November 25, 2025 • 44 mins
Dan Balcauski talks with Emeric Ernoult, the CEO of Agorapulse, a social media management platform. Emeric shares his journey of scaling Agorapulse to serve over 8,000 customers across 140 countries. The discussion covers the importance of constraints in driving innovation, differentiating products in a crowded market, and navigating the competitive landscape. Emeric elaborates on the pivotal innovations, such as the social media inbox, that set Agorapulse apart, as well as the challenges of moving upmarket. He also touches on his experiences with bootstrapping, and the necessity of hiring the right talent. The episode concludes with personal insights on managing stress and plans for AI-driven product development.
01:06 Emeric Ernoult's Journey with Agorapulse
02:12 Navigating a Competitive Market
05:20 Innovative Approaches in Social Media Management
17:32 Challenges and Realities of Bootstrapping
22:59 Taking Chips Off the Table: Secondary Funding Explained
24:12 The Importance of Taking Risks
25:03 The Reality of Entrepreneurial Fear
26:16 The First Major Pivot: From Facebook Contests to Social Media Management
27:02 Mini Pivots and Pricing Strategies
34:59 Building a Mid-Market Go-To-Market Team
42:03 Coping with the Challenges of Running a Company
Guest Links
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Emeric Ernoult (00:00):
someone innovates.
It's never obvious on day onethat this innovation is gonna
change the game.
one beautiful thing aboutbootstrapping a business is that
constraint forces you to do theright thing, when you have a ton
of money the lack of constraintpushes you to do a lot of the
wrong things.
constraint was the forcingfunction to do things
differently.
(00:20):
I think no human being on earthis shielded from fear.
We all feel fear.
There's no exception.
And my lesson from that is thatthere are areas where you have
to innovate.
And there are areas where youabsolutely should not innovate
and you should do what peopleare used to see and used to use.
Dan Balcauski (00:58):
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories and the leaders of the
best scale up B2B SaaScompanies.
I'm your host, Dan Balcauski,founder of Product Tranquility.
Today I'm excited to welcomeEmeric Ernoult CEO of
Agorapulse, a social mediamanagement platform that helps
marketers prove social media'simpact.
With measurable, ROI, Emeric hasscaled Agorapulse to more than
8,000 customers across 140countries.
(01:20):
Emeric, welcome to the show.
Emeric Ernoult (01:22):
Dan, thank you for having me.
I'm excited to have thisconversation with you.
Dan Balcauski (01:26):
The excitement is shared.
Before we dive into your scalingjourney, it gives the elevator
pitch.
What does Agorapulse do?
Who do you serve?
Emeric Ernoult (01:33):
Agorapulse helps businesses and agencies who do
social media for businesses to.
I.
Measure to get everything socialmedia in one place and measure
if it works or not.
Basically helping them prove thevalue of their work.
That's the super short pitch.
I think everybody didn'tunderstand social media and
social media management.
Everybody has been exposed tothe buffers and hoot suites so
(01:54):
they understand thecentralization.
So I don't think we have to, Ihave to sell this anymore.
What I love to sell is thatbeyond the simplicity and the
simplification of your, of thejob we're bringing the.
The measurement of how valuablethat job is.
Like how what value, whatbusiness value it's creating for
the business.
Dan Balcauski (02:12):
Yeah, I, and I imagine that, that journey has
changed over a while from,probably when you started over a
decade ago to, to now where,folks probably didn't understand
what.
What these platforms were.
You did mention a couple ofwell-known competitors and
there's a long list of othersand I imagine that creates
challenges of its own, I guess,
Emeric Ernoult (02:31):
oh
Dan Balcauski (02:31):
just focus on that competitive space.
Like, has it been that way sincethe start or has it gotten more
and more of a red ocean asyou've grown?
Emeric Ernoult (02:42):
Oh, it's gotten more and more of a red ocean as
we grew for sure.
No question.
It's, it is a red ocean today.
It's, this industry was hard in2012 till 2018.
19 but so many smaller companiesis, because it felt easy and fun
Between 2016 and 2020, that nowis a complete red ocean.
(03:03):
Yeah.
Dan Balcauski (03:04):
So I'm curious, given those dynamics I mean, how
do you think about makingheadway in such a.
Crowded market.
I mean, I think this is asituation that a lot of SaaS
founders are finding themselvesin.
We may touch on AI later, but,the ability to sort of, build
software seems to be gettingeasier and easier.
And what maybe seemed like, oh,we've got this lead on this,
(03:27):
market all of a sudden folks arefighting themselves with sort of
10 competitors in the space, allof a sudden what might be
overnight?
How did you think about.
Okay.
Given the constraints of themarket and all these people,
like ostensibly offering what,to a novice or naive buyer might
look the same, how do you thinkabout making your mark within
(03:47):
that market?
Emeric Ernoult (03:50):
Yeah.
That's a great question.
First of all, you win by.
Product or by go-to market.
Those are the two ways you win.
You win by having a betterproduct or a different product,
or you win and or you can, itcan, you can combine both
obviously and or you win byhaving a better go-to market
than the competition or a go-tomarket that they ignored or they
(04:12):
left alone or theyunderinvested.
And my view for my business isthat obviously the product has
to be great.
That's a given in my space.
If your product is city, peopleare going to notice, but is by
having a better go-to market inthe specific verticals that
we've identified and thespecific geographies that we
(04:34):
know we're already strong in, wecan win in our market.
There, there's no way we can winat everything.
So we have to choose thegeographies and the verticals
that we are already doing goodat and focus on these in in, in
a very effective way.
Dan Balcauski (04:48):
So.
Emeric Ernoult (04:49):
So that's a, it's a hard thing to do and it
takes a lot of talents and I'vemade a lot of mistakes trying to
hire for those talents.
But that's my take today.
We're gonna, we're gonna keepthriving because our go-to
market is gonna be moreeffective than the others.
Dan Balcauski (05:04):
As you think about, I guess you could take
it, either the go to market orthe product approaches that you
mentioned.
Were there any creative orunconventional approaches that
you took given this com highlycompetitive landscape that you
think helped you in either ofthose domains?
Emeric Ernoult (05:19):
Yeah.
In 2014, we invented the conceptof a social media inbox when
nobody was doing.
Dan Balcauski (05:28):
I.
Emeric Ernoult (05:28):
An inbox for their social media, incoming
comments and dms and PMs, andall these incoming social
content.
We were the first company in thefirst product to come up with an
inbox like way to treat incomingcontent from social media.
else was doing a bunch ofCollins, Hootsuite was doing
that tweet deck was doing that.
(05:50):
everybody else was doing that,and it was very chaotic and very
messy, and we looked at that andsaid, this is a problem.
And we looked at other ways totreat incoming content that
everybody was using.
It was email.
It's incoming content as wellthat you have to reply and mark
as view and basically handle andsometimes handle as a team.
(06:12):
we decided that it made sense totreat incoming social content
like we treated emails.
And really between 2014 and2020, that was the thing that
made us go from zero to 10million of revenue.
Because nobody else was doingthat.
Sprout copied our inbox in 2016and Hootsuite copied our inbox
in 2019, so it took them sixyears.
(06:32):
So we had this edge on thecompetition by having something
unique and special that nobodyelse was doing well.
So if you had a brand that had alot of engagement and a lot of
activities and their socialprofiles.
Really, we were the bestsolution on the market.
And so we had this very uniquevalue prop that of the market
didn't care about because mostof the market back then only
(06:54):
cared about posting andpublishing and boom, boom, boom.
And so the buffers and theHootsuite were doing that really
well.
And we were not doing thatreally well at the time, at
least for the mark, for the onesin the market that needed this.
duty.
There's all this engagement andall this content I need to
handle, especially with a team.
We were the best solution on themarket and still I believe, the
(07:16):
best solution on the market forthat need because we've we've
continually improved it andtoday we have very deep and
strong inbox processes andworkflows that nobody else has.
it's it, it's not a unique thinganymore because everybody has an
inbox.
So that was the thing between2014 and 2020.
Since 2020, obviously as thefounder.
(07:39):
The co-founder I've beenobsessed about this.
How do I create that again?
Like, what is the product thingI can create that makes us look
different?
And also that makes us tell astory that feels different.
And we developed a social media,ROI.
tool that allows you to measurewhat's happening once people go
(08:00):
from social to your website andconvert into something, a lead,
a sign up, a trial, a demorequest
Dan Balcauski (08:08):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (08:09):
a webinar subscription, whatever.
everybody was doing that withemail.
We've paid with.
Marketing automation, all theother marketing activities were
tracking this next step.
And so nobody was doing that onsocial and no tool was doing
that on social.
So we built this, I actuallypatented this in the US believe
it or not.
A patent pending on this item,which is we're still being
(08:33):
worked.
It's yet another discussion foranother day.
It's.
It's a weird world, the patentworld, I can tell you that I
didn't understand any of thepatent that I submitted.
It was weird language.
And it didn't do what the inboxdid for us.
I'm convinced that it's a greattool, but it require, requires
the users to basically.
(08:54):
their own measurement in place,which many of them, believe it
or not, do not have.
So like most comp companies inthe world especially small and
medium size, they do not have ameasurement framework.
When you tell them what's youranalytic tech stack I dunno.
Or it's not my department, it'ssomeone else and I dunno how to
interact with it so I can't useit.
And that's something we've hearda lot from the social media
(09:16):
peeps that we've been talkingabout.
So the usage penetration of thatfeature was not as great as the
inbox where it was basicallyright there and everybody was
using it where the ROI required.
Them to have access to theiranalytics framework and systems
and be able to tweak them, beable to, oh, I need an event
here to be tracked, and an eventthere to be tracked.
(09:37):
And if the event was nottracked, then do anything they
want on social and go to yoursite.
If you're not tracking what'shappening next, then you're not
gonna track any ROI.
So it was a little bit morechallenging.
So my next, my, my vision forthe next thing, it will be AI
related.
And we already working on it.
(09:58):
And I think that's gonna be howwe can innovate and be a little
different when, again, when itcomes on, when it comes to the
products differentiator,
Dan Balcauski (10:08):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (10:08):
different can your product be
Dan Balcauski (10:10):
There's, there's,
Emeric Ernoult (10:11):
where.
Dan Balcauski (10:12):
oh, go ahead.
Emeric Ernoult (10:13):
No.
Why?
I believe we can, we shouldreally be better is on the GoTo
market side of things.
We need to work on the product.
There's no question your producthas to have something that, oh
my God, it's amazing.
Dan Balcauski (10:23):
I,
Emeric Ernoult (10:24):
as you said, rightfully so, it looks the same
on paper from the newbies.
So you can't.
You can't say, I'm gonna build agreat product and I'm gonna win
thanks to that it's not gonnawork.
So
Dan Balcauski (10:34):
yeah.
Emeric Ernoult (10:35):
It, it's a condition precedent to win, but
it's definitely not a conditionin sufficient.
Dan Balcauski (10:39):
Yes, exactly.
I wanna double click on thisthis inbox idea this feature
set.
And there's a tactical view andthere's more of sort of a
philosophical view.
So, in, there's often aconversation.
I've been involved in theseconversations as a product
leader before where.
You, maybe you have an idea likethis inbox, right?
Where it's like, and there's,there, there could be a debate
(11:01):
saying, well, like, look, yeah,that might be unique, but it'll
be so easy for.
Competitors to just basicallycopy it and replicate it.
You said something interesting,you said, you did have a few
years of runway before thosecompetitors who prob I imagine
were a little bit ahead of youin terms of size of company and
maybe even market share,
Emeric Ernoult (11:19):
Yes,
Dan Balcauski (11:20):
Where you did have some runway.
So I, I'm curious what you thinkabout that as at a philosophical
point like.
Like what, what allowed you tohave that runway on that sort of
capability for so long?
Is there areas, is there arationale why those other
companies didn't sort ofimmediately replicate?
(11:41):
Is there something that mostfolks who aren't sort of
building product or dealing withthat competitive strategy every
day, don't understand when theysay, oh, well those folks will
just be able to churn it out intheir next release.
Emeric Ernoult (11:52):
Yeah, of course.
First of all, we were reallysmall.
Back then we were at one tomillion a year of annual
Dan Balcauski (11:58):
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (11:58):
very, very, very small.
Not even that at, in 2014 wewere like 500 K or 400 k of
Dan Balcauski (12:04):
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (12:05):
Annual.
So I think we were.
the radar.
That's number one.
And number two, there's momentumin product, SaaS product
building.
It doesn't take a, a snap offingers to build a great SaaS
product.
It will take six to nine months.
If you're fast and especiallyback then, today, maybe you can
be a bit faster.
But then there was no way youcan transform your bunch of
(12:27):
columns into a social mediainbox in less than reasonably.
to nine months.
So there was that moment,negative momentum, that, that
prevents you from moving fast tocopy people like this, this,
this quarter over quarter.
That's the second thing And thethird thing back then Collins
was the way everybody was doingsomething.
(12:48):
So when an entire industry isdoing something in one way.
And someone comes in and do itin another way, it will not take
a month for everybody torealize, oh my God, this new way
is amazing.
They will look at this new way.
What are they doing?
It's not the way we're all doingthis.
It must be wrong, and they willonly start to realize that it's
(13:09):
actually a way that works when.
Prospects will come to them andsay, oh, you don't have an
inbox.
Oh, that's a problem.
These guys are Agorapulse.
They have an inbox.
It's so much better.
Why don't you have an inbox?
And that feedback from themarket, percolates up and goes
to dealership and thendealerships will say, oh gosh,
we have to notice this guys thatkeep being mentioned and we're
losing deals and this and that.
(13:30):
not gonna happen like this.
When someone innovates withsomething like that, it's.
It's not gonna be instant thatthe competition notices.
So let's take another example.
All the companies that did, qII,that's very social media stuff,
but they did q publishinginstead of doing scheduled
publishing.
So instead of doing create thepost and schedule it for
tomorrow at 3:00 PM and thenanother post and for Thursday at
(13:53):
5:00 PM and so on and so forth.
That's a scheduling way.
And some companies came in andsaid, no, we're not gonna do
that.
We're gonna create.
Queues based on topics.
So you create a queue that'severy Monday at 2:00 PM and it's
the topic podcast news.
And then there's another slotthat we create for Wednesday at
3:00 PM and it's the topic worldnews and then the war in
Ukraine.
(14:14):
We talk about that on Friday at5:00 PM and then you keep
cranking that content.
Well, that's a war in Ukraine.
That's a world news, that's apodcast news.
And it goes into those queuesand it gets posted
automatically.
During, at that.
Very time slot that's the sameevery week again and again and
again.
That was the Q system.
So some companies created thisand obviously.
They, same thing here.
(14:34):
They had a leap and they didthat for years and before others
like us noticed and say, oh,what are they doing?
Should we do that?
Should we add this as anotherway to post content?
Is this going to change the waypeople post content on social?
And it does take some timesbefore you realize that.
Huh?
Yeah, it's nice.
Let's add that, but it's notgonna change the game.
(14:55):
Or, oh my Lord, it's changingthe game.
We need to adapt and that isgonna take you 1, 2, 3 years
before you realize is the gamechanger you didn't see coming.
Or this is not the game changer,we're losing 10% of our deals
because of that, and we havebandwidth.
Let's build this.
So we stop losing those deals
Dan Balcauski (15:12):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (15:12):
someone innovates.
It's never obvious on day onethat this innovation is gonna
change the game.
Dan Balcauski (15:18):
So, I mean, I heard a couple things there.
One was, there is a, there's abit of mo momentum in terms of
the, it takes time for.
The market feedback to creep upin a larger company, to hear
about, the person who's has asort of disruptive way of doing
things, and maybe you're notsort of losing those deals
necessarily, but maybe they'recropping up in more
(15:39):
conversations and then all of asudden it becomes a larger,
larger piece.
And then I'll buy that.
Point, you're a couple yearsbehind by the time you get your
act together.
And then I think the other thingI heard there was you had a very
strong sort of point of view onthe way customers should
interact with their social mediathrough this inbox paradigm that
was maybe not in directconflict, but would definitely a
(16:03):
different sort of starting pointor paradigm than these.
Other products were builtaround.
And so it's not necessarilythat, like did we just tack this
thing on?
But you were sort of, you had adifferent motion that that maybe
these other companies didn'tquite, they, everyone has their
demo scripts and you sort ofbuilt workflows and onboarding
and et cetera that all of asudden you're like, okay, if
(16:23):
we're gonna change it to this,like this is, we can't just sort
of slot this in.
It's not just adding a feature,but it's sort of having a point
of view on how that work shouldbe done from the customer point
of view.
I think that there was somethingelse that you mentioned within
that arc around inbox though,was that you did say that
Agorapulse was not as good onsort of the publishing side.
(16:44):
As you were I guess this waskinda earlier in the thread.
And that sounded like a, sort ofa a decision to say, okay,
they're winning over there andwe're okay letting them sort of
win on that side because we havethis view that this way to sort
of manage the social media isbetter.
I'm curious, like how do yousort of bit like, what was it
(17:07):
about that that sort of allowedyou to build that.
Conviction.
'cause I could, the oppositeway, right?
Those folks, like, they're aheadof us on this.
Like our best investment is togo catch up with them on that
same dimension.
But, you took what is maybe thecontrarian approach or a very,
strict approach of like, like,that's fine.
We'll let them win over therefor now.
Like, and we'll make thatexplicit, like we're not gonna
chase that.
(17:27):
I'm curious like how you builtthat conviction and what that
looked like on your end.
Emeric Ernoult (17:31):
Wow, that's very simple.
We were bootstrapped, I hadthree developers at my disposal
to build this thing.
And I was very accurately awarethat there was no freaking way
on earth that I could compete onevery aspect with the other
products at the time had raisedmore than a hundred million
dollars.
And I had.
Zero million dollars.
That makes a big difference inthe means that you have to
(17:53):
compete.
So when you are completelyoutnumbered and out, dollared in
the means you have to compete.
You have to pick your battlesvery wisely and go very deep in
one of those battles, andcertainly not try to fight all
of them.
If you asked Emrich of 2014, hewould've told you, I wish we
(18:18):
could do this and this and thisand that, but he would've
immediately told you that rightafter that.
I know I can't.
So I pick this battle and notthe others.
Dan Balcauski (18:27):
Highly pragmatic.
Emeric Ernoult (18:29):
Constraints.
It's just constraints.
And I think that's one beautifulthings about, beautiful thing
about Bootstrap is bootstrappinga business is that constraint
forces you to do the rightthing, when you have a ton of
money the lack of constraintpushes you to do a lot of the
wrong things.
Dan Balcauski (18:45):
Well, let's you brought up the bootstrapping, so
let's talk about thatconstraint.
You see folks are doing allthese things.
You have a wishlist that, threedevelopers even if you have, you
had 30 developers, I'm sure youcouldn't fulfill your entire
wishlist.
Why don't you attack thatconstraint directly?
Did you think about raisinginstitutional capital?
Emeric Ernoult (19:02):
I did.
I tried for many years and itdidn't work.
Like nobody wanted to invest insocial media in 20 14, 15, 16.
Like, it always, it failed everysingle time I did all the
pitches.
I went to San Francisco, I didall the competitions.
I went to startup Garage.
I forgot their name.
In in, in Silicon Valley.
I, I tried like.
(19:24):
I tried everything I could in,in the US and in Europe, and it
never worked out because peoplelooked at what we did and said,
how different are you from X, Y,and Z?
Let's call them Buffer Hootsuiteand whoever else was there
already at the time.
are you from them?
And I said, I don't know.
We didn't have the inbox backthen.
We were less than a million.
We were less than 500 K of vr rlike.
(19:46):
well, the only thing I knew isthat I am hungry as heck want to
win, and I'll do whatever ittakes, but that's all I have for
you, Vc.
So they say, okay, it's notenough.
We need like that uniquecompetitive advantage.
We need that unique feature thatdefendable barrier to entry
that, and we had none of that.
Dan Balcauski (20:05):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (20:06):
it didn't work out.
I wish, at the time I wished Icould.
money because my life was hell.
I didn't pay myself for twoyears.
My wife paid for everythingthanks to her.
Now I'm giving her back.
And and for the first two yearsand for the next two years, I
paid myself minimum wage, whichis not great in, when you live
(20:27):
in a big city like Paris.
I mean, for a minute living inNew York with$1,500 a month,
that's, they're not gonna have avery fun
Dan Balcauski (20:35):
Lot, lot of ramen.
Lot of ramen on the menu.
Emeric Ernoult (20:37):
Yeah, Absolutely.
So that's, that was the cost ofnot raising.
But the fact when I look back Isee the benefit of that, which
is constraint created the, wasthe forcing function to just do
something, to do thingsdifferently.
Dan Balcauski (20:50):
And correct me if I'm wrong, I believe you did
eventually raise capital in like20 18, 19.
Emeric Ernoult (20:56):
No, we did not.
The it was secondary.
Dan Balcauski (20:59):
Ah, okay.
Took a little, took some chipsoff the table.
Okay.
Got it.
Emeric Ernoult (21:03):
some chips off the table.
I bought my house and myco-founder did the same thing.
And we had three business angelsfrom the previous business.
'cause Agora Post was built onthe back of a previous SaaS
business that was kind of dying,but still making us a little bit
of money.
So it funded the beginning with,we were doing like 12,000 a
month, something like that.
back then and it, it paid forthe three developers that I
(21:25):
talked to you about earlier.
We exited them in 2019, but nomoney went in the business.
Dan Balcauski (21:32):
I'm curious about the sort of the, I've seen
several companies do that wherethey just have secondaries and
sort of, allow, folks to takechips off the table.
I'm curious, like, was there adecision point there in terms
of.
Like thinking about like, I meanmaybe it's not 0% or a hundred
percent, maybe it's somewhere inbetween of like, hey, if we sort
of do some of this assecondaries, but then add some
(21:53):
of this to sort of the businesscoffers.
And I'm curious kind of what,what led it to, your decision to
be sort of purely a secondaryapproach.
Emeric Ernoult (22:00):
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm super transparent aboutthat.
At the time a business bankercame to see us with, who had
just sold the company of afriend.
The company of that friend wascalled Mention, and believe it
or not, I bought that companyback four months ago for$60,000
because it was getting bankrupt.
So it did well, selling it in,in, in 2018.
(22:21):
And his business banker came tosee me and, told me you should
sell.
I mean, it's a great time.
Your company's going up into theright.
Every KPI is on the green andit's a great time.
We can sell that and you becomemulti multimillionaire and you
go enjoy life on your sailboat.
'cause I love And good for you.
And I said, no, not doing this.
I enjoy growing this company.
(22:42):
I enjoy being, its CEOI enjoy,I've I.
You heard that I paid myselfminimum wage or I paid myself
nothing, and suddenly I waspaying myself a decent salary
and I was having fun enjoyingthe growth of the business.
So I said, no, I'm not sellingit.
one of my mentor told me you're,that's great.
You shouldn't sell a business.
You enjoy running.
but you or you would be sillynot to take chips off the table,
(23:05):
so you need to do that.
I say, oh, interesting.
How do you do that?
Well, you just go to your bankerand you tell him that.
And I, I just did that.
And he said, ah, okay, so youwanna do a secondary funding?
I say, I don't know what thatmeans, but probably yes.
And so he explained to me whatthat was.
He's basically, you're trying toraise money, but the money is to
buy existing shares instead ofinvesting into new capital in
the company.
(23:25):
I say, oh, that sounds great.
That sounds good to me.
so we raised the money that wasbasically enough to give me and
my co-founder the comfort thatif the thing went bust, we
wouldn't lose everything and wewouldn't be homeless basically.
That was my inner fear of, oh myGod if this thing goes bust, do
I become homeless?
Do I go sleep under a bridge?
(23:46):
I know it's silly, but that fearis always in you it took that
fear away from me.
I will not fear of.
Being homeless anymore because Ihave enough cash to turn around
to invent something else, to gofind a great job somewhere.
Like my financial future is notat risk anymore.
I have enough cash to tobasically prepare for that.
(24:07):
And I have a house, I have aroof on my head, which is
always, which feels like aprotection.
That was great because it, itpushed us to risk again and try
new things and'cause now wedidn't have everything to lose
again, we.
you always.
You never want to lose what youhave, but if you are protected
from homelessness, at least ifyou know you're okay to push a
(24:28):
little bit further, okay.
To take a little bit more risk.
And I think that's whatsecondary can help founders do
is like, okay let's be boldagain and let's take, let's make
bold bets.
if they does, if they don'twork, I'm not losing everything.
I already took something out andI don't feel like, oh, I mean,
think about you have$10 million,they're yours now, and you do
(24:50):
something and you lose them.
That you feel terrible if you'velost the whole thing.
Dan Balcauski (24:55):
Yeah.
Emeric Ernoult (24:55):
if you take 1.5 and you lose 8.5, you feel bad,
but not as bad as if you didn'thave the 1.5 on your table
anymore.
Dan Balcauski (25:03):
Yeah, apparently the only, yeah, apparently the
only entrepreneur who could dothat without feeling those
feelings is Elon.
'cause apparently he just hasrolled all of his winnings from
one thing into a
Emeric Ernoult (25:12):
it,
Dan Balcauski (25:12):
bet on the next thing.
Emeric Ernoult (25:14):
but it's not true.
It does feel those feelings.
It does feel fear, and it is Iheard him express that at
several occasion that it doesfeel fear and he hates it.
It doesn't like it.
We all do, and I don't, I thinkno human being on earth is
shielded from fear.
We all feel fear.
There's no exception.
Dan Balcauski (25:30):
Well, I wanna pivot a little bit, just so,
and, and kind of talk aboutpivot.
So many, founder CEOs on theshow TA have talked about sort
of eras of their scalingjourney, different inflection
points, kind of those pointswhere sort of they realize that,
either, either by revenue ornumber of employees or change in
the market.
Hey, we can't continue to growkind of doing things We.
We've always done.
(25:51):
I'm curious as you've beenrunning Go Pulse for over, over
a decade now a couple ofdifferent moments you've talked
about already.
I guess what have been sort ofthe, I guess what are the big
inflection points as you sort oflook back where you or maybe the
largest one where you have sortof had to kind of, Hey we can't
kind of just continue just doingmore of what we're doing.
We have to really sort of changehow we're doing things inside
(26:12):
the business.
Emeric Ernoult (26:13):
Yeah.
Basically there were the pivotsthat we've made.
The first pivot we made is whenAgool started.
It was Facebook contests andpromotions,
Dan Balcauski (26:20):
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (26:20):
Facebook only, and the service was contest and
promotion sweepstakes, photocontest quizzes.
As you may or may not know, wedon't do any of that today.
So obviously Agorapulse today isthe same brand and the same
name, and the same URL, but theproduct is entirely different.
It's as if I would tell you, weused to sell bicycles.
We're now selling trucks.
It's exactly the same
Dan Balcauski (26:41):
Yeah.
Emeric Ernoult (26:41):
they don't have the same purpose.
So we started with this, werealized it's a very shitty
business model and we pivoted tosocial media management in 2012.
Obviously it took a long time tobuild this.
The inbox came coming in 2014'cause we only had three
developers and no money.
And my wife was paying foreverything.
I was the first pivot gettingfrom contest and promotion to
(27:02):
social media.
And then inside the social mediajourney, there were plenty of
mini pivot.
Mini pivot in terms of how weprice And yeah, we priced in a
very silly way in the early daysthat made our conversion very
bad.
I'll have to give you thisexample.
So our pricing model wasbasically, we didn't have a
package, a pricing page withpackages, though.
(27:22):
Here's a 99 plan and the 49plan, and had a slider.
That was basically slide up totell me how many users do you
need and slide up to tell me howmany profiles, social profiles
you need to manage, and I'llgive you your price.
And our conversion rate withthis type of pricing was shit.
The day we changed this to 49,package 99 like everybody else
(27:45):
our conversion rate went likedoubled overnight.
And my lesson from that is thatthere are areas where you have
to innovate.
And there are areas where youabsolutely should not innovate
and you should do what peopleare used to see and used to use.
So, and sometimes it's not easyto distinguish which one you
should innovate in and which oneyou shouldn't.
But with pricing.
(28:06):
My lesson is make it simple andseamless and don't make them
think they have to say, okay, 99have all of this good, let's go.
And oh, I have to think how muchit's gonna cost me.
I don't, I'm not really sure.
And it's not a good idea.
So that was like one of thosemini pivot.
In 20 21, 20 22 the big moment,the big haha moment when he.
To change something was the,with the go to market and the
(28:28):
market we address, we were verySMB inbound self-serve driven
from 2011 until 2019 andstarting in 2020, we started to
realize that this.
Market segment was going down.
It was it was not growing andfor two reasons, the churn was
really high.
(28:48):
Net monthly churn around 6% for
Dan Balcauski (28:51):
Ugh, that's not great.
Emeric Ernoult (28:52):
5, 5 to six.
No, it's not great.
It's really bad.
and probably the best in classare able to get to four.
I think Buffer was at four,something like that.
And they I would consider themas best in class.
But four monthly is very hardto.
It's very hard to grow after acertain point because 4% on 20
million or 22 millions ofrevenue, a lot of money that's
(29:13):
getting out every week.
And you only, you don't realizethat if your acquisition is
going great, so if you're at 2million, 3 million a r and you
acquire like crazy you don'tfeel the pain.
But when you get a 20 million oreven 10 million, you start
thinking, oh my God, that's alot of churn.
That's a lot of dollar churnevery month.
How do we replace that?
And then you, your SEO does notfeel that.
(29:36):
The tank anymore, your referralsare not enough.
And then you start saying, oh myGod, I can't double down on SEO
or referral unless there's noway you can do that.
So it doesn't, it won't scale.
that was the first realization.
And so we saw, okay, we have toget as close as possible to 100%
NR as we can.
So we need to change who we sellto and we need to solve bigger
(29:56):
problems with those and notbasically SMB.
Was SMB Sales Serve Inbound waswe solved?
Okay.
Problems.
They're
Dan Balcauski (30:04):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (30:05):
They're not too bad.
They're not too strategic forthem.
And so we need to change that.
The problem we solve have to becomplex, strategic, and bad.
So when we solve this, oh my
Dan Balcauski (30:15):
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (30:17):
And that is never going to happen for SMBs.
Never.
It's not the case.
SMBs, in general, SMBs are nevergonna feel that way for
marketing.
They're gonna feel that way formany things, but not for
marketing and definitely not forsocial media.
for some exceptions that they'rethe exception and you're trying
to market to everyone, not tothe exceptions.
So we started to pivot our go tomarket and the way we go to
(30:38):
market and the way we do salesand marketing, and the lesson
here is freaking hard.
Dan Balcauski (30:46):
Well, I wanna, this,
Emeric Ernoult (30:47):
really hard.
Dan Balcauski (30:47):
this is a great topic.
So, so, just to kind of recap.
So, so yeah.
Hi.
Really.
So, so SMB might, maybe evenmicro, SMB super high churn and
kind of a characteristic of themarket itself.
Many products of differentindustries all kind of learn
this lesson really fast, reallyeasy to grow.
'cause there's a lot ofcustomers out there, but also
really finicky.
(31:08):
They tend to go outta businessvery quickly.
But but have those problems.
So, so you go from this sort of.
It more sort of pure inboundself-service motion.
Maybe some might term that likea product led growth to maybe a
more moving up market.
Maybe it's more like a sales ledapproach is, would that be an
accurate characterization aswell?
So, so, okay.
So you realize the problem, allthe executive team realizes the
(31:30):
problem, yes, we need to dothis.
What do you do first?
Like, do you go and like.
Get a new sales team, like, doyou change your marketing?
Do you change the product?
Like what?
Like what do you like, okay, wemade this decision.
Like what do you go do first?
'cause,'cause it, it does entaila bunch of changes that I think
(31:50):
a lot of folks are just don'trealize how messy that could be.
Emeric Ernoult (31:55):
you want the easy and sweet answer, or you
want the real answer?
Dan Balcauski (31:58):
Yes, yes.
Emeric Ernoult (32:00):
Well, the real answer is you have to do all of
this.
So that's what makes it very sodifficult and so challenging.
You cannot go at market if yourproduct doesn't change.
And that's going to take years,not months, not even quarters,
years.
So, and, but you have to do itbecause if you, if your product
is not made market enterpriseready.
(32:21):
year you don't do anything aboutit, the next year you will still
not be enterprise in marketready and the following year not
ready either.
So you're never gonna win thosedeals.
So your product roadmap has todrastically change.
And you have to realize thatthis is going to take three
years for your product to beokay an RFP against an existing
(32:44):
player who's already playing inthat field.
So.
Have that in mind, then you alsoneed to change the way you
market to the market.
Inbound.
Not gonna work.
SEO not gonna work.
Why is all the inbound stuff notgonna work?
Because when you do inbound andSEO and referrals, you get the
traffic you get, which in 90% ofthe cases is not the traffic you
(33:07):
want.
And so you have to change thatbecause if you and we had a lot
of freaking traffic back
Dan Balcauski (33:12):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (33:12):
the days we had, We had close to 6,000 free
trials per month.
90, 95% of which were small tovery small businesses.
Because what, if you look at allthe businesses in the world, 90%
of them are small businesses.
Out of the 10% that remains,six, 7% are mid-market and two
(33:35):
3% are enterprise like, andmaybe it's.
1% enterprise.
I don't know, but that's thiskind of
Dan Balcauski (33:41):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (33:42):
It is.
It is the realm of what it is.
So if your marketing is shoutingin the crowd, opening the
window, I'm here in my office inParis, I could open the window
and say, Hey, come see us.
90 to 95% of those people in thestreets.
either freelancers or one personbusiness or two person, it's
gonna be mostly thinking thatimagining they're all
(34:05):
businesses.
It's all gonna be very smallbusinesses or small businesses.
that's what you get.
It's math.
It's pure percentage wise, it'snot, there's no intent.
There's no intent to attract theright kind of customers, like
basically shouting
Dan Balcauski (34:18):
So, so, so, so you, so you realize they got a
three year cycle on changing theproduct, right?
You've realized you.
Emeric Ernoult (34:26):
or you don't realize it's,
Dan Balcauski (34:27):
You don't realize it at the time.
Emeric Ernoult (34:29):
days, but Then you realize it.
Dan Balcauski (34:31):
Okay, so, so, so, and then, okay.
You realize, okay, the trafficwe're getting organically is not
the traffic we necessarily want.
So, so I guess, so you set theroadmap on a schedule, and
that's going off, but you'relike, all right, it's gonna take
a while to build that out.
I guess, what do you change onthe go to market side, whether
that's marketing or, and orsales, I guess in the interim
(34:53):
to.
To solve this problem of Yeahthe, the SEO the organic traffic
is not what we wanted.
Emeric Ernoult (34:59):
well, I did what every good CEO would do.
I changed leadership and I madebig mistakes again and again
until I, I realized that, okay,shit, I have to learn this
myself because otherwise I'mgonna keep making hiring
mistakes and hiring the wrongpeople for the right job.
And, what I ended up doing islearning the thing myself by
(35:20):
going to, by listening topodcasts, I listened to a ton of
podcasts, marketing podcasts fora year, and going to conferences
and speaking with CEOs who'vedone this switch and speaking
with CEOs who are addressing.
Mid market enterprise and askingthem how is your teammate, how,
who is he leading your salesteam?
What kind of job?
(35:40):
What kind of functions do youhave in your sales team?
What kind of function do youhave in your marketing team?
Oh, you have an ops function.
I don't even know what thatmeans.
I don't even have that.
Okay, ops, what is that?
What do they do?
So had to go learn.
Myself, what it takes to build amid-market, go-to market team.
And once I had learned that,then I could hire the leader who
(36:01):
knew that because I knew whatquestion to ask and what to
verify and what to check, whichI had no clue about with the
first hires that I made.
Dan Balcauski (36:08):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (36:09):
That, yeah,
Dan Balcauski (36:10):
And, and
Emeric Ernoult (36:10):
I wish
Dan Balcauski (36:11):
just,
Emeric Ernoult (36:11):
was an easy answer,
Dan Balcauski (36:12):
so, so double click on that hiring of the, of
that mid-market leader, I guess,and maybe it's faded into the
background or maybe you'verepressed that memory, but like,
if you think about that, likewhen you finally understood what
you needed to hire for, I guess,what were the traits that you
realized you needed?
And then like, what did you lookfor in the hiring process?
Maybe like, like questions youwould ask.
(36:33):
Like, so, so if we could shortcircuit the learning path for
the entrepreneur who's goingthrough that process right now.
So they don't have to gothrough, pure listen to all the
back episodes of Sask GalySecrets.
Of course we have a bunch ofother lessons learned, but if
they don't wanna do that, what'sthe cheat code?
What if they want to go hirethat mid-market leader?
Emeric Ernoult (36:49):
Yeah, the cheat code is the marketer who would
be really good for an inboundSMB.
Let's open the window and shoutto the crowd and make as many
people come to us as possible,or even B2C, which would be kind
of the same principles in thesame way to market.
The very big difference betweenthis kind of profile and the
higher end B2B, mid markets oreven enterprise that.
(37:12):
does not matter too much in thefirst kind who you're marketing
to.
It matters a lot who you'remarketing to in the, with the
second kind.
So if you want the right person,they first should have clarity
on, okay, who is our ICP?
Who is the ideal customer?
Is it manufacturers in Germanyand agencies in the US and
universities in France?
(37:34):
Is it those that we sell the,that are the easiest to sell to
and that retain.
That stays the longest with us,or is it something else?
you don't have this clarity, youcannot define what is the market
you're going to laser focus onin Germany, in France, in the
us, in the uk, because they'reall different.
For example, higher education isa market we've been focusing on.
(37:56):
In the US there is no such amarket In France, it does not
exist'cause there's no money ineducation in France.
So
Dan Balcauski (38:03):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (38:03):
to adapt.
Geo by geo, who is the bestmarket for you and the best ICP?
you're marketing to SMBs, woo,and to the big crowd of
business, you don't need to bethat specific about who you're
going after.
If you're going mid-market orenterprise, you have to be super
darn specific about the type ofcompany, the size of company,
the vertical of the company, thegeography of the company, the
(38:26):
type of person you want to talkto.
What are the other type ofperson you want to talk to?
Do you need to talk to the CMOor the VP of marketing?
For us, we're gonna talk to thesocial media person most of the
time as our champion, but whoelse are we who else do we need
to have on the bandwagon?
Helping the sales to close,especially with larger RFPs and
larger businesses.
So this very acute understandingof who do we sell to is
(38:49):
something that's absolutelynecessary for the mean market
enterprise marketer, andprobably not that necessary for
the.
The small bees or B2C, or let'sdo, let's build brand awareness
and get as many people come toour website as possible.
So that's number one.
Number two, what I've learned isthat the, let's call the first
type of marketer and the secondtype of marketer, right?
(39:10):
So that's easier for the story.
The second type of marketer, theone I need now, they're very
mathematical.
They look at numbers all thetime.
They look at Excel spread.
They are born in spreadsheets.
They aren't, they readspreadsheets and they read SQLs
and MQs and sqs and this andthat, and conversion rate and
da, da, da.
Oh, we have a problem here.
Conversion rate is not as good.
(39:31):
That's the kind of mindset theyhave.
The first type of marketer thatlike creative and entertainment
and video and when and eventsand big booths and like the.
This is a big difference betweenthe two, that it's not to say
that one is better than theother, but one is certainly not
gonna succeed at the other'swork and vice versa.
Dan Balcauski (39:52):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (39:52):
It's not by going into spreadsheets that
you're gonna create superentertaining content that the
crowds are gonna be excitedabout.
And it's not by doing this, thatyou're going to see what's
working or not working in yourgo-to market strategy.
So that's a big trait I'venoticed in those type one, the
first type and the second typeof marketer.
Dan Balcauski (40:09):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (40:09):
And.
The last thing I would say,which is a segue.
The second thing the second typeof marketer sees revenue as a
whole.
They look at operationsenablement and BDRs and account
execs and marketing, which wouldbe content and this, and.
It's a whole operation.
It's, they don't look at it as asiloed operation and they
(40:32):
certainly don't finger point at,oh yeah, my leads are great and
you don't know how to closethem.
The first type of marketer theydo that, they look at sales and
say, you don't know how to closemy leads, because they actually
have no idea how sales work andthey are not.
I don't know if they're notinterested in what they do, but
they certainly are not good atwhat they do and they don't pay
attention and are not interestedin what they do.
Dan Balcauski (40:52):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (40:53):
they re, they keep everything very siloed and
they the kind of there are lowwars to happen inside the
company all the time, so peopleare fighting and disagreeing and
so that's what I've seen withthe first type of marketer, at
least twice.
So that it's twice I got thisexperience and now I had the
second type and it's theopposite.
So I, that's my experience atthe very least.
Dan Balcauski (41:14):
Well, that you were hinting at before in terms
of like, hey, sales can't closemy leads.
I've heard kind of a parallel,so like product management and
engineering, those leaders.
Need to be, maybe they havearguments behind closed doors,
but when they come out, theypresent a unified front When you
have your sales leader and yourmarketing leader that those two
need to have a unified front of,like, we are the revenue
(41:37):
organization and like we don'tthrow each other under the bus.
Maybe, we have spirited.
Debates behind closed doors to,to work problems through.
But we are sort of, we own theentire, flow from lead to sale
and otherwise yeah, especiallyas you get into a mid-market
enterprise sale, like if thatbreaks down yeah.
You don't have a functioningorganization.
Emeric Ernoult (41:54):
Absolutely.
Dan Balcauski (41:55):
so many topics I wanted to cover that we're not
gonna have time to, we'll haveto maybe get you back for a
second time.
But I want to close things outwith a few rapid fire questions.
Look running a company,especially as long as you have
could be taxing mentally,physically, emotionally, what's
your go-to method for clearingyour head when you get
overwhelmed?
Emeric Ernoult (42:14):
I don't know if I have one.
I do take time off, not time offin a sense that I disconnect.
I never disconnect from thebusiness, but I do travel and I
do.
I do go work from other places,like, just to be, make you a
little jealous in
Dan Balcauski (42:28):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (42:28):
already booked my catamaran to go to the
Grenadines in the Caribbean andI'm gonna go sell for two weeks
from French Indies to theGrenadines with my wife and son.
I'm gonna have my laptop.
I'm gonna do deep work.
I'm gonna keep writing my bookbecause I've, I started to write
a book.
So I'm gonna do work because Ienjoy doing the work, but it's
gonna be in such a differentsetting that I will feel like
(42:49):
I've had new air and I've addedoxygen to my air, to my life.
So that's my way of coping withthis, which is, I work all the
time, but I go and travel andwork from different places and
take my family with me, whichallows me to feel like I have a
life.
Because if it was office,office, office.
All day long.
Go to bed, go to the subway, goto bed, go to the subway, go to
the office.
I I would not feel that great.
(43:10):
So that's my way of coping with
Dan Balcauski (43:11):
Change your environment.
Go sailing in the Caribbean.
I love it.
If I give you a billboard, youcan put any message on there for
other beating.
Be SaaS CEOs trying to scaletheir companies, what would it
say?
Emeric Ernoult (43:22):
It's gonna be freaking hard, but eventually.
will love it.
Dan Balcauski (43:29):
It's gonna be hard, but eventually you'll love
it.
Awesome.
Emeric Ernoult (43:33):
Yeah.
Dan Balcauski (43:33):
This has been fantastic.
If listeners wanna connect withyou and learn more about
Agorapulse, how can they dothat?
Emeric Ernoult (43:38):
LinkedIn connect with me on
Dan Balcauski (43:40):
I.
Emeric Ernoult (43:40):
add a note to your invitation.
Say, Hey, I heard you on thispodcast, and loved it.
Love to connect and I accept allthese invitations.
I tend to not accept the onesthat I don't have a note because
I don't want my LinkedIn tobecome a zoo.
So, and I have a lot ofinvitation, so,
Dan Balcauski (43:55):
It's a wise policy.
I have the same, I have the sameprotocol.
That wraps up this episode ofSaaS Scaling Secrets.
Thank you Emeric for sharing hisjourney and insights.
For our listeners who foundEmeric's Insights valuable,
please leave a review and sharethis episode with your network.
It really helps the podcastgrow.
someone innovates.
It's never obvious on day onethat this innovation is gonna
change the game.
one beautiful thing aboutbootstrapping a business is that
constraint forces you to do theright thing, when you have a ton
of money the lack of constraintpushes you to do a lot of the
wrong things.
constraint was the forcingfunction to do things
differently.
(00:20):
I think no human being on earthis shielded from fear.
We all feel fear.
There's no exception.
And my lesson from that is thatthere are areas where you have
to innovate.
And there are areas where youabsolutely should not innovate
and you should do what peopleare used to see and used to use.
Dan Balcauski (00:58):
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories and the leaders of the
best scale up B2B SaaScompanies.
I'm your host, Dan Balcauski,founder of Product Tranquility.
Today I'm excited to welcomeEmeric Ernoult CEO of
Agorapulse, a social mediamanagement platform that helps
marketers prove social media'simpact.
With measurable, ROI, Emeric hasscaled Agorapulse to more than
8,000 customers across 140countries.
(01:20):
Emeric, welcome to the show.
Emeric Ernoult (01:22):
Dan, thank you for having me.
I'm excited to have thisconversation with you.
Dan Balcauski (01:26):
The excitement is shared.
Before we dive into your scalingjourney, it gives the elevator
pitch.
What does Agorapulse do?
Who do you serve?
Emeric Ernoult (01:33):
Agorapulse helps businesses and agencies who do
social media for businesses to.
I.
Measure to get everything socialmedia in one place and measure
if it works or not.
Basically helping them prove thevalue of their work.
That's the super short pitch.
I think everybody didn'tunderstand social media and
social media management.
Everybody has been exposed tothe buffers and hoot suites so
(01:54):
they understand thecentralization.
So I don't think we have to, Ihave to sell this anymore.
What I love to sell is thatbeyond the simplicity and the
simplification of your, of thejob we're bringing the.
The measurement of how valuablethat job is.
Like how what value, whatbusiness value it's creating for
the business.
Dan Balcauski (02:12):
Yeah, I, and I imagine that, that journey has
changed over a while from,probably when you started over a
decade ago to, to now where,folks probably didn't understand
what.
What these platforms were.
You did mention a couple ofwell-known competitors and
there's a long list of othersand I imagine that creates
challenges of its own, I guess,
Emeric Ernoult (02:31):
oh
Dan Balcauski (02:31):
just focus on that competitive space.
Like, has it been that way sincethe start or has it gotten more
and more of a red ocean asyou've grown?
Emeric Ernoult (02:42):
Oh, it's gotten more and more of a red ocean as
we grew for sure.
No question.
It's, it is a red ocean today.
It's, this industry was hard in2012 till 2018.
19 but so many smaller companiesis, because it felt easy and fun
Between 2016 and 2020, that nowis a complete red ocean.
(03:03):
Yeah.
Dan Balcauski (03:04):
So I'm curious, given those dynamics I mean, how
do you think about makingheadway in such a.
Crowded market.
I mean, I think this is asituation that a lot of SaaS
founders are finding themselvesin.
We may touch on AI later, but,the ability to sort of, build
software seems to be gettingeasier and easier.
And what maybe seemed like, oh,we've got this lead on this,
(03:27):
market all of a sudden folks arefighting themselves with sort of
10 competitors in the space, allof a sudden what might be
overnight?
How did you think about.
Okay.
Given the constraints of themarket and all these people,
like ostensibly offering what,to a novice or naive buyer might
look the same, how do you thinkabout making your mark within
(03:47):
that market?
Emeric Ernoult (03:50):
Yeah.
That's a great question.
First of all, you win by.
Product or by go-to market.
Those are the two ways you win.
You win by having a betterproduct or a different product,
or you win and or you can, itcan, you can combine both
obviously and or you win byhaving a better go-to market
than the competition or a go-tomarket that they ignored or they
(04:12):
left alone or theyunderinvested.
And my view for my business isthat obviously the product has
to be great.
That's a given in my space.
If your product is city, peopleare going to notice, but is by
having a better go-to market inthe specific verticals that
we've identified and thespecific geographies that we
(04:34):
know we're already strong in, wecan win in our market.
There, there's no way we can winat everything.
So we have to choose thegeographies and the verticals
that we are already doing goodat and focus on these in in, in
a very effective way.
Dan Balcauski (04:48):
So.
Emeric Ernoult (04:49):
So that's a, it's a hard thing to do and it
takes a lot of talents and I'vemade a lot of mistakes trying to
hire for those talents.
But that's my take today.
We're gonna, we're gonna keepthriving because our go-to
market is gonna be moreeffective than the others.
Dan Balcauski (05:04):
As you think about, I guess you could take
it, either the go to market orthe product approaches that you
mentioned.
Were there any creative orunconventional approaches that
you took given this com highlycompetitive landscape that you
think helped you in either ofthose domains?
Emeric Ernoult (05:19):
Yeah.
In 2014, we invented the conceptof a social media inbox when
nobody was doing.
Dan Balcauski (05:28):
I.
Emeric Ernoult (05:28):
An inbox for their social media, incoming
comments and dms and PMs, andall these incoming social
content.
We were the first company in thefirst product to come up with an
inbox like way to treat incomingcontent from social media.
else was doing a bunch ofCollins, Hootsuite was doing
that tweet deck was doing that.
(05:50):
everybody else was doing that,and it was very chaotic and very
messy, and we looked at that andsaid, this is a problem.
And we looked at other ways totreat incoming content that
everybody was using.
It was email.
It's incoming content as wellthat you have to reply and mark
as view and basically handle andsometimes handle as a team.
(06:12):
we decided that it made sense totreat incoming social content
like we treated emails.
And really between 2014 and2020, that was the thing that
made us go from zero to 10million of revenue.
Because nobody else was doingthat.
Sprout copied our inbox in 2016and Hootsuite copied our inbox
in 2019, so it took them sixyears.
(06:32):
So we had this edge on thecompetition by having something
unique and special that nobodyelse was doing well.
So if you had a brand that had alot of engagement and a lot of
activities and their socialprofiles.
Really, we were the bestsolution on the market.
And so we had this very uniquevalue prop that of the market
didn't care about because mostof the market back then only
(06:54):
cared about posting andpublishing and boom, boom, boom.
And so the buffers and theHootsuite were doing that really
well.
And we were not doing thatreally well at the time, at
least for the mark, for the onesin the market that needed this.
duty.
There's all this engagement andall this content I need to
handle, especially with a team.
We were the best solution on themarket and still I believe, the
(07:16):
best solution on the market forthat need because we've we've
continually improved it andtoday we have very deep and
strong inbox processes andworkflows that nobody else has.
it's it, it's not a unique thinganymore because everybody has an
inbox.
So that was the thing between2014 and 2020.
Since 2020, obviously as thefounder.
(07:39):
The co-founder I've beenobsessed about this.
How do I create that again?
Like, what is the product thingI can create that makes us look
different?
And also that makes us tell astory that feels different.
And we developed a social media,ROI.
tool that allows you to measurewhat's happening once people go
(08:00):
from social to your website andconvert into something, a lead,
a sign up, a trial, a demorequest
Dan Balcauski (08:08):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (08:09):
a webinar subscription, whatever.
everybody was doing that withemail.
We've paid with.
Marketing automation, all theother marketing activities were
tracking this next step.
And so nobody was doing that onsocial and no tool was doing
that on social.
So we built this, I actuallypatented this in the US believe
it or not.
A patent pending on this item,which is we're still being
(08:33):
worked.
It's yet another discussion foranother day.
It's.
It's a weird world, the patentworld, I can tell you that I
didn't understand any of thepatent that I submitted.
It was weird language.
And it didn't do what the inboxdid for us.
I'm convinced that it's a greattool, but it require, requires
the users to basically.
(08:54):
their own measurement in place,which many of them, believe it
or not, do not have.
So like most comp companies inthe world especially small and
medium size, they do not have ameasurement framework.
When you tell them what's youranalytic tech stack I dunno.
Or it's not my department, it'ssomeone else and I dunno how to
interact with it so I can't useit.
And that's something we've hearda lot from the social media
(09:16):
peeps that we've been talkingabout.
So the usage penetration of thatfeature was not as great as the
inbox where it was basicallyright there and everybody was
using it where the ROI required.
Them to have access to theiranalytics framework and systems
and be able to tweak them, beable to, oh, I need an event
here to be tracked, and an eventthere to be tracked.
(09:37):
And if the event was nottracked, then do anything they
want on social and go to yoursite.
If you're not tracking what'shappening next, then you're not
gonna track any ROI.
So it was a little bit morechallenging.
So my next, my, my vision forthe next thing, it will be AI
related.
And we already working on it.
(09:58):
And I think that's gonna be howwe can innovate and be a little
different when, again, when itcomes on, when it comes to the
products differentiator,
Dan Balcauski (10:08):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (10:08):
different can your product be
Dan Balcauski (10:10):
There's, there's,
Emeric Ernoult (10:11):
where.
Dan Balcauski (10:12):
oh, go ahead.
Emeric Ernoult (10:13):
No.
Why?
I believe we can, we shouldreally be better is on the GoTo
market side of things.
We need to work on the product.
There's no question your producthas to have something that, oh
my God, it's amazing.
Dan Balcauski (10:23):
I,
Emeric Ernoult (10:24):
as you said, rightfully so, it looks the same
on paper from the newbies.
So you can't.
You can't say, I'm gonna build agreat product and I'm gonna win
thanks to that it's not gonnawork.
So
Dan Balcauski (10:34):
yeah.
Emeric Ernoult (10:35):
It, it's a condition precedent to win, but
it's definitely not a conditionin sufficient.
Dan Balcauski (10:39):
Yes, exactly.
I wanna double click on thisthis inbox idea this feature
set.
And there's a tactical view andthere's more of sort of a
philosophical view.
So, in, there's often aconversation.
I've been involved in theseconversations as a product
leader before where.
You, maybe you have an idea likethis inbox, right?
Where it's like, and there's,there, there could be a debate
(11:01):
saying, well, like, look, yeah,that might be unique, but it'll
be so easy for.
Competitors to just basicallycopy it and replicate it.
You said something interesting,you said, you did have a few
years of runway before thosecompetitors who prob I imagine
were a little bit ahead of youin terms of size of company and
maybe even market share,
Emeric Ernoult (11:19):
Yes,
Dan Balcauski (11:20):
Where you did have some runway.
So I, I'm curious what you thinkabout that as at a philosophical
point like.
Like what, what allowed you tohave that runway on that sort of
capability for so long?
Is there areas, is there arationale why those other
companies didn't sort ofimmediately replicate?
(11:41):
Is there something that mostfolks who aren't sort of
building product or dealing withthat competitive strategy every
day, don't understand when theysay, oh, well those folks will
just be able to churn it out intheir next release.
Emeric Ernoult (11:52):
Yeah, of course.
First of all, we were reallysmall.
Back then we were at one tomillion a year of annual
Dan Balcauski (11:58):
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (11:58):
very, very, very small.
Not even that at, in 2014 wewere like 500 K or 400 k of
Dan Balcauski (12:04):
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (12:05):
Annual.
So I think we were.
the radar.
That's number one.
And number two, there's momentumin product, SaaS product
building.
It doesn't take a, a snap offingers to build a great SaaS
product.
It will take six to nine months.
If you're fast and especiallyback then, today, maybe you can
be a bit faster.
But then there was no way youcan transform your bunch of
(12:27):
columns into a social mediainbox in less than reasonably.
to nine months.
So there was that moment,negative momentum, that, that
prevents you from moving fast tocopy people like this, this,
this quarter over quarter.
That's the second thing And thethird thing back then Collins
was the way everybody was doingsomething.
(12:48):
So when an entire industry isdoing something in one way.
And someone comes in and do itin another way, it will not take
a month for everybody torealize, oh my God, this new way
is amazing.
They will look at this new way.
What are they doing?
It's not the way we're all doingthis.
It must be wrong, and they willonly start to realize that it's
(13:09):
actually a way that works when.
Prospects will come to them andsay, oh, you don't have an
inbox.
Oh, that's a problem.
These guys are Agorapulse.
They have an inbox.
It's so much better.
Why don't you have an inbox?
And that feedback from themarket, percolates up and goes
to dealership and thendealerships will say, oh gosh,
we have to notice this guys thatkeep being mentioned and we're
losing deals and this and that.
(13:30):
not gonna happen like this.
When someone innovates withsomething like that, it's.
It's not gonna be instant thatthe competition notices.
So let's take another example.
All the companies that did, qII,that's very social media stuff,
but they did q publishinginstead of doing scheduled
publishing.
So instead of doing create thepost and schedule it for
tomorrow at 3:00 PM and thenanother post and for Thursday at
(13:53):
5:00 PM and so on and so forth.
That's a scheduling way.
And some companies came in andsaid, no, we're not gonna do
that.
We're gonna create.
Queues based on topics.
So you create a queue that'severy Monday at 2:00 PM and it's
the topic podcast news.
And then there's another slotthat we create for Wednesday at
3:00 PM and it's the topic worldnews and then the war in
Ukraine.
(14:14):
We talk about that on Friday at5:00 PM and then you keep
cranking that content.
Well, that's a war in Ukraine.
That's a world news, that's apodcast news.
And it goes into those queuesand it gets posted
automatically.
During, at that.
Very time slot that's the sameevery week again and again and
again.
That was the Q system.
So some companies created thisand obviously.
They, same thing here.
(14:34):
They had a leap and they didthat for years and before others
like us noticed and say, oh,what are they doing?
Should we do that?
Should we add this as anotherway to post content?
Is this going to change the waypeople post content on social?
And it does take some timesbefore you realize that.
Huh?
Yeah, it's nice.
Let's add that, but it's notgonna change the game.
(14:55):
Or, oh my Lord, it's changingthe game.
We need to adapt and that isgonna take you 1, 2, 3 years
before you realize is the gamechanger you didn't see coming.
Or this is not the game changer,we're losing 10% of our deals
because of that, and we havebandwidth.
Let's build this.
So we stop losing those deals
Dan Balcauski (15:12):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (15:12):
someone innovates.
It's never obvious on day onethat this innovation is gonna
change the game.
Dan Balcauski (15:18):
So, I mean, I heard a couple things there.
One was, there is a, there's abit of mo momentum in terms of
the, it takes time for.
The market feedback to creep upin a larger company, to hear
about, the person who's has asort of disruptive way of doing
things, and maybe you're notsort of losing those deals
necessarily, but maybe they'recropping up in more
(15:39):
conversations and then all of asudden it becomes a larger,
larger piece.
And then I'll buy that.
Point, you're a couple yearsbehind by the time you get your
act together.
And then I think the other thingI heard there was you had a very
strong sort of point of view onthe way customers should
interact with their social mediathrough this inbox paradigm that
was maybe not in directconflict, but would definitely a
(16:03):
different sort of starting pointor paradigm than these.
Other products were builtaround.
And so it's not necessarilythat, like did we just tack this
thing on?
But you were sort of, you had adifferent motion that that maybe
these other companies didn'tquite, they, everyone has their
demo scripts and you sort ofbuilt workflows and onboarding
and et cetera that all of asudden you're like, okay, if
(16:23):
we're gonna change it to this,like this is, we can't just sort
of slot this in.
It's not just adding a feature,but it's sort of having a point
of view on how that work shouldbe done from the customer point
of view.
I think that there was somethingelse that you mentioned within
that arc around inbox though,was that you did say that
Agorapulse was not as good onsort of the publishing side.
(16:44):
As you were I guess this waskinda earlier in the thread.
And that sounded like a, sort ofa a decision to say, okay,
they're winning over there andwe're okay letting them sort of
win on that side because we havethis view that this way to sort
of manage the social media isbetter.
I'm curious, like how do yousort of bit like, what was it
(17:07):
about that that sort of allowedyou to build that.
Conviction.
'cause I could, the oppositeway, right?
Those folks, like, they're aheadof us on this.
Like our best investment is togo catch up with them on that
same dimension.
But, you took what is maybe thecontrarian approach or a very,
strict approach of like, like,that's fine.
We'll let them win over therefor now.
Like, and we'll make thatexplicit, like we're not gonna
chase that.
(17:27):
I'm curious like how you builtthat conviction and what that
looked like on your end.
Emeric Ernoult (17:31):
Wow, that's very simple.
We were bootstrapped, I hadthree developers at my disposal
to build this thing.
And I was very accurately awarethat there was no freaking way
on earth that I could compete onevery aspect with the other
products at the time had raisedmore than a hundred million
dollars.
And I had.
Zero million dollars.
That makes a big difference inthe means that you have to
(17:53):
compete.
So when you are completelyoutnumbered and out, dollared in
the means you have to compete.
You have to pick your battlesvery wisely and go very deep in
one of those battles, andcertainly not try to fight all
of them.
If you asked Emrich of 2014, hewould've told you, I wish we
(18:18):
could do this and this and thisand that, but he would've
immediately told you that rightafter that.
I know I can't.
So I pick this battle and notthe others.
Dan Balcauski (18:27):
Highly pragmatic.
Emeric Ernoult (18:29):
Constraints.
It's just constraints.
And I think that's one beautifulthings about, beautiful thing
about Bootstrap is bootstrappinga business is that constraint
forces you to do the rightthing, when you have a ton of
money the lack of constraintpushes you to do a lot of the
wrong things.
Dan Balcauski (18:45):
Well, let's you brought up the bootstrapping, so
let's talk about thatconstraint.
You see folks are doing allthese things.
You have a wishlist that, threedevelopers even if you have, you
had 30 developers, I'm sure youcouldn't fulfill your entire
wishlist.
Why don't you attack thatconstraint directly?
Did you think about raisinginstitutional capital?
Emeric Ernoult (19:02):
I did.
I tried for many years and itdidn't work.
Like nobody wanted to invest insocial media in 20 14, 15, 16.
Like, it always, it failed everysingle time I did all the
pitches.
I went to San Francisco, I didall the competitions.
I went to startup Garage.
I forgot their name.
In in, in Silicon Valley.
I, I tried like.
(19:24):
I tried everything I could in,in the US and in Europe, and it
never worked out because peoplelooked at what we did and said,
how different are you from X, Y,and Z?
Let's call them Buffer Hootsuiteand whoever else was there
already at the time.
are you from them?
And I said, I don't know.
We didn't have the inbox backthen.
We were less than a million.
We were less than 500 K of vr rlike.
(19:46):
well, the only thing I knew isthat I am hungry as heck want to
win, and I'll do whatever ittakes, but that's all I have for
you, Vc.
So they say, okay, it's notenough.
We need like that uniquecompetitive advantage.
We need that unique feature thatdefendable barrier to entry
that, and we had none of that.
Dan Balcauski (20:05):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (20:06):
it didn't work out.
I wish, at the time I wished Icould.
money because my life was hell.
I didn't pay myself for twoyears.
My wife paid for everythingthanks to her.
Now I'm giving her back.
And and for the first two yearsand for the next two years, I
paid myself minimum wage, whichis not great in, when you live
(20:27):
in a big city like Paris.
I mean, for a minute living inNew York with$1,500 a month,
that's, they're not gonna have avery fun
Dan Balcauski (20:35):
Lot, lot of ramen.
Lot of ramen on the menu.
Emeric Ernoult (20:37):
Yeah, Absolutely.
So that's, that was the cost ofnot raising.
But the fact when I look back Isee the benefit of that, which
is constraint created the, wasthe forcing function to just do
something, to do thingsdifferently.
Dan Balcauski (20:50):
And correct me if I'm wrong, I believe you did
eventually raise capital in like20 18, 19.
Emeric Ernoult (20:56):
No, we did not.
The it was secondary.
Dan Balcauski (20:59):
Ah, okay.
Took a little, took some chipsoff the table.
Okay.
Got it.
Emeric Ernoult (21:03):
some chips off the table.
I bought my house and myco-founder did the same thing.
And we had three business angelsfrom the previous business.
'cause Agora Post was built onthe back of a previous SaaS
business that was kind of dying,but still making us a little bit
of money.
So it funded the beginning with,we were doing like 12,000 a
month, something like that.
back then and it, it paid forthe three developers that I
(21:25):
talked to you about earlier.
We exited them in 2019, but nomoney went in the business.
Dan Balcauski (21:32):
I'm curious about the sort of the, I've seen
several companies do that wherethey just have secondaries and
sort of, allow, folks to takechips off the table.
I'm curious, like, was there adecision point there in terms
of.
Like thinking about like, I meanmaybe it's not 0% or a hundred
percent, maybe it's somewhere inbetween of like, hey, if we sort
of do some of this assecondaries, but then add some
(21:53):
of this to sort of the businesscoffers.
And I'm curious kind of what,what led it to, your decision to
be sort of purely a secondaryapproach.
Emeric Ernoult (22:00):
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm super transparent aboutthat.
At the time a business bankercame to see us with, who had
just sold the company of afriend.
The company of that friend wascalled Mention, and believe it
or not, I bought that companyback four months ago for$60,000
because it was getting bankrupt.
So it did well, selling it in,in, in 2018.
(22:21):
And his business banker came tosee me and, told me you should
sell.
I mean, it's a great time.
Your company's going up into theright.
Every KPI is on the green andit's a great time.
We can sell that and you becomemulti multimillionaire and you
go enjoy life on your sailboat.
'cause I love And good for you.
And I said, no, not doing this.
I enjoy growing this company.
(22:42):
I enjoy being, its CEOI enjoy,I've I.
You heard that I paid myselfminimum wage or I paid myself
nothing, and suddenly I waspaying myself a decent salary
and I was having fun enjoyingthe growth of the business.
So I said, no, I'm not sellingit.
one of my mentor told me you're,that's great.
You shouldn't sell a business.
You enjoy running.
but you or you would be sillynot to take chips off the table,
(23:05):
so you need to do that.
I say, oh, interesting.
How do you do that?
Well, you just go to your bankerand you tell him that.
And I, I just did that.
And he said, ah, okay, so youwanna do a secondary funding?
I say, I don't know what thatmeans, but probably yes.
And so he explained to me whatthat was.
He's basically, you're trying toraise money, but the money is to
buy existing shares instead ofinvesting into new capital in
the company.
(23:25):
I say, oh, that sounds great.
That sounds good to me.
so we raised the money that wasbasically enough to give me and
my co-founder the comfort thatif the thing went bust, we
wouldn't lose everything and wewouldn't be homeless basically.
That was my inner fear of, oh myGod if this thing goes bust, do
I become homeless?
Do I go sleep under a bridge?
(23:46):
I know it's silly, but that fearis always in you it took that
fear away from me.
I will not fear of.
Being homeless anymore because Ihave enough cash to turn around
to invent something else, to gofind a great job somewhere.
Like my financial future is notat risk anymore.
I have enough cash to tobasically prepare for that.
(24:07):
And I have a house, I have aroof on my head, which is
always, which feels like aprotection.
That was great because it, itpushed us to risk again and try
new things and'cause now wedidn't have everything to lose
again, we.
you always.
You never want to lose what youhave, but if you are protected
from homelessness, at least ifyou know you're okay to push a
(24:28):
little bit further, okay.
To take a little bit more risk.
And I think that's whatsecondary can help founders do
is like, okay let's be boldagain and let's take, let's make
bold bets.
if they does, if they don'twork, I'm not losing everything.
I already took something out andI don't feel like, oh, I mean,
think about you have$10 million,they're yours now, and you do
(24:50):
something and you lose them.
That you feel terrible if you'velost the whole thing.
Dan Balcauski (24:55):
Yeah.
Emeric Ernoult (24:55):
if you take 1.5 and you lose 8.5, you feel bad,
but not as bad as if you didn'thave the 1.5 on your table
anymore.
Dan Balcauski (25:03):
Yeah, apparently the only, yeah, apparently the
only entrepreneur who could dothat without feeling those
feelings is Elon.
'cause apparently he just hasrolled all of his winnings from
one thing into a
Emeric Ernoult (25:12):
it,
Dan Balcauski (25:12):
bet on the next thing.
Emeric Ernoult (25:14):
but it's not true.
It does feel those feelings.
It does feel fear, and it is Iheard him express that at
several occasion that it doesfeel fear and he hates it.
It doesn't like it.
We all do, and I don't, I thinkno human being on earth is
shielded from fear.
We all feel fear.
There's no exception.
Dan Balcauski (25:30):
Well, I wanna pivot a little bit, just so,
and, and kind of talk aboutpivot.
So many, founder CEOs on theshow TA have talked about sort
of eras of their scalingjourney, different inflection
points, kind of those pointswhere sort of they realize that,
either, either by revenue ornumber of employees or change in
the market.
Hey, we can't continue to growkind of doing things We.
We've always done.
(25:51):
I'm curious as you've beenrunning Go Pulse for over, over
a decade now a couple ofdifferent moments you've talked
about already.
I guess what have been sort ofthe, I guess what are the big
inflection points as you sort oflook back where you or maybe the
largest one where you have sortof had to kind of, Hey we can't
kind of just continue just doingmore of what we're doing.
We have to really sort of changehow we're doing things inside
(26:12):
the business.
Emeric Ernoult (26:13):
Yeah.
Basically there were the pivotsthat we've made.
The first pivot we made is whenAgool started.
It was Facebook contests andpromotions,
Dan Balcauski (26:20):
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (26:20):
Facebook only, and the service was contest and
promotion sweepstakes, photocontest quizzes.
As you may or may not know, wedon't do any of that today.
So obviously Agorapulse today isthe same brand and the same
name, and the same URL, but theproduct is entirely different.
It's as if I would tell you, weused to sell bicycles.
We're now selling trucks.
It's exactly the same
Dan Balcauski (26:41):
Yeah.
Emeric Ernoult (26:41):
they don't have the same purpose.
So we started with this, werealized it's a very shitty
business model and we pivoted tosocial media management in 2012.
Obviously it took a long time tobuild this.
The inbox came coming in 2014'cause we only had three
developers and no money.
And my wife was paying foreverything.
I was the first pivot gettingfrom contest and promotion to
(27:02):
social media.
And then inside the social mediajourney, there were plenty of
mini pivot.
Mini pivot in terms of how weprice And yeah, we priced in a
very silly way in the early daysthat made our conversion very
bad.
I'll have to give you thisexample.
So our pricing model wasbasically, we didn't have a
package, a pricing page withpackages, though.
(27:22):
Here's a 99 plan and the 49plan, and had a slider.
That was basically slide up totell me how many users do you
need and slide up to tell me howmany profiles, social profiles
you need to manage, and I'llgive you your price.
And our conversion rate withthis type of pricing was shit.
The day we changed this to 49,package 99 like everybody else
(27:45):
our conversion rate went likedoubled overnight.
And my lesson from that is thatthere are areas where you have
to innovate.
And there are areas where youabsolutely should not innovate
and you should do what peopleare used to see and used to use.
So, and sometimes it's not easyto distinguish which one you
should innovate in and which oneyou shouldn't.
But with pricing.
(28:06):
My lesson is make it simple andseamless and don't make them
think they have to say, okay, 99have all of this good, let's go.
And oh, I have to think how muchit's gonna cost me.
I don't, I'm not really sure.
And it's not a good idea.
So that was like one of thosemini pivot.
In 20 21, 20 22 the big moment,the big haha moment when he.
To change something was the,with the go to market and the
(28:28):
market we address, we were verySMB inbound self-serve driven
from 2011 until 2019 andstarting in 2020, we started to
realize that this.
Market segment was going down.
It was it was not growing andfor two reasons, the churn was
really high.
(28:48):
Net monthly churn around 6% for
Dan Balcauski (28:51):
Ugh, that's not great.
Emeric Ernoult (28:52):
5, 5 to six.
No, it's not great.
It's really bad.
and probably the best in classare able to get to four.
I think Buffer was at four,something like that.
And they I would consider themas best in class.
But four monthly is very hardto.
It's very hard to grow after acertain point because 4% on 20
million or 22 millions ofrevenue, a lot of money that's
(29:13):
getting out every week.
And you only, you don't realizethat if your acquisition is
going great, so if you're at 2million, 3 million a r and you
acquire like crazy you don'tfeel the pain.
But when you get a 20 million oreven 10 million, you start
thinking, oh my God, that's alot of churn.
That's a lot of dollar churnevery month.
How do we replace that?
And then you, your SEO does notfeel that.
(29:36):
The tank anymore, your referralsare not enough.
And then you start saying, oh myGod, I can't double down on SEO
or referral unless there's noway you can do that.
So it doesn't, it won't scale.
that was the first realization.
And so we saw, okay, we have toget as close as possible to 100%
NR as we can.
So we need to change who we sellto and we need to solve bigger
(29:56):
problems with those and notbasically SMB.
Was SMB Sales Serve Inbound waswe solved?
Okay.
Problems.
They're
Dan Balcauski (30:04):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (30:05):
They're not too bad.
They're not too strategic forthem.
And so we need to change that.
The problem we solve have to becomplex, strategic, and bad.
So when we solve this, oh my
Dan Balcauski (30:15):
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (30:17):
And that is never going to happen for SMBs.
Never.
It's not the case.
SMBs, in general, SMBs are nevergonna feel that way for
marketing.
They're gonna feel that way formany things, but not for
marketing and definitely not forsocial media.
for some exceptions that they'rethe exception and you're trying
to market to everyone, not tothe exceptions.
So we started to pivot our go tomarket and the way we go to
(30:38):
market and the way we do salesand marketing, and the lesson
here is freaking hard.
Dan Balcauski (30:46):
Well, I wanna, this,
Emeric Ernoult (30:47):
really hard.
Dan Balcauski (30:47):
this is a great topic.
So, so, just to kind of recap.
So, so yeah.
Hi.
Really.
So, so SMB might, maybe evenmicro, SMB super high churn and
kind of a characteristic of themarket itself.
Many products of differentindustries all kind of learn
this lesson really fast, reallyeasy to grow.
'cause there's a lot ofcustomers out there, but also
really finicky.
(31:08):
They tend to go outta businessvery quickly.
But but have those problems.
So, so you go from this sort of.
It more sort of pure inboundself-service motion.
Maybe some might term that likea product led growth to maybe a
more moving up market.
Maybe it's more like a sales ledapproach is, would that be an
accurate characterization aswell?
So, so, okay.
So you realize the problem, allthe executive team realizes the
(31:30):
problem, yes, we need to dothis.
What do you do first?
Like, do you go and like.
Get a new sales team, like, doyou change your marketing?
Do you change the product?
Like what?
Like what do you like, okay, wemade this decision.
Like what do you go do first?
'cause,'cause it, it does entaila bunch of changes that I think
(31:50):
a lot of folks are just don'trealize how messy that could be.
Emeric Ernoult (31:55):
you want the easy and sweet answer, or you
want the real answer?
Dan Balcauski (31:58):
Yes, yes.
Emeric Ernoult (32:00):
Well, the real answer is you have to do all of
this.
So that's what makes it very sodifficult and so challenging.
You cannot go at market if yourproduct doesn't change.
And that's going to take years,not months, not even quarters,
years.
So, and, but you have to do itbecause if you, if your product
is not made market enterpriseready.
(32:21):
year you don't do anything aboutit, the next year you will still
not be enterprise in marketready and the following year not
ready either.
So you're never gonna win thosedeals.
So your product roadmap has todrastically change.
And you have to realize thatthis is going to take three
years for your product to beokay an RFP against an existing
(32:44):
player who's already playing inthat field.
So.
Have that in mind, then you alsoneed to change the way you
market to the market.
Inbound.
Not gonna work.
SEO not gonna work.
Why is all the inbound stuff notgonna work?
Because when you do inbound andSEO and referrals, you get the
traffic you get, which in 90% ofthe cases is not the traffic you
(33:07):
want.
And so you have to change thatbecause if you and we had a lot
of freaking traffic back
Dan Balcauski (33:12):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (33:12):
the days we had, We had close to 6,000 free
trials per month.
90, 95% of which were small tovery small businesses.
Because what, if you look at allthe businesses in the world, 90%
of them are small businesses.
Out of the 10% that remains,six, 7% are mid-market and two
(33:35):
3% are enterprise like, andmaybe it's.
1% enterprise.
I don't know, but that's thiskind of
Dan Balcauski (33:41):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (33:42):
It is.
It is the realm of what it is.
So if your marketing is shoutingin the crowd, opening the
window, I'm here in my office inParis, I could open the window
and say, Hey, come see us.
90 to 95% of those people in thestreets.
either freelancers or one personbusiness or two person, it's
gonna be mostly thinking thatimagining they're all
(34:05):
businesses.
It's all gonna be very smallbusinesses or small businesses.
that's what you get.
It's math.
It's pure percentage wise, it'snot, there's no intent.
There's no intent to attract theright kind of customers, like
basically shouting
Dan Balcauski (34:18):
So, so, so, so you, so you realize they got a
three year cycle on changing theproduct, right?
You've realized you.
Emeric Ernoult (34:26):
or you don't realize it's,
Dan Balcauski (34:27):
You don't realize it at the time.
Emeric Ernoult (34:29):
days, but Then you realize it.
Dan Balcauski (34:31):
Okay, so, so, so, and then, okay.
You realize, okay, the trafficwe're getting organically is not
the traffic we necessarily want.
So, so I guess, so you set theroadmap on a schedule, and
that's going off, but you'relike, all right, it's gonna take
a while to build that out.
I guess, what do you change onthe go to market side, whether
that's marketing or, and orsales, I guess in the interim
(34:53):
to.
To solve this problem of Yeahthe, the SEO the organic traffic
is not what we wanted.
Emeric Ernoult (34:59):
well, I did what every good CEO would do.
I changed leadership and I madebig mistakes again and again
until I, I realized that, okay,shit, I have to learn this
myself because otherwise I'mgonna keep making hiring
mistakes and hiring the wrongpeople for the right job.
And, what I ended up doing islearning the thing myself by
(35:20):
going to, by listening topodcasts, I listened to a ton of
podcasts, marketing podcasts fora year, and going to conferences
and speaking with CEOs who'vedone this switch and speaking
with CEOs who are addressing.
Mid market enterprise and askingthem how is your teammate, how,
who is he leading your salesteam?
What kind of job?
(35:40):
What kind of functions do youhave in your sales team?
What kind of function do youhave in your marketing team?
Oh, you have an ops function.
I don't even know what thatmeans.
I don't even have that.
Okay, ops, what is that?
What do they do?
So had to go learn.
Myself, what it takes to build amid-market, go-to market team.
And once I had learned that,then I could hire the leader who
(36:01):
knew that because I knew whatquestion to ask and what to
verify and what to check, whichI had no clue about with the
first hires that I made.
Dan Balcauski (36:08):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (36:09):
That, yeah,
Dan Balcauski (36:10):
And, and
Emeric Ernoult (36:10):
I wish
Dan Balcauski (36:11):
just,
Emeric Ernoult (36:11):
was an easy answer,
Dan Balcauski (36:12):
so, so double click on that hiring of the, of
that mid-market leader, I guess,and maybe it's faded into the
background or maybe you'verepressed that memory, but like,
if you think about that, likewhen you finally understood what
you needed to hire for, I guess,what were the traits that you
realized you needed?
And then like, what did you lookfor in the hiring process?
Maybe like, like questions youwould ask.
(36:33):
Like, so, so if we could shortcircuit the learning path for
the entrepreneur who's goingthrough that process right now.
So they don't have to gothrough, pure listen to all the
back episodes of Sask GalySecrets.
Of course we have a bunch ofother lessons learned, but if
they don't wanna do that, what'sthe cheat code?
What if they want to go hirethat mid-market leader?
Emeric Ernoult (36:49):
Yeah, the cheat code is the marketer who would
be really good for an inboundSMB.
Let's open the window and shoutto the crowd and make as many
people come to us as possible,or even B2C, which would be kind
of the same principles in thesame way to market.
The very big difference betweenthis kind of profile and the
higher end B2B, mid markets oreven enterprise that.
(37:12):
does not matter too much in thefirst kind who you're marketing
to.
It matters a lot who you'remarketing to in the, with the
second kind.
So if you want the right person,they first should have clarity
on, okay, who is our ICP?
Who is the ideal customer?
Is it manufacturers in Germanyand agencies in the US and
universities in France?
(37:34):
Is it those that we sell the,that are the easiest to sell to
and that retain.
That stays the longest with us,or is it something else?
you don't have this clarity, youcannot define what is the market
you're going to laser focus onin Germany, in France, in the
us, in the uk, because they'reall different.
For example, higher education isa market we've been focusing on.
(37:56):
In the US there is no such amarket In France, it does not
exist'cause there's no money ineducation in France.
So
Dan Balcauski (38:03):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (38:03):
to adapt.
Geo by geo, who is the bestmarket for you and the best ICP?
you're marketing to SMBs, woo,and to the big crowd of
business, you don't need to bethat specific about who you're
going after.
If you're going mid-market orenterprise, you have to be super
darn specific about the type ofcompany, the size of company,
the vertical of the company, thegeography of the company, the
(38:26):
type of person you want to talkto.
What are the other type ofperson you want to talk to?
Do you need to talk to the CMOor the VP of marketing?
For us, we're gonna talk to thesocial media person most of the
time as our champion, but whoelse are we who else do we need
to have on the bandwagon?
Helping the sales to close,especially with larger RFPs and
larger businesses.
So this very acute understandingof who do we sell to is
(38:49):
something that's absolutelynecessary for the mean market
enterprise marketer, andprobably not that necessary for
the.
The small bees or B2C, or let'sdo, let's build brand awareness
and get as many people come toour website as possible.
So that's number one.
Number two, what I've learned isthat the, let's call the first
type of marketer and the secondtype of marketer, right?
(39:10):
So that's easier for the story.
The second type of marketer, theone I need now, they're very
mathematical.
They look at numbers all thetime.
They look at Excel spread.
They are born in spreadsheets.
They aren't, they readspreadsheets and they read SQLs
and MQs and sqs and this andthat, and conversion rate and
da, da, da.
Oh, we have a problem here.
Conversion rate is not as good.
(39:31):
That's the kind of mindset theyhave.
The first type of marketer thatlike creative and entertainment
and video and when and eventsand big booths and like the.
This is a big difference betweenthe two, that it's not to say
that one is better than theother, but one is certainly not
gonna succeed at the other'swork and vice versa.
Dan Balcauski (39:52):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (39:52):
It's not by going into spreadsheets that
you're gonna create superentertaining content that the
crowds are gonna be excitedabout.
And it's not by doing this, thatyou're going to see what's
working or not working in yourgo-to market strategy.
So that's a big trait I'venoticed in those type one, the
first type and the second typeof marketer.
Dan Balcauski (40:09):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (40:09):
And.
The last thing I would say,which is a segue.
The second thing the second typeof marketer sees revenue as a
whole.
They look at operationsenablement and BDRs and account
execs and marketing, which wouldbe content and this, and.
It's a whole operation.
It's, they don't look at it as asiloed operation and they
(40:32):
certainly don't finger point at,oh yeah, my leads are great and
you don't know how to closethem.
The first type of marketer theydo that, they look at sales and
say, you don't know how to closemy leads, because they actually
have no idea how sales work andthey are not.
I don't know if they're notinterested in what they do, but
they certainly are not good atwhat they do and they don't pay
attention and are not interestedin what they do.
Dan Balcauski (40:52):
Mm.
Emeric Ernoult (40:53):
they re, they keep everything very siloed and
they the kind of there are lowwars to happen inside the
company all the time, so peopleare fighting and disagreeing and
so that's what I've seen withthe first type of marketer, at
least twice.
So that it's twice I got thisexperience and now I had the
second type and it's theopposite.
So I, that's my experience atthe very least.
Dan Balcauski (41:14):
Well, that you were hinting at before in terms
of like, hey, sales can't closemy leads.
I've heard kind of a parallel,so like product management and
engineering, those leaders.
Need to be, maybe they havearguments behind closed doors,
but when they come out, theypresent a unified front When you
have your sales leader and yourmarketing leader that those two
need to have a unified front of,like, we are the revenue
(41:37):
organization and like we don'tthrow each other under the bus.
Maybe, we have spirited.
Debates behind closed doors to,to work problems through.
But we are sort of, we own theentire, flow from lead to sale
and otherwise yeah, especiallyas you get into a mid-market
enterprise sale, like if thatbreaks down yeah.
You don't have a functioningorganization.
Emeric Ernoult (41:54):
Absolutely.
Dan Balcauski (41:55):
so many topics I wanted to cover that we're not
gonna have time to, we'll haveto maybe get you back for a
second time.
But I want to close things outwith a few rapid fire questions.
Look running a company,especially as long as you have
could be taxing mentally,physically, emotionally, what's
your go-to method for clearingyour head when you get
overwhelmed?
Emeric Ernoult (42:14):
I don't know if I have one.
I do take time off, not time offin a sense that I disconnect.
I never disconnect from thebusiness, but I do travel and I
do.
I do go work from other places,like, just to be, make you a
little jealous in
Dan Balcauski (42:28):
Hmm.
Emeric Ernoult (42:28):
already booked my catamaran to go to the
Grenadines in the Caribbean andI'm gonna go sell for two weeks
from French Indies to theGrenadines with my wife and son.
I'm gonna have my laptop.
I'm gonna do deep work.
I'm gonna keep writing my bookbecause I've, I started to write
a book.
So I'm gonna do work because Ienjoy doing the work, but it's
gonna be in such a differentsetting that I will feel like
(42:49):
I've had new air and I've addedoxygen to my air, to my life.
So that's my way of coping withthis, which is, I work all the
time, but I go and travel andwork from different places and
take my family with me, whichallows me to feel like I have a
life.
Because if it was office,office, office.
All day long.
Go to bed, go to the subway, goto bed, go to the subway, go to
the office.
I I would not feel that great.
(43:10):
So that's my way of coping with
Dan Balcauski (43:11):
Change your environment.
Go sailing in the Caribbean.
I love it.
If I give you a billboard, youcan put any message on there for
other beating.
Be SaaS CEOs trying to scaletheir companies, what would it
say?
Emeric Ernoult (43:22):
It's gonna be freaking hard, but eventually.
will love it.
Dan Balcauski (43:29):
It's gonna be hard, but eventually you'll love
it.
Awesome.
Emeric Ernoult (43:33):
Yeah.
Dan Balcauski (43:33):
This has been fantastic.
If listeners wanna connect withyou and learn more about
Agorapulse, how can they dothat?
Emeric Ernoult (43:38):
LinkedIn connect with me on
Dan Balcauski (43:40):
I.
Emeric Ernoult (43:40):
add a note to your invitation.
Say, Hey, I heard you on thispodcast, and loved it.
Love to connect and I accept allthese invitations.
I tend to not accept the onesthat I don't have a note because
I don't want my LinkedIn tobecome a zoo.
So, and I have a lot ofinvitation, so,
Dan Balcauski (43:55):
It's a wise policy.
I have the same, I have the sameprotocol.
That wraps up this episode ofSaaS Scaling Secrets.
Thank you Emeric for sharing hisjourney and insights.
For our listeners who foundEmeric's Insights valuable,
please leave a review and sharethis episode with your network.
It really helps the podcastgrow.
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