#40 Thought Leader: B2B/B2C-Connections in the SAAS World (Andrew Davies – Paddle)
We're thrilled to bring you our latest podcast episode with special guest Andrew Davies, CMO @Paddle! Join Tim and Andrew as they explore the intricacies of B2B and B2C connections in the SaaS world. Tune in now and be the first to listen! 🎙️🚀
Wie sieht das Konnektion der B2C und B2B? Und was kann wir lernen? Wir haben
eine
kreative, kreative, beliebte Erfahrungen. Und in B2B, ich glaube, wir haben
wirklich
sehr leid. Ich glaube, das Approach ist superinteressant. Wie kann man
mit Media-Astern, wie bei den Abituten zu erreichen? Ja. Warum nicht?
Sie tun es gut. Instead der Gegner auf einer E-Book, warum kann man sich in
einem
kreative, kreative Weise sagen? Wir haben eine Story. Willkommen zu der Revenue
-Marketing Real Talk Podcast.
Heute ist das Episode ein Special-Gest, ein Teil der unserer neuen Seer-Gerä
ten, die mit der
Special-Format um uns zu bringen, die Industrie-Experienz-Exekutungen, die
haben sehr viele,
viele Experienz, keine Präscher hier, Andrew. Aber ja, ich bin die Willkommen
Andrew von
Pettel. Ihr habt schon Pettel im letzten 2022. Pettel-Sray ist ca. 300
Millionen in der Benzer-Captain-Money.
Ihr habt dann ein Quart-Profit-Wall für 200 Millionen. Und das ist eigentlich,
wie ich sie entdeckt.
Ich denke, es war heute hier in den Saster in Barcelona, in 2022, wo ihr die H
usten der
Sider-Wend und es war eine sehr kleine Dokumentin der Beine von Pettel-Profit-W
all. Und ich war, "Wow,
das ist so cool. Ich habe nie gesehen, dass es eigentlich nicht so, wenn man
sich das auch mit den
Jungen ist, die Menschen nicht zu sagen oder die Show oder zu sagen, dass es
wirklich zu sagen ist." Ich glaube, das war
wirklich spätisch. Und ich denke, du hast die Driving-Force behindert, die CMO
-Pettel, die alle
sehen, alle globalen Marketing-Efforts. Was macht du das in der ersten Stelle?
So ein paar vier Jahre, ich
habe meine Business in einem Insight-Venture-Back-Roll-Up. Wir waren im Sell-S
ide in ein Deal und dann
wir hatten eine Borte, vier oder fünf Businesses des nächsten 18-Jahres. Ich
habe es schon ein
hoher Bunche von M&A. Und dann, wenn ich Jungen pädelt, ich habe es noch ein
paar Abilitierungen, die wir in
einem Teil des Partys zu bewerben haben. Und die Profit-Wall-Akquisition war
sehr sehr sehr, sehr sehr, sehr weh. Und ich habe
vorher schon wieder viele andere Transactions über den letzten paar Jahren
gemacht, ich habe es schon um ein bisschen mehr
Experienz zu tun in der Prozess. All good marketing starts with a bit of
customer insight. Und
the insight here is that paddelskustomers are global software founders who are
desperately trying to
grow their businesses. Und all of them have got one or two aspirations, either
they want to sell their
business or they want to get big enough to buy other businesses. And so the
insight behind the
documentary was, we were going to be in this acquisition process. So why wouldn
't we tell the story
inside the deal room for our customers and our prospects who want to be
involved in acquisitions in
the future. So it was something that was not very covered, not very discussed.
And we had an
opportunity a moment in time to do that. Yeah, so we grabbed the opportunity
and had to go at filming it.
And where there are no fears behind doing this, maybe of the founders even know
we can't do that.
That's like what will the VCs think? All the future investors, like, you know,
like, was there any
emotional kind of fear behind that too? I had a very simple conversation with
our general counsel,
Mariam, and I said, "We'll record everything. You'll have it under lock and key
in a drop box.
And if everything goes well, we'll tell the story and you can improve it. And
if things don't go
well, we'll have not really spent much money on just recording it. And we won't
need to go
anywhere with it from then on. And from the founders perspective, Christian was
very up for it,
founder of Paddle, and Patrick PC, founder of ProfitWell is very media savvy.
And so I think they were
already doing some behind the scenes work there side too. I'm not sure what
that story would have
been if we didn't end up acquiring them. But yeah, together we were able to
tell that story.
I feel like position looks like exactly. Yeah, well, I would have been good too
. It's still good
content. It's still good content. Yeah, actually, you know what, when I think
of pedal,
always this kind of media company first thinking approach always comes to mind.
And I think that's also
what pedal really stands for. Doing this very innovative kind of marketing,
thinking, hey,
we need to become a media company, just educating our customers at scale, but
not with only
education, kind of theoretical hard content to consume, but also with this
entertainment part.
So what I'm always wondering is this mindset of becoming a Netflix, you know,
for your own company,
would you say every B2B SaaS company should have this approach? Where is it
relevant and where is
it not? So I think sometimes when we discuss media companies or becoming a
media company, we get lost.
So let's go back to the first principles. I think we should all be building
content that's engaging,
inspiring, educational, entertaining, four-hour target customer. That's a great
way of differentiating
in a very busy competitive landscape. Number two, we should all be doing
content, building content
that has a red thread from the topics we're talking about down to the product
value proposition
we're selling. And thirdly, I think there's something really interesting about
episodic content.
You know, you've got a podcast here. You're speaking regularly to a growing
audience. And so people
know you for revenue marketing. And if you are able to commit to regular
content on a similar theme
or similar format, your audience starts being engaged with and then subscribing
to whether
technically or not, being engaged with an ongoing series. And I think that's
super interesting,
because much of what B2B marketing, you know, SaaS B2B marketing is about is
these one drops.
You know, and I think building episodic formats where you're taking a topic and
diving deep
and diving deep time and again means you build an audience around that topic
cluster that's super
important for how you can build your business in the future. So should every B2
B SaaS company do
it or would you say there's a time and place for it? So if we reduce it to
those three first
principles, I think every B2B SaaS company should be doing those. But does it
mean video?
Maybe, maybe not. It could be as simple as an iPhone. It could be text updates
on LinkedIn.
It could be something else. So I don't think I don't think it has to
necessarily be a video format,
although I'm a big believer in the video format. And also it depends on your go
-to-market.
So Paddle serves thousands of software entrepreneurs globally. And so we're
able to speak at scale
and build a brand to demand engine where we're building this community,
building this brand,
building this awareness about us and it filters through to our demand engine.
If you haven't built
that or if you've got an extremely enterprise whale hunting focused target
market, then perhaps
there's a different approach you should be taking. But yeah, those first
principles, I think
everybody can adopt. But even Salesforce, I mean they created Salesforce Plus
now, which is also
this kind of Netflix mentality and they serve enterprises. Yeah, 100%. And in
my first SaaS
business, it was a personalization business. It was small. And we were going
after these whales,
Salesforce was a customer who would in contact personalization for them. And
our belief was that
in our podcast and we were quite early in the podcast game, our belief was it
wasn't about the
audience. It was about the people in front of us. And so we used to get target
customers to come
and speak with us and then use that cut those clips up and use them in our
marketing efforts.
And so I think you also have to think creatively about why you're doing this.
Is it for the
relationships? Is it for the audience? Is it for the product proposition? The
positioning? And
being clear about the why behind it is fun. Yeah. What I find very fascinating
and what I've
been reflecting also now coming back from Golden Hour, where a lot is about
this media company building,
like entertainment stuff. If we compare B2C and B2B mostly in B2C, there's a
lot of,
sometimes it's actually influencers that have a lot of audience that already
are very deep into
this content game and you have episodes. I mean the biggest influencer world,
Kim Kardashian,
she's got this huge audience and from that audience she's then started building
businesses.
And she's worth over a billion dollars now, which is crazy. And in B2B, I feel
like it's going
a little bit the other way around. You have a business first, you have a
product, and then you
feel like well, but we kind of also need the community to actually help scale
even further.
So then at some point they look at okay why is B2C so successful and then they
started investing
heavily into community. How do you see this whole connection of B2C and B2B and
what can we learn?
So firstly the audience of the product that has to be some connection. I've
seen it come on stock
both ways where people have built an audience but then don't have product in
order to sell to,
monetize the audience and the opposite way around where people have a really
compelling product,
but they actually don't have anyone to sell it to. And I think that's the
interesting merge here is
that media, media companies are extremely good at building attention. And SaaS
businesses are
extremely good at monetizing. And so combining those two together, you've got a
really interesting
powerhouse. So if we go to your question of what can we learn from B2C, I think
there's a whole
bunch of things we can learn from B2C. There's always a few years ahead of us.
And I've been thinking
lots recently about the concept of B2B lifestyle brands. So if we take consumer
lifestyle brands,
Nike, Lulu Lemon, Red Bull as three easy examples, they are all about marketing
the lifestyle
aspiration rather than their products. Their products are actually a non-comp
ulsory entry point
into their community. You don't have to wear Nike's in order to go and play
basketball down at
the local gym, but there's a badge of identity. I was in common garden a few
weeks ago with my kids
in London. And we walked past the Lulu Lemon shop. And as we walked past, there
were maybe 20
guys and girls all limbering up, ready to go on a run with the store manager.
That's a fantastic
example of a lifestyle brand execution into real world. Now we're all of them
wearing Lulu Lemon
kit, no, but this was something that was an emotional experience, a together
experience, a community
experience that was very clearly linked to their brand proposition. But
actually the shop next door
where they were meeting was not central to the experience they had together.
And we can use
examples from Red Bull, you know, an energy drink that sponsors and creates
amazing content
around extreme sports. We can use all these examples. So I do think this
concept of a lifestyle
brand gives us a few learnings. We can dive into those if you're interested.
I find it fascinating because something I've also been observing recently is
that these big
influencers, they stand for a specific lifestyle, like Logan Paul, one of the
biggest US influences,
also YouTubers. I mean, he's done a lot of adventure stuff, extreme sports and
stuff like that.
And then he's brought out this drink, right? And it's also already turned into
a huge success
into a B2C product and company lifestyle. But people don't buy it because the
product is
exceptional. They buy it because of the lifestyle. It kind of portrays. And
then also there's Jim
Shark. I think one of the greatest successes is because of the community they
've built, right? I mean,
they've even created runners, clubs and their own gym and all that stuff. And
also then Eman
Gazi, not sure if you know him. He's also created the drink around his
lifestyle. And we can see more
and more. And those products, they like, they crush all numbers because people
identify so much
with the lifestyle. And I think it's very interesting to observe and there's
clearly a trend in B2C.
But what I'm kind of, what I haven't understood yet and maybe you can help me
is how can we transition
that into B2B? So I think there are a few learnings that we can dive into there
. The first one is this
understanding of an aspirational future. I think businesses that really
understand the future that
their customers desire and those customers are businesses, but also the
individuals in those
businesses, they really grab hold of something. So if we take some examples,
take Salesforce as an
example, right? Just that example a few times here. Once you're in the
Salesforce community,
trailblazers is this educational journey you go on through certifications where
your career
improves as you go through those steps. You've got this meeting ground at Dream
force or the
different world tours they do where you can meet with your community and there
's this idea of
progressing towards this, you know, this ideal outcome, this growth outcome. So
I think firstly,
there's a case of understanding, identifying and communicating this aspir
ational future for
your customers. The second thing I think is interesting, you've touched on it
is the people,
the community side. So I think we can learn that we have to join dots between
our community members
rather than just marketing to all of them. There is that genuine sense of
shared community,
but also to your point that yourselves and key people within your tent speaking
outwards are
influences, thought leaders about the topics where you want to own the topics
you want to have as
the topics you want to have as as ideal futures for your target customers. So
the community piece,
I think, is really interesting. And then thirdly, you've got to create
memorable experiences.
And in B2B, I think we've been really bad at that. And so you used the
documentary example,
that was memorable to you. It was in Barcelona a couple of years ago. It was a
shared event,
right? It was in person. Until today, I used this example actually in so many
conversations.
Yeah, or it could be, it's free advertising. Or it could be swag, or it could
be, you know,
it could be online, it could be video, whatever it might be, but those are
memories that people
make together. And so if we think about that, so we've got a sense of an aspir
ational future,
we've got a community that we go there with where there's an identity, and we
've got these kind of
these memorable experiences on the journey. We point back to all of those, I
think, are ideas
that B2B can learn from. And it's not just, you know, the snazzy sales forces,
I think of GitHub,
all my developer friends. There was that phase where everyone was moving to
GitHub. And that just
became almost the lifestyle add-on for any developer. It made their lives
easier. It made their
team's lives easier, their transparency. The credibility it gave you, the sense
of progress it gave
you. So I think you can do this in most sectors where you've got a large enough
target market.
Yeah. And how do you do that, pedal? No. So firstly, it all comes back to, do
we really understand
our customers? And we serve entrepreneurs who have a self-serve software
product. Most of them are
from non-US, non-UK markets. We have loads of US and UK audiences, but there
are so many vendors
trying to serve those VC-backed businesses, whereas we love serving globally
distributed software
businesses. Do we really understand the problems they face? Do we really
understand the challenges
in front of them as they go from zero to IPO? So a paddle, we want to
understand them more and more.
Today, I'm meeting with 60 or so software founders in Hamburg. I love traveling
around.
I'm meeting people face to face to understand their challenges and their
problems.
And then once we understand where they are, we understand what we do to help
them. We understand
how that fits into an overall journey. We talk about these invisible barriers
to growth
that these software founders face. I remember experiencing those as a software
founder myself.
I wanted to focus on the product and the customer. And suddenly there were
legal issues and
hiring issues. And how do we deal with this tax and how do we price our product
? Those are
invisible barriers to growth that we can go and solve. So we understand our
audience. We
understand our product. And now it's about how do we be incredibly creative
about communicating that?
How do we break through? Because I think mediocrity is really, really
competitive.
Chuking up another e-book, extremely competitive. Doing another MeToo post,
extremely competitive.
But what's not competitive is filming a documentary about an acquisition we did
, or sending a
device into space to process a payment, or doing some documentary storytelling
about some of our
customers and how they've started in villages and then ended up selling around
the world.
I think there's some really interesting space in those areas.
Yeah. So what's the next kind of... What's the next development phase of where
will this
kind of go into when we now see more businesses creating their own Netflix kind
of platform?
And if we look at B2C, I mean, there's brands that use big celebrities as their
face of the brand,
like Rocha Federer, Sidi and Murphy, and people like that. Do you think this
will also be a case
where there's this big, I don't know, Dreamforce event, for example. And we
will see, I don't know,
Rocha Federer become the face of the conference. And... Would you say that
could be an opportunity
hard as for a developer, or would you say maybe not a B2B? I do think celebrity
endorsements in B2B
is super interesting. If you can find an alignment between somebody who is well
-known and lines
up perfectly with your values, I think that's super compelling. It can be
extremely expensive,
but if you've got a mass market appeal, even if it's a B2C product, that's a
super interesting
way to go. I also just think that in a market, which is becoming increasingly
competitive,
businesses that work out their fundamentals and just execute on them. We carft
a week, month,
after month, year after year, end up building that competitive advantage, that
moat. And often that
moat is in brand awareness. We're not, I don't believe we're in a world of just
winner takes all.
At the same time, businesses who have spent the time and spent the resource and
spent the
thinking to build that audience awareness and affinity. Every study shows when
you've done that in
your target segment, your demand conversions go up. It's really simple. And so
I think doing that ahead
of time is competitive advantage. And then I down market, if it's hard to
acquire new customers,
this is something you can do reasonably cost effectively and make a pool to
fish out of in the
future. So we'll be seeing Tiger Woods on Pettles Studio soon. Not sure we
could afford Tiger Woods.
And you mentioned Netflix and Pettles Studio as a bunch. I think it's really
interesting that
video is one of the encapsulations of this trend that we are seeing. But I don
't think it's the only
one. I think video is super compelling and how it communicates personality, in
how it can
communicate that rich experience. But just putting video as the format choice,
I think undermines
what we're trying to do here, which is understand their context and deliver
value into that context.
And so many businesses, they don't do this because they don't feel they've got
a nice studio,
or they don't feel they've got the right kit or the editing ability. And I just
think that those
are false obstacles we place in front of us. I mean just look at TikTok, what
kind of stuff works
there. Almost no one has a professional studio. And they do it kind of dance in
front of them.
You're right. You've obviously done it. But if we think about where this goes,
I draw parallels with
the category creation trend that happened three or four five years ago when
everyone wrote the
books and everyone tried to create their own category. Now I believe in the
fundamentals of that
approach. But if everybody creates their own category, you have categories of
one. And a category
of one is not a category part of the definition, a characteristic of a category
. So you look behind
your around you and there are followers and there are other people leaders and
there are people
ahead of you. And so you have to be careful with this when it comes to Netflix
and Billy and
Media Company. Are you going to build this media company on your own domain
with an audience of
one or two or ten or twenty? Maybe that is worth it. But I do think there are
some really
interesting partnership opportunities here too. And you talked about celebrity
partnerships,
but it could be partnerships with people who have an audience. You're
interested in it could be
partnerships with other trade bodies or other competitors. And I think that
approach is super
interesting on how you can combine media assets, how you can combine audiences
to achieve your
potential goals. We are already very deep into long-term brand plays, demand
creation,
kind of stuff. And coming from a time where the economy was kind of going down
a little bit,
we had to focus a lot as marketers on really hitting those pipeline targets. We
can
generate short-term revenue. How did you manage to still invest into that long-
term play
on pedal studios, for example, while you had such a big pressure on hitting
short-term goals.
And what was your justification? The job of every CMO is to manage two time
frames. This caught
as pipeline and some time in the future when we want a brand position and an
audience.
That second one is very ethereal and difficult to measure. But I do believe we
've got to constantly
operate on those two timeframes. And if we only operate on the first time frame
, then we lose out
on our preferred future. Because if you don't invest in brand, you pay the
price in customer
acquisition cost to every single quarter that goes on. And so for us, there was
a few things.
Firstly, our leadership team found a Christian, CEO, Jimmy, they get it. They
understand that
it lowers customer acquisition costs, enables us to reach the world and it will
be part of our
exit valuation whenever we choose to exit. And so that leadership belief is
really important.
The second thing is that I think many marketers divide up their brand and their
demand, spend,
or their programs. And I think that's a crying shame. Because if you do that,
it's so easy to cut
the brand stuff. If we think about what those two words mean for me, in every
interaction you want
to generate resonance so that you earn attention. And you want to do that for
two reasons, to change
people's mind, brand, how they perceive you, and to get people to act, demand.
And if you combine
those into the same programs, then you're able to fund them out of your
existing budget. So the
documentary, now you remember that, you said you've retold that story lots of
times. It feels like
it could be just a little brandy play. But the documentary showed up in our g
ong recordings,
I think 50 or 60 times in the next couple of months with with prospects. People
remembered it.
And it was something that was interesting, inspirational. It was a reason for
them to go and
find out who we were. So we saw that very clearly. Even to this day, I had
people watch out me or
people getting contact and say, that was something that we did. That was
something that we saw. And
we're doing what we do now as a result of it. The space campaign is another
example. Yeah, it was a nice,
three minute video of sending a rocket to space and processes in transaction.
Again, very clearly
linked to our consumer, customer insight about people wanting to go globally.
But behind it was
an ABM program that generated demand. And so I do think we have to think about
things holistically and not
separate our budgets and teams into camps where you can really easily suffer
reductions in one of them.
I also believe that a lot of the parts that brand covers are also being covered
by really
creating demand. But also there's more to it when you actually focus on the
demand play. It's also
not only, hey, we got a big brand. And this is what you should perceive about
it and stuff like that.
But also when this brand will become relevant for you to get to know the
product better and really
kind of know the timing for it. Why should, for example, at what kind of time
you look into
pedal, for example, as a product, which brand doesn't really take care of? It's
more like the more
people we reach the better kind of stuff. But demand is more focused on the
impact that one touchpoint
has with a person. And I think connecting the two obviously will be the most
powerful but also
the hardest and most complex. And we've just got to do better. So I talked to
there about brand campaigns that have a demand impact. I completely agree it's
traditional demand
campaigns that have a brand impact. So if you're doing a podcast, why not do it
well? If you do
a customer story, why not actually do it well instead of using that budget on
another ebook,
why don't you find a more creative way of telling the story? Your SDR call
scripts, your SDR
outbound outreaches. Are they building brand or are they actually undermining
it? Every one of those
interactions has an opportunity to move both hearts and minds as well as
actions. And I mean,
with every outreach also, you can decide if you want to kind of get more people
to act, which is
also the short term play, but then also there's a possibility of doing it in a
long-term way of
just adopting the mindset of how can I actually provide most value with that
email and actually
create demand so that people in future will then come to me. And I think that's
also what
just differentiates the ones that have short term success versus the ones that
really thrive in
a long-term sustainable business then. What you've just said around as a market
er, and I think
that really does differentiate good from great marketers. Great marketers
always have the two-time
zones in mind. How hard was it for you when you had this pressure coming from
everywhere? We see
your CEO, maybe your team, also customers, partners to still invest into the
long-term play.
Partly, it's because I never wanted signed up for Aspire to be a CMO. I was a
software founder,
then ended up taking that part of the business and when we exited it, that was
the seat I got.
And then it was a natural next step when I started working with paddlers and
advisor and they had
an open CMO role to step in and help them in this way. But I'm seeing it from
the business perspective,
not the marketing perspective. So I think that's really important and I think
that's one way marketers
can always aspire to grow is by seeing the business engine, the value creation
that's happening
across every touch point in the business rather than just their piece of it.
And then secondly,
it's about having a thesis. I think so many marketers get bogged down into
being data-driven. And of
course, we all want to be data-driven. But there's no point optimizing around
the data points you can see
if you don't have a thesis about why people are acting, why people are
responding, what is the problems
in their business, how they decide to buy. So building a thesis around those
things that you can
then test and prove with your data, I feel is much more compelling than just
saying this campaign's
working or not working and therefore we're going to turn this off or that off
in a specific time
frame. So in what we were doing, we had a very clear three-part thesis on our
marketing.
And this has been true since the day I joined to now two and a bit of years
later. Number one,
we want to make downmarket frictionless. What that means is we want to
increasingly invest in
our self-serve so that people can come in even if they're the tiniest business
around the world
and they can go live if they want to without ever talking to us. And so we want
that brand to
demand an engine to work and it really does work. 27% of our revenue right now
is self-serve. So we
want to make downmarket frictionless. Number two, we want to be surgical in
finding new markets.
So we just don't want to go up the revenue curve and say we can serve bigger
customers that
look like those we're serving today because that might not be true. We want to
find pockets of new
GMV pockets of new revenue and businesses that we can serve really, really well
with our existing
product and proposition. So we want to be surgical at market. And then the
third one is we dubbed it as
we want to create a two-horse race. When you're a software founder, you've got
a choice. Either you
build up your payments infrastructure in a piecemeal way. You buy a PSP and
then you buy a tax tool
and you buy a reconciliation tool and you get your high-sum engineers to stitch
it together and
you hire a payments team eventually to build out more customizations yourself.
You buy a finance
team to work it all or that's piecemeal or a platform. You choose someone like
Paddle to take
care of all of that for you. And so that was a positioning goal. So we want to
be frictionless
down market, surgical up market and we want to create this two-horse race
because if every single
software founder or software leader knows that there are two choices rather
than just one, the default
piecemeal, then we'll end up winning. And so those three were really important
to us. And then the
final thing that underpins everything we do is we want to be the most helpful
brand in SaaS.
We want to access more and more data, analyze data, show people what the market
's saying,
show people what's working, what's not working. And if we can do those three
things while being
the most helpful brand in SaaS, we win. So that's sat behind all of those
decisions we made.
I love that. I think that's also how we approach marketing. We want to be the
most
helpful agency for B2B SaaS companies when it comes to modern marketing and
revenue marketing.
And it's played out so well. I mean, it's always a long-term play. But you see
results coming in
from the work you've done a year ago now, right? And I think what you've told
me also in our
conversation before this podcast that you've achieved something like 150% of
your marketing targets
in Q1, which is insane. I think not many people or companies can say that now.
But it's probably
most likely because of the work you've done during the hard times of last year
and maybe the year
before. Let's let you now to hitting those goals. It's been really interesting
how we've started
this year. And I think there are a few things that are underpinning that. I do
believe there's
signs of a bit of a comeback in growth rates in the markets we serve. Tell us
more about that.
What can we see in the market? Andrew, you're sitting on so much data. What's
important for
people now? Yeah, we see about 36 billion of ARR of software and subscription
revenue.
So we're seeing a few things. On consumer software, we've seen a real kick over
the last
couple of months. It's been great to see that come back in B2B. We've had three
consecutive months
of growth, which is the first time we've seen that since a year and a half ago.
And is that
across all regions globally or is it mostly in the US, for example? No, so we
're actually seeing
some of the emerging regions grow faster, much faster than the US and the UK.
So companies that internationalize are doing very well right now. So what's
emerging regions
for users like India or? Yeah, depends for each company and the products they
sell. But in that
in America, in India, yes. I think in Southern Europe as well, Eastern Europe.
So we're seeing
some really interesting opportunities there. And the main learning there is,
you don't just
believe one market is your goal because actually that makes you at huge risk of
the macroeconomics
in that industry. So I think we have started to see that. I think secondly, you
mentioned just the
hard yards over the last year or two. Last year was hard for everybody, right?
A paddle. We went
through a CEO transition as our CEO Jimmy stepped up to be the CEO. We rebuilt
all of our core
platform and launched that. We went through big market downturn with Silicon
Valley Bank and all
kinds of other nonsense going on. And in the midst of all of that, we still
grew, but it was hard.
And so I think as we've entered 2024, yes, we're seeing some market resurgence.
But also we're
seeing the value of alignment across our company. And I think as someone who's
mostly been involved
with quite early stage businesses, it's hard to, it's hard to overestimate the
value of an aligned
organization. And I know you've spent a lot of time at Yoriyaa building that
alignment across
all of your teams. But a paddle, we've got multiple product lines. We're
serving all of these
different ICPs, all these different ideal customer profiles with different
types of product,
all with different margins. It's quite complex. But over the last year, we've
taken care to line
up behind a consistent strategy and then start executing on it. And it's been
really, really good
to see the results of that bare fruit over the course of the last couple of
quarters. And then
the final thing is, as we're chasing for new bits of GMV, new pockets of
revenue, we're finding
ways of being much more specific, customized, personalized about it. I know one
of your propositions
is helping businesses enter the German market because you can add this local
ization as a
dominant player within the German market. You can add this localization lens
onto American and
UK and other businesses coming and marketing here. And that's been a real
learning for us too.
We now have regional focuses and segment focuses in our marketing, which is
much more customized
than we have in prior years. So interesting. I want to, for the last part of
this podcast,
I have a little bit into more of you as a person instead of all your work
topics.
I've been known you for a bit now. We've spent a few days together and you're
also in our advisory
board. I've learned a ton of from you and we had many conversations. And for me
, you're always the
person who's super relaxed and you're always happy, you're always so positive.
And I mean,
you've achieved so much in your career. I think it's outstanding what you've
done. Even now,
I mean, being a CM of pedal, I can imagine there's a lot of like obviously
responsibility that you
have a lot of pressure, high targets. I mean, just also looking at your growth
rates. It probably
is not always easy. I could imagine. But at the same time, I feel like you're
so content with
everything in your life. Like what you do, but also your big family guy. I know
that. So,
how do you stay so relaxed all the time? But you have so much responsibility at
home as a dad,
but also as an executive. How do you do that? What's your secret sauce?
There's definitely no secrets. I think a few things. Firstly, I love the wisdom
Churchill quote, success is stumbling from one failure to the next with no loss
of enthusiasm.
And that sums up my journey. Loads of failures, but lots of enthusiasm to get
back up and keep going.
I think some people just get beaten up by their own failures. And people who
keep walking through
is not they didn't have the failures as they put on a smile, got up and had
another go. That's
really important to me. I do believe that optimism is a free catalyst. If you
walk into a room with
an optimistic mindset, you can gather people around you and you can start
walking towards that
preferred future. And yet so many people leave it at the side. So I really
believe that. And
fundamentally, I love what I do. I'm very privileged to do the job I do. I'm
very privileged to
work with the people I work with. But even if everything fails at paddle for a
quarter, as you said,
I've got a fantastic family, my wife and kids. I've got great friends around me
. And I think
putting things in that longer term perspective is really important for us
because so many founders,
so many leaders in businesses get caught up and their identity becomes intertw
ined with their
career. And we have to remember that we're human beings, we're not human doings
. And separating
those two identities, I think, is absolutely essential to being able to balance
stuff that's going
wrong at work, with making sure you bring your whole self into the dinner table
with your kids
at the evening. So when I talk to peers that are my age also very successful,
if they look at you,
for example, you have everything they wish they had, right? I mean, you had an
exit. You've probably
made a lot of money already. You're not doing too bad now in terms of your
career. You have a family
already. You have a nice house somewhere around London. All that stuff, right?
Like why do you still
have put so much pressure on yourself every day of doing the CMR job if you
didn't really have to?
What is it that motivates you still? I don't find turning up to work at PIDAL
as me putting loads
of pressure on myself. Genuinely, I'm doing this job, I'm doing this role
because there's a fantastic
team around me. And I really enjoy that. I've done advisory work and I could
just be a portfolio
advisor doing a few bits here and there. But I love being part of a team. I
really do. I love being
part of a team whether you're a backstab against the wall or whether you're
going out on the attack.
I love being part of a team. So that's really important to me. Secondly, there
's a really
interesting blend of the go-to-market experience I've had and the
entrepreneurial experience I've
had because we're serving founders and we're in a business which is in its
scale-up journey where
there's still enough broken about everything we're doing that we've got to use
that entrepreneurial
mindset to fix things on the fly as we scale. And I'm not sure I'd have
anywhere near the same
interest or motivation at a much larger business. And so both of those things
get me up. I love
traveling. I love meeting people face to face. That's a key part of my role as
well. And so no,
I'm really content. And another thing that I've spoken about with a few people
who are my age with
kids our age is that this time in my life, I love the fact that I'm able to
have weekends with
my children. And I'm able to have dinner with my children when I'm not
traveling and I'm able to
be there in a way that those early days when we were building IDO, it was all
day every day.
I can't really know. And I'm very grateful now that of course I work long hours
, I work hard.
But there's a balance in my life that's sustainable that wasn't when I was
starting
founding a business. How do you manage that? How do you keep that balance all
the time?
So I don't have kids and I struggle sometimes even. My version of balance is
you think about a
pendulum. My version of balance is swinging from one to the other and maybe
waving at the point
of balance as you zoom past it. So right now I'm away from home and I'm
completely focused on the
meetings I've got all this afternoon, all this evening. Here is podcast. But
tomorrow afternoon I'll
be home and I'll be completely focused hopefully on picking up my kid from
school. And so for me
balance isn't a steady state. Balance is being comfortable with swinging from
one to the next.
And I also think that it's important to have people around you who are willing
to speak truth.
I love my wife is able to bring real insight into when she thinks I'm pushing
it too hard,
when I don't have enough margin and she'll tell me. Other friends around me who
are willing to
tell me that as well. And I think that's important because in the work context
it's rare that people
will tell you that. So having people outside of work who are able to speak that
is important.
Nice. One last question. What are you most bullish about in the next coming of
months in the B2B
SaaS marketing world? Wow. In the B2B SaaS marketing world. That's
disconcertingly specific. In the B2B SaaS marketing world I'm bullish about a
bias towards quality
and creativity. I think it's really cool that we were in the event in Golden
Hour in Brooklyn
and seeing all of these people around us, creators around us who are putting
their heart and soul
into what they're doing. I love that. And I think that is going to be buoyed by
some market
resurgence where we're going to start seeing some customer growth and net new
customer growth.
I'm excited by that because I believe people who take a long-term perspective
and understand
the fundamentals of their business, who their customer is, what the market is
they serve, how they
can reach them, how they can measure that, and then just execute on that every
day with creativity
and with quality are going to separate themselves from the rest. So yeah, that
's exciting.
Especially with the rise of AI where it is just so much quantities of content
everywhere.
Only differentiate with quality, right? 100% AI will do away with the mediocre
marketer.
You can't do that anymore because it already does a mediocre marketer's job
well enough.
So that's a massive challenge. So what's the biggest tip you can give to our CM
OS?
CMOS are there listening today. So one thing that's important to me and
everyone says it,
but not many people do it, is customer proximity. How many customers can I be
with every single week?
And how can I give the gift of customer proximity to our teams? How can I take
that insight to them?
How can I make sure they are going and speaking to customers? I think it's so
important, particularly
with our creative teams that we give them two things. We give them customer
proximity,
and we give them time. And now in the rigmarole of building our businesses so
often,
we forget those two things and then ask why there's no creativity and quality.
You have to give those two inputs in order to demand those two outputs.
Cool. Love that. Thank you so much for everything you've said today. I think
was super valuable inside for content. If anybody out there has a question to
Andrew,
I'm sure people can reach out to you on LinkedIn. Yeah, Grammy on LinkedIn.
He's a very approachable guy, so pitch yourself. No jokes aside. But if you
have a question
about anything we've talked today, feel free to add in the comments or text
Andrew or me on LinkedIn.
Yeah, thanks for listening and I guess see you next week. Cheers.