Numbers and Narratives
Numbers and Narratives bridges the gap between the marketing/customer experience and data - come listen to marketing and CX experts talk about how to use data to better engage with your customers and provide a great experience.
Numbers and Narratives
Bundling Vs. Unbundling: The SaaS Debate - Sean and Ibby
In this episode of Numbers and Narratives, we rambled about a wide array of things including conference experiences, the trend of bundling vs. unbundling in SaaS products, and the challenges of building software for small businesses.
Key takeaways from the discussion:
Value of smaller, focused conferences
Bundling trend in SaaS products
Challenges of all-in-one solutions
Rippling as an example of the above
Importance of "one core feature" in bundled products
We talked about the benefits of attending smaller, more focused conferences that prioritize education and networking over aggressive product pitching. In regards to software, we focused on SMBs and the potential drawbacks of all-in-one solutions.
All right Sean. So in the length of a tweet or a tweet thread what did we talk about today?
Speaker 2:Bundling airports and Parker Conrad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, shout out to Parker Conrad, enjoy the episode. I'm Amy Syed, I'm Sean Collins and this is Numbers and Narratives is Numbers and Narratives. So I was at a conference this week and it was a company called Question Pro and didn't really know a ton about them. They're really cool. They work kind of in the survey space and one of the things that I was talking to them about last night was this is the first conference I've been to and, sean, you and I go to conferences a lot and it's kind of interesting to think about this.
Speaker 1:But I always feel like I'm being sold to Every single company that puts on a conference. They kind of do this thing where every single session, for the most part, is a new product release that they have and they have a customer come up and talk about how much of a game changer it is and that's fine. But interestingly, I feel this company question like I went to their conference and coming out of it I am like wow, like I want to be like a brand ambassador for this company. I had such a good time and I think one of the biggest reasons is they didn't try to sell me the entire time, like they have survey software for both you know employee experience, customer experience and market research and they have a lot of really really cool features, but they didn't explicitly talk about it during every single or actually even most of the sessions. What they did instead was in the middle of the sessions, they'd have little things like hey, we're going to use our live polling product which is free, by the way that was something I realized while we were doing it To do a quiz for the entire conference where you'd like win big prizes if you, you know got the right answer. And that was that was pretty sweet. I like now know about their product and I know about its capabilities. I know about all it's like cool stuff, but the the sessions that I went to were actually really really smart.
Speaker 1:Individuals that you know not not not all of them were question for customers. That not all of them were question for customers. They were just people that were affiliated in some regard, or people that they thought were smart came on to talk about everything from safety to the right way to set up, how to develop a good brand experience through surveys, talk about AI Everyone does that but I thought it was really really good and I think it's tantamount to the culture that they've built. The culture that they've built is really, really good. I want to partner with this company, with Cotera, in some way, because of how much I enjoy their conference. Anyway, rant over.
Speaker 2:I guess there's two ways maybe to successfully have an event like that. You can do what they did, which is super cool, I agree, to not be pushing the product, to not make them the hero of this situation, but have it be one where it's just like let's educate people, because I guess it almost goes back to the five levels of awareness, right Like it's. You obviously have some level of awareness. If you're at this conference to begin with, you have some level of understanding of the problem and the pain point and all that. But you know, if you, if you focus on just educating people and helping people learn and figure out how to be better, whether it's with or without your product, they're going to develop some level of trust and affinity towards you. They maybe they want to work with you down the line. You know, I think there's a lot of products, depending on kind of your price point, where you want to be like aspirational for companies for a long time of. Like man, I can't wait till we're big enough to use this product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. That's actually definitely. I want to find a way of like introducing Cotera's customers to Question Pro Like compared to, especially like other people in the space like Quattrox and Medallia, like they're going to be the first people I go to. I'm like, oh, you should check out this company now.
Speaker 2:That's the best thing, right, like now, even if, like, they didn't make a sale to you which they still might, because you could use it to for your own research and analysis and stuff like that. If all came out of that was they got 15 people to tell all of their friends and clients and podcast listeners about their product. Like that's a major win. Oh, for sure, and that's really cool, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the other way you can approach it is.
Speaker 2:You can go hard the opposite side, where it's just like a Kool-Aid fest, right, like you were just getting people hyped up about your product. For that to work, the attendance like really have to be power users already. I think Braze Forge is actually a great example of this. The people who go to Braze Forge there's a few who are prospects and being courted on through this, but for the most part it's power users of Braze who want to be around other email geeks and learn what other people are doing and just hang out and learn about the new features that are going to be released and like it's a cool experience too. Like I love. I love Forge. But I think those are kind of the two different ends of the spectrum and everything else in between kind of sucks, where I won't say who it was, but the last conference you and I went to together.
Speaker 2:I found the conference to be a yeah, I mean it was a complete waste of time, other than just like when we got to sit outside and talk to people completely not about the product that was throwing this event. It was awful because you're just pitching your feature set to me and I don't care. I didn't come because it was yours. I came because of the topic of customer experience and I felt like I got hoodwinked a little bit into just listening to demos for an hour before we built.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's definitely right, and I think one of the things that it's kind of taught me is one the events that I run slash, the events that I hope to run in the coming year and also, just in general, the conferences I want to go to, I think I'm going to start to look for smaller. I think I'm going to start to look for smaller conferences, like the like x day, which is what this company question pro did. It's not like tiny, it's not like it was like 100 people, it's like, I think, three, four or five hundred people. But the thing that is interesting about it is all of the people that were there were kind of like they were there, like they're there because they're interested in something around the product, and I think you find a higher density of people that are actually fairly interesting and would be up to it.
Speaker 1:It's also just easier to talk to them, right, like you're going to a happy hour, you're going to a dinner and there's just a slightly smaller number of folks. It's less. What do you say? It's less, I don't know. Scary, intimidating Intimidating may be the right word to like go up to and talk to a bunch of people and it feels less like just an excuse for people to go out and like rage.
Speaker 2:Like I went to Affiliate Summit West a couple of years ago and every single person that I talked to like it was known that this was just like a party. Like I was going there because we-.
Speaker 2:Oh shop talk is like this Just kind of moved on from our affiliate guy. We didn't have someone else, and so I was going to kind of meet with our existing affiliates, build that relationship, let them know, like hey, we've got someone else coming soon, everything will be fine, maybe make a couple of connections. And we were evaluating a new affiliate software at the time so I was hoping to get some recs there're still working. Because I was trying to like check in on east coast hours before. It was like how are you even awake? Like weren't you out till like four last night. I was like no, I went to bed at 9 30 because I'm responsible, but everyone else there was just there to get hammered.
Speaker 2:And like party in vegas and have vendors pay for stuff. Like that's not, you're not making meaningful connections there. You're not actually learning anything there because all the speakers are just pushing their products, not not really teaching. It's awful. Like the. The best conference I've ever been to is still unspam, which is really good. Emails conference, like you're saying, a couple hundred people centered around a topic that people are care about and passionate about. You weren't getting sold to. It was. It was great yeah, in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I feel the same way about shop talk. Like I kind of dread going to shop talk every year for this very reason, like it's just not, it's just I don't know folks that and look, listen, like I I am a vendor, I do sell things. I just like meeting people who are similarly minded, that are interested in experience and are interested in doing this kind of thing and it's yeah, I find the same thing. I feel like this way about a lot of the big Vegas conferences. Actually, you go I think that's the MO is some company who is trying to get your business, is going to pay to take you to some club or some experience or some whatever, and you sign up for it because you have to get the five second pitch, but you just kind of are there to get drunk and it's like all right. It's just not for me.
Speaker 2:I don't really want to do those kinds of things I feel like if that's your thing, go for it.
Speaker 1:Marketing budget. I just don't really usually meet people that I find that are that interesting at those things.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I think I think you know my general flag is if it's in Las Vegas, there is going to be no value that comes out of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, las Vegas is terrible Vegas is just generally like an awful, awful place and it has cheap yeah, it has cheap conference space and that's why everyone wants to do it there and whatever.
Speaker 2:But I mean, you know it does attract people. It attracts the people that are going to go and be wined and dined. You know, some, some people very much want to have the get me out of my life and out of town for a while and let me go crazy. And you know, to each their own, yeah.
Speaker 1:By the way, this is the. This is the first time, I think, that I've thought during a podcast recording that maybe people will come.
Speaker 2:If people actually listen to this, this, they will maybe be angry in the comments um, which is fine yeah, uh, cool, the mayor of las vegas is who's a rabid listener will be.
Speaker 1:The mayor of las vegas really loves experience and marketing and all the other things that we talked about. He also sent me a message right before we started recording, which I because I am leaving this hotel immediately after I realized I didn't respond to you. Oh, no, I did. I said, no, let's do it. Oh wait, no, you sent me another text message. No, I sent you a different one. You sent a different one. It's all good.
Speaker 2:I suggested two topics. I said we could talk about SEO and content marketing or we could talk about SaaS. A question I've been asked a few times in the last two weeks by five or six different VCs is the idea of bundling versus unbundling. I think we've all been experiencing this wave for the last couple of years of very niche, very specific SaaS products and now there's a lot of questions about are we moving back towards the bundled massive one? So we could chat about that. I like that.
Speaker 2:I was just reading some interesting stuff about NerdWallet's SEO strategy and the impacts of that, and so I'd be happy to talk about content marketing.
Speaker 1:Those are both really good. Something very, very quickly on the unbundling versus bundling bit is I think you're right, but I think like one of the reasons is that oh man, I really hope VCs aren't listening to this. Vcs like VCs kind of just like they tend to be, like popular on unpopular items in the VC landscape and, I think, point solutions because the barometer for how much money you have to make as a business and your TAM has to be so much higher because investors have, you know, higher interest rates. By the way, I actually think the nerd wallet thing is more interesting and I kind of actually want to talk about that during this episode. But the only thing I have to say about unbundling versus bundling is I think part of it's the market because if an investor has a 5%, you know a 5% yield by just chucking it into Ally Bank or whatever. Shout out Ally Bank for 5% interest rates.
Speaker 2:I think, like I think because, like this episode is not brought to you by Allied Bank.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, we'll start this episode off by saying it's not sponsored by Allied Bank. I think that because the barometer for what you need to like the vision basically has to be so much higher. Like, instead of convincing somebody, I had a. I was talking to an investor yesterday that you know we were texting about a company that will remain unnamed. But they were like, oh yeah, like they're only at $100 million and not really growing that fast. I was like, my God, if you had told me three years ago, when I was investing in companies, that this company was going to hit $100 million, I would have been ecstatic, like ecstatic. And now it's just apparently not good enough because it's like, oh, they were supposed to meet $100 million three years ago, but now they have to be like a billion dollars in revenue for anyone to even like be happy about it. And I'm like, listen, most of you guys have never built companies before. Shut up, it's, it's whatever. That's not the issue.
Speaker 2:That's not the issue. I take with it, Like I think it's fine that most of them have never built companies before. The bigger, the bigger question is like when you have these megalith companies that you know all in one solutions they usually suck, and that's the concern, right, it's like they're probably good at one thing and that was the thing they originally set out to solve, and then, rather than getting really good at a second thing, they got decent at 10 things, to kind of hey, we're an email platform, so we're going to be great at sending emails. Email marketers also sometimes send texts and want to do analysis and segmentation, so we'll give you a really shitty interface to do very basic SQL or whatever, With a ton of limitations. It's not that helpful, but they can say they have it, and so people will.
Speaker 2:When brands and marketing operations teams or finance teams are doing their reviews of all of the software subscriptions they have and they see hey, you're spending on an analytics tool, an email tool, an SMS tool, a push tool, a personalization tool, a segmentation tool All of those are features within this one. Just consolidate and save us a bunch of money. Sure, we save a bunch of money, but we have one shitty tool instead of five good tools now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, look here's, we can pick on some real life companies here for a sec actually, like so. I mean, cotero was selling to e-commerce businesses for a while when we first started. We've actually we haven't necessarily exited that market anymore, but it's not a core focus as far as because of something valuable that I learned, learned. So look at Klaviyo, right, klaviyo three years ago was primarily an email product. Klaviyo has now come out with they don't have push, but they have SMS, they have data analytics and reporting, they have segmentation tools and a company that was buying Cotera for personalization and segmentation a tenant for SMS and Klaviyo.
Speaker 2:Wait, klaviyo does have push now. Oh, anyways, damn, anyways, damn All right, that took me too long to Google and confirm before I interrupted you. But they have Push now.
Speaker 1:Wait, that's kind of cool, good, good for Klaviyo. Oh yeah, email, sms and Push automations. So okay, listen, basically what this means is if there is a $25 million or a $ a year business that needed to buy Cotera to do segmentation and personalized recommendations. I don't know why I'm first there, by the way. Like Klaviyo definitely comes first, which is email, attentive probably comes second. There's probably like there's probably like Postpilot probably comes third, right, Like direct mail and Cotera comes fourth because they want to be able to personalize stuff.
Speaker 1:My sort of thing is all right, postpilot can do. I guess clavio can't do direct mail. But you're gonna google it now and probably clavio can do direct mail. But, like, instead of buying clavio, attentive and cotera at each like thousands of dollars a year or tens of thousands of dollars a year, probably you can now get away with doing just clavio for a decent amount of time, right, like you can, instead of buying three pieces of software when you're 25 million, you can wait until you're 75 million to actually like get the next level up right, and I think, like that market capture is part of the appeal of these kinds of businesses, where I think the bet that Klaviyo is taking is like, listen, like we were helping a customer of ours decide between using Klaviyo's SMS and using Ateneb's SMS, and one of the things that I found was Ateneb's SMS is actually a lot more customizable because you can use Liquid Logic and you can use all these things.
Speaker 1:But they're a really, really small team and my thought process was all right. Klaviyo is like a lot more basic than this, but for the thing that I know you want to do with it, klaviyo is going to be fine and so that was a recommendation and you're with Klaviyo, you're using Klaviyo SMS. I don't actually think that you're going to be able to do a 10x thing, because it's like a lot more complicated and, like that was my recommendation, I don't know, do all of Atena's features and so why would you pay them tens of thousands of dollars a year to be able to use things where you're going to be doing the exact same thing with Klaviyo and it's not going to cost you any more money? And that was, I think, what they did. I hope.
Speaker 2:Atena's team is not listening to this. It's almost like when you're catering to, or when one of your buyer S side of SMB, right, like you, have pared down features, pared down capabilities, low cost. Then, as they mature and move up, they want to add in all these features, but they don't want to migrate off of the original tool. So they start looking for external, other tools that solve those problems, like another SMS platform or another push like PushOwl or something like that. Yeah, and then they realize, okay, we've matured enough that we might as well consolidate again, because now our costs are ballooning across all these other ones. And so we'll move from MailChimp to Klaviyo, and then that means they can also move off PushOwl and do it Klaviyo. They'll move off of some cheap SMS tool and do it in Klaviyo, and then again you used the right word I think of like leveling up. Eventually they are going to level up and they're going to want the bigger features, and then it becomes a game about a combination of features and integrations, right, and so I think even Attentive, right.
Speaker 2:Like I would say, if you are evaluating Attentive, and again, let's just keep the bad comments coming, don't even go with attentive, go with postscript. Uh, like it has better integrations with clavio, and so now at least you have a center of, like a single center you can primarily use as clavio, but you have the extra features of a postscript or an attentive. But somewhere you like, you do want to have a primary platform where you're managing most things and if you're not going to consolidate that in like a cdp, then you're going to want to do it in like a Klaviyo and have tools that integrate directly with it and you can see the messages they got and you can see the events and all that stuff. Yeah, that's a hundred percent right.
Speaker 1:That's exactly correct, I think. How do you do you use Rippling? Like at built or like? Rippling is, I think, actually the best example of a company that's done this. So Rippling is HR software. For those who don't and I am the biggest Rippling fanboy I think that Rippling could come to me and be like give me all of the money in your bank account and I would maybe give it to them. It's run by Parker Conrad.
Speaker 1:So Parker Conrad was the founder of Zenefits, actually a great entrepreneur. I respect him a lot Personally. I feel like he's one of those people that actually kind of lives up to a lot of the things that he says. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are poorly worshipped. They don't actually deserve the worship that they get. But Parker Conrad, I think, is a really nice guy. I think he genuinely cares about building interesting things. He's a good dude. Anyway, rippling I love.
Speaker 1:It's our HR software. We use it at Cotera and one thing I will say is it actually the UX is not good. I don't have that much to compare it to. Besides, like ADP, which is what we use at Peloton, and I didn't really. Adp was horrible, but that's because it's legacy software. Rippling is new software and it is quite like. The UI is not great. The UX is also not great. I feel like I'm actually on the phone with their customer support every single time I have to do something. Granted, they don't make me log into the platform.
Speaker 1:The platform is relatively set up and go. The reason I love it is because it combines the basic necessities of having to pay people in multiple states, having to pay people cross border. We have UK employees. We have US employees having to deal with health insurance. That's the reason why I'll pay them anything, so their PEO is really, really good. Now, the way that health insurance works is, if you're a small business, you don't have very much negotiating leverage. So usually if you want to provide a plan for your employees, you have to basically go and talk to an insurance broker. You have to say they are trying to, you know, mitigate your risk across all your employees. And if you don't have that many employees, you don't really get that good of a plan because that risk mitigation is pretty high. Big companies can get around this because they have massive employee bases. What Rippling does is they basically treat every single person that uses the Rippling platform as like part of the Rippling company.
Speaker 2:And then Rippling goes yeah.
Speaker 1:So Rippling then goes and negotiates with the insurance companies on your behalf, and what that allows me to do as a business owner is I can pay out of pocket for every single one of Cotera's employees full. We pay for health insurance because of the fact that it's so much less expensive than it would be if I had bought it on the open market. We were being quoted $800, $900 a month per employee when we first started Cotera and I think for our base plan, which is pretty good, it's like an HSA plan $2,500 deductible, which for me is great. I'm a young guy, I don't get sick that often, I don't have to go to the doctor, but we have all of the same plans that I had at Peloton and it's like $250, $265 a month. It's like very, very inexpensive and we can just pay for it, and that's why I love Rippling.
Speaker 1:They have one core feature, one core thing that basically lets me, you know, hire people and offer them something really, really good. But they also deal with 401k match. They also deal with healthcare. They also deal with taxes. They also deal with my employer taxes. They deal with buying all of the electronics and provisioning all the apps and even though the UX isn't that good because they have all those features and I spend, I think, $11,000 a year with them, like $1,000 a month for all this. I will continue to pay it, just because it takes so much headache off my shoulders. Sometimes the bad UX is if you don't have to use the product every single day and don't have to become a power user. Maybe the features themselves, I don't know. Maybe now I'm Kotaro's taking the bundling place and maybe I'm just our UX is not awesome. We need to improve it.
Speaker 2:This is a long-winded way of saying please forgive our poor UX.
Speaker 1:Please forgive my poor UX.
Speaker 2:Please forgive my poor UX. Okay, this episode is also not sponsored by Rippling. That's cool man. I don't know anything about HR. I don't either.
Speaker 1:That's the thing right, Like most people that start businesses don't. Hr is fundamentally unsexy. You don't need to know that much about it, but it's actually really hard and they solve it for you and I'm happy to pay that cost?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's definitely a problem that I think you should absolutely just pay to outsource and not have to stress about. Do you have any examples of products that are bundled? I mean, it was a roller coaster, right. You started off talking about how much you love this dude and he's worth the worship and your money, and then you went straight into how shitty their UI is and how you have to talk to support. All the time I was on the edge of my seat.
Speaker 1:Parker Conrad, if you're listening to this, please, please talk to me. My co founder, we love you, just like my fiance loves Taylor Swift.
Speaker 2:I love Parker Conrad. Yeah, you'll be selling out European stadium tours in no time, Parker. One small business founder at a time.
Speaker 1:Should we call it?
Speaker 2:there, I guess. I mean, I don't think we have time to talk about SEO anymore, so we should probably do that some other time. Oh yeah, crap we don't talk about SEO.
Speaker 1:I think we should definitely talk about SEO. Okay, yeah, I really want to learn about NerdWallet's SEO, but I think that's maybe we can just do that next week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it was a pretty fascinating especially. You know they are a partner of mine at Built and so it was very interesting to see some stats that I'm not normally seeing, that Ahrefs exposed for us. So that was pretty cool. I can post the. I'll send you the links. You can put it in the show notes.
Speaker 1:I wanted to learn about SEO. This is something that we're focusing on and I'm making a couple of growth hires. Side note if you're a great growth marketer and you want to join an early stage company, please reach out to me. At ibid, at Coteraco, it's kind of like a hybrid marketing sales role, but it'll be pretty exciting and very fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the other I was going to say. I actually have been talking for a while and our team has deliberately not pursued SEO as a strategy, and I think that most brands should also not pursue SEO as a primary growth strategy.
Speaker 1:All right, Before we go as always.
Speaker 2:I have a question for you. I want this on the public record. What is the appropriate amount of time to show up before your flight for a domestic flight? Hour and a half Hour and a half?
Speaker 1:Are you checking bags? No, no, that's the thing. If you're not checking bags, in an hour, hour and a half, hour and a half, I think For most like large American airports, I think like if you're like where I grew up Omaha, Nebraska you can show up literally like 45 minutes in advance, Like it takes you 15 minutes when we go to Memphis to visit Kristen's family.
Speaker 2:it's yeah like you're through security in like 10 minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so I think for those you could do it shorter, but I think on average for most like LaGuardia, LaGuardia, JFK, sometimes Newark I Google it because Newark can the United Terminal is absolutely bananas and the security line can be out the door. I think it also depends, Like, if you're traveling on a holiday, go longer. I usually do an hour and a half. I've got a fun story that I will tell you at some other point about a time during COVID when I showed up for a flight that I was going for an interview.
Speaker 1:I was flying across the pond for an interview for one day and I showed up and I had an image copy of my Vax card and they were like this is not acceptable. You must have like a physical Vax card, which I didn't have, and they'd like booked me on like a really expensive business class flight the day after Thanksgiving, the week, the day, the month, the Sunday night after Thanksgiving weekend. And I was like, oh my God, there I am definitely not going to get this job Slash. We were fundraising. It was actually a fundraising thing. It was like a VC that was doing it. I was like, oh man, they're going to be pissed. But yeah, I ended up getting on that flight. Long story short.
Speaker 2:That's not a long story. That's a long story Skipping the entire story.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you in the next episode. Tune in for the next episode to hear about how I did this and how I panicked. Before we go, please subscribe. Please share this with your friends. If you people that you think are going to be a great guest for us, we still do do guests, even though I think the last two that you've listened to and probably the next one won't have a guest. But, yeah, if you have a good guest that you love, please send them our way. If you yourself would be a good guest, give us a shout. Well, we'd love to have you on. See ya, bye.