but I don't think you
really understand how importantit is until you go through these
(06:33):
rapid scaling events, right?
Where you're hiring a ton ofpeople or making a ton of
decisions quickly.
It can give you some of theprinciples, some of the guidance
that you need.
Dan Balcauski (06:42):
Well, I know Pendo played a big role in
either coining or at leastpopularizing the term
product-led growth.
I'm curious what your definitionis of PLG and walk us through
how that concept came about andhow it became instantiated at
Pendo.
Eric Boduch (06:57):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say as a wholewe were a big.
for the role of productmanagement.
Right.
And we are we happened to be ata great time where I think
product managers were startingto get the respect in an
organization they deserved.
It, it changed a lot from,product managers being, there,
listening to some older friendsthat had been doing it way back
(07:19):
in the day.
Like even going back to my.comtimes and talking with people
that were 20 years older thanme, 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, buthe couldn't really sell.
But the customers really likedhim.
He just didn't know how to closedeals.
So we made him a productmanager.
Like that was kinda like the oldthing is like, well, where do
they come from?
They're like engineers thatcustomers like, but don't write
(07:42):
great codes, salespeople thatcustomers like and like to talk
to, but can't close deals, andproduct management just changed
a lot and got elevated andbecause 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 thesoftware that's eating the world
and having good skill sets andgood processes and good
(08:03):
fundamentals in how you driveand build a product
organization.
I.
Super important.
And then so product led growthjust built upon that.
And I look at it and I gave anumber of talks on this as more
of like, Hey, let's just dropgrowth word for a minute here,
and think about things asproduct led, right?
Because product ledorganizations can impact more
(08:24):
than just growth.
It's how you build product, it'show you market, it's how you
approach things.
It's your mentality to capturingdata.
It affects a lot of things.
Dan Balcauski (08:33):
Are like like any term that goes out in the wild.
And you kind of hinted at thisbefore, right?
What you said, product marketfit, which I have very similar
feelings I think to productmarket fit of like, you could
create these type of terms, cancreate the illusion of
communication where we both sayuse the same words, but we're
kind of talking past each other.
Eric Boduch (08:51):
Mm-hmm.
Dan Balcauski (08:52):
And I've found that a bit with PLG to a certain
extent where some folks, forexample, will say, well, PLG
means you have a freemium offer,or, PLG means X, y, Z.
Right.
Are there ways that you thinkabout it sort of in its I guess
your original framing or yourframing that you think maybe
folks don't understand today?
And like, what it, like, I guessthe core of what it means.
Eric Boduch (09:14):
Yeah, I mean, I think if you think about product
led growth, and you think aboutit 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 yourfreemium process.
(09:37):
And then map what you knowsuccessful either upsells or
conversions to a paid offeringlook like.
Like what do they, what productsdo they use?
What do their interaction habitslook like?
You know what feature sets arebeing used and when, by what
type of people.
And then use things like guidesin product like Pendo provided,
or marketing outreach to drivepeople to things that, is gonna
(09:59):
move them up a tier from thefree tier to a paid tier, or
move them from a free trial to,a paid engagement.
So I think there's a lot to besaid there, and I think that's a
big piece of product led growth.
I think the second piece, if youput all enterprise lines on it
and you have these existingcustomers.
How are you understanding whatthey're doing in the terms of
retention?
Right.
And while that's not product ledgrowth, it is very much product
(10:21):
led.
Right?
What are the habits, what arethe usage habits of customers
that are likely to renew?
And then also you, if you're inan enterprise situation and a
lot of'em are land and expands,or a lot of'em have additional
product offerings to cross sellor upsell, think about product
led from that standpoint.
How does your product data helpyou inform.
Targets that should be upselltargets or cross sell targets.
(10:44):
There's a lot of great data inyour product and how people use
your product that can be used tobetter drive everything from
outreach marketing campaigns to,targets for your sales team,
prioritize targets for yoursales team.
It can affect a lot of pieces ofyour business.
And I think we're barelytouching on how product data can
(11:05):
be used.
I mean, I think there's.
All the Pendo customers outthere, there's probably a
hundred other things you can bedoing to getting value out of
your Pendo instance.
Dan Balcauski (11:14):
Well, one thing I heard in that response was kind
of hearkening back to thatcultural underpinning of data
driven, right?
There's a lot of capabilities inthe product data in your
marketing data especially whenyou're doing things at volume
that maybe cut against the grainof how maybe traditional B2B.
(11:34):
Either product management ordevelopment was done, which was
like, Hey, the, JP Morgan wantsthis feature, right?
And so we build that based uponthe last conversation the
salesperson sold, right?
And this is very much cuttingagainst that and using data to
really support those decisions,both in the acquisition and the
retention side of things
Eric Boduch (11:52):
PP
Dan Balcauski (11:52):
and the monetization piece as well.
Eric Boduch (11:54):
The data you have.
And now with ai, it justaccelerates that right now
because now you can look at allof this data and use AI to sort
through and find patterns,really effectively.
I.
So.
Dan Balcauski (12:05):
Yeah.
Well, and it's interesting that,you had such a data-driven
culture, this focus onproduct-led growth, but I guess
one thing that always reallystruck me about Pendo is how
distinctive your brand is in thetech space, from the pink color
to the overall kind of brandpersonality.
I, how intentional was thatbrand building during those
scaling years?
And I guess, did you feel likeit had a key role in the Pendo
(12:27):
success?
Eric Boduch (12:28):
Oh, absolutely.
It had a, absolutely had a keyrole 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 weretalking about colors, he
mentioned pink, and we had seen.
And we had some relationshipswith the Marketo people and
seeing the effectiveness ofMarketo's Purple.
So when we went through Pink, Ithink, Todd was thinking about
(12:50):
it as a secondary color, as ahighlight color.
But we're like, Hey, let's, amI, if we're gonna go pink, we're
gonna go pink.
We're gonna go big.
Right?
I think we even had a websitedesign that was called Big Tank
at some point, right?
It was big.
It was in your, it was in yourface.
We had a name that helped ussupport that too.
Some of it was happenstance, butPendo, which we started to value
(13:10):
to measure, in Latin was allabout
Dan Balcauski (13:12):
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Eric Boduch (13:13):
Yeah.
But, and then we found out inSwahili it means love.
Right?
So like there was a tie into thepink color there ended up being
a tie into taglines.
We used in a philosophy we hadabout building products that
your customers love.
Right?
There's a huge opportunity thatwe can just keep building on
that.
We had a heart as some imagery,made in North Carolina with Love
(13:33):
by Pendo, right?
Like there was a lot of stuff wedid to play on that.
We had some great marketingpeople.
It started with me runningmarketing.
It was extended by Jake who wasa great marketing leader and
Joe's turnoff and now there's anew guy there, grad, everyone
says is gonna be amazing, in aline of great marketing people
that, or great marketing leadersthat Pendo Hass had and great
(13:55):
marketing people that Pendo hashad.
I mean, I, even looking back, tomy team, they've all gone on to
be successful, both at Pendo andelsewhere, in, in leadership
positions.
So it's great to see Pendocontinuing to push brand.
It's great to see the peoplethat worked on the early brand
continuing to do great things atPendo and other places.
But yeah, brand was a big piece.
We always wanted to punch biggeroutside of our weight.
(14:17):
I mean, my marketing budget whenwe started was tiny.
People had no idea We werespending that little and getting
that much bang for the buck,whether it's
Dan Balcauski (14:26):
Well.
Eric Boduch (14:26):
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 goto conferences we weren't even
at and be like, Hey, I saw youguys 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 awebsite redesign, we called up a
dozen of our customers and hadthem working with us around,
(14:49):
understanding who they feltPendo was, and at the time, I
think one of our customers, Ican't remember who I was,
describe, described to us aslike their best friend or their
girlfriend that.
Gives you the straight scoop andhelps you make the right
decisions and helps you and islike always there to support
you.
So we saw ourselves as liketrying to be that best friend of
product managers and really notonly through our product, but
(15:11):
through our outreach and ourcommunity and our give back.
Try to elevate the profession ofproduct management.
Dan Balcauski (15:18):
Well, we've, I.
Brand like, culture or product,market fit could be one of these
fluffy terms.
I guess, how do you think aboutthe difference between like an
authentic brand or brand storyversus just good marketing?
Like, is there, like, how do youthink about it?
Like as a marketing leader?
Eric Boduch (15:36):
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 yourbrand?
Do the employees believe in it?
Do the leaders follow it?
And it extends with a lot ofthings in companies.
Like, do they use, do companiesuse their own product?
I remember when Google had theirsocial network, I don't think
any of their executives wereusing it.
Right.
Like, so you knew that wasn'tgonna do very well.
(15:57):
Right.
Or their employees using it.
And I remember in a Windowsphone day, I walked through
Microsoft and everyone's usingan iPhone.
Right.
You know there's gonna be aproblem there.
And I think it's an extent youcan take that same extension to
brand and other places where youknow it.
Does it feel like it's part ofthe organization or does it feel
like an artificial bolt on?
Right.
It's not like, just likeculture, putting a saying on a
(16:17):
wall doesn't mean people aregonna live it.
You, you have to make sure theylive it and are part of it and
feel part of it and wanna bepart of it.
Dan Balcauski (16:25):
Yeah, I mean throughout kind of what you're
saying there, right?
Is it a tie back to thisculture?
Is it really grounded in who youwanna be as a company and also
some of these really decisivebets going with pink, really
like leaning into that versusjust the secondary color making
it kind of owning that.
And also, making sure there wascustomer involvement in making
sure it resonated with them andwhat you're building with like
(16:46):
the website,
Eric Boduch (16:46):
but that all
Dan Balcauski (16:47):
I guess.
Eric Boduch (16:47):
around the product too.
Like we had a great product,right?
We really concentrated onbuilding a product for product
management and all those thingswere supporting functions, like
how can we bring the product infront of more people, right?
It was a great product that wehad built and brand just helped
us get that product in front ofmore product managers.
And it helped us sell moreeffectively and it helped us get
(17:08):
great feedback more effectively.
It helped
Dan Balcauski (17:11):
well.
Eric Boduch (17:11):
build a better product.
So,
Dan Balcauski (17:13):
Well, lemme ask you this, like, when you look at
the SaaS landscape todaycompared to when you were
building Pendo brand, like howdo you think, most companies are
approaching brand and brandstorytelling?
Are they getting it right?
Eric Boduch (17:24):
wow.
I think there's companies thatare getting it right.
I mean, the world has changed alot, right?
Like.
I used to do a lot of outreachdirectly on Twitter, where I'll
just be like finding productmanagers.
I'll be like, Hey, we'rebuilding 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 launchedthis.
We'll have to show it to you.
I think it could help you.
(17:45):
These are the three things wedo, right?
Like that I think are importantas as someone that, that has a
product background, right, froma Background.
I think brand today is likedifferent.
Like we're in a weird worldright now with ai.
There's a lot of chaos outthere.
Not to say like, not to say youcan't build a strong brand.
I think, a lot of companiesthink brand is all there is, and
they're rotating to that becauseit's been hard doing demand gen
(18:07):
and lead gen and I always thinkthere's a balance, right?
We ran an Lead gen operation inthe early days and I think
probably still do, it was verygood 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 reallystrong messaging for product
managers and I think the brandand our lead gen efforts and our
content efforts all playedtogether, to make a really
(18:29):
strong marketing presence andreally, enhance the work.
People like Chaz Guino, ouroriginal 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 dobrand, but brand is part of a
bigger puzzle, and it's a
Dan Balcauski (18:45):
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (18:46):
do brand these days in some parts, just because
there's so much noise in themarket today, even more so than
there was before.
Dan Balcauski (18:52):
Yeah.
Well, kind of, after exitingPendo, you, you chose to build a
venture studio, which you'redoing now rather than kind of go
to the traditional angel or VCroute, I guess, for folks who
maybe aren't aware, I guesswhat, how, what's fundamentally
different about the VentureStudio model?
Why did that approach appeal toyou?
Why would to go that direction?
Eric Boduch (19:09):
a lot of, like venture studios is a term that
is maybe not well defined.
Dan Balcauski (19:15):
We're hitting a lot of those in these
conversation, which is like whatI like to do.
'cause I feel like there's a lotof fluffy conversation out
there.
So.
Eric Boduch (19:21):
And I think like, like venture capital, it's a two
and 20 model, for those whodon't know, it's like 2% fees
every year.
20% carry, meaning 20% of theprofits go, back to the out the.
The partners in the venturecapital model.
So it's pretty well defined.
And you might see like a one anda half or a 2% fee, or maybe a
two and a half percent fee orwhatever, so there's some
variance on that model.
(19:41):
And it might be things like theytake 20% of the profits until
they return three x and thenit's 30%.
Like, so there's some smallvariances on the model.
Studios are a lot different,because, there's a lot of
different models and a lot ofdifferent ways to approach the
studio, and there's been nostandardization.
And we could
Dan Balcauski (19:57):
Mm-hmm.
Eric Boduch (19:58):
talking about different studio models and what
I think of them and the ones Ilike and the ones I don't.
But the way we work is, reallyhands-on.
We work with two companies ayear to co-create'em with
entrepreneurs.
You can think of us as unpaidco-founders, right?
So I have a team of six thatwe're gonna grow up to a team of
eight once we raise a little bitmore money for the studio here.
(20:18):
And, we work with companiesreally 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, theequivalent of two full-time
people for the first 24 monthsof your existence.
You're not gonna have to pay'em.
Where we get paid an equity asan essence of co-founder, right?
And we're really focused on canwe add a ton of value in those
(20:39):
first two years that, our makeand break years for pretty much
all startups.
I think if you can get throughthose first two years in a great
position.
You're probably gonna besuccessful, if
Dan Balcauski (20:49):
I guess, yeah, no, that makes sense.
Without having to dive into allthe different sort of ways
Venture Studios run, I guess ifyou just look at like how you
guys have set up 24 and up arethere advantages you see to,
incubating companies in thatapproach versus your pure
bootstrap vc, other potentialmodels.
Are there advantages that yousee in terms of like, potential
(21:10):
for company success or likeanything else?
Eric Boduch (21:13):
Yeah, I mean you could think of us in some ways
as replacing that kind offriends and family round that
little tiny bit of money.
So like Put resources you don'thave to pay for right in play.
From the get go.
So when you don't have any moneyor have very little money, you
can stretch that a lot farther.
And that helps get the companiesto a point where they have early
design partners where they havean early prototype or maybe even
(21:34):
a beta of a product, and nowthey're going out and maybe
raising a pre-seed round from amuch stronger position.
We're
Dan Balcauski (21:41):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (21:41):
at enhancing that.
I'm raising a venture capitalround now that I'm, I guess I'm
officially gonna announcesomewhere.
But we're
Dan Balcauski (21:46):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (21:47):
a little$10 million fund so we can put that first
half million to a million intothe studio companies and even
get them a little bit fartherthan we could, separate deals,
separate structure, but, we'lldo a fund with a separate group
of investors to put that firstmillion in.
'cause we got asymmetricknowledge.
We know a lot about thecompanies where we've been
working with them.
We've been able to work with theCEO.
(22:07):
We, in essence, have a lot ofdue diligence.
More than, a pre-seed fund isgonna be able to get in 99% of
the cases.
Or at least 90% of the casesbecause we've been working with
them that long.
So why not take advantage ofthat?
Put that first check intocompanies that we have a high
degree of conviction behind thatwe've alleviated a lot of the
risks that we have, theasymmetric knowledge and help
(22:28):
our vs help our entrepreneurpartners not have to worry about
that, that first check in thedoor and can get it from us and
maybe a couple VCs that.
That work with us or, bring apartner into that deal at a
price point that's probably alittle bit less than market, but
we're making, we're doing it atat a stage where they don't have
to worry about chopping it.
And it's really early.
So, yeah,
Dan Balcauski (22:49):
Makes sense.
Well, so you've I believe you'velaunched four companies now
through 24 and up, but Rev, revcast.
Eric Boduch (22:56):
is a tough word to define.
Like what, what's the startupthat's launched?
But if you think about launch aslike a, we have customers using
the product, and B, we haveexternal money outside of the
studio investment in thecompanies, then yes, we have a,
a company troop that goes afterbrand story.
So like we talked about, like,as a company scales, how do you
enforce and make sure and forcemaybe is a strong word, how do
(23:18):
you oversee and make sure thatyou know all the salespeople,
all the support people, all themarketing materials, all the
landing pages.
Are consistent with your brandstory.
So we're able to consume, all ofthe external communications, map
it against your messaging rubricand other company documents and
show you where things are goingoff the rails.
Maybe it's a sales person thatneeds to be retrained, and how
(23:40):
to sell to this particular ICP,or maybe it's a customer service
person needs to be, taught abouthow to better support this
product.
Or maybe it's marketingmaterials that are out of date.
And because you've changed themessaging or launched a new
product.
So we use AI to identify all ofthat and help the product
marketers, the brandstorytellers, understand what
needs to be updated and whatneeds to be fixed.
(24:01):
It's probably a problem thatcould not be solved without AI
and if it was solved, like wehad to do this once at Pendo it
just took a huge amount ofeffort to go through and find
everything, train everyone.
There's just a lot of dollarsgoing into that.
So we use AI to tell peopleunderstand.
What needs to be fixed?
What's working well?
I think that second part isinteresting too, is like you can
(24:22):
find little interesting nuggets,right?
When you're looking at things atscale, like, hey, there's a
salespeople person that is notgiving the pitch the same way
everyone else is, but he'sreally successful with people in
the financial services industry.
What's he saying?
Right?
And then you can
Dan Balcauski (24:37):
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (24:37):
that and be like, oh, here's some things that he's
doing that actually we shouldincorporate into our messaging.
Right?
There's some secondary impactsof that that are
Dan Balcauski (24:46):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (24:47):
so
Dan Balcauski (24:47):
Yeah.
I, I got a,
Eric Boduch (24:48):
excited about that because it, like,
Dan Balcauski (24:50):
yeah, I, I got a chance to look at it as well.
It's very, really a neat, reallyneat product.
For sure.
So, but you were saying you're,you're, you're delineating these
differences between launchingand not launching.
And so I guess yeah, if youwanna correct me on how many
you, you say were launched.
Eric Boduch (25:03):
I would say that are launched today, another
three that are in the works
Dan Balcauski (25:06):
Okay.
Okay.
Eric Boduch (25:07):
at varying stages, troops, one that's launched.
We found that those performancemanagements for ai helps you
understand how well your agentsare actually working.
I would say every softwarecompany that's out there is
building agents should look atincorporating something like we
found into their product, right?
We help them, make sure that theagent pieces of their product
that they are launching areactually doing what they're
(25:28):
supposed to be doing.
So help them manage thatperformance.
And then the third
Dan Balcauski (25:31):
So.
Eric Boduch (25:32):
cast is in the revenue space, helping people
think about revenue in adifferent lens.
We've moved into a world ofefficiency.
So how do you make sure you'reapplying every dollar in the
right way?
How are you thinking offorecasting?
Not just for deal forecasting,but do you have, are you
forecasting people and pipelineand performance?
Are you really thinking aboutyour organization like a
(25:52):
sophisticated manufac orthinking about your revenue
organization, like asophisticated.
Manufacturing plant would thinkabout building product, right?
Like, do you have the right setof resources?
Where are your bottlenecks?
What are your assumptions?
Are you tracking to them?
Are you managing risks?
And if you do that right, thenyou have a lot of, like, the
revenue leader now can go to theCEO with a lot of confidence
saying, I'm gonna hit thisnumber and if I don't, here's
(26:14):
the areas of risk, right?
That I need to keep an eye on.
Here's why we would miss ifwe'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 belike, Hey, this is where we
struggled.
It was on, a win rate in theenterprise and this is what
we're doing to fix it.
Or we struggled because wethought we needed three X
(26:36):
pipeline coverage for our new,group in amea, but we really
need three, five to deliver.
Or we struggled because, wedidn't hit our hiring goals for
this new team in apac.
Right.
So bringing a lot morevisibility and accountability
and making revenue a sharedactivity.
I, I in the organization, like acollaborative activity between
finance, the CEO and the revenueleader to understand like how to
(26:59):
build the revenue organizationso that it can scale because
it's not about this quarter,it's about this year.
It's about building somethingthat has the, that the CEO and
the board has confidence willgrow the company to where it
needs to get.
Maybe that's an IPO.
that's from 10 to a hundredmillion, are you building the
right org?
So those are the three that havelaunched an agent company a
(27:19):
company that helps you buildyour revenue organization and
then a company around brandstory and storytelling.
So
Dan Balcauski (27:27):
Got it.
Well, and just I wanna put a pinin the revenue thing and just
come back to it in a second.
But, obviously you've now beendoing this enough to, launch
three and got kind of three morein the works, I guess.
Is there anything that's beensurprising you've learned about
the studio model that you didn'texpect when you started?
Eric Boduch (27:42):
Woo a ton.
I mean, some of it'smacroeconomic changes.
When we started Rev cast, itwas, interest rates are still
low.
So we started with a segment oflike, Hey, our wedge into that
marketplace was quota capacitybecause the reason people miss
is like they're not managingtheir sales hiring properly.
So we helped them manage quota,sign better quota, look at how
they're thinking about quota andhiring and people going out on
(28:04):
paternity leave and calculatingthat and promotions how that
affects their ability to hit therevenue target.
And then what, interest rateswent up, SaaS changed, and it
quickly became an inefficiencystory.
So we had to build a lot more.
So like the macro affects a tonof things.
And on the positive side too, westarted troop looking at how we
can build a platform for productmarketing, right?
And for storytelling in anenterprise in that messaging
(28:26):
space.
And then AI came and we're like,holy shit.
I hope I can say that on yourpodcast.
But we were like.
Dan Balcauski (28:31):
Oh, say whatever you want.
We're.
Eric Boduch (28:32):
imagine what we could do with ai.
Now we're not even giving peopleguidelines and help, but we can
actually take in and consume alltheir communications and tell
you what they're doing right andwhat they're not doing right.
Who's doing things well, who'sdoing odd things, which we,
those renegades, they're doingthings that are off the rails,
but are closing deals and how wecan incorporate those in.
So like that was a positive onthe macro side, right?
(28:53):
That all of a sudden, likemakes, makes us able to solve
problems in product marketing wecouldn't solve before.
And then there's newopportunities coming outta macro
too, that we learned, like wefound, is all about managing the
performance of agents.
That market didn't exist, twoand a
Dan Balcauski (29:09):
Yeah, that wasn't a thing.
Eric Boduch (29:10):
open AI and things, there was very few people
building, and using agents andnow all of a sudden that's
probably gonna be the biggestthing.
I mean, all these people thatare building agents and then
they're rolling them out andthey're like.
Oh, it shouldn't say that.
Oh, it shouldn't do that.
Oh, it, how do you manage thatin production there?
Like there's no way to managethat in production and like you
can't expect your IT to team todo that.
(29:30):
like a great plugin into anyonebuilding software.
I mean, they have to usesomething like Wave found to do
that.
You have to manage agents inproduction.
It's inevitable.
I mean, people are just gonnarun into that problem and then
it's gonna be like, okay, how dowe do that?
So like those macro things havehad huge impacts.
And then I've just learned,there's like some inside
baseball things like we, wechanged some of our, ways we
think about our due diligencebecause of ai, right?
(29:53):
We can do due diligence a lotfaster.
We can build internal toolingaround ai.
So we're spending a lot moretime building internal tooling
in the studio to help ourcompanies.
Like we, we built an agent thatwill take all of your phone
calls that the sales team hasdone and then look for trends
and threads and.
Things that come up, objectionsthat are common across, say not
(30:14):
just one customer, but in theaggregate across, say, a
hundreds over months, right?
So we have an agent that'llconsume, whether it's a grain
transcript or recording thatway, that's great for, the hop
ons on the one case, but nowwe're aggregating'em all
together and giving you thatfeedback.
And that's like an internalagent tool we built at the
studio.
So there's things that we'velearned, because of the
(30:34):
environment and then there'sother things that.
We, we've learned just fromdoing, like, it's still painful
to, to incorporate in startupcompanies, like a lot harder
than it feels like it should be.
Even with all of the startupsthat are out there or have
started to try to help you inthat space.
And maybe that's because there'snot a lot of money in the early
stage startups.
The zero to five people, butit's still a painful process.
(30:56):
It's painful hiring peopleacross multiple states, like all
that kind of stuff.
You didn't realize how painfulthat was because.
I hadn't done it in eight, nineyears.
Right.
Since the beginning of Pendo andworking on that.
And frankly, Raul handled mostof that.
Thank you, Raul.
So all those kind of things youlearn as you're going through.
There's so many things we
Dan Balcauski (31:14):
Well.
Eric Boduch (31:14):
this.
Dan Balcauski (31:14):
Yeah.
What I heard there is that likeit's hard enough to scale one
company.
It sounds like as you're dealingwith macro effects, you're
feeling that multiplied acrossall these companies
simultaneously.
So, I, I,
Eric Boduch (31:24):
like you talk to like one of these big
multi-stage VCs and they'relike.
I'm on 20 boards or I have 20investments.
I mean, like I have, we have sixcompanies in total and say we're
really active with four at atime, right?
Like four seems like a lot tome, right?
Like
Dan Balcauski (31:38):
yeah.
Eric Boduch (31:38):
trying to add value about four.
So like kudos to the near edgeof the world, from battery that
are adding significant value toa ton of companies.
But I think that's thedifference on the studio side is
like near Edge can give greatboard oversight and advice.
I can actually dig in and.
Jump into Google Console and belike, oh, this is why SEO is
like going down on this searchterm, right?
(31:59):
Like, so I
Dan Balcauski (31:59):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (32:00):
and help people.
And that's a lot of fun.
Or I can go through, Figmadesigns and be like, what if we
thought about things this way?
So I think that's the greatthing about four.
But time still disappears, man.
Woo.
Dan Balcauski (32:11):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
If you figure out that you letme know.
Eric Boduch (32:16):
Tough.
I've, I've found the
Dan Balcauski (32:18):
yeah.
Eric Boduch (32:18):
math.
Dan Balcauski (32:19):
Yeah, the math on math on that one.
Well look, there's obviously alot of hype in the SaaS world
and worldwide right now.
I guess I, I am curious,'causeyou mentioned, obviously, Wafa
is purely in that AI space.
You're building a lot of toolsinternally to help you, like,
I'm curious like how youevaluate whether a.
Use case AI use cases worthpursuing.
Like, how are you sort ofsorting through the noise and
(32:40):
like trying to figure out, okay,where's the state of the
technology versus what isfeasible?
I mean obviously you mentionedall the things with like, I
think everyone who's building AIagents is kind of realizing
there's one story that you mighthear on a keynote stage in our
story when you get a thing inproduction and maybe there's a
gap in between.
Like how are you approachingthose?
Eric Boduch (32:57):
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned something that's
really interesting, there's somepeople on LinkedIn that are
saying like, oh, it's the deathof product management.
And I think that's crap, right?
Like I think it's like we'reentering the golden age of
product management.
But there's a caveat to it,right?
Because like product managersshould be good with empathy with
customers.
They should be good aboutunderstanding a problem.
Like that's their core skillset.
If you go back to pragmatic andyou look at their own like
(33:19):
laminated one sheet that we allused to have at our
Dan Balcauski (33:21):
Oh, I, I have it.
I have it on my wall here.
Pragmatics marketing rules.
Eric Boduch (33:25):
Love like some great people out of there in
that
Dan Balcauski (33:28):
Great stuff.
Eric Boduch (33:29):
And that was awesome back in the day and
really was a great foundationfor product managers.
I mean, if you go back to someof those fundamentals and think
about that, like if productmanagers are following and are
trained on those fundamentalaspects, it should be the golden
age of product management.
If product managers are notthinking about things that way
and don't, and are weak in thefundamentals, like maybe some of
(33:50):
'em have gotten, in the lateryears of the golden era of sas,
right?
May maybe that makes things alittle bit harder.
But I think first personprinciples, the ability to
empathize with customers, strongsense of empathy, working with
customers to understand theirproblems.
Those are all core skills ofproduct management.
So we should be entering that,that golden age.
And I would say the caveat,which goes back to what you
(34:11):
talked about, you mentionedsomething about what models can
and can't do, right?
So there's a skill set forproduct managers in the AI space
and software in general thatthey need to have, which is like
the willingness and the abilityin 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 alittle bit of skating to the
(34:32):
puck, right?
Like early on we're like, hey.
Tokens were kind of expensive.
It was expensive using AI to doa lot of things.
But we made an argument we had ahypothesis, maybe more than an
argument that token costs aregonna go down significantly, as
the,
Dan Balcauski (34:45):
And they have, I think it's like a thousand X in
two years, something like that.
It's crazy.
Eric Boduch (34:49):
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 downa thousand x right.
Then we're gonna get more out of'em.
You know that.
So there's a balance, and Ithink product managers really
need to dig in and understandwhat models can and can't do
what the costs associated withthem look like now versus the
(35:09):
future.
How to get the most out of'em.
I think that's the, if there's acaveat to the golden age of
product managers, if you'reworking in an AI space, and I
would say 90% of the people outthere are touching on AI in some
way, you need to have a goodunderstanding 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,
(35:29):
working on neural nets, have tohave written
Dan Balcauski (35:31):
Yeah,
Eric Boduch (35:32):
about attention none of that kind of stuff.
But you do need to understandwhat they can and can't do.
And I think having that kind ofbackground, and so, so my
background, even though Ihaven't written code in a long
time, is, computer science fromCarnegie Mellon Computer
Engineering technically, butcomputer
Dan Balcauski (35:46):
I was computer engineering as well.
Hey, I didn't know we had thatin common, so.
Eric Boduch (35:49):
Like, thank you to the Tartans and Carnegie Mellon.
Such a great education, thinkingabout things logically, probably
the biggest thing outta that.
But, I was writing neural netsback in the day.
Like, I actually in one of mycourses, like, working on a
neural net to help identifywhether mushrooms would kill you
or you could eat'em, right?
Like, like stuff like that.
Now that all coming around, alittle bit different with,
Dan Balcauski (36:09):
Yeah, you don't wanna, you don't wanna get that
wrong, right?
Yeah.
You don't wanna get thatidentification wrong.
Eric Boduch (36:14):
My point
Dan Balcauski (36:14):
Cat.
Cat, not cat or hot dog.
Not hot dog, right?
Those are a little bit lessrisk.
Eric Boduch (36:19):
is pretty funny.
For those who haven't
Dan Balcauski (36:21):
That was good.
Eric Boduch (36:21):
Valley stuff yeah.
I mean they're, need to, theydon't need to be I'm not a big
believer that even though I havea CS background by education at
least that.
PMs need to be technical, butthey need to be technophiles.
They need to be able to dig inif they're working on software,
understand things like howmodels work, what they will or
won't be able to do.
And more than anything
Dan Balcauski (36:40):
It.
Eric Boduch (36:40):
be willing to have those conversations with people
that really do know, right?
Like be
Dan Balcauski (36:45):
Well, it.
Eric Boduch (36:45):
be always learning.
Dan Balcauski (36:47):
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 withthis.
Like, are there obviously peopleare trying to put this stuff
into production.
Are there mistakes that you'reseeing companies make as they
try to put these things out intothe world that like other people
should be aware of?
Right.
As you've kind of seen, what wefound has kind of gone through.
Eric Boduch (37:06):
Anyone building software and agents should be
talking away found, even ifthey're not using it, just to
see some of the things they'verun across and some of the
problems they can help themsolve.
On the performance managementside, I mean, we're not talking
about analytics like Pendo does,like checking to see how often
people are using your agents orclicking on'em.
But we're talking about like howthe agents themselves work, how
they perform.
(37:27):
I think both of those things areimportant, where Pendo will go
on the analytics side and whatwe found is doing on the
performance management side.
But I do think like if you'rerolling out agents, whether it's
in your product, it's in theenterprise, you really need to
be thinking about performancemanagement and and part of that
will, probably will evolve to bethings like governance and
compliance.
(37:47):
But we haven't seen that yet.
And.
Usually people don't
Dan Balcauski (37:49):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (37:50):
compliance and governance until they're forced
to.
But performance managementbecomes really important because
you wanna make sure your agentsare effective.
They are answering questions,they are giving a great, user
experience to whoever theirusers are.
And without a runtime,performance management
infrastructure in place to dothat, you just can't do it.
So, I mean,
Dan Balcauski (38:07):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'd mean just,
Eric Boduch (38:09):
that something like that, you
Dan Balcauski (38:12):
yeah, I mean just what.
One of the things I'm surprisedI haven't seen as much noise in
is I just think the entire worldof QA is gonna be disrupted,
right?
Because you had thesedeterministic systems that you
could write, very simple sort ofscripted 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?
(38:32):
It just it kind of blows up thatparadigm and I just don't think
the world has kind of caught upto that, in full full amount
yet.
But,
Eric Boduch (38:38):
there's a testing startup called MOOC that does
some outsource testing, MUUK andI'm like, Hey, if you guys can
tie in with the ALS of the worldand generate testing plans,
right, for the vibe coding worldand, or even, cursor windsurf,
what have you, there's a lot ofinteresting opportunities there.
And I think in the testing spacethat are pretty wild and.
And I think it's a hard problemto solve, but if you do it maybe
(39:00):
with a man in the middle, right,where, where someone like a MOOC
is providing qa, people that areusing the AI to be way more
effective, even if it's not AIdoing all the testing you have a
great solution.
I think a little bit of that, AIto make people better is really
where we are today as opposed tousing AI to replace people.
I don't think in a lot ofenvironments we're quite close
(39:23):
to that.
But using AI to make peoplebetter we're definitely there.
Dan Balcauski (39:27):
Well Eric, I could talk to you all day, but
we are running up on time.
I wanna be respectful of yoursand the audiences, so I just.
Yeah, no, you absolutely comeback and do part two.
It's up time in the future.
We would love to hear more,especially some of these
companies get escape velocityand I'm sure you'll have all new
lessons to share.
Eric Boduch (39:43):
side forever too, because I feel like revenue
organizations need to change,right?
Like if you're not hitting yournumbers, you need to think about
like how to build your revenueorganization.
Differently.
It's
Dan Balcauski (39:52):
Well, well,
Eric Boduch (39:53):
quarter, right?
Like so talk to the rev castpeople like Dustin's a rockstar
there.
Jeff's been doing rev opsforever and they're like, Hey,
we can help you if you'remissing numbers and aren't sure
why.
That's like, talk to the peopleat Rev cast.
And even if you don't use'em,you should get great ideas about
like, here's how you shouldthink about and track the key
metrics for your revenue team.
(40:13):
Right?
I used to tell people this atPendo.
I was like, here's what youshould think about free trials.
You don't have to use Pendo forit.
You can.
Do all this yourself, but theseare the things you should be
doing with freemium or freetrials or product led growth at
the enterprise where you'relooking at upsells.
These are all the things you
Dan Balcauski (40:29):
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (40:30):
You don't have to use
Dan Balcauski (40:30):
Well, I,
Eric Boduch (40:31):
it, but have those conversations.
There's, it's such a fun time tobuild companies right now.
There's so many awesome thingswe can do.
And I know
Dan Balcauski (40:38):
yeah.
Eric Boduch (40:38):
through your time.
You have like a lightningquestion or something you wanna
end with.
Right.
Dan Balcauski (40:43):
It's all good, man.
No, it's definitely an excitingtime, for sure.
Yeah.
I want a couple, close it outwith a couple rapid fire
closeout questions.
First, when you think about allthe spectacular people you've
had a chance to work with overthe years is there anyone who
just pops to mind who's had adisproportionate effect on the
way you think about buildingcompanies now?
Eric Boduch (40:58):
Oh wow.
Like trying to give an Oscarspeech or something.
I mean, there's so
Dan Balcauski (41:02):
No, no.
I mean, you don't need to thinkyour agent, your mother, like
Eric Boduch (41:05):
Yeah.
Dan Balcauski (41:05):
cast characters.
If you just pick one.
Eric Boduch (41:07):
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, orAustin, the CEO of truth.
I don't know.
I mean, like, but no, in allseriousness, I mean, like, it
all started with fundamentals ineducation, right?
Thinking about things a littlebit differently, thinking about
things in problems, logically,being able to break'em down, so.
(41:29):
Invaluable education.
I got outta Carnegie Mellon, oneof my early professors there who
since passed.
Jack Roseman was a great mentorto me.
And just, working with amazingpeers is always invigorating,
right?
Like it's always fun talkingwith interesting people.
I mean, you can probably tellfrom my enthusiasm today, I am
enjoying this, right?
But, similarly, like workingwith people like Chad Burnett,
(41:50):
who is an early studio engineerand is now over, as the CTO of
way found like.
Those conversations.
I love to have, I mean, I'm aguy who loves to geek out over
that stuff, over dinner orcoffee, or drinks, like, so,
know, those things dramaticallyaffect me.
I love to talk with smart peoplethat love to learn, love to
question things, love to bringup interesting ideas.
(42:11):
So, I mean, it's like, it's, isthere 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 tomake the world a better place
and talking about how we do itis just awesome.
So I love to do that.
Dan Balcauski (42:31):
Well, well, yeah.
No, this has been fantastic.
If listeners wanna connect withyou, learn more about 24 and up
or any of your companies, howcan they do that?
Eric Boduch (42:38):
LinkedIn's great.
I'm the only Eric Bodak onLinkedIn.
It's really kind of odd, Ithink, but I'm the only one
there, so you can't really missme.
My email is Eric ERIC at 24 andup.com.
Feel free to email me.
I try to get to that.
I know of an, we're building awe're building an AI agent that
I'm gonna commercialize for,helping in essence EAs, right?
So I, I have an agent nowlooking at my emails also on my
(43:01):
calendars and recordings andeverything.
It's pretty wild.
So hopefully I don't missanything.
But,
Dan Balcauski (43:05):
well, I'll put I'll put a link to your LinkedIn
in the show notes as well aslinks to your companies we've
discussed for sure.
Thank you so much, Eric.
Everyone that wraps up thisepisode of Sask Scaling Secrets.
Thank you to Eric for sharinghis journey and insights.
For our listeners, we foundEric's insights valuable.
Please leave a review and sharethis episode with your network.
It really helps the podcastgrowth.
Thank you so much.
we quadrupled, then we tripled, then we tripled.
(00:02):
We had one time where, afterdoing our first fundraising
round with battery, we wentfrom.
Like 20 people to 40 somethingpeople, in 45 days.
I don't think you reallyunderstand how important it is
until you go through these rapidscaling events, right?
Where you're hiring a ton ofpeople or making a ton of
decisions quickly.
And I look at it like, Hey,let's just drop growth word for
(00:23):
a minute here, and think aboutthings as product led, right?
Because product ledorganizations can impact more
than just growth.
It's how you build product, it'show you market, it's how you
approach things.
I think it's like we're enteringthe golden age of product
management.
Dan Balcauski (00:58):
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories 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 welcomeEric Boduch, CEO, and founder of
24 and up a venture studiothat's re-imagining how early
stage companies get built.
Eric co-founded Pendo where hespent eight years helping scale
one of SaaS' biggest successstories.
(01:18):
He's a serial entrepreneur,former host of the Product Love
podcast, which I had the honorof being featured on at one
point, and someone who brings asystematic approach to the
challenges that trip up mostScaling companies.
Eric, great to have you on SaaSScaling Secrets.
Eric Boduch (01:32):
Hey, great to be here.
Thanks, Stan.
Dan Balcauski (01:34):
Well, I am very excited to finally get.
To have a chance to talk to youon the podcast.
We've been known each othersince that episode of Product
Level, which I think wasprobably three, four years ago
now.
Time goes by so quickly.
Eric Boduch (01:46):
I would guess
Dan Balcauski (01:47):
yeah.
Yeah.
It's wild.
Wild.
I, I wanna start with a littlebit of your time at Pendo.
You spent eight years thereScaling Pendo through different
stages of growth, and I guess asyou look back now, were there
kind of.
Key inflection points or eraswhere you really realized, Hey
we can't keep doing things theway we've been doing them.
Those moments where you had tochange your approach as the
(02:09):
organization got bigger and youfaced new challenges that you
didn't as an early stagecompany.
Eric Boduch (02:14):
Yeah, absolutely.
Dan.
I think, first the zero to oneis a unique time in, in the
existence of a company, right?
Because you're reallyscrambling, you're scraping,
you're trying to get those earlycustomers, those early
advocates.
You're trying to prove that youhave something that delivers
value.
So that's a unique time ingetting to that traction point.
Once you have some semblance ofproduct market fit, arguable
(02:37):
that, that term even exists.
But once you have some semblanceof happy customers revenue and
ideally renewing customers,right?
Or customers, are we gonnarenew?
I think it changes a little bitinto like, how do you grow the
company and then you're tryingto put in place, things like,
the beginning of processes andpeople and.
And then it turns from, say fiveor 10 million up to more
(03:01):
scalable processes and buildingleaders in the organization and
handing out responsibility morebroadly across the organization.
So things definitely change alot from the zero to one, from
like, and then from like one tofive, and then five or 10 and
up, things change ratherdramatically.
I think.
For all the entrepreneurs outthere that are struggling to get
(03:23):
that foothold, the zero to oneis probably the hardest time.
Dan Balcauski (03:27):
As you think about that journey which of
those transitions maybesurprised you the most or caught
you most off guard.
Eric Boduch (03:35):
We had a pretty experienced management team.
I don't know that I would sayany part of them.
Surprised us the most, or caughtus off guard.
But there's definitely uniquechallenges in each one, That you
have to think about.
And I think there's certainaspects to how you build a
company that helps you navigate,that scale, especially that
rapid scale.
Like we went from, wequadrupled, then we tripled,
(03:56):
then we tripled.
We had one time where, you know,after doing a fundraising our
first fundraising round withbattery, we went from.
Like 20 people to like 40something people, in 45 days.
Right.
It was like,
Dan Balcauski (04:08):
Wow.
Eric Boduch (04:09):
growth, right?
So, what helps you through
Dan Balcauski (04:11):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (04:12):
I, I think having people that work well together,
really strong leaders, but alsohaving a really strong culture
and a sense of what thecompany's about and why it
exists, because you can alwaysfall back on that when making
decisions.
Dan Balcauski (04:27):
Say a little more about culture.
'cause culture is one of thesethings that is kind of a fluffy
term.
I think you might, maybe have anadvisor to say, Hey, culture is
important, but you're like,okay, yeah, I agree.
What do I do now?
Were there things that, ritualsthat you or Todd and the other
management team did explicitlyto help reinforce or set that
culture?
Eric Boduch (04:46):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think.
Well, you mentioned the wordfluffy.
Let's talk about that a littlebit because I also, I did a
startup right out, while I wasin college during the.com times,
right?
So like culture, there was oftenthings like, well, it wasn't
kombucha at the time, but it wassomething equivalent, right?
And, a pool table or a ping pongtable or whatever in the office.
And that's not what I think ofas culture, right?
(05:08):
Like culture isn't like perks.
Culture is like how you thinkabout the business like.
Obsessing over customers beingcustomer focused, like that core
value that was part of Pendo wasa big part of our culture being
data driven, right?
That was a big part of ourculture and people might The
word driven versus focused or Orwhatever, those are pieces of
our culture that I think wasvery important.
(05:32):
And it was part of what was partof Pendo, so you could go back
Dan Balcauski (05:35):
mm.
Eric Boduch (05:35):
and it was like, is this in the best interest of a
customer or are we doing thisbecause it's easier for us?
Right?
Like, and if you have guidingprinciples or core values there,
then I think it's very helpfulin how you approach problem
solving, how you approachchallenges, how you approach
whether people are quote unquotea cultural fit.
And, hiring people who shouldn'tbe cultural fit isn't.
I like'em cultural fit is like,do they fit in with.
(05:58):
How the company views the world,how the company approaches
things.
Dan Balcauski (06:02):
So having those principles there for, decisions
both around kind of what is,what to do in maybe strategy,
but then also in the hiringpractices as well, is what I
heard.
Eric Boduch (06:12):
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 theculture side of things to keep
that consistent.
And I always knew culture wasimportant.
Todd and I knew culture wasimportant.
I think the whole founding teamdid, but I don't think you
really understand how importantit is until you go through these
(06:33):
rapid scaling events, right?
Where you're hiring a ton ofpeople or making a ton of
decisions quickly.
It can give you some of theprinciples, some of the guidance
that you need.
Dan Balcauski (06:42):
Well, I know Pendo played a big role in
either coining or at leastpopularizing the term
product-led growth.
I'm curious what your definitionis of PLG and walk us through
how that concept came about andhow it became instantiated at
Pendo.
Eric Boduch (06:57):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say as a wholewe were a big.
for the role of productmanagement.
Right.
And we are we happened to be ata great time where I think
product managers were startingto get the respect in an
organization they deserved.
It, it changed a lot from,product managers being, there,
listening to some older friendsthat had been doing it way back
(07:19):
in the day.
Like even going back to my.comtimes and talking with people
that were 20 years older thanme, 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, buthe couldn't really sell.
But the customers really likedhim.
He just didn't know how to closedeals.
So we made him a productmanager.
Like that was kinda like the oldthing is like, well, where do
they come from?
They're like engineers thatcustomers like, but don't write
(07:42):
great codes, salespeople thatcustomers like and like to talk
to, but can't close deals, andproduct management just changed
a lot and got elevated andbecause 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 thesoftware that's eating the world
and having good skill sets andgood processes and good
(08:03):
fundamentals in how you driveand build a product
organization.
I.
Super important.
And then so product led growthjust built upon that.
And I look at it and I gave anumber of talks on this as more
of like, Hey, let's just dropgrowth word for a minute here,
and think about things asproduct led, right?
Because product ledorganizations can impact more
(08:24):
than just growth.
It's how you build product, it'show you market, it's how you
approach things.
It's your mentality to capturingdata.
It affects a lot of things.
Dan Balcauski (08:33):
Are like like any term that goes out in the wild.
And you kind of hinted at thisbefore, right?
What you said, product marketfit, which I have very similar
feelings I think to productmarket fit of like, you could
create these type of terms, cancreate the illusion of
communication where we both sayuse the same words, but we're
kind of talking past each other.
Eric Boduch (08:51):
Mm-hmm.
Dan Balcauski (08:52):
And I've found that a bit with PLG to a certain
extent where some folks, forexample, will say, well, PLG
means you have a freemium offer,or, PLG means X, y, Z.
Right.
Are there ways that you thinkabout it sort of in its I guess
your original framing or yourframing that you think maybe
folks don't understand today?
And like, what it, like, I guessthe core of what it means.
Eric Boduch (09:14):
Yeah, I mean, I think if you think about product
led growth, and you think aboutit 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 yourfreemium process.
(09:37):
And then map what you knowsuccessful either upsells or
conversions to a paid offeringlook like.
Like what do they, what productsdo they use?
What do their interaction habitslook like?
You know what feature sets arebeing used and when, by what
type of people.
And then use things like guidesin product like Pendo provided,
or marketing outreach to drivepeople to things that, is gonna
(09:59):
move them up a tier from thefree tier to a paid tier, or
move them from a free trial to,a paid engagement.
So I think there's a lot to besaid there, and I think that's a
big piece of product led growth.
I think the second piece, if youput all enterprise lines on it
and you have these existingcustomers.
How are you understanding whatthey're doing in the terms of
retention?
Right.
And while that's not product ledgrowth, it is very much product
(10:21):
led.
Right?
What are the habits, what arethe usage habits of customers
that are likely to renew?
And then also you, if you're inan enterprise situation and a
lot of'em are land and expands,or a lot of'em have additional
product offerings to cross sellor upsell, think about product
led from that standpoint.
How does your product data helpyou inform.
Targets that should be upselltargets or cross sell targets.
(10:44):
There's a lot of great data inyour product and how people use
your product that can be used tobetter drive everything from
outreach marketing campaigns to,targets for your sales team,
prioritize targets for yoursales team.
It can affect a lot of pieces ofyour business.
And I think we're barelytouching on how product data can
(11:05):
be used.
I mean, I think there's.
All the Pendo customers outthere, there's probably a
hundred other things you can bedoing to getting value out of
your Pendo instance.
Dan Balcauski (11:14):
Well, one thing I heard in that response was kind
of hearkening back to thatcultural underpinning of data
driven, right?
There's a lot of capabilities inthe product data in your
marketing data especially whenyou're doing things at volume
that maybe cut against the grainof how maybe traditional B2B.
(11:34):
Either product management ordevelopment was done, which was
like, Hey, the, JP Morgan wantsthis feature, right?
And so we build that based uponthe last conversation the
salesperson sold, right?
And this is very much cuttingagainst that and using data to
really support those decisions,both in the acquisition and the
retention side of things
Eric Boduch (11:52):
PP
Dan Balcauski (11:52):
and the monetization piece as well.
Eric Boduch (11:54):
The data you have.
And now with ai, it justaccelerates that right now
because now you can look at allof this data and use AI to sort
through and find patterns,really effectively.
I.
So.
Dan Balcauski (12:05):
Yeah.
Well, and it's interesting that,you had such a data-driven
culture, this focus onproduct-led growth, but I guess
one thing that always reallystruck me about Pendo is how
distinctive your brand is in thetech space, from the pink color
to the overall kind of brandpersonality.
I, how intentional was thatbrand building during those
scaling years?
And I guess, did you feel likeit had a key role in the Pendo
(12:27):
success?
Eric Boduch (12:28):
Oh, absolutely.
It had a, absolutely had a keyrole 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 weretalking about colors, he
mentioned pink, and we had seen.
And we had some relationshipswith the Marketo people and
seeing the effectiveness ofMarketo's Purple.
So when we went through Pink, Ithink, Todd was thinking about
(12:50):
it as a secondary color, as ahighlight color.
But we're like, Hey, let's, amI, if we're gonna go pink, we're
gonna go pink.
We're gonna go big.
Right?
I think we even had a websitedesign that was called Big Tank
at some point, right?
It was big.
It was in your, it was in yourface.
We had a name that helped ussupport that too.
Some of it was happenstance, butPendo, which we started to value
(13:10):
to measure, in Latin was allabout
Dan Balcauski (13:12):
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Eric Boduch (13:13):
Yeah.
But, and then we found out inSwahili it means love.
Right?
So like there was a tie into thepink color there ended up being
a tie into taglines.
We used in a philosophy we hadabout building products that
your customers love.
Right?
There's a huge opportunity thatwe can just keep building on
that.
We had a heart as some imagery,made in North Carolina with Love
(13:33):
by Pendo, right?
Like there was a lot of stuff wedid to play on that.
We had some great marketingpeople.
It started with me runningmarketing.
It was extended by Jake who wasa great marketing leader and
Joe's turnoff and now there's anew guy there, grad, everyone
says is gonna be amazing, in aline of great marketing people
that, or great marketing leadersthat Pendo Hass had and great
(13:55):
marketing people that Pendo hashad.
I mean, I, even looking back, tomy team, they've all gone on to
be successful, both at Pendo andelsewhere, in, in leadership
positions.
So it's great to see Pendocontinuing to push brand.
It's great to see the peoplethat worked on the early brand
continuing to do great things atPendo and other places.
But yeah, brand was a big piece.
We always wanted to punch biggeroutside of our weight.
(14:17):
I mean, my marketing budget whenwe started was tiny.
People had no idea We werespending that little and getting
that much bang for the buck,whether it's
Dan Balcauski (14:26):
Well.
Eric Boduch (14:26):
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 goto conferences we weren't even
at and be like, Hey, I saw youguys 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 awebsite redesign, we called up a
dozen of our customers and hadthem working with us around,
(14:49):
understanding who they feltPendo was, and at the time, I
think one of our customers, Ican't remember who I was,
describe, described to us aslike their best friend or their
girlfriend that.
Gives you the straight scoop andhelps you make the right
decisions and helps you and islike always there to support
you.
So we saw ourselves as liketrying to be that best friend of
product managers and really notonly through our product, but
(15:11):
through our outreach and ourcommunity and our give back.
Try to elevate the profession ofproduct management.
Dan Balcauski (15:18):
Well, we've, I.
Brand like, culture or product,market fit could be one of these
fluffy terms.
I guess, how do you think aboutthe difference between like an
authentic brand or brand storyversus just good marketing?
Like, is there, like, how do youthink about it?
Like as a marketing leader?
Eric Boduch (15:36):
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 yourbrand?
Do the employees believe in it?
Do the leaders follow it?
And it extends with a lot ofthings in companies.
Like, do they use, do companiesuse their own product?
I remember when Google had theirsocial network, I don't think
any of their executives wereusing it.
Right.
Like, so you knew that wasn'tgonna do very well.
(15:57):
Right.
Or their employees using it.
And I remember in a Windowsphone day, I walked through
Microsoft and everyone's usingan iPhone.
Right.
You know there's gonna be aproblem there.
And I think it's an extent youcan take that same extension to
brand and other places where youknow it.
Does it feel like it's part ofthe organization or does it feel
like an artificial bolt on?
Right.
It's not like, just likeculture, putting a saying on a
(16:17):
wall doesn't mean people aregonna live it.
You, you have to make sure theylive it and are part of it and
feel part of it and wanna bepart of it.
Dan Balcauski (16:25):
Yeah, I mean throughout kind of what you're
saying there, right?
Is it a tie back to thisculture?
Is it really grounded in who youwanna be as a company and also
some of these really decisivebets going with pink, really
like leaning into that versusjust the secondary color making
it kind of owning that.
And also, making sure there wascustomer involvement in making
sure it resonated with them andwhat you're building with like
(16:46):
the website,
Eric Boduch (16:46):
but that all
Dan Balcauski (16:47):
I guess.
Eric Boduch (16:47):
around the product too.
Like we had a great product,right?
We really concentrated onbuilding a product for product
management and all those thingswere supporting functions, like
how can we bring the product infront of more people, right?
It was a great product that wehad built and brand just helped
us get that product in front ofmore product managers.
And it helped us sell moreeffectively and it helped us get
(17:08):
great feedback more effectively.
It helped
Dan Balcauski (17:11):
well.
Eric Boduch (17:11):
build a better product.
So,
Dan Balcauski (17:13):
Well, lemme ask you this, like, when you look at
the SaaS landscape todaycompared to when you were
building Pendo brand, like howdo you think, most companies are
approaching brand and brandstorytelling?
Are they getting it right?
Eric Boduch (17:24):
wow.
I think there's companies thatare getting it right.
I mean, the world has changed alot, right?
Like.
I used to do a lot of outreachdirectly on Twitter, where I'll
just be like finding productmanagers.
I'll be like, Hey, we'rebuilding 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 launchedthis.
We'll have to show it to you.
I think it could help you.
(17:45):
These are the three things wedo, right?
Like that I think are importantas as someone that, that has a
product background, right, froma Background.
I think brand today is likedifferent.
Like we're in a weird worldright now with ai.
There's a lot of chaos outthere.
Not to say like, not to say youcan't build a strong brand.
I think, a lot of companiesthink brand is all there is, and
they're rotating to that becauseit's been hard doing demand gen
(18:07):
and lead gen and I always thinkthere's a balance, right?
We ran an Lead gen operation inthe early days and I think
probably still do, it was verygood 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 reallystrong messaging for product
managers and I think the brandand our lead gen efforts and our
content efforts all playedtogether, to make a really
(18:29):
strong marketing presence andreally, enhance the work.
People like Chaz Guino, ouroriginal 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 dobrand, but brand is part of a
bigger puzzle, and it's a
Dan Balcauski (18:45):
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (18:46):
do brand these days in some parts, just because
there's so much noise in themarket today, even more so than
there was before.
Dan Balcauski (18:52):
Yeah.
Well, kind of, after exitingPendo, you, you chose to build a
venture studio, which you'redoing now rather than kind of go
to the traditional angel or VCroute, I guess, for folks who
maybe aren't aware, I guesswhat, how, what's fundamentally
different about the VentureStudio model?
Why did that approach appeal toyou?
Why would to go that direction?
Eric Boduch (19:09):
a lot of, like venture studios is a term that
is maybe not well defined.
Dan Balcauski (19:15):
We're hitting a lot of those in these
conversation, which is like whatI like to do.
'cause I feel like there's a lotof fluffy conversation out
there.
So.
Eric Boduch (19:21):
And I think like, like venture capital, it's a two
and 20 model, for those whodon't know, it's like 2% fees
every year.
20% carry, meaning 20% of theprofits go, back to the out the.
The partners in the venturecapital model.
So it's pretty well defined.
And you might see like a one anda half or a 2% fee, or maybe a
two and a half percent fee orwhatever, so there's some
variance on that model.
(19:41):
And it might be things like theytake 20% of the profits until
they return three x and thenit's 30%.
Like, so there's some smallvariances on the model.
Studios are a lot different,because, there's a lot of
different models and a lot ofdifferent ways to approach the
studio, and there's been nostandardization.
And we could
Dan Balcauski (19:57):
Mm-hmm.
Eric Boduch (19:58):
talking about different studio models and what
I think of them and the ones Ilike and the ones I don't.
But the way we work is, reallyhands-on.
We work with two companies ayear to co-create'em with
entrepreneurs.
You can think of us as unpaidco-founders, right?
So I have a team of six thatwe're gonna grow up to a team of
eight once we raise a little bitmore money for the studio here.
(20:18):
And, we work with companiesreally 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, theequivalent of two full-time
people for the first 24 monthsof your existence.
You're not gonna have to pay'em.
Where we get paid an equity asan essence of co-founder, right?
And we're really focused on canwe add a ton of value in those
(20:39):
first two years that, our makeand break years for pretty much
all startups.
I think if you can get throughthose first two years in a great
position.
You're probably gonna besuccessful, if
Dan Balcauski (20:49):
I guess, yeah, no, that makes sense.
Without having to dive into allthe different sort of ways
Venture Studios run, I guess ifyou just look at like how you
guys have set up 24 and up arethere advantages you see to,
incubating companies in thatapproach versus your pure
bootstrap vc, other potentialmodels.
Are there advantages that yousee in terms of like, potential
(21:10):
for company success or likeanything else?
Eric Boduch (21:13):
Yeah, I mean you could think of us in some ways
as replacing that kind offriends and family round that
little tiny bit of money.
So like Put resources you don'thave to pay for right in play.
From the get go.
So when you don't have any moneyor have very little money, you
can stretch that a lot farther.
And that helps get the companiesto a point where they have early
design partners where they havean early prototype or maybe even
(21:34):
a beta of a product, and nowthey're going out and maybe
raising a pre-seed round from amuch stronger position.
We're
Dan Balcauski (21:41):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (21:41):
at enhancing that.
I'm raising a venture capitalround now that I'm, I guess I'm
officially gonna announcesomewhere.
But we're
Dan Balcauski (21:46):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (21:47):
a little$10 million fund so we can put that first
half million to a million intothe studio companies and even
get them a little bit fartherthan we could, separate deals,
separate structure, but, we'lldo a fund with a separate group
of investors to put that firstmillion in.
'cause we got asymmetricknowledge.
We know a lot about thecompanies where we've been
working with them.
We've been able to work with theCEO.
(22:07):
We, in essence, have a lot ofdue diligence.
More than, a pre-seed fund isgonna be able to get in 99% of
the cases.
Or at least 90% of the casesbecause we've been working with
them that long.
So why not take advantage ofthat?
Put that first check intocompanies that we have a high
degree of conviction behind thatwe've alleviated a lot of the
risks that we have, theasymmetric knowledge and help
(22:28):
our vs help our entrepreneurpartners not have to worry about
that, that first check in thedoor and can get it from us and
maybe a couple VCs that.
That work with us or, bring apartner into that deal at a
price point that's probably alittle bit less than market, but
we're making, we're doing it atat a stage where they don't have
to worry about chopping it.
And it's really early.
So, yeah,
Dan Balcauski (22:49):
Makes sense.
Well, so you've I believe you'velaunched four companies now
through 24 and up, but Rev, revcast.
Eric Boduch (22:56):
is a tough word to define.
Like what, what's the startupthat's launched?
But if you think about launch aslike a, we have customers using
the product, and B, we haveexternal money outside of the
studio investment in thecompanies, then yes, we have a,
a company troop that goes afterbrand story.
So like we talked about, like,as a company scales, how do you
enforce and make sure and forcemaybe is a strong word, how do
(23:18):
you oversee and make sure thatyou know all the salespeople,
all the support people, all themarketing materials, all the
landing pages.
Are consistent with your brandstory.
So we're able to consume, all ofthe external communications, map
it against your messaging rubricand other company documents and
show you where things are goingoff the rails.
Maybe it's a sales person thatneeds to be retrained, and how
(23:40):
to sell to this particular ICP,or maybe it's a customer service
person needs to be, taught abouthow to better support this
product.
Or maybe it's marketingmaterials that are out of date.
And because you've changed themessaging or launched a new
product.
So we use AI to identify all ofthat and help the product
marketers, the brandstorytellers, understand what
needs to be updated and whatneeds to be fixed.
(24:01):
It's probably a problem thatcould not be solved without AI
and if it was solved, like wehad to do this once at Pendo it
just took a huge amount ofeffort to go through and find
everything, train everyone.
There's just a lot of dollarsgoing into that.
So we use AI to tell peopleunderstand.
What needs to be fixed?
What's working well?
I think that second part isinteresting too, is like you can
(24:22):
find little interesting nuggets,right?
When you're looking at things atscale, like, hey, there's a
salespeople person that is notgiving the pitch the same way
everyone else is, but he'sreally successful with people in
the financial services industry.
What's he saying?
Right?
And then you can
Dan Balcauski (24:37):
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (24:37):
that and be like, oh, here's some things that he's
doing that actually we shouldincorporate into our messaging.
Right?
There's some secondary impactsof that that are
Dan Balcauski (24:46):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (24:47):
so
Dan Balcauski (24:47):
Yeah.
I, I got a,
Eric Boduch (24:48):
excited about that because it, like,
Dan Balcauski (24:50):
yeah, I, I got a chance to look at it as well.
It's very, really a neat, reallyneat product.
For sure.
So, but you were saying you're,you're, you're delineating these
differences between launchingand not launching.
And so I guess yeah, if youwanna correct me on how many
you, you say were launched.
Eric Boduch (25:03):
I would say that are launched today, another
three that are in the works
Dan Balcauski (25:06):
Okay.
Okay.
Eric Boduch (25:07):
at varying stages, troops, one that's launched.
We found that those performancemanagements for ai helps you
understand how well your agentsare actually working.
I would say every softwarecompany that's out there is
building agents should look atincorporating something like we
found into their product, right?
We help them, make sure that theagent pieces of their product
that they are launching areactually doing what they're
(25:28):
supposed to be doing.
So help them manage thatperformance.
And then the third
Dan Balcauski (25:31):
So.
Eric Boduch (25:32):
cast is in the revenue space, helping people
think about revenue in adifferent lens.
We've moved into a world ofefficiency.
So how do you make sure you'reapplying every dollar in the
right way?
How are you thinking offorecasting?
Not just for deal forecasting,but do you have, are you
forecasting people and pipelineand performance?
Are you really thinking aboutyour organization like a
(25:52):
sophisticated manufac orthinking about your revenue
organization, like asophisticated.
Manufacturing plant would thinkabout building product, right?
Like, do you have the right setof resources?
Where are your bottlenecks?
What are your assumptions?
Are you tracking to them?
Are you managing risks?
And if you do that right, thenyou have a lot of, like, the
revenue leader now can go to theCEO with a lot of confidence
saying, I'm gonna hit thisnumber and if I don't, here's
(26:14):
the areas of risk, right?
That I need to keep an eye on.
Here's why we would miss ifwe'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 belike, Hey, this is where we
struggled.
It was on, a win rate in theenterprise and this is what
we're doing to fix it.
Or we struggled because wethought we needed three X
(26:36):
pipeline coverage for our new,group in amea, but we really
need three, five to deliver.
Or we struggled because, wedidn't hit our hiring goals for
this new team in apac.
Right.
So bringing a lot morevisibility and accountability
and making revenue a sharedactivity.
I, I in the organization, like acollaborative activity between
finance, the CEO and the revenueleader to understand like how to
(26:59):
build the revenue organizationso that it can scale because
it's not about this quarter,it's about this year.
It's about building somethingthat has the, that the CEO and
the board has confidence willgrow the company to where it
needs to get.
Maybe that's an IPO.
that's from 10 to a hundredmillion, are you building the
right org?
So those are the three that havelaunched an agent company a
(27:19):
company that helps you buildyour revenue organization and
then a company around brandstory and storytelling.
So
Dan Balcauski (27:27):
Got it.
Well, and just I wanna put a pinin the revenue thing and just
come back to it in a second.
But, obviously you've now beendoing this enough to, launch
three and got kind of three morein the works, I guess.
Is there anything that's beensurprising you've learned about
the studio model that you didn'texpect when you started?
Eric Boduch (27:42):
Woo a ton.
I mean, some of it'smacroeconomic changes.
When we started Rev cast, itwas, interest rates are still
low.
So we started with a segment oflike, Hey, our wedge into that
marketplace was quota capacitybecause the reason people miss
is like they're not managingtheir sales hiring properly.
So we helped them manage quota,sign better quota, look at how
they're thinking about quota andhiring and people going out on
(28:04):
paternity leave and calculatingthat and promotions how that
affects their ability to hit therevenue target.
And then what, interest rateswent up, SaaS changed, and it
quickly became an inefficiencystory.
So we had to build a lot more.
So like the macro affects a tonof things.
And on the positive side too, westarted troop looking at how we
can build a platform for productmarketing, right?
And for storytelling in anenterprise in that messaging
(28:26):
space.
And then AI came and we're like,holy shit.
I hope I can say that on yourpodcast.
But we were like.
Dan Balcauski (28:31):
Oh, say whatever you want.
We're.
Eric Boduch (28:32):
imagine what we could do with ai.
Now we're not even giving peopleguidelines and help, but we can
actually take in and consume alltheir communications and tell
you what they're doing right andwhat they're not doing right.
Who's doing things well, who'sdoing odd things, which we,
those renegades, they're doingthings that are off the rails,
but are closing deals and how wecan incorporate those in.
So like that was a positive onthe macro side, right?
(28:53):
That all of a sudden, likemakes, makes us able to solve
problems in product marketing wecouldn't solve before.
And then there's newopportunities coming outta macro
too, that we learned, like wefound, is all about managing the
performance of agents.
That market didn't exist, twoand a
Dan Balcauski (29:09):
Yeah, that wasn't a thing.
Eric Boduch (29:10):
open AI and things, there was very few people
building, and using agents andnow all of a sudden that's
probably gonna be the biggestthing.
I mean, all these people thatare building agents and then
they're rolling them out andthey're like.
Oh, it shouldn't say that.
Oh, it shouldn't do that.
Oh, it, how do you manage thatin production there?
Like there's no way to managethat in production and like you
can't expect your IT to team todo that.
(29:30):
like a great plugin into anyonebuilding software.
I mean, they have to usesomething like Wave found to do
that.
You have to manage agents inproduction.
It's inevitable.
I mean, people are just gonnarun into that problem and then
it's gonna be like, okay, how dowe do that?
So like those macro things havehad huge impacts.
And then I've just learned,there's like some inside
baseball things like we, wechanged some of our, ways we
think about our due diligencebecause of ai, right?
(29:53):
We can do due diligence a lotfaster.
We can build internal toolingaround ai.
So we're spending a lot moretime building internal tooling
in the studio to help ourcompanies.
Like we, we built an agent thatwill take all of your phone
calls that the sales team hasdone and then look for trends
and threads and.
Things that come up, objectionsthat are common across, say not
(30:14):
just one customer, but in theaggregate across, say, a
hundreds over months, right?
So we have an agent that'llconsume, whether it's a grain
transcript or recording thatway, that's great for, the hop
ons on the one case, but nowwe're aggregating'em all
together and giving you thatfeedback.
And that's like an internalagent tool we built at the
studio.
So there's things that we'velearned, because of the
(30:34):
environment and then there'sother things that.
We, we've learned just fromdoing, like, it's still painful
to, to incorporate in startupcompanies, like a lot harder
than it feels like it should be.
Even with all of the startupsthat are out there or have
started to try to help you inthat space.
And maybe that's because there'snot a lot of money in the early
stage startups.
The zero to five people, butit's still a painful process.
(30:56):
It's painful hiring peopleacross multiple states, like all
that kind of stuff.
You didn't realize how painfulthat was because.
I hadn't done it in eight, nineyears.
Right.
Since the beginning of Pendo andworking on that.
And frankly, Raul handled mostof that.
Thank you, Raul.
So all those kind of things youlearn as you're going through.
There's so many things we
Dan Balcauski (31:14):
Well.
Eric Boduch (31:14):
this.
Dan Balcauski (31:14):
Yeah.
What I heard there is that likeit's hard enough to scale one
company.
It sounds like as you're dealingwith macro effects, you're
feeling that multiplied acrossall these companies
simultaneously.
So, I, I,
Eric Boduch (31:24):
like you talk to like one of these big
multi-stage VCs and they'relike.
I'm on 20 boards or I have 20investments.
I mean, like I have, we have sixcompanies in total and say we're
really active with four at atime, right?
Like four seems like a lot tome, right?
Like
Dan Balcauski (31:38):
yeah.
Eric Boduch (31:38):
trying to add value about four.
So like kudos to the near edgeof the world, from battery that
are adding significant value toa ton of companies.
But I think that's thedifference on the studio side is
like near Edge can give greatboard oversight and advice.
I can actually dig in and.
Jump into Google Console and belike, oh, this is why SEO is
like going down on this searchterm, right?
(31:59):
Like, so I
Dan Balcauski (31:59):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (32:00):
and help people.
And that's a lot of fun.
Or I can go through, Figmadesigns and be like, what if we
thought about things this way?
So I think that's the greatthing about four.
But time still disappears, man.
Woo.
Dan Balcauski (32:11):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
If you figure out that you letme know.
Eric Boduch (32:16):
Tough.
I've, I've found the
Dan Balcauski (32:18):
yeah.
Eric Boduch (32:18):
math.
Dan Balcauski (32:19):
Yeah, the math on math on that one.
Well look, there's obviously alot of hype in the SaaS world
and worldwide right now.
I guess I, I am curious,'causeyou mentioned, obviously, Wafa
is purely in that AI space.
You're building a lot of toolsinternally to help you, like,
I'm curious like how youevaluate whether a.
Use case AI use cases worthpursuing.
Like, how are you sort ofsorting through the noise and
(32:40):
like trying to figure out, okay,where's the state of the
technology versus what isfeasible?
I mean obviously you mentionedall the things with like, I
think everyone who's building AIagents is kind of realizing
there's one story that you mighthear on a keynote stage in our
story when you get a thing inproduction and maybe there's a
gap in between.
Like how are you approachingthose?
Eric Boduch (32:57):
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned something that's
really interesting, there's somepeople on LinkedIn that are
saying like, oh, it's the deathof product management.
And I think that's crap, right?
Like I think it's like we'reentering the golden age of
product management.
But there's a caveat to it,right?
Because like product managersshould be good with empathy with
customers.
They should be good aboutunderstanding a problem.
Like that's their core skillset.
If you go back to pragmatic andyou look at their own like
(33:19):
laminated one sheet that we allused to have at our
Dan Balcauski (33:21):
Oh, I, I have it.
I have it on my wall here.
Pragmatics marketing rules.
Eric Boduch (33:25):
Love like some great people out of there in
that
Dan Balcauski (33:28):
Great stuff.
Eric Boduch (33:29):
And that was awesome back in the day and
really was a great foundationfor product managers.
I mean, if you go back to someof those fundamentals and think
about that, like if productmanagers are following and are
trained on those fundamentalaspects, it should be the golden
age of product management.
If product managers are notthinking about things that way
and don't, and are weak in thefundamentals, like maybe some of
(33:50):
'em have gotten, in the lateryears of the golden era of sas,
right?
May maybe that makes things alittle bit harder.
But I think first personprinciples, the ability to
empathize with customers, strongsense of empathy, working with
customers to understand theirproblems.
Those are all core skills ofproduct management.
So we should be entering that,that golden age.
And I would say the caveat,which goes back to what you
(34:11):
talked about, you mentionedsomething about what models can
and can't do, right?
So there's a skill set forproduct managers in the AI space
and software in general thatthey need to have, which is like
the willingness and the abilityin 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 alittle bit of skating to the
(34:32):
puck, right?
Like early on we're like, hey.
Tokens were kind of expensive.
It was expensive using AI to doa lot of things.
But we made an argument we had ahypothesis, maybe more than an
argument that token costs aregonna go down significantly, as
the,
Dan Balcauski (34:45):
And they have, I think it's like a thousand X in
two years, something like that.
It's crazy.
Eric Boduch (34:49):
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 downa thousand x right.
Then we're gonna get more out of'em.
You know that.
So there's a balance, and Ithink product managers really
need to dig in and understandwhat models can and can't do
what the costs associated withthem look like now versus the
(35:09):
future.
How to get the most out of'em.
I think that's the, if there's acaveat to the golden age of
product managers, if you'reworking in an AI space, and I
would say 90% of the people outthere are touching on AI in some
way, you need to have a goodunderstanding 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,
(35:29):
working on neural nets, have tohave written
Dan Balcauski (35:31):
Yeah,
Eric Boduch (35:32):
about attention none of that kind of stuff.
But you do need to understandwhat they can and can't do.
And I think having that kind ofbackground, and so, so my
background, even though Ihaven't written code in a long
time, is, computer science fromCarnegie Mellon Computer
Engineering technically, butcomputer
Dan Balcauski (35:46):
I was computer engineering as well.
Hey, I didn't know we had thatin common, so.
Eric Boduch (35:49):
Like, thank you to the Tartans and Carnegie Mellon.
Such a great education, thinkingabout things logically, probably
the biggest thing outta that.
But, I was writing neural netsback in the day.
Like, I actually in one of mycourses, like, working on a
neural net to help identifywhether mushrooms would kill you
or you could eat'em, right?
Like, like stuff like that.
Now that all coming around, alittle bit different with,
Dan Balcauski (36:09):
Yeah, you don't wanna, you don't wanna get that
wrong, right?
Yeah.
You don't wanna get thatidentification wrong.
Eric Boduch (36:14):
My point
Dan Balcauski (36:14):
Cat.
Cat, not cat or hot dog.
Not hot dog, right?
Those are a little bit lessrisk.
Eric Boduch (36:19):
is pretty funny.
For those who haven't
Dan Balcauski (36:21):
That was good.
Eric Boduch (36:21):
Valley stuff yeah.
I mean they're, need to, theydon't need to be I'm not a big
believer that even though I havea CS background by education at
least that.
PMs need to be technical, butthey need to be technophiles.
They need to be able to dig inif they're working on software,
understand things like howmodels work, what they will or
won't be able to do.
And more than anything
Dan Balcauski (36:40):
It.
Eric Boduch (36:40):
be willing to have those conversations with people
that really do know, right?
Like be
Dan Balcauski (36:45):
Well, it.
Eric Boduch (36:45):
be always learning.
Dan Balcauski (36:47):
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 withthis.
Like, are there obviously peopleare trying to put this stuff
into production.
Are there mistakes that you'reseeing companies make as they
try to put these things out intothe world that like other people
should be aware of?
Right.
As you've kind of seen, what wefound has kind of gone through.
Eric Boduch (37:06):
Anyone building software and agents should be
talking away found, even ifthey're not using it, just to
see some of the things they'verun across and some of the
problems they can help themsolve.
On the performance managementside, I mean, we're not talking
about analytics like Pendo does,like checking to see how often
people are using your agents orclicking on'em.
But we're talking about like howthe agents themselves work, how
they perform.
(37:27):
I think both of those things areimportant, where Pendo will go
on the analytics side and whatwe found is doing on the
performance management side.
But I do think like if you'rerolling out agents, whether it's
in your product, it's in theenterprise, you really need to
be thinking about performancemanagement and and part of that
will, probably will evolve to bethings like governance and
compliance.
(37:47):
But we haven't seen that yet.
And.
Usually people don't
Dan Balcauski (37:49):
Hmm.
Eric Boduch (37:50):
compliance and governance until they're forced
to.
But performance managementbecomes really important because
you wanna make sure your agentsare effective.
They are answering questions,they are giving a great, user
experience to whoever theirusers are.
And without a runtime,performance management
infrastructure in place to dothat, you just can't do it.
So, I mean,
Dan Balcauski (38:07):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'd mean just,
Eric Boduch (38:09):
that something like that, you
Dan Balcauski (38:12):
yeah, I mean just what.
One of the things I'm surprisedI haven't seen as much noise in
is I just think the entire worldof QA is gonna be disrupted,
right?
Because you had thesedeterministic systems that you
could write, very simple sort ofscripted 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?
(38:32):
It just it kind of blows up thatparadigm and I just don't think
the world has kind of caught upto that, in full full amount
yet.
But,
Eric Boduch (38:38):
there's a testing startup called MOOC that does
some outsource testing, MUUK andI'm like, Hey, if you guys can
tie in with the ALS of the worldand generate testing plans,
right, for the vibe coding worldand, or even, cursor windsurf,
what have you, there's a lot ofinteresting opportunities there.
And I think in the testing spacethat are pretty wild and.
And I think it's a hard problemto solve, but if you do it maybe
(39:00):
with a man in the middle, right,where, where someone like a MOOC
is providing qa, people that areusing the AI to be way more
effective, even if it's not AIdoing all the testing you have a
great solution.
I think a little bit of that, AIto make people better is really
where we are today as opposed tousing AI to replace people.
I don't think in a lot ofenvironments we're quite close
(39:23):
to that.
But using AI to make peoplebetter we're definitely there.
Dan Balcauski (39:27):
Well Eric, I could talk to you all day, but
we are running up on time.
I wanna be respectful of yoursand the audiences, so I just.
Yeah, no, you absolutely comeback and do part two.
It's up time in the future.
We would love to hear more,especially some of these
companies get escape velocityand I'm sure you'll have all new
lessons to share.
Eric Boduch (39:43):
side forever too, because I feel like revenue
organizations need to change,right?
Like if you're not hitting yournumbers, you need to think about
like how to build your revenueorganization.
Differently.
It's
Dan Balcauski (39:52):
Well, well,
Eric Boduch (39:53):
quarter, right?
Like so talk to the rev castpeople like Dustin's a rockstar
there.
Jeff's been doing rev opsforever and they're like, Hey,
we can help you if you'remissing numbers and aren't sure
why.
That's like, talk to the peopleat Rev cast.
And even if you don't use'em,you should get great ideas about
like, here's how you shouldthink about and track the key
metrics for your revenue team.
(40:13):
Right?
I used to tell people this atPendo.
I was like, here's what youshould think about free trials.
You don't have to use Pendo forit.
You can.
Do all this yourself, but theseare the things you should be
doing with freemium or freetrials or product led growth at
the enterprise where you'relooking at upsells.
These are all the things you
Dan Balcauski (40:29):
Yeah.
Eric Boduch (40:30):
You don't have to use
Dan Balcauski (40:30):
Well, I,
Eric Boduch (40:31):
it, but have those conversations.
There's, it's such a fun time tobuild companies right now.
There's so many awesome thingswe can do.
And I know
Dan Balcauski (40:38):
yeah.
Eric Boduch (40:38):
through your time.
You have like a lightningquestion or something you wanna
end with.
Right.
Dan Balcauski (40:43):
It's all good, man.
No, it's definitely an excitingtime, for sure.
Yeah.
I want a couple, close it outwith a couple rapid fire
closeout questions.
First, when you think about allthe spectacular people you've
had a chance to work with overthe years is there anyone who
just pops to mind who's had adisproportionate effect on the
way you think about buildingcompanies now?
Eric Boduch (40:58):
Oh wow.
Like trying to give an Oscarspeech or something.
I mean, there's so
Dan Balcauski (41:02):
No, no.
I mean, you don't need to thinkyour agent, your mother, like
Eric Boduch (41:05):
Yeah.
Dan Balcauski (41:05):
cast characters.
If you just pick one.
Eric Boduch (41:07):
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, orAustin, the CEO of truth.
I don't know.
I mean, like, but no, in allseriousness, I mean, like, it
all started with fundamentals ineducation, right?
Thinking about things a littlebit differently, thinking about
things in problems, logically,being able to break'em down, so.
(41:29):
Invaluable education.
I got outta Carnegie Mellon, oneof my early professors there who
since passed.
Jack Roseman was a great mentorto me.
And just, working with amazingpeers is always invigorating,
right?
Like it's always fun talkingwith interesting people.
I mean, you can probably tellfrom my enthusiasm today, I am
enjoying this, right?
But, similarly, like workingwith people like Chad Burnett,
(41:50):
who is an early studio engineerand is now over, as the CTO of
way found like.
Those conversations.
I love to have, I mean, I'm aguy who loves to geek out over
that stuff, over dinner orcoffee, or drinks, like, so,
know, those things dramaticallyaffect me.
I love to talk with smart peoplethat love to learn, love to
question things, love to bringup interesting ideas.
(42:11):
So, I mean, it's like, it's, isthere 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 tomake the world a better place
and talking about how we do itis just awesome.
So I love to do that.
Dan Balcauski (42:31):
Well, well, yeah.
No, this has been fantastic.
If listeners wanna connect withyou, learn more about 24 and up
or any of your companies, howcan they do that?
Eric Boduch (42:38):
LinkedIn's great.
I'm the only Eric Bodak onLinkedIn.
It's really kind of odd, Ithink, but I'm the only one
there, so you can't really missme.
My email is Eric ERIC at 24 andup.com.
Feel free to email me.
I try to get to that.
I know of an, we're building awe're building an AI agent that
I'm gonna commercialize for,helping in essence EAs, right?
So I, I have an agent nowlooking at my emails also on my
(43:01):
calendars and recordings andeverything.
It's pretty wild.
So hopefully I don't missanything.
But,
Dan Balcauski (43:05):
well, I'll put I'll put a link to your LinkedIn
in the show notes as well aslinks to your companies we've
discussed for sure.
Thank you so much, Eric.
Everyone that wraps up thisepisode of Sask Scaling Secrets.
Thank you to Eric for sharinghis journey and insights.
For our listeners, we foundEric's insights valuable.
Please leave a review and sharethis episode with your network.
It really helps the podcastgrowth.
Thank you so much.
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