August 22, 2023 • 23 mins
EPISODE SUMMARY
In the software world, we often find ourselves grappling with a multitude of decisions. Should we take this path or that one? But what if there was a way to consistently make the right decisions? Enter Jon Darbyshire, Co-Founder, and CEO of SmartSuite. SmartSuite is a platform that streamlines business processes and workflow automation. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jon to discuss the secrets behind their rapid growth and his powerful mantra: “Follow the Customer”.
Jon takes us on a journey through his meticulous process of deciphering precisely what the market craves and what will resonate with them. He shares insights into how to create products that customers will adore and how to market them effectively with Host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Matt Wolach.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach
Episode: Episode No. 278, "Your New Growth Mantra: Follow the Customer - with Jon Darbyshire"
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS sales coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Guest: Jon Darbyshire, Co-Founder & CEO at SmartSuite
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
- Follow the Customer: Understanding Needs Through Active Engagement
- Leverage AI for Content Creation: Boosting Efficiency and Productivity
- Utilize AI for Data Analytics: Transforming Data into Insights
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
- Influencer Partnerships: Leveraging Industry Experts
- User Interface for Millenials and Gen Z: Meeting the Digital Natives Needs
TOP QUOTES
Jon Darbyshire
[07:34] "People can sense in the first 30 to 60 seconds what the product does."
[21:10] "Follow the customer. Understand that customers can help you, as an entrepreneur, know exactly what to build and why."
Matt Wolach
[10:59] "The fact that you looked at who were the actual end users, you talked to them, you sat down, you saw the interaction that they had with the product, I think that's so smart."
[12:33] "I recommend recording your demos, you can go back and see how the interaction went. Especially if things don't go well, you can go back and find out what you said that maybe lost them.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about SmartSuite, visit: https://www.smartsuite.com/
You can also find Jon Darbyshire on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondarbyshire/
Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt Wolach (00:10):
Growing software, sometimes we have all kinds of
decisions to make sure we dothis. Should we do that? Where
do we do this? How do we dothis? What should we build next?
How should we market thesedecisions get us very frustrated
and flustered and we oftentimesmake the wrong decision. What if
we were able to make the rightdecision each time something
that helped us get the rightproduct out something that
helped us sell that product evenbetter, Jon Darbyshire stopped
(00:31):
it. And he's from SmartSuiteGreat tool. And he shared his
mantra called Follow thecustomer. And he shared exactly
how they've been able to growquickly because of what they've
done following what their marketneeds and what they look for. He
walks through his process of howhe understands exactly what the
market needs exactly what theywill love and what's going to
sell. So check this episode out,I think you're gonna get a lot
(00:52):
out of it.
Intro/ Outro (00:53):
Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that
gives you proven techniques andformulas for boosting your
revenue and achieving your dreamexit brought to you by a guy
who's done just that multipletimes. Here's your host, Matt
Wolach.
Matt Wolach (01:10):
and welcome to Scale Your SaaS very happy to
have you here. Thank you verymuch. I am really excited for
today's show. I've got Johndarbishire. With me, John, how
you doing?
Jon Darbyshire (01:19):
I'm doing great, man. It's pleasure to be here.
Matt Wolach (01:21):
And it's a pleasure to have you Jon. Now, let me
make sure everybody out there.
If this is your first time here,we are here to help you Scale
Your SaaS so you can learn howto grow your company and get
that amazing exit you're lookingfor. And Jon's gonna help us do
that sharing his story as well.
If you're new, definitelysubscribe to the show, hit that
subscribe button. That way,you're gonna get notified of all
our future shows where we haveother awesome guests like John
(01:43):
sharing their story and helpingyou out John, let me make sure
everybody knows who you are. SoJon, he's the co founder and CEO
at smart, sweet smart suitehelps coordinate people and work
across all levels of anorganization to ensure that team
members have the informationthey need to accomplish the work
that matters most Jon has beendedicated to automating every
day essential business tasks tocreate smarter, more efficient
(02:07):
organizations, no matter whatthe industry, this guy knows his
stuff. Absolutely. You're goingto enjoy this. Jon, thanks for
being here.
Jon Darbyshire (02:15):
Oh, it's a pleasure looking forward to
digging into this conversation.
Matt Wolach (02:17):
Likewise. So tell me what's been going on with you
lately? And what's coming up?
Jon Darbyshire (02:21):
Yeah, you know, we're, I'm passionate about all
things, no code. So smartsuiteis in the no code space. So
we're we I spend most of my timeeach day interacting with
customers and partners, justunderstanding the types of
business processes they have intheir organization, and the ways
that smartsuite can help supportthem both currently, but more so
in the future. So I'm interestedin understanding what features
(02:42):
and functionality that we needto add that will help better
serve our customer base that'sthere. And we do that in quite a
number of ways. But the mosteffective way is to have direct
conversations like we're doingnow, mainly over video. So we
can record those we use AI tokind of transcribe the
information that we heard, justmakes the whole process very
easy. And then I have theability to very quickly go back
(03:03):
through conversations that we'vehad and kind of pull out topics
across maybe five or sixdifferent conversations to kind
of see themes that we're saying.
Matt Wolach (03:13):
I love it. So a couple of things to hit on that.
So first, you mentioned no code.
Do you have a tech backgroundyourself?
Jon Darbyshire (03:19):
Yeah, I've been in the no code space for about
25 years
Matt Wolach (03:22):
I built allow, you know,
Jon Darbyshire (03:24):
the first company that I did, Archer
Technologies was one of thefirst one of the very first
traditional second generation nocode platforms, Marc Benioff
started Salesforce Ed. Withinabout two months of us starting
Archer, Archer today was justsold again and a couple of
months ago, for 1.4 billion theyown kind of the governance Risk
(03:46):
and Compliance space, which ishelping organizations really
manage risk inside of thebusiness. That was an
interesting story with thatcompany in that we targeted the
top 30 financial servicescompanies in the US as our first
customers and sold into groupsof 10. And after three years, we
had 29 of the top 30 Before wewent out to any other industry
(04:07):
that was there. So that was myfirst entree into no code with
large enterprise customers. Andit's kind of taken lots of
different different paths inthat journey over the last 1012
years.
Matt Wolach (04:19):
Very, very cool.
Yeah, it's definitely a hotbutton topic. You also mentioned
that you like having a lot ofconversations and conversations
with your market. How did youlearn that? That's important?
Jon Darbyshire (04:31):
Yeah, actually, I learned that in my days at
Archer when things were prettylean. And I didn't know anything
else to do other than talk withcustomers, right? When those
early days that were there, andI came up with this mantra of
follow the customer. And I'vekind of done that throughout my
career ever since and that nomatter what I had in my, in my
business strategy about what Ithought the product that
(04:52):
companies should do when I talkwith customers, and if that's
different from the needs thatthey have. I've learned that
that's the time to pivot and tomake sure that I'm solving Those
problems for that group ofcustomers that I'm working with.
And that's certainly reallywell, and that it gets brought
me into new markets with newthings that I haven't thought
about maybe in that initialstrategy that was there. But it
also helped the customers becomevery sticky. At smart orient
(05:15):
Archer, the first 10 years ofthat company, we had a 97.6%
renewal rate, right across, Ican't tell you how many hundreds
and hundreds of renewals and ourbase price point was about
350,000 give you an ID. So thoseare, these aren't small
accounts. These are big onesacross that. So I found that,
you know, follow the customerhad a direct correlation to us
(05:37):
back to how happy they were inthe renewals that we have.
Matt Wolach (05:41):
That's amazing. I love that. So how did the whole
idea of smartsuite come about?
Jon Darbyshire (05:46):
Yeah, you know, I sold Archer in 2010, and
thought I had officially retiredforever. And started a family
foundation and started investingin startups. I've invested in
about 400, startups kind ofthrough that journey, had the
chance to just meet and interactwith lots of founders. And some
common themes kind of came upafter years of doing that. The
(06:07):
first one was, they would get alot of questions around what
types of products should theyhave in their own business to
help them manage and run theirbusiness? And with those
products that were selected, beable to scale with him as the
business scaled over time waskind of the next question. So I
kept coming back to I wanted tobuild a platform that could help
manage any business process inan organization that came with
(06:28):
templates. In the case ofsmartsuite, we have 200
templates that cover 35different categories of business
processes. So if somebodydoesn't know how to manage
sales, or marketing, or HR, orwhat a best in class process
looks like, that template, letsthem know that just in seconds,
they can download that and seethat information. So the idea
behind smartsuite was to workwith companies from to users up
(06:50):
to the fortune 100, to helpmanage any type of process
inside of that organization in away that allows the infant the
data to be connected, so thatyou don't duplicate the data,
you just have one place to login, your employees don't have
five different products thatthey work with each day, you
could have one core producttypically.
Matt Wolach (07:09):
So I really love this idea. I think it's
something super important. Butmy guess is and I don't know for
sure, because we didn't talkabout this beforehand. But my
guess is that that would havebeen really hard to get your
market to understand exactlywhat that does for them. When
you say like automation andprocess is kind of like big,
like open ended words? And didwas it hard to convince them or
(07:30):
get them to understand exactlyhow the product can help them?
Jon Darbyshire (07:34):
Yeah, so I think for us, the biggest marketing
effort that we put forth isaround education. And what we
found is the best way to educateis through video. And that
people can sense in the first,you know, 30 to 60 seconds, what
the product does, and begin tokind of make up their own mind,
if it's something that would bea value to them in their
organization, because businessprocess Atomy automation is a
(07:57):
mouthful. Not everybodyunderstands that I come from a
consulting background early inmy career at Ernst and Young. So
that's just kind of baked intowho I am as a person
understanding that that piece,but not everybody understands
that. So once organizationsbegin to realize that they can
have their sales, theirmarketing their it their product
(08:17):
processes in one place andconnected, they start to get
excited when they see okay, nowthat the data is there, how can
I pull data analytics, you know,charts and dashboards on top of
that, to really understandwhat's happening inside of the
business and make sure that I'vegot my people focused on the
right things that are that.
Matt Wolach (08:36):
A lot of so your market super competitive.
There's other companies doingthis as well. What are you guys
doing right now to separateyourselves from those
competitors?
Jon Darbyshire (08:45):
Yeah, I think part of that goes back to my
early days at Archer when weworked with large enterprise
organization. So we understandthat governance and security are
very important in a product,meaning that as I grow as a
company, not everybody shouldsee all the information that's
inside of even a particularprocess. So I need to be able to
access control that which wecall permissions at different
(09:06):
levels to different users atdifferent times that are
involved in that workflow. Thenthere's certain pieces of
information that they shouldn'tsee at all. Maybe if you're in
an HR process, and you'reletting employees look at some
of the information that's there,but you don't want them to see
the compensation for everybody.
So that particular field can behidden. It's there. So it's the
little subtle things like that,that help organizations really
(09:27):
build the type of process thatis specific to what they need.
That's there. And then the bigpiece that we've added that's
different about smartsuite is wespent a large amount of time at
the very beginning of thecompany to focus on the user
interface. And we directed thatat millennials and Gen Zers. Who
are the people that we feel dowork in most organizations. And
what we learned from thatexercise is that those two
(09:50):
generations are very differentthan the generations before them
on how they want to work, howthey want to view work on a
screen how collaborative theywant to be. how they want to see
what other co workers areworking on and be able to
comment on that at times. So allthose things kind of came
together in our UI. And you'llsee what smartsuite Compared to
a lot of products, it's morevisual, there's more vivid
(10:12):
colors, it's meant to help keeptheir attention as they're
working. It also allows them towork both from their mobile and
from their computer, from theirtablet all at the same time, we
found many of the millennialsthat we spoke with, as they were
talking to us, and I would eventalk with him about interfaces,
I'd see they would be on theirmobile phone. And at first, I
would get annoyed, I'm like,What are you doing, like we're
(10:34):
having a conversation. And thenI realize now they're looking at
the product on the mobile, atthe same time that we're having
the conversation on the screen.
And that's just normal for them.
So we tried to build in, youknow, take all of that input and
build that into the core UI. Sothat we can help keep
millennials and Gen Z earsengaged and motivated and build
more of a collaborative cultureinside the organization.
Matt Wolach (10:59):
I mean, another perfect example of you following
your your mantra of follow thecustomer right there. I mean,
the fact that you looked at whowas the the actual end users,
you talked to them, you satdown, you saw the interaction
that they had with the product,I think that's, that's so smart.
And for everybody out there,this is so critical to make sure
that you are addressing yourmarket and learning from your
(11:22):
market, understanding what theyneed, so you can build into the
product, exactly what's going tofit for them. That sounds like
you guys did that really well,Jon.
Jon Darbyshire (11:30):
that's the My favorite part of every day is I
spent a couple of hours justmeeting with, with customers and
partners to do just that. Andone of the favorite things that
I like to do is use a video,like we're kind of using now in
our discussion, where I can demothe product and show them
things. But they're not justlooking at the product, I can
see their facial expressions,because not everybody
(11:51):
communicates great back to be asthe CEO with what they like and
don't like in a product. But Ican tell from those visual cues
at times that I nailed it, or wedid not nail it at all, like we
need to keep working even thoughthey didn't say that it just
didn't resonate. And I could seefrom that expression is there.
So I think that video and havingthe ability to look back at
(12:12):
those videos at certain pointsat times as you're demoing
certain screens in your productare super important. And I hope
that we can get to a position inAI, where I can take those
recordings. And I could documentthe sentiment from the facial
expressions that are being shownat the same level of is I could
do from the words that they'reactually speaking.
Matt Wolach (12:33):
Yeah, that's a that's a good point. That would
be pretty slick, if it can helpus figure some of that out. And
I do recommend a lot of peoplewho follow the show know that I
recommend recording your demos,you can go back and kind of see
hey, what what happened here?
How did this interaction go? Howdid that go? And especially if
things don't go well, you cankind of go back and find what
did I say? What did I do that?
(12:54):
Maybe lost them. And having thatrecording is very critical to be
able to do that. So I'm glad youguys are doing that.
Jon Darbyshire (13:00):
You know, there's products that that add
the AI on top of thoserecordings that just make things
so easy. And we just startedthis maybe six months ago. But
at the you know, we just when welog into a meeting, we just log
in with our recording softwarethat has AI as well, it records
the entire meeting transcribesit, but then it summarizes it
automatically for you, it tellsyou who was in attendance.
(13:21):
Here's a summary of everythingthat was talked about, here's
the action items that came outof it. And I've been amazed at
how good it is. And it also thenallows us to search back through
conversations with large groupsof people looking for key topics
just to see like, what am Italking about over the last two
weeks? Like are there any themesthat are popping up across these
(13:41):
hundreds of discussions thatwe've had with our company back
with customers and partners?
Matt Wolach (13:47):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Some of the technology we
have at our fingertips right nowis quite amazing. For sure, for
sure. So tell me you guys haveseen some good success. What
were some of the things you guysdid early on, it helped you get
to this point that helped yougrow and and take that next
step?
Jon Darbyshire (14:03):
Yeah, probably the best thing that we did was,
you know, this, the overallspace that we're in, like you
kind of said is a littlecrowded, there's a quite a
number of players that are inthat space. When you talk about
business process automation, wehad to find a way to set
ourselves apart. So peoplereally understood what we did.
And what we did at first was wefound the biggest influencers on
(14:23):
YouTube for our top threecompetitors. And we wanted to go
after we reached out to each ofthem. And we said, hey, we're a
new product in the category. Weknow you're an expert on this
other product that's there, andyou're producing a lot of
content around that. We'd likefor you to you know, start a
free trial of our product andthen share your your thoughts
good or bad back to youraudience on how we compare
(14:44):
against the product that youwere there. Behind the Scenes
what we were hoping whathappened was that we would grab
their attention enough that theyasked more questions and said
we'd like to start working withyou. And that's what happened
with the first three influencersacross the first three
competitor that we went after.
So now Those three are some ofour biggest partners, they
produce content weekly, we nowhave over 300 videos that have
(15:04):
been created on our product. Butit then goes back out into their
channels at the same time thatwe promote on our channels. And
I would say that, excuse me,about 65 to 70% of the lead
volume that comes into ourwebsite to start a free trial
with us is because of videocontent that people have seen,
and that, again, is because ofour focus on people that
(15:24):
actually get work done, which ismillennials and Gen Zers. tend
to consume video more so than alot of the print type media that
we've done in the past, likecold, cold emails, blogs, those
types of things.
Matt Wolach (15:39):
I love it. It's such a smart play that not a lot
of people do. So you found thesepeople on YouTube, essentially,
right, who are already talkingabout products in the space and
basically convinced them to talkabout yours.
Jon Darbyshire (15:51):
We did and then we did a couple of things. So
the first was, we didn't pay himanything, we just said, Hey,
would you just you know, try usout and just share your thoughts
back good or bad. And two ofthem came out and said, Hey,
this product is better than theother product that we're
promoting right now. They stillpromote the other those other
products, but now we're kind ofin their toolkit of, of, of
(16:13):
products that they, you know,talk about each week. So as a
new feature comes out, they'llpromote those new features and
talk back to their audience,that many of those also have
consulting organizations thatare kind of a part of that. So
they provide consulting servicesaround the products that they
support, and kind of in thatecosystem as well. And the
second thing that we did is wereached out to some and said,
(16:33):
Hey, we would like to haveregular content every week about
these types of topics, would yoube interested in having a
relationship with us where wepaid you to generate content as
well. So we get both, we get thefree? And then we also do some
of the paid video content.
Matt Wolach (16:50):
Super smart setup.
I love it. So looking at theother side of the coin, what
were some of the things you guysdid that you're like, Oh, I wish
we didn't do that. That was thatwas a pretty tough time.
Jon Darbyshire (17:01):
Yeah, you know, we we focus mainly, well, how we
were reaching customers was twoways through the videos and
through word of mouth. Nomarketing until this day, we
don't have a marketingdepartment, it's hard to believe
everything happens through thosechannels and, and some social
media awareness that we dothat's there, I wish we would
(17:22):
have started doing more socialmedia awareness sooner, we've
just found. It's just such a bigmarket. And such an easy way to
tap into, I give you an example.
We're I just started a 30 dayblog series. And I think I'm on
day seven, where I'm talkingabout all things, no code, and
just educating people aroundwhat no code means and the
(17:43):
players that are in the spacethat's there. In the first six
blogs that we did, we had, Ithink, as of today, like 83,000
impressions, those are free. Anyof that, that's just on
LinkedIn. That's not any of theother channels where we're
cutting the content up. Nowinternally and pacing that back
back out, I'm just finding thatthat is so effective to reach
(18:04):
the audience that we have, forus specifically without needing
to do paid ads, in that case, togo after those same people. And
then we'll follow that up withthem, once we kind of get them
kind of in our ecosystem willhave different ways that will
follow up. But it's been a greatway just to bring people into
the ecosystem, and not justcustomers, partners and
(18:24):
integration partners, as well.
I've started reaching out to ussaying, Hey, we would love to
integrate with your product,here's what we could do and the
joint value that we could havefor our joint customers that are
there. And that just expands ournetwork and our partners network
at the same time. So we find alot of value in that as well.
Matt Wolach (18:44):
We love that. It's fantastic. So if you think about
your company, looking ahead,what are some of the areas of
innovation and growth thatyou're envisioning for
smartsuite in the coming years?
Jon Darbyshire (18:53):
Yeah, I can tell you everybody's talking about
this. But AI has just explodedwithin our customer base in a
couple of different ways. Theprimary aspect is around content
creation. So thank you, ifyou're a marketing agency, and
you're using our product tomanage the creation of content
around marketing and interactionwith your customers, you'd go in
and write the blogs inside ofour or their articles inside of
(19:15):
our product, you know that youshare with your customers? Well
now we built AI into that tomake it super easy. So now you
can use AI to help do that basedon keywords or longtail keywords
and audience and tone and youknow even the language, maybe I
want this in four differentlanguages that are a little
different when I send it out. Soour customers have went just
(19:35):
crazy with understanding how touse chat. GBT type prompts
inside of a product likesmartsuite to generate content
across every aspect. So we haveproduct managers and product
teams that are writingrequirements for new features. A
lot of the time those featureshave been created and other
products and ChatGPT could helpyou do the research help you
(19:55):
actually write the initial speccan even come up with a list of
action items to Start with tostart the planning process.
That's there. Some cases thatcould take days, Chet GPT could
help you do that sometimes in 10minutes, like it's a tremendous
time savings. The second partthat we're seeing is people that
have data and smartsuite aresaying now, can you help me
understand what I'm seeing inthis data, so maybe I have 1000
(20:18):
records on the sales side. And Ijust have all kinds of different
accounts all over the world,different sizes of companies,
and it made me say, Hey, I justwant to break this up and look
at the cohorts. And help meunderstand where my most
profitable customers are comingfrom. Maybe it shows you the
list. Now, you could say, Okay,what's the most effective way to
market to this particularsegment of people? Maybe that
(20:41):
I'm going after? If you haveother data on the marketing
side, you could do the samething? Like, where am I seeing
the biggest bang for the buck onmy marketing spend right now, so
maybe I want to put the pedaldown on that. But hold back and
another area that's there. Sotwo ways content creation, and
then data analytics. As far asAI?
Matt Wolach (21:00):
I love that genius stuff. What advice would you
have for other early stagesoftware leaders who are looking
to grow and scale and get to agood level?
Jon Darbyshire (21:10):
Yeah, that's kind of a, I think we could
spend a day on that particulartopic. But I probably go back to
what I said first, which is, youknow, follow the customer. You
know, my first customer hadArcher, you know, I was the CEO
of a company and I went to theirlocation for about two months
and work with him every day tosee how just to see how they
were going to use our product.
They put me in a closet with twointerns. And I'm not joking, it
was a closet, they turned into alittle office. And I'll never
(21:33):
forget the interns looking at mesaying, now tell me what you do.
Again, I'm like, I'm the CEO ofthis company. But what I learned
from Paul, was that I gained somuch information, being with the
customer for a period of time,that allowed me to go back and
say, This is exactly what we'rebuilding and why like, I'm not,
this isn't something I justthought of that we need to test
(21:56):
out. I've been there, Iunderstand what they need. I've
seen it firsthand, I know whatto build. So I encourage every
entrepreneur to find those earlycustomers. And it doesn't mean
you have to be on site with himfor two months. You know, in
today's world, you don't do thatas much, but you need to be
connected with them asfrequently as you can through
through video.
Matt Wolach (22:16):
I love it. Well, Jon, this has been great. I
really appreciate you coming inand sharing all this
information. I love your yourfollow the customer mantra. How
can our audience learn moreabout you and SmartSuite?
Jon Darbyshire (22:27):
Yeah, we'd love for you to come to our website,
SmartSuite.com, we have a free14 day trial. So you can just
click go through the process,we'll ask you what areas of
interest that you might have,meaning what types of processes
we could help you with. And thenwe'll load some sample
processes. So you can just clickand start playing like there,
you don't have to buildanything, it's just right there.
After two weeks, if you're ifyou're not ready, that you would
(22:49):
want to purchase the productthat that automatically moves
you to our free plan. So it'sjust free forever. Until you
determine that maybe you findvalue, then you can move into
one of our paid plans. If youwanted to talk with me directly.
Probably LinkedIn is probablythe easiest way if you would
just send me you know, connectwith me and then send me a DM.
Matt Wolach (23:07):
Okay, perfect. And we'll put all that into the show
notes. So if you're watching orlisten, and you'll be able to
see that there. But Jon, this isawesome. Thanks so much for
coming in.
Jon Darbyshire (23:15):
Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks, man.
Matt Wolach (23:18):
Absolutely. And thank you guys out there for
watching. I really appreciateit. Hope you enjoy this. Hope
you got a lot of value out ofit. Again, make sure you're
subscribed to the show so you donot miss anything that we have
coming up. That's it for thistime, and we'll see you next
time. Take care.
Intro/ Outro (23:33):
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For more help on finding greatleads and closing more deals. Go
to Mattwolach.com
Growing software, sometimes we have all kinds of
decisions to make sure we dothis. Should we do that? Where
do we do this? How do we dothis? What should we build next?
How should we market thesedecisions get us very frustrated
and flustered and we oftentimesmake the wrong decision. What if
we were able to make the rightdecision each time something
that helped us get the rightproduct out something that
helped us sell that product evenbetter, Jon Darbyshire stopped
(00:31):
it. And he's from SmartSuiteGreat tool. And he shared his
mantra called Follow thecustomer. And he shared exactly
how they've been able to growquickly because of what they've
done following what their marketneeds and what they look for. He
walks through his process of howhe understands exactly what the
market needs exactly what theywill love and what's going to
sell. So check this episode out,I think you're gonna get a lot
(00:52):
out of it.
Intro/ Outro (00:53):
Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that
gives you proven techniques andformulas for boosting your
revenue and achieving your dreamexit brought to you by a guy
who's done just that multipletimes. Here's your host, Matt
Wolach.
Matt Wolach (01:10):
and welcome to Scale Your SaaS very happy to
have you here. Thank you verymuch. I am really excited for
today's show. I've got Johndarbishire. With me, John, how
you doing?
Jon Darbyshire (01:19):
I'm doing great, man. It's pleasure to be here.
Matt Wolach (01:21):
And it's a pleasure to have you Jon. Now, let me
make sure everybody out there.
If this is your first time here,we are here to help you Scale
Your SaaS so you can learn howto grow your company and get
that amazing exit you're lookingfor. And Jon's gonna help us do
that sharing his story as well.
If you're new, definitelysubscribe to the show, hit that
subscribe button. That way,you're gonna get notified of all
our future shows where we haveother awesome guests like John
(01:43):
sharing their story and helpingyou out John, let me make sure
everybody knows who you are. SoJon, he's the co founder and CEO
at smart, sweet smart suitehelps coordinate people and work
across all levels of anorganization to ensure that team
members have the informationthey need to accomplish the work
that matters most Jon has beendedicated to automating every
day essential business tasks tocreate smarter, more efficient
(02:07):
organizations, no matter whatthe industry, this guy knows his
stuff. Absolutely. You're goingto enjoy this. Jon, thanks for
being here.
Jon Darbyshire (02:15):
Oh, it's a pleasure looking forward to
digging into this conversation.
Matt Wolach (02:17):
Likewise. So tell me what's been going on with you
lately? And what's coming up?
Jon Darbyshire (02:21):
Yeah, you know, we're, I'm passionate about all
things, no code. So smartsuiteis in the no code space. So
we're we I spend most of my timeeach day interacting with
customers and partners, justunderstanding the types of
business processes they have intheir organization, and the ways
that smartsuite can help supportthem both currently, but more so
in the future. So I'm interestedin understanding what features
(02:42):
and functionality that we needto add that will help better
serve our customer base that'sthere. And we do that in quite a
number of ways. But the mosteffective way is to have direct
conversations like we're doingnow, mainly over video. So we
can record those we use AI tokind of transcribe the
information that we heard, justmakes the whole process very
easy. And then I have theability to very quickly go back
(03:03):
through conversations that we'vehad and kind of pull out topics
across maybe five or sixdifferent conversations to kind
of see themes that we're saying.
Matt Wolach (03:13):
I love it. So a couple of things to hit on that.
So first, you mentioned no code.
Do you have a tech backgroundyourself?
Jon Darbyshire (03:19):
Yeah, I've been in the no code space for about
25 years
Matt Wolach (03:22):
I built allow, you know,
Jon Darbyshire (03:24):
the first company that I did, Archer
Technologies was one of thefirst one of the very first
traditional second generation nocode platforms, Marc Benioff
started Salesforce Ed. Withinabout two months of us starting
Archer, Archer today was justsold again and a couple of
months ago, for 1.4 billion theyown kind of the governance Risk
(03:46):
and Compliance space, which ishelping organizations really
manage risk inside of thebusiness. That was an
interesting story with thatcompany in that we targeted the
top 30 financial servicescompanies in the US as our first
customers and sold into groupsof 10. And after three years, we
had 29 of the top 30 Before wewent out to any other industry
(04:07):
that was there. So that was myfirst entree into no code with
large enterprise customers. Andit's kind of taken lots of
different different paths inthat journey over the last 1012
years.
Matt Wolach (04:19):
Very, very cool.
Yeah, it's definitely a hotbutton topic. You also mentioned
that you like having a lot ofconversations and conversations
with your market. How did youlearn that? That's important?
Jon Darbyshire (04:31):
Yeah, actually, I learned that in my days at
Archer when things were prettylean. And I didn't know anything
else to do other than talk withcustomers, right? When those
early days that were there, andI came up with this mantra of
follow the customer. And I'vekind of done that throughout my
career ever since and that nomatter what I had in my, in my
business strategy about what Ithought the product that
(04:52):
companies should do when I talkwith customers, and if that's
different from the needs thatthey have. I've learned that
that's the time to pivot and tomake sure that I'm solving Those
problems for that group ofcustomers that I'm working with.
And that's certainly reallywell, and that it gets brought
me into new markets with newthings that I haven't thought
about maybe in that initialstrategy that was there. But it
also helped the customers becomevery sticky. At smart orient
(05:15):
Archer, the first 10 years ofthat company, we had a 97.6%
renewal rate, right across, Ican't tell you how many hundreds
and hundreds of renewals and ourbase price point was about
350,000 give you an ID. So thoseare, these aren't small
accounts. These are big onesacross that. So I found that,
you know, follow the customerhad a direct correlation to us
(05:37):
back to how happy they were inthe renewals that we have.
Matt Wolach (05:41):
That's amazing. I love that. So how did the whole
idea of smartsuite come about?
Jon Darbyshire (05:46):
Yeah, you know, I sold Archer in 2010, and
thought I had officially retiredforever. And started a family
foundation and started investingin startups. I've invested in
about 400, startups kind ofthrough that journey, had the
chance to just meet and interactwith lots of founders. And some
common themes kind of came upafter years of doing that. The
(06:07):
first one was, they would get alot of questions around what
types of products should theyhave in their own business to
help them manage and run theirbusiness? And with those
products that were selected, beable to scale with him as the
business scaled over time waskind of the next question. So I
kept coming back to I wanted tobuild a platform that could help
manage any business process inan organization that came with
(06:28):
templates. In the case ofsmartsuite, we have 200
templates that cover 35different categories of business
processes. So if somebodydoesn't know how to manage
sales, or marketing, or HR, orwhat a best in class process
looks like, that template, letsthem know that just in seconds,
they can download that and seethat information. So the idea
behind smartsuite was to workwith companies from to users up
(06:50):
to the fortune 100, to helpmanage any type of process
inside of that organization in away that allows the infant the
data to be connected, so thatyou don't duplicate the data,
you just have one place to login, your employees don't have
five different products thatthey work with each day, you
could have one core producttypically.
Matt Wolach (07:09):
So I really love this idea. I think it's
something super important. Butmy guess is and I don't know for
sure, because we didn't talkabout this beforehand. But my
guess is that that would havebeen really hard to get your
market to understand exactlywhat that does for them. When
you say like automation andprocess is kind of like big,
like open ended words? And didwas it hard to convince them or
(07:30):
get them to understand exactlyhow the product can help them?
Jon Darbyshire (07:34):
Yeah, so I think for us, the biggest marketing
effort that we put forth isaround education. And what we
found is the best way to educateis through video. And that
people can sense in the first,you know, 30 to 60 seconds, what
the product does, and begin tokind of make up their own mind,
if it's something that would bea value to them in their
organization, because businessprocess Atomy automation is a
(07:57):
mouthful. Not everybodyunderstands that I come from a
consulting background early inmy career at Ernst and Young. So
that's just kind of baked intowho I am as a person
understanding that that piece,but not everybody understands
that. So once organizationsbegin to realize that they can
have their sales, theirmarketing their it their product
(08:17):
processes in one place andconnected, they start to get
excited when they see okay, nowthat the data is there, how can
I pull data analytics, you know,charts and dashboards on top of
that, to really understandwhat's happening inside of the
business and make sure that I'vegot my people focused on the
right things that are that.
Matt Wolach (08:36):
A lot of so your market super competitive.
There's other companies doingthis as well. What are you guys
doing right now to separateyourselves from those
competitors?
Jon Darbyshire (08:45):
Yeah, I think part of that goes back to my
early days at Archer when weworked with large enterprise
organization. So we understandthat governance and security are
very important in a product,meaning that as I grow as a
company, not everybody shouldsee all the information that's
inside of even a particularprocess. So I need to be able to
access control that which wecall permissions at different
(09:06):
levels to different users atdifferent times that are
involved in that workflow. Thenthere's certain pieces of
information that they shouldn'tsee at all. Maybe if you're in
an HR process, and you'reletting employees look at some
of the information that's there,but you don't want them to see
the compensation for everybody.
So that particular field can behidden. It's there. So it's the
little subtle things like that,that help organizations really
(09:27):
build the type of process thatis specific to what they need.
That's there. And then the bigpiece that we've added that's
different about smartsuite is wespent a large amount of time at
the very beginning of thecompany to focus on the user
interface. And we directed thatat millennials and Gen Zers. Who
are the people that we feel dowork in most organizations. And
what we learned from thatexercise is that those two
(09:50):
generations are very differentthan the generations before them
on how they want to work, howthey want to view work on a
screen how collaborative theywant to be. how they want to see
what other co workers areworking on and be able to
comment on that at times. So allthose things kind of came
together in our UI. And you'llsee what smartsuite Compared to
a lot of products, it's morevisual, there's more vivid
(10:12):
colors, it's meant to help keeptheir attention as they're
working. It also allows them towork both from their mobile and
from their computer, from theirtablet all at the same time, we
found many of the millennialsthat we spoke with, as they were
talking to us, and I would eventalk with him about interfaces,
I'd see they would be on theirmobile phone. And at first, I
would get annoyed, I'm like,What are you doing, like we're
(10:34):
having a conversation. And thenI realize now they're looking at
the product on the mobile, atthe same time that we're having
the conversation on the screen.
And that's just normal for them.
So we tried to build in, youknow, take all of that input and
build that into the core UI. Sothat we can help keep
millennials and Gen Z earsengaged and motivated and build
more of a collaborative cultureinside the organization.
Matt Wolach (10:59):
I mean, another perfect example of you following
your your mantra of follow thecustomer right there. I mean,
the fact that you looked at whowas the the actual end users,
you talked to them, you satdown, you saw the interaction
that they had with the product,I think that's, that's so smart.
And for everybody out there,this is so critical to make sure
that you are addressing yourmarket and learning from your
(11:22):
market, understanding what theyneed, so you can build into the
product, exactly what's going tofit for them. That sounds like
you guys did that really well,Jon.
Jon Darbyshire (11:30):
that's the My favorite part of every day is I
spent a couple of hours justmeeting with, with customers and
partners to do just that. Andone of the favorite things that
I like to do is use a video,like we're kind of using now in
our discussion, where I can demothe product and show them
things. But they're not justlooking at the product, I can
see their facial expressions,because not everybody
(11:51):
communicates great back to be asthe CEO with what they like and
don't like in a product. But Ican tell from those visual cues
at times that I nailed it, or wedid not nail it at all, like we
need to keep working even thoughthey didn't say that it just
didn't resonate. And I could seefrom that expression is there.
So I think that video and havingthe ability to look back at
(12:12):
those videos at certain pointsat times as you're demoing
certain screens in your productare super important. And I hope
that we can get to a position inAI, where I can take those
recordings. And I could documentthe sentiment from the facial
expressions that are being shownat the same level of is I could
do from the words that they'reactually speaking.
Matt Wolach (12:33):
Yeah, that's a that's a good point. That would
be pretty slick, if it can helpus figure some of that out. And
I do recommend a lot of peoplewho follow the show know that I
recommend recording your demos,you can go back and kind of see
hey, what what happened here?
How did this interaction go? Howdid that go? And especially if
things don't go well, you cankind of go back and find what
did I say? What did I do that?
(12:54):
Maybe lost them. And having thatrecording is very critical to be
able to do that. So I'm glad youguys are doing that.
Jon Darbyshire (13:00):
You know, there's products that that add
the AI on top of thoserecordings that just make things
so easy. And we just startedthis maybe six months ago. But
at the you know, we just when welog into a meeting, we just log
in with our recording softwarethat has AI as well, it records
the entire meeting transcribesit, but then it summarizes it
automatically for you, it tellsyou who was in attendance.
(13:21):
Here's a summary of everythingthat was talked about, here's
the action items that came outof it. And I've been amazed at
how good it is. And it also thenallows us to search back through
conversations with large groupsof people looking for key topics
just to see like, what am Italking about over the last two
weeks? Like are there any themesthat are popping up across these
(13:41):
hundreds of discussions thatwe've had with our company back
with customers and partners?
Matt Wolach (13:47):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Some of the technology we
have at our fingertips right nowis quite amazing. For sure, for
sure. So tell me you guys haveseen some good success. What
were some of the things you guysdid early on, it helped you get
to this point that helped yougrow and and take that next
step?
Jon Darbyshire (14:03):
Yeah, probably the best thing that we did was,
you know, this, the overallspace that we're in, like you
kind of said is a littlecrowded, there's a quite a
number of players that are inthat space. When you talk about
business process automation, wehad to find a way to set
ourselves apart. So peoplereally understood what we did.
And what we did at first was wefound the biggest influencers on
(14:23):
YouTube for our top threecompetitors. And we wanted to go
after we reached out to each ofthem. And we said, hey, we're a
new product in the category. Weknow you're an expert on this
other product that's there, andyou're producing a lot of
content around that. We'd likefor you to you know, start a
free trial of our product andthen share your your thoughts
good or bad back to youraudience on how we compare
(14:44):
against the product that youwere there. Behind the Scenes
what we were hoping whathappened was that we would grab
their attention enough that theyasked more questions and said
we'd like to start working withyou. And that's what happened
with the first three influencersacross the first three
competitor that we went after.
So now Those three are some ofour biggest partners, they
produce content weekly, we nowhave over 300 videos that have
(15:04):
been created on our product. Butit then goes back out into their
channels at the same time thatwe promote on our channels. And
I would say that, excuse me,about 65 to 70% of the lead
volume that comes into ourwebsite to start a free trial
with us is because of videocontent that people have seen,
and that, again, is because ofour focus on people that
(15:24):
actually get work done, which ismillennials and Gen Zers. tend
to consume video more so than alot of the print type media that
we've done in the past, likecold, cold emails, blogs, those
types of things.
Matt Wolach (15:39):
I love it. It's such a smart play that not a lot
of people do. So you found thesepeople on YouTube, essentially,
right, who are already talkingabout products in the space and
basically convinced them to talkabout yours.
Jon Darbyshire (15:51):
We did and then we did a couple of things. So
the first was, we didn't pay himanything, we just said, Hey,
would you just you know, try usout and just share your thoughts
back good or bad. And two ofthem came out and said, Hey,
this product is better than theother product that we're
promoting right now. They stillpromote the other those other
products, but now we're kind ofin their toolkit of, of, of
(16:13):
products that they, you know,talk about each week. So as a
new feature comes out, they'llpromote those new features and
talk back to their audience,that many of those also have
consulting organizations thatare kind of a part of that. So
they provide consulting servicesaround the products that they
support, and kind of in thatecosystem as well. And the
second thing that we did is wereached out to some and said,
(16:33):
Hey, we would like to haveregular content every week about
these types of topics, would yoube interested in having a
relationship with us where wepaid you to generate content as
well. So we get both, we get thefree? And then we also do some
of the paid video content.
Matt Wolach (16:50):
Super smart setup.
I love it. So looking at theother side of the coin, what
were some of the things you guysdid that you're like, Oh, I wish
we didn't do that. That was thatwas a pretty tough time.
Jon Darbyshire (17:01):
Yeah, you know, we we focus mainly, well, how we
were reaching customers was twoways through the videos and
through word of mouth. Nomarketing until this day, we
don't have a marketingdepartment, it's hard to believe
everything happens through thosechannels and, and some social
media awareness that we dothat's there, I wish we would
(17:22):
have started doing more socialmedia awareness sooner, we've
just found. It's just such a bigmarket. And such an easy way to
tap into, I give you an example.
We're I just started a 30 dayblog series. And I think I'm on
day seven, where I'm talkingabout all things, no code, and
just educating people aroundwhat no code means and the
(17:43):
players that are in the spacethat's there. In the first six
blogs that we did, we had, Ithink, as of today, like 83,000
impressions, those are free. Anyof that, that's just on
LinkedIn. That's not any of theother channels where we're
cutting the content up. Nowinternally and pacing that back
back out, I'm just finding thatthat is so effective to reach
(18:04):
the audience that we have, forus specifically without needing
to do paid ads, in that case, togo after those same people. And
then we'll follow that up withthem, once we kind of get them
kind of in our ecosystem willhave different ways that will
follow up. But it's been a greatway just to bring people into
the ecosystem, and not justcustomers, partners and
(18:24):
integration partners, as well.
I've started reaching out to ussaying, Hey, we would love to
integrate with your product,here's what we could do and the
joint value that we could havefor our joint customers that are
there. And that just expands ournetwork and our partners network
at the same time. So we find alot of value in that as well.
Matt Wolach (18:44):
We love that. It's fantastic. So if you think about
your company, looking ahead,what are some of the areas of
innovation and growth thatyou're envisioning for
smartsuite in the coming years?
Jon Darbyshire (18:53):
Yeah, I can tell you everybody's talking about
this. But AI has just explodedwithin our customer base in a
couple of different ways. Theprimary aspect is around content
creation. So thank you, ifyou're a marketing agency, and
you're using our product tomanage the creation of content
around marketing and interactionwith your customers, you'd go in
and write the blogs inside ofour or their articles inside of
(19:15):
our product, you know that youshare with your customers? Well
now we built AI into that tomake it super easy. So now you
can use AI to help do that basedon keywords or longtail keywords
and audience and tone and youknow even the language, maybe I
want this in four differentlanguages that are a little
different when I send it out. Soour customers have went just
(19:35):
crazy with understanding how touse chat. GBT type prompts
inside of a product likesmartsuite to generate content
across every aspect. So we haveproduct managers and product
teams that are writingrequirements for new features. A
lot of the time those featureshave been created and other
products and ChatGPT could helpyou do the research help you
(19:55):
actually write the initial speccan even come up with a list of
action items to Start with tostart the planning process.
That's there. Some cases thatcould take days, Chet GPT could
help you do that sometimes in 10minutes, like it's a tremendous
time savings. The second partthat we're seeing is people that
have data and smartsuite aresaying now, can you help me
understand what I'm seeing inthis data, so maybe I have 1000
(20:18):
records on the sales side. And Ijust have all kinds of different
accounts all over the world,different sizes of companies,
and it made me say, Hey, I justwant to break this up and look
at the cohorts. And help meunderstand where my most
profitable customers are comingfrom. Maybe it shows you the
list. Now, you could say, Okay,what's the most effective way to
market to this particularsegment of people? Maybe that
(20:41):
I'm going after? If you haveother data on the marketing
side, you could do the samething? Like, where am I seeing
the biggest bang for the buck onmy marketing spend right now, so
maybe I want to put the pedaldown on that. But hold back and
another area that's there. Sotwo ways content creation, and
then data analytics. As far asAI?
Matt Wolach (21:00):
I love that genius stuff. What advice would you
have for other early stagesoftware leaders who are looking
to grow and scale and get to agood level?
Jon Darbyshire (21:10):
Yeah, that's kind of a, I think we could
spend a day on that particulartopic. But I probably go back to
what I said first, which is, youknow, follow the customer. You
know, my first customer hadArcher, you know, I was the CEO
of a company and I went to theirlocation for about two months
and work with him every day tosee how just to see how they
were going to use our product.
They put me in a closet with twointerns. And I'm not joking, it
was a closet, they turned into alittle office. And I'll never
(21:33):
forget the interns looking at mesaying, now tell me what you do.
Again, I'm like, I'm the CEO ofthis company. But what I learned
from Paul, was that I gained somuch information, being with the
customer for a period of time,that allowed me to go back and
say, This is exactly what we'rebuilding and why like, I'm not,
this isn't something I justthought of that we need to test
(21:56):
out. I've been there, Iunderstand what they need. I've
seen it firsthand, I know whatto build. So I encourage every
entrepreneur to find those earlycustomers. And it doesn't mean
you have to be on site with himfor two months. You know, in
today's world, you don't do thatas much, but you need to be
connected with them asfrequently as you can through
through video.
Matt Wolach (22:16):
I love it. Well, Jon, this has been great. I
really appreciate you coming inand sharing all this
information. I love your yourfollow the customer mantra. How
can our audience learn moreabout you and SmartSuite?
Jon Darbyshire (22:27):
Yeah, we'd love for you to come to our website,
SmartSuite.com, we have a free14 day trial. So you can just
click go through the process,we'll ask you what areas of
interest that you might have,meaning what types of processes
we could help you with. And thenwe'll load some sample
processes. So you can just clickand start playing like there,
you don't have to buildanything, it's just right there.
After two weeks, if you're ifyou're not ready, that you would
(22:49):
want to purchase the productthat that automatically moves
you to our free plan. So it'sjust free forever. Until you
determine that maybe you findvalue, then you can move into
one of our paid plans. If youwanted to talk with me directly.
Probably LinkedIn is probablythe easiest way if you would
just send me you know, connectwith me and then send me a DM.
Matt Wolach (23:07):
Okay, perfect. And we'll put all that into the show
notes. So if you're watching orlisten, and you'll be able to
see that there. But Jon, this isawesome. Thanks so much for
coming in.
Jon Darbyshire (23:15):
Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks, man.
Matt Wolach (23:18):
Absolutely. And thank you guys out there for
watching. I really appreciateit. Hope you enjoy this. Hope
you got a lot of value out ofit. Again, make sure you're
subscribed to the show so you donot miss anything that we have
coming up. That's it for thistime, and we'll see you next
time. Take care.
Intro/ Outro (23:33):
Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS.
For more help on finding greatleads and closing more deals. Go
to Mattwolach.com
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