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A masterclass on the services to product pivot | Nishant Patel @ Contentstack
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What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I tell you that in this episode, we are featuring a Patel who built a business in the US? The stereotype says that he would be running a motel or a convenience store - but this Patel has built a b2b SaaS company that is almost a unicorn.
Nishant Patel moved to the US when he was just 14, and then went on to become a techie in the San Francisco Bay area at the peak of the dot com bubble in the year 2000. He was there when the term cloud was coined, and he was so fascinated by the promise of the cloud that he quit his job and started Raw Engineering - which was helping companies adopt cloud technologies.
He then achieved the rare feat of building not one but three product businesses within that services business, and the biggest of them is Contentstack.
Contentstack is a fascinating business - it’s a pioneer in the space of the headless CMS, and this episode is a deep dive that will help you understand the content space and how it has evolved over the last decade, and what is the secret sauce behind Contentstack because of which it has raised almost 180 million dollars and is near a unicorn valuation.
Subscribe to the Founder Thesis podcast for more such deep dives with tech leaders.
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Transcript
Introduction and Background of Nishant Patel
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone. I'm Nishant Patel. I'm the co-founder and CTO at Contentstock.
00:00:17
Speaker
What's the first thing that comes to your mind when I tell you that in this episode we are featuring a Patel who built a business in the US. The stereotype says that he would be running a motel or a convenience store. But this Patel has built a B2B SaaS company that is almost a unicorn. Nishant Patel moved to the US s when he was just 14 and then went on to become a techie in the San Francisco Bay area at the peak of the dot-com bubble in the year 2000.
00:00:42
Speaker
He was there when the term cloud was coined, and he was so fascinated by the promise of cloud that he quit his job and started raw engineering, which was helping companies adopt cloud technologies. He then achieved the rare feat of building not one, but three product service businesses within that service business. And the best of them is Content Stack. Content Stack is a fascinating business. It's a pioneer in the space of the headless CMS, and this episode is a deep dive that will help you to understand the content space and how it has evolved over the last decade.
00:01:11
Speaker
and what is the secret sauce behind content stack which it has raised almost one eighty million dollars and is near a unicon valuation founded thesis podcast for more such deep dives with tech leaders What is Content Stack? Let's start by understanding the business. Sure. um Content Stack is a content management system. it so You can think of any brands or any company in the world.
00:01:38
Speaker
um they basically interact with their end users through content. So it could be you know on the web channel or the mobile or maybe even digital signages. So kind we provide software all in and the cloud that lets these big, large brands manage and deliver content.
Early Work Experiences and Dot-Com Era
00:02:00
Speaker
Okay. The term that describes content stack on, there's this website called Traction, which is
00:02:09
Speaker
a website where you track startups is that it's a headless CMS. What does what does that term mean, headless CMS? CMS is the most content management system. What is the word headless there mean? Yeah, so we pioneered this sort of category called headless CMS. And like going back in sort of the early web days, there was only one channel, which is the web, right? and There were a bunch of CMS companies that came about for sort of the the smaller websites. You typically have like WordPress users and for the large enterprises, you would, you know, companies use like Sitecore and Tridi and AEM. This is, I'm talking in the early 2000s, right? Where it was just a web channel.
00:02:53
Speaker
We saw an opportunity. It's an Adobe product, I think. Sure, yeah. It's the Adobe Experience Manager. And large, large companies use that software. um And it was only the the web channel back then. right So we ah my journey kind of as a software engineer started in 2000. And in 2007, when you know I looked at the cloud, I think I signed up for AWS in 2006, actually. So Amazon Web Services, the cloud. right and It blew my way. i said okay yes You started as a software engineer in India or in the US? like like Where did you grow up? Yeah, so I grew up in India. I was born in India, but I moved to the US when I was 14. So I did my high school and college and all that in the US. like your Your parents moved there? or
00:03:48
Speaker
No, um so you know ah basically ah they my aunt actually applied for a visa when I was born and she had already moved to the U.S. back in like the 70s or something. right you know when it takes It took like 14 years for the visa to come come around and then my parents definitely they want to move to the U.S. so they asked me the question if you want to move you have to stay with your cousin.
00:04:17
Speaker
I was like, sure. And I hadn't met the cousin, but I was like, you know, this is like 92. Were you are ah like in a big city or a small city? where Like, what was the in India? Like, what was your exposure? Oh, in India. Yeah. No, in India, I was in ah and Mumbai, but I spent and quite a bit of years in Rajasthan in a boarding school. ah So out of the 14 years, I think like six, seven years I was in a boarding school. So your aunt applied for a visa for you. and Yes, she applied for the visa. I think in 1992, the visa came in, and I had the option to move. My parents gave me the option to move to the US um in to a town called Columbus, Ohio. ah It's in's the middle of America. And my cousin, who had migrated there like 10 years prior,
00:05:11
Speaker
was also, you know, still trying to make it as an immigrant in the U.S., but that's the place I would have ended up, right? And I totally took it because I think, you know, I was ah i was very, like, drawn to technology in the 80s in India, and a you know few things trickled in, I think, at that at that time, like an Atari 2600, like gaming and um some small computers here and there. And I was just, like, drawn to it. And my dad had bought me, like,
00:05:39
Speaker
World Book Encyclopedia, it's like the set of like 24 books, right? A lot of us that grew up in the 80s probably remember that. And most of that is, you know, the content was all from America and it's a lot of technology and I was drawn to that. And so when the time came, you know, and the option was there, I was like, yeah, sure, I'll move there. So that's how I ended up in the States, yeah.
00:06:04
Speaker
Okay okay and of course you're a Patel and there is a very strong Patel community in the states. I think they're typically known to run motels I think. I i was ah thought you were going to ask me about the motel so you have to you know and you cannot like you cannot go through like you have to Basically, I tell everyone i I hit all the stereotypes of ah Patel in America, you know, yeah I
Career Development and Cloud Technology Ventures
00:06:35
Speaker
moved to America, I work at a convenience store. And then the, you know, my cousin buys a motel and I work at a motel and then even as a doctor or techie, you know,
00:06:45
Speaker
um I've checked all those boxes. Okay, okay, okay. So ah where did you start working then as ah once you finished your, like probably you did a BS or an MS or something in computer science? Yeah.
00:07:02
Speaker
I did a BS from Ohio State University and I graduated in 2000. So, um you know, I was drawn, like I said, I was drawn to ah tech and also, you know, just growing up as a Patel, I think, um you know, everyone around you is just always talking about business. um And I think, you know, when I wanted, when I was growing up, I say i looked up to my dad who had a few businesses here and there.
00:07:28
Speaker
um I wanted to start a business. So I kind of put both of those things together and in college I started a business. Well, I started the business, but I had no idea what the heck I was doing. I knew how to build a product. So I built something like a Spotify playlist player or something like that, right? In college, but no idea how to go to market and all that. And um so I graduated. During the Napster days, I mean, when you were in college, your peers would have been using Napster for music, I guess.
00:07:59
Speaker
Absolutely. It was Napster. And then there was a there's a company called Real Audio, I believe, that started streaming services um on the web. And I'm like, well, you know that's kind of cool. So can I just like use API to start streaming audio and then let users create playlists and things like that, right? Obviously, way too early for the market to be.
00:08:21
Speaker
ready for that type of ah technology. So of course, no go to market. So I ended up and after graduation, you got to make money. So I got a job in San Francisco. So I flew out to San Francisco from there. So I started my journey. Where did you join? I would say I joined a startup. you know like Growing up in Ohio, I was like, hey, if I get like $35,000, it's like, man, that's going to be a lot of money. right And then you had couple of like young startups in San Francisco, like show up and it's like, Hey, I'll give you double the money. I'm like, all right, deal. And I go out to San Francisco, right? Until you get the first paycheck and you're like, what the heck? was Where's all the money, you know? ah as yeah so i The money was going in taxes or there was like an ESOP component or what? like
00:09:15
Speaker
yeah There wasn't any subcomponent. The money was going on taxes because the more money you make, you know, I think your brackets change and so those calculations don't apply and you got to, you know, pay more taxes. And also I moved to San Francisco in 2000. So it was the dot com like boom, right? Yeah. I called up like 50 apartment places to get an apartment. ah Finally got one and it was like 2000 bucks back then.
00:09:44
Speaker
um you know And I had to get two bedrooms because my sister was going to move from India. um So I think all of that and you know it's like first paycheck I get and I'm like, man, what is this? you know And also say like I had like a big, like I started with like negative $40,000. It wasn't student loans because I think my dad paid for it. I was just like stupid and spent a lot of money on credit cards in college. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. so Um, so anyways, so yeah, the dot.com was interesting. It was the best time to be in San Francisco, I think, because there was a lot going on and the excitement around the internet, right? Um, and, and you know, the, there was this like, um,
00:10:27
Speaker
like this like sense that you know the tech can kind of change the world. you know And I felt that. I mean, Memphis is like amazing in the 2000 till the dot com bust happened. you know so And yeah like, what was your company? What's the product that they were building where you spent like the seven years?
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, so I joined them and they didn't have a product still, right? So they had this idea of like managing all the the different racks in like a retail store.
00:10:59
Speaker
Okay, so ah the whole management of that is like a whole other world. And so they wanted to build software to ah you know work with these large brands, large retailers, manage all the digital, but sorry, not the digital, the physical racks and things like that, right? um So we we started, so I basically started to, um I think I wrote the first line of code for this company, it was called Wise Connect.
00:11:25
Speaker
And and you know they got funding, and then they they added a bunch of people. So I mean, this this kind of story goes back. The first year um with Weiss Connect, I worked there for like maybe five, six months. And I'm like, hey, man, can you give me more money? Because there's a bunch of people knocking on my door that they're going to give me like 30% more, right? And the founder is just like, nah, we can't give you the money.
00:11:53
Speaker
says, all right, I quit. I'm going to go to this other company that's like 200 people. I got ah this fancy office in downtown San Francisco. And so I switched, and I went there. And in a month, that company shuts down. So that's when I realized like the dot-com like bust. It was so fast. you know In two weeks, like the whole like San Francisco south of market if you know for the folks hadn't been there. It was the kind of all the startups over there that everything was just like boarded up in in like less than a month, like end of 2000. It was funny you know I walked into
00:12:33
Speaker
you know, early in the morning you walk in ah to the office and these guys were like drinking beer and playing pool and stuff like that. And I was so naive. I'm like, did we go public or what? You know, in in those days, like you could, you don't need to have a, have revenue. You could just put like dot com to your name and listed public, right? So, um but no, they said the company shut down and I'm like, why are you guys like,
00:13:01
Speaker
It's like, oh, we'll just get another job next door. That was just so oblivious to what was happening in the market. As soon as I walked out, I think the jobs were gone. So it was it was a it was a very hard sort of um month, I think. One of so it's sort of the worst times, I would say, in my career.
00:13:24
Speaker
And, but I, if looking back, I would, you know, I would be like, that was kind of the best lesson I learned. And it helped me with entrepreneurship way down the line. So yeah. yeah And then like, did you land on your feet?
00:13:42
Speaker
I did. you know so um um'm an next At that point, I was an extreme introvert, so I didn't really make a lot of connections, but i the the the few connections that I had, um you know I kind of called them up, and then one of my friends said, hey, there's a job at this company called Tipco.
00:14:04
Speaker
which was also you know started by an Indian founder that had moved to the States when he was young. And he he pioneered this technology called the information bus, which was like, you know publish publish, subscribe you know for the techies out there. ah He's one of the the inventors of that. And he started a company in the integration space where these large enterprises, when they buy you know, these ERP software ah like ah HR systems and finance and supply chain, you got to move data between these systems, right? So you need another set of software, integration software that kind of helps with that, right? So he pioneered that and one of my friends got me an interview there um and so, you know, the interview was pretty straightforward because I just showed them all the work that I had done. Even the
00:14:52
Speaker
the company that I started in college, I had a product ah which was way far ahead than what anyone else was doing. So so I did get a job there. And then where the recruiters, I still remember I got a job at Inmedia.
00:15:06
Speaker
know you know there would have Where's Inmedia today? you know like yeah yeah but But I went with Tipco. you know So I got two jobs. I landed, OK.
00:15:18
Speaker
The problem, though, is that at Tipco, like just within a month, this is like December 1, 2000, I got the job. um Like I said, two weeks before, it was like the worst time, like the bottom and bottom for me, because I had to take care of my sister and pay for all the credit cards and all sorts of stuff. right And then a month into that job, Tipco started laying off people.
00:15:41
Speaker
And I was just like, oh my god, like I don't want to live through this again. right um So I was always a hard worker. But I think that just like said, I'm not going to get laid off here. right And typical, I think every few months started laying off people. So it wasn't just like the first. I think it went through like eight or 10, I can't remember, rounds of layoffs after like two thousand two thousand one I think it all continued to 2003 because in the middle of 2001, September 11 happened. That also just kind of further drove the market down. right So it was a pretty interesting time to be in tech after the dot-com bust and that was my start of the career.
00:16:27
Speaker
and you were building products there or what this is ah yeah me what it sounds like like they do bespoke bespoke projects like when a company is buying bunch of tools that they will do the integration between those tools so it's a services says business right no no it's a product it was a product business and so you can imagine companies like FedEx and Cisco and Costco and all these guys they have ah you know, these like huge, like software systems ah that have purchased to, to get more value out of those systems. Those systems have to talk to each other. And so typical made the the glue software between these yeah ERP systems. So it was pretty deep sort of engineering kind of challenge and work and the the solution that we built. To answer your question, I did get a job in the core engineering team. Okay.
00:17:21
Speaker
but which is what ah today like a zapier is doing like ah well is is doing a version for smaller companies. Absolutely. so Okay, this market is called IPass, right? Integration platform as a service. ah Yeah. Of course, that time probably the name wasn't coined yet, right? Like when you were building it. Yeah, because there's no at that time there was no one like service, like like software as a service, right? Right. I think Salesforce had just
00:17:53
Speaker
Salesforce had just started and they said, we will deliver a software. And they called it, I think, application service interface or and sorry, application service provider. They were calling it SaaS. remember but ah there was a piece ep yeah it remember the piece yeah that. was dr yeah yeah So weren't calling it like SaaS yet. So the iPads kind of came way, way later.
00:18:17
Speaker
oh So I worked for this company for six years. and um you know my I definitely did well because I just like went all in. you know just I didn't look at the time and and you know I just like just went in. And it was interesting work and I worked i was working with some amazing amazing people, really smart people. So I learned a lot. And then fast forward to 2006, I so i look at ah signed up for the service called Amazon Web Services.
00:18:51
Speaker
And I was going away. For typical, yeah. For typical, I sight. Well, you know, as an engineer, I would always explore, you know, I was i was very interested in in product. I was building product.
00:19:03
Speaker
So I would always keep in touch with a lot of the new things that were happening. There were you know companies like 37signals that make a product called Basecamp. So this is like SaaSk economy was just starting, right? Right. And so i was I was tuned into that. And then Amazon decides to release this service called Amazon Web Services with one or two services like for the techies out there, EC2.
00:19:29
Speaker
and And basically what that was is like you literally just log in and say start a server and and it just starts a server. um And before that, you had to have a lot of capital investment to buy a server and host that server in a data center. right So my mind was blown. I was like, holy shit, like this is amazing.
00:19:49
Speaker
right And then I tried to evangelize that within typical. And you know I was young at that time. And I just like, what are these guys like? They're not seeing where this is going to go. And a little bit more little bit impatient, right? And so I said, you know what? I'm just going to quit. I'm going to start what I called at that time was integration on the web. That's kind of the precursor to the iPads, integration platform as a service, right?
00:20:20
Speaker
um So that I quit in 2007. So it took me a year or so. And, you know, I was married by that time and my wife said, you know, she's also an entrepreneur. She's actually the CEO of a content site right now where we still work together. She had started another business which failed in 2001. It was my time around. She's like, I'll keep the job, let the money come in and you can go, you know, start this iPad. Is he also a techie or like?
00:20:52
Speaker
She, no, um she is tuned into the tech world, but she comes, you know her skills are more on the ah go-to-market side. Yeah, just the go-to-market side. So it's a really good you know partnership between us, right? But in that 2007, she was just like, basically um said, hey, it's your turn. Go do your thing. you know And she'll keep her job.
00:21:21
Speaker
And then it so happened in 2007, my uncle passed away in India, and I came to India right after I quit. right And one of the folks I know here in in a suburb called Virar in Mumbai, ah there's a college ah called Viva. And you know one of our friends, or my dad's friend, asked me to go and deliver a seminar ah to a bunch of students. And I was like, sure, I'll do that. you know And this is where internet was just kind of taking off in India at that time. So they were they were curious to know what's going on in tech right in in the US. It would take a few i would say like a few years for the tech to make it to India. you know Nowadays, everything shows up instantly. right um So I did that. And then after that seminar, I told the folks that I'm i'm starting a business. I want to build an integration software.
00:22:14
Speaker
And a couple of guys said, hey, after the talk, like can we join you? And I'm like, really? You want to join me? oh All right, how much you want to get paid? It's like 10,000 rupees. I was like, that's the conversion in my head. And I'm like, all right, I can afford that. You two are hired. And I got lucky there because I think these individuals were extremely smart, extremely hardworking. They're still with me over the years, almost 17 plus years. So yeah, that was awesome.
00:22:45
Speaker
And that's my that's the start of my journey back in India. that aws epiphany You had an epiphany when you saw AWS, that this is the future of the web. ah How did that lead to you wanting to do an IPass?
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, so you know I was, and it wasn't just a the cloud sort of thing, because I think Salesforce had already started what, like you said, it was called the ASP, right? Application Service Provider. So it was kind of a precursor to like SaaS software. And there were a few tools like that coming out. I remember there was something called vufu.com, which is like a form builder application. There was a bunch of them coming out, and I was just very curious you know ah And I would always try to reverse engineer of how they built these softwares. And then when Amazon came out and then they put in their pricing, I'm like, man, you can just like start this and you know have a production software without much capital investment. I wouldn't say I knew what the future was going to be. I think it was like connecting all these dots.
00:23:53
Speaker
And I think the the thing that I just, I'm like, okay, there's a bunch of cloud-based software coming, not cloud-based, ASP type of software coming up where you don't have to install anything. And then there's this like cloud now that's gonna just make it very easy to start servers. So I kind of just like put two and two together. And I was like, all right, it's gonna be an explosion of these applications, right? Because you don't need that capital investment.
00:24:22
Speaker
And so I was like, well, if it's the same problem you know that had before the cloud with all the software that these enterprises had, which was installed in the data center, you still have to connect those, right? So I'm like, all right, I'm an expert in that. So why don't we just build a integration software that's also entirely in the cloud so you don't have to install anything, right? So that was kind of the rough idea. yeah okay It took me a long time to get to that product, though.
00:24:51
Speaker
yeah So essentially like you gave the example of that form building software. ah So like this, there would be hundreds of softwares that people would use. So like a company might use some software for lead gen where ah potential leads are filling the form. Now, for that to enter Salesforce would need some integration. And so therefore, ah you would, ah you saw that opportunity to build a cloud native I pass, which could work with these hundreds of ah the the explosion of SAS, which you saw coming could work with them. so Okay. I understood. and absolutely Yeah.
00:25:33
Speaker
So did you, ah you know, 2007 is when that whole Lehman crash was happening, like really bad time to start a business. ah Like did you want to raise funds to build the product first? Because typically SaaS needs upfront investment. You need to spend on product. You need to spend on go to market. It takes maybe a year or two before you start.
00:25:58
Speaker
reaching revenues that can at least take care of payroll. ah so how did you like How did you build that? Yeah, I think all those words that you mentioned, I had no idea how to do any of those. like yeah That's what I would say. I think you know I was just at a talk this morning at a V work, just like a developer event. i'm like just amazed by how you know younger folks know all those things. You know, go to market is important. How do you raise capital? All those things, I mean, they were like, I'm like, wow, we've come a long way, right? Back in 2007, there were people raising capital and all that, but my I was just like, you know, I was an introvert.
00:26:42
Speaker
So I didn't necessarily you know talk to a lot of folks. um I read a lot. I i was just just a geek. I would consume a lot of tech stuff. And then I would have these like ideas of where the world is going. But you know being an introvert, the whole VC thing presenting to them was just like terrifying to me.
00:27:02
Speaker
okay So I knew with the VC world, and just the fact that I had to go and present and raise capital and sell the idea was like terrifying to me. So I did what I know best, is I know to build software. right So that's where I started. And then to bring the money in to start a company, even to pay those two guys that I ran into in India,
00:27:25
Speaker
um I was like, well, I can develop software, you know, in those, in the six years at Tipco, I had made enough connections there, plus Tipco's customers, they all knew me as, okay, Nishant just get stuff done. So they,
00:27:43
Speaker
The marketing department of Tipgo were kind of the early adopters of the cloud because I sold them on like, hey, you can like cost your cut your cost tremendously if you move some of your workload to the cloud. And this friend of mine at Tipgo said, all right, we'll give you a project. right So then we started down that journey of like just getting really good at cloud.
00:28:05
Speaker
And helping these customers move to the cloud, whoever would take the you know the the chance to like move some some work workloads to the cloud. It wasn't everyone. It took a while for a bunch of people to come on the cloud, but there were definitely on the fringes of these big companies, some people that wanted to move fast.
00:28:25
Speaker
they were they were they were open to take a chance. and And we were actually, I would say, and I would claim this, I don't know how to prove this, but we were one of the first companies in India to do cloud implementations for ah customers. This is back in 2007, right? So it's way early. And Amazon, we were, um I think, that one of the five advanced partners in like 2008. There's a company called Raw Engineering that I started and Amazon was very small. We went to the event. It was like 150 people, right? Very small and now it's like thousands, right? um So yeah, it's it's I got on there. There's a bunch of people that I knew that
00:29:10
Speaker
basically said, hey, it's going to be cheaper. It's going to be faster. Let's try it. Right. So we went down the whole services route, if you will, instead of building a product that I wanted to build. Okay. I'm assuming you're, uh, yeah.
00:29:27
Speaker
Business development would have happened by virtue of Amazon making you a partner. like ah Amazon would have needed companies like you who helped their customers to adopt the cloud. ah so i mean you and or Did you also have to like hustle and get business beyond that first tip code? No, I didn't know anything. I didn't even know the partner ecosystem and they could help with the channel. and I think some folks at Amazon knew us, I would say. We were advanced partner and listed on their website. I think some business did trickle in through that. But even they were new. you know They didn't have a full partner um team. Amazon became Amazon. like
00:30:08
Speaker
I think after like 2010, 2011, it took them a few years. People forget that, you know. It took them a few years to get to ah that that scale. And so we were part of, we were going alongside them in the early journey and we didn't move millions of dollars ah of revenue from, you know, typical data centers to the to Amazon, but it was over the years. right and and i wasn't you know Like I said, I was still new to business, so I didn't really understand that I could just kind of work with them and get the business kind of going. um I basically ah depended on the the network that I had, and I think the word of mouth
00:30:51
Speaker
you know I got a few ah customers in Silicon Valley, ah big, large companies as customers for the services side of things. And I was busy myself because I was personally a programmer and I was programming as well as doing the business, trying to get the money in. That went on for a while. And then, of course, the mobile showed up, you know, iPhone shows up in 2008. It's like, oh man, this is crazy. So we started doing app development. Again, I'll make this claim, one of the first companies to do app development out of India in 2008, 2008, 2009 timeframe. So we were quick to adopt new technologies.
00:31:31
Speaker
And then we as we were helping people move to the the cloud, the typical way of companies would move things to the cloud was like, hey, I have this like software that I'm installing locally in a data center. Can you just lift it and shift it and install it in the cloud server, right?
00:31:48
Speaker
And we did that, and I'm fast forwarding to a content stack now. it's As we were doing that, these marketing teams that I would work with, it's like, hey, can you take my site core or WordPress and move it to the cloud and run it on that server? So we did did a few of those projects, and we it was painful. First, mobile showed up, and they were only catering to the web channel. So the way it was built, it was very tightly coupled.
00:32:17
Speaker
um That was an issue. The second issue is they're just installing the software. So anytime a new version comes in, they have to upgrade. And what cloud provider was, it changed the way you delivered software. It's like electricity. you know you just It just comes in. if Even if they upgrade their grids and all, you don't change anything within your house, right? The lights still work. That's cloud, basically.
00:32:42
Speaker
So you essentially had to rewrite software to work in the cloud. But a lot of these big companies, they just didn't want to change. you know And so I said, well, the the there's web channel. Now there's a mobile channel. And it doesn't take a genius to basically say, there's going to be more channels where content has to be delivered. Cloud software, like CMS needs to be rewritten for the cloud.
00:33:11
Speaker
And I called it SimpleCMS at that time, Simple Content Management Systems. It's like, hey, can we just like create a database? Put some APIs. APIs are basically a way to talk to these you know ah software systems. And then pull that content out and create that web page. you know And then pull that content out and create the mobile app. um So you're kind of decoupling ah content from the experience, which is the web and the mobile. And thereby, you could basically create whatever experience. It could be a digital signage or a kiosk.
00:33:46
Speaker
It doesn't matter. Your content is separate, and you manage it in the cloud, right? So it was like ah very different. you know And I'm lucky. There was a few folks wanted content management, and they said, Nishant, I don't care what do you do in the background. I sold them this idea. They're like, I don't care what you do in the background. I just want my content to be delivered the way it should be delivered. So I used that service as everything to stop building the content management platform.
00:34:16
Speaker
ah So we started in 2011, 2012. Yeah. ah
00:34:23
Speaker
So how it used to happen before the Headless CMS ah came in was that ah you would on a WordPress itself have ah all your content and you could change the status that this is published or unpublished is because it's outdated or something which is published. If it needs to be updated, then you edit it and republish it. That was how content was managed.
00:34:48
Speaker
Now, because you have multiple channels, so it would mean manual effort. Like you first go on your WordPress to do it for your website and then maybe you have a mobile app for which there is some other way to edit that data or unpublish or republish or refresh the data, the the content. ah So what you did was make it centralized at one place, which is the headless CMS. And that headless CMS is talking to a WordPress, talking to a mobile app. and ah
00:35:20
Speaker
yeah how How does that updation of content happen? like does the ah like Does the Headless EMS send an update to ah WordPress or whatever is the front-end that ah this piece of content is updated and so it should be ah republished? Or is it that WordPress is not carrying any content anymore and every time somebody visits a link, ah WordPress is dynamically picking up the content from the Headless EMS real-time and rendering it for the user?
00:35:52
Speaker
How does that work? Yeah, let me answer that. So you don't need WordPress. um What we did is, if you think of WordPress and what the the the example that you gave where you update the blog post and it goes live.
00:36:06
Speaker
What WordPress used to do is, because of the web channel, like the way it was going to look and feel, so that the you know for the techies out there, the HTML CSS, the front-end experience, which is built in HTML CSS, how the website's going to look, is very hard-coded with the content that was going to kind of fill in into that look. right yeah it was very like The whole software is made so the front-end and the content is all together. you know It's tightly coupled.
00:36:33
Speaker
but yeah So if you want to do mobile, you had no way to do it besides hacking the crap out of WordPress to send the same content to like a mobile website, ah mobile app. right So what we did is like, all right, let's separate this.
00:36:49
Speaker
So we let you basically model the content. So if it's a webage ah blog page, you could basically say it has a title field, it has a description field. Whatever fields you want, we'll let you do that. Drag and drop, you do that. And that's it. And then when you want to make a new blog, you fill out a form, nothing else. You don't even care about how it's going to look. okay So once you do that, so for a content editor, they come in and they just create these content models and then content entries is what we call it so you create a content model called blog it has five fields then you create content entries for that which is where the you're writing the blog okay you can think about it you can with large enterprises you can imagine the different type of content models that they would need right
00:37:37
Speaker
Now, in terms of the front-end experience like the website, so let's you take your blog and you want to let's say publish it to a website and you want to publish it to a mobile app as well. While you just write the code for this website separately,
00:37:51
Speaker
And then you use our APIs to pull the content and paste it into that frontend experience. So it's completely decoupled. So the experience is decoupled, and you developed develop that once for the web. And then you take your mobile SDKs, and you develop it for the mobile. But the content stays the same. So for you as a content editor, go into content stack, and you write a blog entry. You just see a form. It's nothing special. You just see a form. You fill that out. You say publish.
00:38:21
Speaker
and magically you'll up appear on the front end website as well as on the mobile app. right This is very simple. um But fast forward, ah a lot of these large companies, you know they have a lot of content challenges. So you know you in this example with the blog, but let's say it's a large enterprise, when you create a blog, they have to publish a blog to 80, 90 different countries all at the same time. So you can just imagine that.
00:38:57
Speaker
okay So how do you do that, right? ah So we created over the years, we caught up to everything that these traditional old CMSs provided for these large enterprises in a new way, in the cloud way. And the customers, it's like refreshing for them because they're not having to deal, like their tech teams don't have to deal with these old systems that you had installed, and then they have to upgrade. They have to go through these upgrade cycles every six months, and you waste energy, effort, and all the you know ah time for these techy people to do upgrades. Like, who does that? You will not believe it. Even to this day, their customers stuck with these old systems
00:39:47
Speaker
And they're still doing upgrades. And finally, some of these companies say, hey, me too. We have an headless CMS. This is 2024, guys. Adobe AEM, Sitecore, Tridian. Tridian actually don't even doesn't even say that they have a headless CMS. you know like Almost 10 years later, these guys are saying, we have headless CMS. so it took um 10 years to realize that this is going to change you know the whole CMS industry. ah you So anyways, that was the opportunity for us.
00:40:23
Speaker
oh ah you So are you now providing a full stack CMS? Not just yeah the... Okay. So even the front end where it is rendered, what like the Adobe product does or a WordPress does, that portion of it also you provide. So a customer could opt for like a full stack solution or just for the headless CMS part of it, which is at the backend where the content manager or the content management team is creating and updating content. we We do provide that ability as well. So there's an additional feature where you could host your front end experience, right? So it's all just about hosting your code now, that nothing else. ah But our approaches
00:41:06
Speaker
You know, in this, we call it the composable sort of, you know, tech stack, the the composable architecture, if you will. So if you want to build an experience, an experience could be a web webp page. Okay. Website. The content bit could come from the headless CMS.
00:41:24
Speaker
There could be that you are making calls to other different services, specialized services. For example, you know analytics. So you just call another analytics player in your code. You basically write it and call Google Analytics. Maybe you have discussion threads. You use something like discuss.
00:41:43
Speaker
you know So you can compose the experience by connecting to these different technologies. So what our approach at Content Slack is, we will make that easy. you know We want you to take the best of the best and compose it all together. right So we believe in this composable world and what that allows the customers to do is like, if one of the vendors that they're using for this composable, if there's another new better solution,
00:42:11
Speaker
and they don't like this vendor because they haven't caught up, they they don't keep up with the latest technology, they can literally just drop them and then replace it with a new vendor that is more, you know, they feel comfortable that they will help, they'll continue to sort of innovate, right? So it gives them the flexibility to basically pick and choose the vendors. I think that's like a win-win on both the sides. so The vendors have to constantly make sure that they're innovating and keeping the customer along the journey. and We don't end up with the case with Adobe and Sitecore and all that that we are. like Ten years later, they're still on this like old mess.
00:42:53
Speaker
right so So I think this composable architecture world is much better. And in this ecosystem, we sort of um started this ah alliance called the Mach Alliance, which is like microservices, API first, cloud native and headless technologies, right? With other vendors alongside like e-commerce, you know, there's commerce tools.
00:43:21
Speaker
And there's like 50 other renders in this sort of alliance that are specialized on different services. And we basically have this promise that we all kind of work very well together so that the customers could write pick and choose and then you know use their build their text tech stock. It's getting very techie here, but I think it gives the ultimate choice to the customer. And then to answer your question,
00:43:44
Speaker
you know We have headless CMS, but we are also giving the options for other things around the headless CMS. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're we're going to stop working with some vendors that are very specialized in that area. No, I think it's the choices with the customer. But there's customers there's some customers that don't want to work with 20 vendors.
00:44:06
Speaker
You know, they might, they they just want to work with like a few. So for those customers, we want to provide some additional, uh, you know, capabilities as well. And so we've kind of gone down this, like what they call it a digital experience platform route, where we're building and adding some of these like peripheral services that, that these customers need to build their experience. Okay. Um, yeah, I want to, uh,
00:44:36
Speaker
I want to attempt to understand this from a technical point of view as a non-techy. I'm going to kind of continue to probe you a little further. um Let's take the example of Flipkart.
00:44:49
Speaker
ah what ah so You said that you have like a composable architecture where a company can work with multiple tools and ah they all talk to each other. ah What would be the set of tools that a company like Flipkart would be working with? and ah you know, where does content stack fit in that? And just just give me like a more, like a one-on-one for content. Like ah what, sure but so in the case of Flipkart, I'm assuming every product that is listed as a piece of content. Absolutely. So Flipkart, like Flipkart is massive right now, but when they, let's say first, when they started
00:45:31
Speaker
If they wanted to click, it's an e-commerce website. right So what do you need for e-commerce? Well, if you look at a web page, you have product information, product imagery. ah You have ah the cart experience. right ah You have ah sort of the reviews and commenting. You have the payment. right So all these could be specialized vendors.
00:45:54
Speaker
So I'll pick pick ah the the whole composable thing for them. So it starts with content and commerce, most of this stuff. right So Flipkart, I would say, it will start with commerce, because that's their bread and butter. So you go pick a technology like Commerce Tools, which provides the ability to add all the SKUs and products into that system. It's all cloud-based, headless, microservices. you know Commerce Tools is a great company out of Germany.
00:46:24
Speaker
Okay. Flipkart would pick that. I i haven't heard of Commerce Tools. Typically, when I speak to D2C founders, they talk of WooCommerce, Magento. Shopify. Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah so Are these similar to Commerce Tools? ah They're similar. I think commerce tools kind of is very focused on these large, large use cases, complex use cases. Okay. And then these D.I.Y.
00:46:59
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. Shopify, like anyone can go in and a Shopify, like right the other x extreme of DIY and Magento. and yeah It's like a spectrum, right? Like it's a spectrum. So if you go to the right, it's like very like quick kind of things. and then maybe WooCommerce and all are kind of in the middle. The commerce tools might be on the left. The commerce tools basically has a very ro robust set of APIs that you could use to store all the ah product information. They handle the cart. ah they're probably I'm not sure, but I think they might do something around order management as well. But if you don't want to use theirs, I'm actually not even sure if they have that. But there's other order management services that are API first that you could use.
00:47:45
Speaker
So you basically take commerce tools and you can maybe ship rocket would have something. ah Yeah, exactly. but but So your experience would be possibly handled by ship rocket kind of a, okay. Absolutely. Yeah. So, so if you're Flipkart, right, you, you don't want to run a Shopify website.
00:48:04
Speaker
Right. um So you would pick these technologies that so your team is not building sort of the e-commerce engine. You'll just pick commerce tools. Okay. For payment instead of you building the whole thing about payment across the world on Flipkart, just use a, you know, Stripe or something like that. So you're composing, right? You're just composing. And then what's the end result do you need? Well, you just need that experience, which is the e-commerce website. Now you say, where does,
00:48:30
Speaker
What does content fit in? Well, if you look at an e-commerce website, product information is one thing, right? The PDP page is what they call it, the product detail page. Okay. But if you look around, there's like help documents, there's about documents, there's, I mean, you can just, just go in the corner and there's all all sorts of stuff that you have to do. So there's more than just commerce, right? Just for an e-commerce website, there's more than Commerce, so all those content use cases. Even, for example, the product page, you might say you know Commerce Tools has like five attributes at the store, the name, the title, the description, the imagery. But you might want to further like you know add content around that, so you could use Content Stack to do that with your product description page. And we have customers that use everything, WooCommerce, Shopify, Commerce Tools, all those, with Content Stack.
00:49:25
Speaker
right And so, contents that could be sort of this other sort of content thing that Flipkart could buy to manage the content. And yeah these are large brands. i we've we're We're completely focused on large of enterprises.
00:49:43
Speaker
Most of the time, these companies have teams across the world but and different, different requirements. They have to manage different languages um and also you know manage personalization as well. So you can just imagine the content problem gets like multidimensional. like If you want to release one content, um a piece of content, let's say a website title and description,
00:50:10
Speaker
You got to do it in 80 languages. like and Not just that. You might have another 10 layers of personalization to see if you know the text is better here or there. right Some A-B testing stuff. And then you want you might want to personalize it for people in India versus people in the US. So it just becomes multidimensional.
00:50:32
Speaker
And you know content set provides all the tools needed for these large enterprises to manage all those things without like a large team. like We take care of all that stuff for them. Also, I think one important bit that we take care ah for them is these large enterprises have massive load in terms of traffic. you know We deliver that traffic anywhere in the world in like sub-milliseconds.
00:51:01
Speaker
So, you know, and and we guarantee that content is gonna be delivered wherever ah that content needs to be the closest, right? So we deliver these these pieces of content like less than 200 milliseconds. So there's that experience that shows up is like, you know, like pretty fast, right? So all those like hairy technology things we've already taken care of. Okay, who' who's your biggest customer?
00:51:31
Speaker
Um, so I should probably go. I never remember who I can quote, right? So, um, go ahead. Yeah. Uh, what Mattel, um, I'm just looking at my website. Mattel is, uh, the toy company that have, you know, many, many brands, right? So.
00:51:55
Speaker
you know You can just imagine how complex their deployment can get. And they use e-commerce as well, obviously, for some some brands. So we integrate with them. ah MongoDB, which is you know a leading software company, um that also uses a content stack.
00:52:13
Speaker
um You have companies like Walmart, you know, Walmart uses us for ah the marketplace content, not necessarily entirely Walmart.com um site. So a large, pretty much a lot of large enterprise ah you know, companies that would find Pontus as the right solution. and And I would say more refreshing than sort of those traditional software companies, you know, that they're they have to continually use because they've made so much investment over the years.
00:52:45
Speaker
And you know they realize that they're just like locked in. And these companies are not innovating. you know So so these these brands have taken you know the plunge into like, hey, there could be a better better way to manage this. um and And yeah, and they've moved to content stock. OK. Do you see more use case of ah e-commerce focused businesses or more use case of businesses which are using it for a marketing purpose. So like say Mattel would be more marketing focused. Every piece of property ah would have like descriptions and there would be probably stories around the toys and there would be all sorts of stuff for every SKU that they have. ah So it's probably more of a marketing use case. So is that more common use case for customers who come to you or?
00:53:41
Speaker
I mean, we're a pretty horizontal sort of technology, right? It's awesome. And the gt GTM is ah harder, I guess, that for that, right? um But no, it goes across the board. I think the e-commerce might be around like 20 to sort of ah percent.
00:54:03
Speaker
ah there was There's gaming, there's, you know, airlines, there's manufacturing, there's finance. um You could just name it, you know, there's different- Airlines would be using it for marketing purposes or something else also.
00:54:20
Speaker
It's marketing purposes. What about the you know the digital signage that you see in the airports? So you have those screens that you show, ah even the the airline ah information that you see. right So there's a lot of content that kind of comes from there. And then there's the real time like flight information that might come from a different system. But the other content probably comes from Content Sack. So airlines actually have some interesting, interesting use cases besides just the website and the reservation system that they have. ah Because they've got to deliver this content to many screens outside of just the web page. So it gets pretty interesting. Think about gaming. Gaming also is fascinating because you know we have some some large gaming customers on our platform that
00:55:08
Speaker
ah deliver content around the world, all all the people using console, all those imagery don't necessarily come from content stack. It could be some backend system that that gaming company has done. But on the on the games, there's a lot of content around that that you know comes from content stack. but Give me some examples for the gaming use case.
00:55:32
Speaker
Yeah, so um I mean, these ah these companies, I can't you know ah talk about the specific use case, but I'll just say, you know, you're playing a game.
00:55:45
Speaker
um Even on the screens that you see, you know, the information, the text, all that text and the images and stuff like that could come from content stack, right, as you're playing the game. And then the the motion, you know, the 3D motion and all that, that could come from a different system. But just the text at the bottom, some of the images that you see,
00:56:07
Speaker
you know It depends on that gaming company and the game and the tech team, what they decide to put in content site versus their backend systems, ah thereby they're just like composing that experience together. um what we In the pandemic, you know it's everyone, I think, around the world, in March of 2000, everyone hit the brake and we're like, you know what's going to happen? right Literally in like a week or two, our traffic just went off the roof.
00:56:37
Speaker
And after that, we thought, we're going to be OK. Everyone's going to move to digital. And that off the roof was more driven through gaming to start with. And then we saw e-commerce take off. And everything kind of took off on the digital side. And I would say, you know unfortunately, a lot of companies got ah caught up in that in the wrong place at the at the wrong time. right ah For us, we were at the right place at the right time. so We got lucky because our software and tech had matured enough and then the world all of a sudden wanted to go digital and they had to accelerate it. And what do you do? Like, you know, ContentSec is the company that delivers content.
00:57:19
Speaker
right You want to deliver a digital experience, you want content. So we kind of got lucky, I would say. It's not any genius here. um And we took advantage of that. And a lot of companies, basically, um you know they had these old technologies that they could not pivot. But the world and the situation required them to pivot. So you know it was like,
00:57:46
Speaker
We saw that opportunity, right? And and we tried to capture it as much as we could. Okay. um I'd love to hear about the journey of building the product into an organization. So I'm assuming Content Stack would have been a product within raw engineering in 2013 when you conceptualized it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So tell me that journey of making it into a company from just one product within raw engineering.
00:58:16
Speaker
It's been a long journey. you know It's been a long journey. ah Me as a techie and, again, early adopter of the cloud, ah just internal gut instincts where a lot of these things would move to the cloud. So we built content stack from the need, right? We saw that need and we built it. And I just like, as I was going through the sort of building my business, my services business, somehow I just knew to anytime I started a new project,
00:58:47
Speaker
I would give ample time to those engineers, and it would be usually one or two people. I'll carve them on the site, because services business is like like drugs, man. The money keeps rolling in, ah and you can hire more people, and the money keeps rolling in, at least at that time, because after the downturn, 2009, 2010, it started going up, right?
00:59:09
Speaker
So you need some sort of a discipline to carve out. It's very hard to build a product, products in a services company, right? True. i didn't I mean, I didn't have any like, this is just looking back. It's like, oh man, that move was pretty good.
00:59:26
Speaker
Because we anything like the simple CMS we wanted to build, it's like, hey, this idea, literally, I just shot an email. I said, all right, let's take two people and give it a month. And this is what we need to do. And we'll revisit it in a month. And then month two, we'll have some more goals. And every time you kind of achieve those, it's like, oh, well, oh, shoot. you know It's getting better. All right, let's go another month. Let's go another month. In like three or four months,
00:59:53
Speaker
it becomes clear that there's a product there. right So we build a lot of products, actually. So we build something very similar to Okta. For those that know Okta, it's a single sign-on solution. And I had done that in typical for a project. And I'm like, well, if everything's going to be a SaaS service and companies are going to buy, enterprises are going to buy SaaS products, they' they're going to have a login problem.
01:00:17
Speaker
So we quickly did something very similar to build like a single sign-on product in 2010. We built a simple CMS. Then there was a thing called CloudThis. It's a product name that we came up with. And what that did was you know it created this visual tool like a drag and drop visual tool that will connect directly with all your you know cloud ah servers and kind of visually show you what the cloud servers are doing. And for that, we basically wrote like an agent that would collect data. So you could just think of Datadog.
01:00:57
Speaker
which is a you know very successful company today. And we had this tech that we had built that would, you know, provide this visual sort of view, ah collecting all the data from the servers and show you in a very like visual, um you know,
01:01:16
Speaker
visual diagram way. ah you know So that was a tool and we incubated that for like I would say a year or so. So we ended up building a lot. okay I did not know how to go to market. I just was a techie and I just ended up building a lot of products. Some of those absolutely did not re-scrap them.
01:01:37
Speaker
But the tech that we built there came in use for other things later on. So we there was three main products that became successful in this journey. We built like eight or 10 SaaS products. ah One was a back end as a service product. And for those that have been in this industry for a while, in 2012, mobile apps were like just everywhere.
01:02:03
Speaker
So we built a cloud service that you could build any type of data model, and we just gave you an SDK. So you were as an entrepreneur wanted to build a mobile app. You didn't have to worry about anything on the server side. You could just take, literally just build a mobile app.
01:02:20
Speaker
And we will scale everything for you in in the cloud for all the backend services. And we did a lot of innovation there. And there were competitors at that time that got bought by Facebook and Google. Google you know bought this thing called Firebase. Facebook bought this thing called Parse. And we were competing with these like small startups at that time that got bought by these bigger companies. And I think I was at a disadvantage because I just Didn't really know how to do go-to-market. I didn't have a salesperson. You know, I'm just growing my business even after five, six years through just word of mouth.
01:02:56
Speaker
right And so I had the products and also I had the freemium. These are all freemium products. So I had a lot of developers on the platform. I had built back and I had 40,000 developers at these are accounts and like almost like 10,000 apps that they had built on that product. But the revenues were like absolutely nothing. right So it has been a long journey.
01:03:23
Speaker
I think the back-end as a service product was successful because we were able to get 40,000 developers, I think. I think it failed commercially because we weren't able to either sell it off or monetize it, um because I just didn't know how to go to market. You didn't talk about the iPads. Yeah, three that's what I was going to do. You said three products were successful, ah Simple CMS, which became Content Stack, back-end as a service, and what was the third?
01:03:53
Speaker
All right, so third we get back to the iPads product that I initially wanted to build in 2007, right? So fast forward to 2013. We again carved out a couple of people and said, can we do this graphical thing where you drag and drop cloud software, and then you just connect them individually, and it would move data between them, right? So now take that failed project, cloud this. We took the tech that we built there and used it in this um in this ah product, right? And the single sign-on stuff that we did to connect to all the SaaS, so we used that in this product. So the whole idea was to build the iPads, the integration platform, and the market was just right.
01:04:40
Speaker
because there was so many cloud services. I think Zapier was also around, but Zapier was kind of focused on these like small use cases. And us being focused more on the enterprise, on the services side, we're like, Mel Zapier is not going to do it. We need like enterprise, you know, integration platform as a service. And we did get inspired by Zapier for sure. But I also took a lot of my enterprise knowledge in the early days of the integration software company that I worked for, Tipco.
01:05:10
Speaker
and went down the IPaaS journey and we built what we call built IO flow. you know And so that was the third third product. And we had you know a few large customers using that for some ah interesting use cases. And so fast forward to 2018.
01:05:31
Speaker
There was a deal that um there was a company that was big. ah All three were products within Draw, built IOflow, back-end-as-a-service, simple CMS. Yeah, they were all under the built IO branch. It was built IOflow, built IO MBass, mobile back-end-as-a-service, good and built IO content stack. um okay So it was all together. And then we still had the services business, right? So it was just a mess of, like,
01:06:01
Speaker
this This thing is all bootstrapped still. 10 years. How much revenue were you doing by that time? 2018? I would say around 5-6 mil. That included the services and everything. The products were doing like reasonable, not like crazy. Because again, le me didn't I think our first salesperson we hired was probably around 2015-2016.
01:06:24
Speaker
okay For services as well as the product. like We didn't have sales for a long time. This five, six mil, what percentage was services? Like a lion's share or? Lion's share. I would say 80 plus percentage was services. okay I could be wrong. yeah I have to look look up. It might have been a little more than that, um but it wasn't like much you know and and it was sustaining. I was also finally after like six, seven years taking some salary,
01:06:54
Speaker
yeah leaving And then Neha joined me actually in 2012. She quit her job and then she's doing the same business. She's my wife. She's the CEO of ContentSec right now. She joined me in this business and she's like, hey, let me show you how to go to market. So she came on and she's like, okay, you've built all these products. We've got to figure out how to sell this thing.
01:07:16
Speaker
Right? um So I think once she joined, I think the business, the revenues started, you know, ticking up. There was a deal that there's a company I wanted to buy built on your flow, like buy that product.
01:07:32
Speaker
um And we went through it, and it was a good exit, I would say. right And I had given ESOS, by the way, to my ah you know early sort of partners that had joined us. I had given them ESOS back in 2010, 2011, where in India they didn't even know anything about ESOS. And I actually gave that to them. I was like, hey, you just have to trust me. If this thing goes anywhere, you'll make a lot of money.
01:07:59
Speaker
And I have one request for you. It's like, don't ask me for crazy raises every year. Because I was giving like my average raise was like 30, 40% year over year. Because it was just like up and up and up, right? Yeah. Of course, they kept on asking me for the the raise. I had no idea of the ESOP till the 2018 exit that we had, right? um Now they know everything about ESOPs.
01:08:22
Speaker
But anyways, I think the that company that wanted to buy us, they just wanted to buy the built-ire flow product because it was you know they had this integration need and they wanted a cloud integration product. But they didn't know what to do with content stack and the services business we had. What was that company's core product with the acquirer?
01:08:42
Speaker
it was it was i mean i can't I don't think I can say the name, but it was a ah tech company. and very successful company that were doing, um you know, a bunch of different software in the manufacturing space. And they had, it was an older sort of traditional company in that ah they had a few cloud products as well. And they wanted to integrate all those things with something modern, like the built higher flow. Right. So this was not a ah product to sell, but it was a product to augment their existing, uh,
01:09:16
Speaker
solutions that they were anyway selling. They they were not looking at the standalone. They wanted to sell. So i okay you know I go to this. So I had a meeting with the CEO and and and the advisor. that And it was just like this big meeting room. And I ended up a nobody startup guy. And these guys are like a publicly traded company and you know, billions of dollars and they were grilling me for two, three hours, but they put up a slide that showed all their product and then integration was in the middle. And I'm just like, man, you guys want me.
01:09:51
Speaker
Why'd you put up that slide? you so ah um So that was interesting. But I think the the CEO at that time, he wanted to own the product. He didn't want to license it. And we were we were so like, I personally, I was like, this thing is going to blow up. you know The integration space is going to be massive. And we don't want to sell this to this this this company. And they were offering us double digit millions, right? And bootstrapped, OK?
01:10:25
Speaker
um And it was a good deal, man. After 10, 12 years of like grind, you know it's like it can relieve not just me, but all the other you know folks that had worked so hard to get to this place. It's like money that you never even thought you would get. You would relieve that. So you know at the very end, they're like, yeah, we'll buy you for this.
01:10:48
Speaker
And you know I got around to it and was like, all right, man, let's go. like We can build new products. Let's like figure out, take this, and sell the whole thing. okay And then I get a call the next day and it's like, no, we'll just want to license it.
01:11:03
Speaker
So I went from this rollercoaster, I was like, okay, I don't want to sell him this stuff to like, all right, let's just go through it. I don't have to worry about my mortgage and everything is paid off and the folks around us will also make a lot of money in India. I mean, they would have gotten curbs of rupees, right? Young guys. So I got to run through that thinking as I will create something new again, okay?
01:11:26
Speaker
Next morning we wake up and then we're like, all right, let's you know go through this deal. And they call us and they're like, all right, we change our mind. We just do license deal. So I don't know if it was like their strategy or whatever.
01:11:39
Speaker
and not knowing anything about that. So I went through this, we all went through this like roller coaster ride and it was still a good deal. It was a multimillion dollar license deal, but they took the source code from us. um and you know And that was, it's like, ah I don't know if you want to sell that, but that money was good enough. And of course we did not, it was the product to that time, right? We also had a roadmap.
01:12:04
Speaker
um that they didn't buy, right? So I was pretty confident. I think I got around to the fact that, and then also they carved it out for their sort of side of, ah you know, world, which was very different than the world that we were going after. So I think we were okay. And so we took that money and then we quickly realized these products products have a lot more value than you know, ah then the services company that's like around it, right? So we took that money and we split the companies. So we split built IO flow, the code that was a copy went to this other company, but then we accelerated the roadmap for the next year. Like they just went down and accelerate the roadmap so we could differentiate, you know, very differently just in case if they decide to come in our territory, right? So we did that, but we have a new company now called built.io.
01:12:57
Speaker
You have content stack, and then we still have the raw engineering company. um And what about MS, mobile backend as a service? The MS stayed within raw engineering, and we said we'll keep it as a niche product. And we kind of we still have that, but it's like more verticalized now in the sports ah world. And raw engineering has basically become a product company itself. There's no outside funding. And they basically are just ah creating you know sports applications.
01:13:28
Speaker
um So that's, that's still going. Um, and what is raw engineering's ARR now? Raw is probably little around like four or five mil. Okay. Yeah. And and that's just, um, but what, what kind of products are they doing? Like.
01:13:47
Speaker
It's mostly, it's still the MBass, but it's, we call it digital fan experience platform. okay And it's ah to build sports apps. So it could be, you know, um there is,
01:13:58
Speaker
um and NBA is a bunch of and NBA teams are a customer. There's a bunch of other leagues within the basketball um you know sports around the world that are a customer. um So it's like a fan experience sort of app. There's a bunch of other the services is around that. So it's very niche. It's not a big market, but it's fun. It's like a widely-built app solution for a sports business.
01:14:29
Speaker
Absolutely. yeah it's ah We have that, but we have a bunch of other services on top um that we can do so. So it's not so not a lot of competition. commerce tools You gave me the example of commerce tools. So this is something like that, but for sports. Yeah, exactly. okay so um And so I think the content stack and built IO now, we have two product companies and our management got split. I took built IO and they had to content stack as the CEO. And we had to, we decided to go raise capital because, you know, splitting one company into three, I think the operations, the costs and all kind of just go up. And it was all bootstrapped, right? So ah we decided to go the funding route. I literally just took two calls with VCs and I'm like, I'm done.
01:15:22
Speaker
I was like, we can't do all of it together. Right. And so we're like, oh can we sell one? Right. So we sold. So in that, the other sort of deal where let's say you wanted to buy us, we had an investment banker. Okay. After that, this time when we decided to sell built, I always we said, we don't, we'll just try to sell it ourselves.
01:15:49
Speaker
And we did that, you know, ah we created always, we basically just looked at the Forrester analyst reports and looked at the IPass world or integration. And we're the top players there and that didn't have any cloud software. And we just started hitting them up. And I think ah to our surprise, we got quite a bit of interest because even there at that now, you know after 10 years that the cloud was invented, they're like, shoot, we have to change our game, right? So we got a bunch of interesting parties. We also had some,
01:16:22
Speaker
ah Silicon Valley, like, you know, known companies that were not in the integration space, but they were big enough to they where they wanted an integration engine as part of their stack. So we got some interest there as well. And we ended up selling it to a company called Software AG in Germany. So we did get our exit without any raise, like the double digit millions, right? But it took a while after that roller coaster ride. When did you sell to Software AG?
01:16:53
Speaker
It was 2018 or 2019. Okay. A year or two after that. Okay. Yeah. It was, I think it was like a year after that. Yeah. So maybe 2019 and they have of course on the, you know, she being sort of.
01:17:08
Speaker
ah the go-to-market, you know, person with Content Sack. Content Sack had some really good big enterprise customers already. And our competitor, you know, um had already raised money while Content Sack was in a services company. But they raised money and they educated the world what headless EMS is. So I give them credit for that. Who is your competitor?
01:17:33
Speaker
This one in the headless CMS space, so there was a report ah from Forrester. So Forrester coined that term headless, just headless, right? okay The whole headless thing that you hear in the tech world, it was from the CMS side. And there was a report from Forrester in 2014 that said, hey, there's this headless world, which is API first, cloud stuff. And there's these two CMS companies. I think there was another one as well. I can't remember that company, but it's like Content Sack Contentful.
01:18:02
Speaker
right are the pioneers in this space. and So it's it's contentful. And in 2013 or 2014, I think they raised money, their first sort of big check. And they they basically spent that money educating the market. At least CMS is the way to go. And they were focused more on the developer side. We, from the very beginning, were focused on both, the editor experience. So editors have to use our product, as well as the developer. So our focus was both.
01:18:30
Speaker
So then fast forward to 2018, we said, let's just focus on the enterprise. These guys are sort of down market. you know They're trying to get the masses. And they've ah they've already created this thing around Headless CMS. And so we just doubled down on the the enterprise market. And I think that was like the brilliant move because the enterprise at that point was ready now.
01:18:58
Speaker
ah hey, we need headless CMS, who are the vendors? And then we would come up and we were absolutely ready for the enterprise because of our services experience. So we had our customer service that was just excellent because we had that services sort of background.
01:19:16
Speaker
and these large enterprise customers that need a lot of handholding and and it's complex use cases. So you can't just say, hey, sign up for your free trial, right? And so I think that worked out for us. And of course the pandemic was sort of the accelerator.
01:19:30
Speaker
um so So, you know, context like we went and raised like three rounds, we got seriously, I think it's close to 180 million dollars. So some massive investment went into this, this company. Why, why did you raise so much money? Like I can see you did a, your first raise was 2019 40ish million, then 2021 close to 60 million and then 80 million 2022.
01:20:00
Speaker
ah You had that money from the sale of for built IO.
01:20:06
Speaker
it did you need ah What did you need money for? That's what I want to understand. That's a very good question. I think by this time, like a decade later, I think the importance of go to market to me was Like serious. And then we had to get people that were smarter than us. And the timing we felt was just right. So, you know, everything else was sorted. Like I don't have to, you know, these are yeah and i know enjoy this. right Yeah, I think there's like this other thing as well, like you know where you if you have a mortgage, you have credit card bills and all this stuff to deal with, and then you're running a company, yeah there's a lot of stress, and you have to do a bunch of payroll and grow and all that. I think that exit kind of got us to, all of us, to like say, hey, we don't have to worry about that, and we have more, right? um So now I think this bet that we have, we have this other big thing, and the time was right.
01:21:03
Speaker
you know And we felt we got to accelerate everything,
Navigating Economic Challenges and Strategic Financing
01:21:07
Speaker
right? And we could kind of, yeah, we could use our money from the other sale and kind of still go by slowly. um And I was also you know not as young as before. So all those sort of things kind of came into the thinking and we said, let's just accelerate this thing.
01:21:24
Speaker
Right. And there was another thing I think the series C we didn't have to raise at that time, you know, we had still a lot of capital, the pandemic, like I said, 80 million, we didn't have to raise, but go back to the the early days of my career, that experience that I had with the the downturn of the dot com.
01:21:46
Speaker
Yeah. It just, for me, internally, I always kind of have this like radar on when things are not right. and Like, hey, this guy you know has no revenue and is getting 100x the valuation. That's just like, holy, yeah, this is coming to an end very soon. right So it kind of built that in me. And that's why I was able to, I think, run a bootstrap company for a long time um you know and did all these things. And I think, also, that Series C that it's like, hey, this is insane. VCs are still investing. We just went through two years of like crazy growth numbers. Let's just put it all together and lock the money in the bank. um And you know if the market goes down,
01:22:33
Speaker
We will have that money in the bank. If it goes up, no worries. We'll continue to do well. so And we were very conservative in our valuations and all that sort of stuff. We didn't play that game. you know There's companies that had less revenues than us. There was a competitor of built IO flow, built IO, sorry, the IPAS, that got valuations of like billions of dollars.
01:22:56
Speaker
you know, um but not as much revenue, you know, so I don't know, it was all this stuff and we ended up basically just kind of trying to secure and and make sure that we are well-capitalized for sort of the long, long journey, right? What were you valued at in this CDC? Are you at liberty to share?
01:23:19
Speaker
um I can't share, but it's like close to um you know so the unicorn status, if you will. well okay um And again, I don't really care about any of that. um you know I've been in this thing for 20 years. I want to build a company that's a long, sustaining company providing value to our customers. I think I see a lot of people just get hung up on this like unicorn. Maybe it's more media.
01:23:46
Speaker
ah But as a founder, I really have no no interest in that sort of um you know label, if you will. um We got lucky again, ah in the sense that we didn't raise at a crazy valuation, you know knowingly and purposefully. So I don't have to build up my valuation to that if the market corrects. And knock on wood, I don't have to. you know At a conservative level, we're still pretty good.
Enterprise Sales Led Growth Strategy
01:24:15
Speaker
Um, and, and, uh, yeah, just think like five, 10 years out. Um, what would you like the company to be? Uh, and it, it all kind of goes back to the customers and the value that you're providing, right? So I like that sort of thinking, you know, uh, then help me, uh, understand your, uh, go to market for content stack, uh, you know,
01:24:42
Speaker
You, ah like you said, you sucked at GoToMarket and you must have learned, together you and Neha would have cracked that code. What is the error now for content suck?
01:24:55
Speaker
Um, I'm not at liberty to share, but, um, it's pretty high. It's, I would say it's in terms of like Indian sort of SaaS companies. Um, we would be in the top, you know, uh, top, uh, sort of, uh, list of, of revenue plus like between 50 and 50 million plus for sure. Yeah. Okay. Um, and, uh, yeah, I just don't want to share. I, you know, yeah that's fine. but That's fine. That's fine. Yeah. Um, the range is good enough. Yeah. Yeah.
01:25:25
Speaker
yep yeah So so but and how how did you, how did you scale to this kind of revenue to 50 mil plus kind of? Yeah. So the money definitely helped. I think the pandemic was sort of another accelerator, right? Because people started to realize they had to move fast and our technology helps company move really fast. Uh, in some cases it's like, holy shit, like I'm stuck in this like old CMS world and one website update takes me two months and you can literally do it. Like you can do like.
01:25:58
Speaker
20 updates a day with our technology. And of course, with low cost, you don't need massive people. So I think the value is pretty solid, right? It's just people need to try try it out. So with the money that we took in, we hired some really good um team ah that helped us kind of, you know,
01:26:20
Speaker
go to market and all that. And, you know, we were focused on enterprise, so we hired a sales team across the regions that we wanted to sort of compete in. So it's mostly US, Europe, and Asia pack sort of got added later. And it's all SLG motion, mostly. ah What is SLG? ah Like, give me a 101 on that.
01:26:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's sales led growth, right? There's a couple of sort of motions that ah people are in. There's also a hybrid as well. So sales led growth versus product led growth. I think the product led growth, you can loosely um tie with like freemium model where you could just kind of come on the the products website and sign up for like, you know, free version.
01:27:09
Speaker
these are exactly Exactly. Exactly. So those are like PLG, you know, product-led growth. um where people just use it and they like the product, the time to value is very short and people usually, they want them to go to the next year where they can swipe their credit card. With the SLG motion, it's a little complex. so you It's like traditional, what traditional software used to be where you had sales people that ah with all the leads that would work, the leads and inbound, outbound both,
01:27:41
Speaker
ah although we get mostly inbound um you know with with our marketing efforts. ah These individuals work with these ah customers, and our sales cycle is pretty long because these large enterprises, they have you know complex use cases, so it takes a while to work through that.
01:28:02
Speaker
and And so it's it's kind of a slower motion, but it's bigger um deals. You know, our ASPs are upwards, like close to 200,000. Average selling price. Yeah, average selling price. So yeah, so that's like the sales led growth. You said 200,000. Your ASP. Okay. What is the difference between ASP and ACV? Average contract value. Like some founders talk of ASP, like you spoke of ASP, some founders speak of the ACV.
01:28:31
Speaker
the average contract value? ah Yeah, it's an annual contract value. So you know you could sign on reded for two years, three years, and then you just like take that and say, what's what's the yearly ARR revenue you would get? And that's important because you want to keep that customer for ah you know three years. um So there's also the lifetime value of that customer that you that you need to track. right ah In our business, I think our um The way we kind of run our business, are are you know there's retention and churn. but You don't want churn. Because we're SLG and our customer service is the best in the SaaS industry, our retention rate is like upwards of 97-98%.
01:29:21
Speaker
Well, which is unheard of in large sort of enterprise. And even like, of course, on the the the PLG, the small to medium size, I think the churn tends to be high because and the smaller sort of ah companies that tend to kind of move move on and things like that. um But yeah, so we focus a lot on customer service, customer success, ah making sure that these and enterprises that buy us ah get the value that you know that they need and be it's more, even our customer organization is very service oriented and make sure that those guys are successful. And that you know once you do that, it just, they keep investing in you and then our products is keep getting better and better and they start consuming more and more. So it's not just like that first time deal, but you wanna make sure that they continue to you know get value and and and keep spending more on your platform.
01:30:19
Speaker
um So that's kind of content second. That's how we operate. yeah Do you typically like take like do a multi-year deal where you get them to pay upfront for a couple of years or is it like annual?
01:30:33
Speaker
It's a combination. We have a lot of multi-year deals, three years, even five-year deals. um You know, it depends. I think obviously if you sign up for multi-year, you get a pretty good discount, right? So yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Understood. So is, ah you know,
01:30:56
Speaker
To achieve SLG, is it just about hiring a couple of good sales people or what else goes around it? like Do you need to support them with marketing investment also? What kind of marketing investment? what ah like Just help me understand that ah SLG, from a holistic perspective, if I'm a founder who wants to do an SLG motion for my SaaS product, what all do I need to do?
01:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think the first thing with SLG, you know especially for us kind of selling in US, and I'm based out of the US, I spend most of the time there. um it's you know These sales reps are not cheap, right? So you need funding. If you don't have funding, SLG motions are very hard. the i I've seen companies do it out of India as well.
01:31:45
Speaker
um which is good. It's a good sign, right? Like you could keep some of the costs low there, but it's still sort of a hard motion to have. um So you would hire these experienced, you know, account executives.
01:31:59
Speaker
ah You know, you could start out small, you know, you can kind of break up the US region into two or maybe just like the time zones are, you know, it's like three, four time zones in the US, right? So ah having just one small team catering to the entire US becomes difficult. So I would say at minimum two, you break it up into two.
01:32:22
Speaker
And then you hire these like, you know, account reps that in in our case, these account reps had to be pretty knowledgeable and senior because the the the the product that we have and then the customers that we're selling to, right, requires that type of. ah What is the difference between a sales rep and an account rep?
01:32:43
Speaker
Um, it's, it's the same. I think okay you just have different, what we have is like, we have just different levels. So we have a, which is an account, account executive one, two, three, and we break them down into a one would go after sort of the billion dollar plus enterprise and a two might be more mid market. We don't do small.
01:33:02
Speaker
Um, so, so, and also it's kind of a ah graduation, right? So we have this program where we have, you know, uh, our BDRs, which is the business development reps. These are individuals that, you know, we have a target list of customers or prospects that we want to go after or ICP, if you will. Right. Ideal, ideal profile.
01:33:25
Speaker
um We have that list and then our BDRs will basically do the the calling and the outreach and into stuff like that. right um So those individuals tend to be really good sales folks eventually right once day because they have to learn your pitch of the product.
01:33:41
Speaker
And they got to pitch it, you know, and get someone's attention in like less than a minute. And so they they tend to become really good. And then they become, you know, we have this like a few that have made it through the chain of actually becoming ah proper sales reps.
01:33:57
Speaker
right And the the the one that I can think of, you know, when I'm still does though the even though they get leads and they have to work those leads as a sales rep. right And I found that fascinating because they're still hustling and they're still doing the and and building the leads right by doing some outbound calls. ah So they they tend to be really good, the the you know the ones that really become safe. So the VDR is at the bottom of the hierarchy. These are people who are
01:34:31
Speaker
checking, ah making a lead warm and then passing it on. like Like they would do a cold call and check, hey, would you be interested to know more? And if someone says yes, so so then you have generated a warm lead and then ah an AE or ah like an account executive or a sales rep will take over from there. Absolutely. And I think for us, um I think 80, 90% of our leads come in inbound. um It might have gone down because we were doing a lot of other sort of ah marketing activities as well, but um you know once those leads come in, I think the BDRs kind of work through them.
01:35:09
Speaker
Okay. They qualify the lead to decide if it's the time of an AE or not. Absolutely. And then it goes to the AEs because the AEs are, you know like I said, they're they're expensive. ah There's also ramp up time because when you get a new AE coming into your company, ah depending on how complex your product is, ah there's a ramp time. You're still paying that person.
01:35:33
Speaker
But, you know, if the ramp time is three months, you got to pay that person three months or six months as well. So it takes time, you know, for those individuals to ramp up. ah The way to build a BDR would be to hire for hustle and grit, right? you You need people who are willing to... Yeah, and and the single threaded is not...
01:35:55
Speaker
Single threaded is not going to work. You know, it's like, Hey, give me the leads. I'm just going to call them. It's not going to work. So you want a single threaded, single threaded is like, you know, you just on the phone.
01:36:07
Speaker
but you want the BDR that is going to go to the LinkedIn, find out about this this this lead, do all sorts of different threads like LinkedIn and maybe ah blogs that that person has written and kind of find out more about that person and even the company, right? And have the context ah and then do the call or the outreach through an email or whatever channel. So it's like, you got to be multi-threaded and not everyone does that, right? At least in our world.
01:36:37
Speaker
um you know Okay, okay so so that's what you're hiring for in a BDR. What are you hiring for in an AE? Are you looking at someone who's from the industry who understands the product? i mean but but Initially, we didn't because then the RAM type is there, but I think to close, to get the RAM,
01:36:57
Speaker
fast, it still takes time, even if you bought you get an A from the same industry. ah They might know all the CMS and all that sort of concept, but then the way content excels, it they need to you know learn all that. um So it takes still takes time.
01:37:14
Speaker
um Ideally, yes, I think it would be good if someone already has a deep domain expertise. It does help, but we also like to go people from the outside because they bring sort of a different perspective. So it's a mix and match. What are you hiring for? like Like if you're not hiring for a relevant experience in the same industry, then what is it that you're hiring for? Grit. hung How is it different from a media? like Same. It's the same. It's just different part of or different. Not all BDS can be like a sales person, but it is a good ramp for in like a very young individual that wants to get into sales. Right. And I've seen, I've heard, we don't do this, but I've heard these large software companies and the training program that
01:38:06
Speaker
ah they put these BDRs through. like So I've heard this case where you know the BDR is doing a call and then everyone, maybe we do, I don't know, um but all the BDRs are just listening you know around them. Imagine as a young person kind of going through that and you have to pitch it and you know it's it's terrifying, right? But if you go through that, you i mean i mean you're building some muscles that are like incredible. The other thing is like you are building which I wish I did in the early days where, you know, you get a no, like, no, I'm not going to do this for you and hurt your ego. And, you know, that like, no, like you get OK and you get, you know, like, yeah, you've been a lot of this. You build resilience. So I think the BDRs are like, like solid. You know, I appreciate what they do. Some of those tend to kind of move up.
01:38:58
Speaker
ah the the chain towards like selling ah you know on the on the sales side, which is, like they tend to be amazing. But I'm not clear on the difference between the two. but what What extra does an AE have, which a BDR doesn't have, or a sales rep? The the know-how. They build the relationships. They programatize, because you already have that like a qualified lead now. Now the playbooks become very different.
01:39:27
Speaker
Right, so it's not, it depends on the product, right? Our product's very techie. So you could have a very simple product. You might not need both those motions. But for our product, the sales engine, the sales, sorry, the AE, which is the the sales rep, they build relationships across that whole, um you know, like the C levels, and and then figure out the org maps, and what what are their pain points? They try to understand that, and then they, okay They make sure that you know our product and demos are all lined up properly. and they And they get me on the call, or they get you know on at the right time. and So it's it's very complex sale on the enterprise side. um And that's why it's you know it's it's expensive to build this motion. ah ah But enterprise sales, you need something like this. you know it's It's not just like a freemium sign up.
01:40:22
Speaker
So you have BDRs, you have AEs or sales reps, and then what else do you need for SLG? Yeah, you need um the the sales engineers, right? So the sales folks are not necessary. Some of them tend to be very techy, but they need ah sort of, I think, one sales engineer support a couple of sales reps. um And these sales engineers tend to be a lot more technical, because remember, we are catering to the editor.
01:40:54
Speaker
um you know the content editor as well as the developer. So there's a lot of techie questions that come through as well and even the editor questions. So these guys tend to demo the product pretty well and and answer all the techie questions and kind of assist the sales person in in making that sale.
01:41:13
Speaker
right okay OK. And that this is all before sales. And then once you wreck close the deal, then the whole customer success motion starts after that, right? um And we basically have, we bought like 50 people. We carved out those people out of raw engineering. And ContentSec kind of tucked that in, like bought that in, into ContentSec after like two or three years.
01:41:42
Speaker
because we Our partners, content tech partners, they were like, hey, there's raw engineering and they're doing services for content stack. So, you know, there's conflict of interest.
01:41:54
Speaker
and which, you know, definitely valid. So we wanted to make sure that they didn't feel that way and and we are giving business to all our partners. So the more we do with that all that knowledge, you know, ah so we we brought them in into our customer success organization so they don't help customers like write code.
01:42:16
Speaker
But they onboard the customer. They train the customer. They walk them through all sorts of architectural kind of discussions. They even help and enable the partner. like you know Big companies like Capgemini and Valtech and all these E-PAM. They help these partners ah with all our product needs. right um So this this organization, we call it the Technical Solutions Organization.
01:42:46
Speaker
And they come into play after we close close the close the deal.
Implementation Challenges and Customer Value
01:42:52
Speaker
Okay. ah What is the role of partners here? Do they bring in the business or do they come in after you have got business as implementation? Like you started Draw Engineering as an and AWS partner.
01:43:08
Speaker
ah So what you would be doing is both, I guess, some and AWS clients, AWS might refer to you and tell you that help these guys implement AWS. Whereas in some cases you would tell them, Hey, I'll help you go to AWS.
01:43:22
Speaker
get business to AWS. So is it similar with these partners for you? Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, take me back like 10 years. I had no idea what to do with the, you know, the partnership. ah Now we have to work all those angles, right? So these large SIs and, you know, because software integrator. Yeah. um as Solution integrator software. Solution integrator. Okay.
01:43:48
Speaker
Infosys, Vipro are SIs, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. These guys um are, you know, they have teams that get, ah you know, educated on, on these, you know, companies like Content Stack and they know how to implement it perfectly and write and stuff like that. So E-PEM, I think, has like 200 developers on Content Stack that they've trained. And there's a bunch of other, you know, Valtech and Capgemini and all these guys that have many Folks trained on content stack so they and in the customers that we deal with our large organizations they tend to have
01:44:28
Speaker
Sometimes they have small teams, big teams. It it all depends. you know But a lot of them work with these large solution integrators to help them ah implement technologies. right So for companies like ContentSec, it's important to work with these SIs. And it goes both ways. right And we track that. you know We give business to them. Sometimes a customer the the customer already has an SI that they work with. right and even Accenture and all these all these ones. um so And also sometimes you know they say, hey, do you recommend SIs? And so we work with some larger SIs. There's also some agencies that we work with. And it it goes both ways. you know we We recommend for certain use cases, we recommend certain partners. For certain use cases, we recommend that certain partners. um So it's it's a combination of both. And then sometimes, not sometimes, the partners also
01:45:27
Speaker
bring us into deals for certain use cases that they know that Content Sack is going to be a better fit. Okay. I want to ask like a very 30,000 feet above the ground kind of a question. Why not just do the implementation in-house? Why i work with a middleman between you and your customer for implementation? Why not just use the middleman for sales? You can always give them a sales commission.
01:45:56
Speaker
but do the implementation in-house? Yeah, remember that raw engineering had services and product all combined? Yeah. For some reason, our our industry does not know how to value a company like that. I think there is some play with that as well. ah The services revenue, because it's usually project-based,
01:46:20
Speaker
It's valued very differently. So a services company is valued very differently than a SaaS company with the AR revenue, which is like electricity, paying electricity bill. If you don't have a lot of churn, that money is just going to come in. you know this This is interesting. okay I come from sort of a business family. right And in my mind, business was profits and loss. like You just have to go sell.
01:46:48
Speaker
And then whatever happens, expenses, and then and then January 1st, you basically start at zero. Because that year, January 1st, you have no revenue. right The SaaS is very different. you know it's Like I said, if you have $10 million dollars of revenue last year, January 1st, depending on your churn number, in our case, 97%. So you know that you're going to lose $3 million you know But $9.7 million is the revenue January 1st. So the value of a company like that is like crazy. right What is a services company? January 1st? Besides the retainers, the revenue is zero. so So I think that plays a lot. And I think VCs don't like to have a lot of services revenue in a SaaS company. And I can see see the reason why.
01:47:43
Speaker
ah Second, I think the partner ecosystem gets, you know, there's a conflict of interest, I believe. Although previously, you know, before the SaaS world, tech companies would work with these partners and SIs, as well as have a professional services team. But those professional services team would charge a lot higher than the SIs, right? So that's how they kind of, but for some reason in the SaaS world, it's looked it It just does not look right. It's very few SaaS companies that I know that also does professional services. But that's a that's a very good question. I think a lot of, some sometimes some customers asks so ask us like, hey, why don why don't you just do it because you have the technical solution organization, right?
01:48:29
Speaker
And I do see that are you know that request and argument as well. um But we've got to balance all these sort of parties alongside that. So I think we've come up with a really good model where a TSO is alongside the partner, alongside the customer, and the TSO organization actually has solution architects. These individuals ah they live and breathe solutions on content stack. So they they get assigned to accounts, they get ah you know assigned to partners, and we are making sure that these guys all are successful. right So we've kind of come up with a good balance ah between between all of them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but ah would this lead to
01:49:16
Speaker
perverse incentives where a SaaS company may not want the product to be very easy to implement because the easier they make it and the more productized it is, the lower is the revenue opportunity for the SIs.
01:49:35
Speaker
It is conflicting. and there's conflicting i think I don't think you consciously do anything. Maybe I'm naive. okay but No, it would not be a conscious choice, but yeah incentives drive behavior. it's It's basic human psychology. We don't even realize it. Absolutely. I think sometimes it's it's misaligned. I think the SIs, they're driven by hours, right? so the the the knowledge the The usual thinking is like you know they want like harder technologies and stuff like that. And I think in some cases, i do it does come to me. It's like, why are you guys doing this? right But for the most part, I think even the SI is because they have to make the customer successful for the ongoing sort of relationship. I think they're also the incentive lies in the customer success.
01:50:26
Speaker
Yes, they have to drive revenues from hours, but I think it's like balanced with making sure that the customer doesn't get cheated. So the good SIs and the good teams, they're very well aware of that. you know And I think for the most part. I'm not saying the power incentives will affect the SIs, not at all. I'm saying they will affect the SaaS companies. The SaaS company has less incentive to productize further to simplify further, to make it more DIY, because the more you do that, the more you affect your partner revenue and your partner is bringing in business to you. I think it depends, right? Like, so we're at that stage now that um there's no way we're going to think about that because we're big enough to where, you know, for us, in my mind, it's always customer first, a customer value. Time to value to me should be like,
01:51:20
Speaker
very short for anything we do. Are we always successful at that? Maybe, maybe not. But our product and engineering thinking is around providing that value. So we never even think in terms of that. um I think when you are small it's still you still like when you're small, you still have to have a product that's like amazing. you know um I just don't see that playing out. um i mean yeah you know I've gone through a Salesforce implementation cycle and it is such a clunky product. It's not that Salesforce has some perverse incentive to keep it clunky, but I think that
01:52:06
Speaker
You just, inside Salesforce, you would not even be hearing it that your product is clunky. And, you know, because there is a system integrator who is making sure that the customer is not exposed to any of the clunkiness. And whereas there are a whole bunch of startups doing CRM, CRM continues to remain a category which sees multiple companies attempting it. Someday there will be a better Salesforce, which is more DIY, not as clunky. and You know, so that that's just like, it's it's like very ah hypothetical conversation, but that's just something else. No, but you're right. I think, I mean, these products inherently just get complex, right? So if you, it's like the the paradox, right? Like you, as you get,
01:52:53
Speaker
Bigger your product gets complex. You want to add more features more products more? Capabilities what you hear is feature demands because you know your your partners will tell you we need this feature We need this feature. You will probably not hear demands of simplification as much as demand of features. I think you do hear that. I think the business though, you know, like Salesforce, it's not just Salesforce, they end up buying so many companies and integrating these companies and yeah the value kind of, you know, is all over the place, right? And the the
01:53:26
Speaker
they've been around for more than 20 years, it's going to be complex. right right um so So there's no way around it. you know I would highly recommend this book called Innovator's Dilemma. you know it it It gives you a very different view to Like, you know, sitting outside, you can say these companies don't innovate or don't make their product better. But to your point, they're listening to their customers and partners and just adding features catered to them. yeah um and And thereby making the the product even more complex as they keep adding new features.
01:54:03
Speaker
But then they're like, oh, well, these other company came by and it's a better technology and took this company, this big company out. Well, those other companies are not focused on like these massive customers. They're focused on like whatever the new tech is and maybe some edge use cases. It just so happened that those things eventually become bigger and then take over this company. right So it's this kind of balancing act between the two. I've seen companies.
01:54:30
Speaker
I've seen companies do both really well. you know There are companies out there that in the SaaS world like Cloudflare, you know they're like like at a billion in revenue, and they're still showing 50% growth.
01:54:43
Speaker
you know and right so They're a bunch of them out there. I want to say a bunch of them. There are a few. Cloudflare, Datadog, Mongo. These guys are like, they've kind of managed both that paradox. They've managed both pretty well.
01:55:00
Speaker
um so Okay, interesting. Coming back to the SLG, I just wanted one last a query in that. ah You said 80 to 90% of your leads are inbound. Yeah.
01:55:17
Speaker
how how What does one need to do to reach that level of inbound leads? What do you invest in? I think the marketing, so so of course for us like Headless EMS is kind of the the, you know, where everyone wants to move towards that.
Brand Awareness and Future Innovations
01:55:32
Speaker
And these enterprises, you know, they can't just, they do their research and things like that. And of course all our marketing activities,
01:55:39
Speaker
um you know, the brand awareness, the demand generation, um you know, the campaigns that we run ah kind of drives a lot of that traffic, organic and organic both. So of course you need dollars for that because you want to market to get that inbound flow, right? How much of that dollars is spent on pure performance marketing campaigns versus how much is on other stuff and what is the other stuff?
01:56:05
Speaker
Hey, I'm still a product guy. I don't like all those numbers in my head, you know, got it about it yeah but but we do have, you know, it's it's not like something absurd. Like it's usually ah in line with a lot of like, you know, ah enterprise sort of SaaS companies. um Nothing is like completely off. I mean, ah I'm more and like what I want to learn is besides spending dollars on performance marketing, what else do you do?
01:56:34
Speaker
ah Performance marketing is like a no-brainer. Of course, you need to do that. But what else? um I mean, the market for us, you know we're always concerned about our brand awareness. so you know The fact that our competitor you know was in the market and educating everyone about about the Headless EMS world and also kind of went the small to mid-size, they're everywhere. right Everyone knows them and we have sort of a brand awareness challenge and we always worry that
01:57:08
Speaker
you know, are we on the table for all the enterprises that are in market trying to buy a CMS? And, you know, we're not comfortable saying yes. Like there's still companies out there that don't ah know us. So, you know,
01:57:25
Speaker
We're working through some of those challenges. you know What are the tactics that we can come up with and and make sure that we we are there. you know Our brand is known. And it's not easy. you know Brand awareness takes a long, long time. um And especially when there's a company that's that's out there doing this for a while, like even being number two, it's it's pretty hard.
01:57:48
Speaker
You know, um, so so besides that, I think there's a bunch of this, this podcast is like contributing to perhaps illness and right. ah Probably you would tell you, um, so I had this, this guy, okay, this kid come, come up to me and say, Hey, you were so good at talking in front of people. And I'm like, really? I got, I'm getting, I'm trying to get better. Hmm.
01:58:12
Speaker
And it will, maybe now you you you talk to me and it feels like I'm natural. I tell you, man, like till 45, I'm 47, till 45, I was still not, and I was working on it, the you know, in my early 40s or late 30s, but it was not come natural to me, you know? And and um so yeah, so I think,
01:58:36
Speaker
you know, it's changing and now I'm kind of putting myself out there and being on these ah podcasts. And also I think I have this like thing of like, okay, now as you get sort of, you know, sort of on the other end of your career, you want to, you know, give back wherever possible. And that's why I was telling you is like, I'm energized by some of these questions I was getting by some of these early founders and all the knowledge that they have, you know, and And I keep telling him, I had none of this knowledge when I started, man. And it was like, I can sit back here and say, I was this genius that I thought about all this stuff. Absolutely not, man. It's like learned along the way. You know, so.
01:59:21
Speaker
Okay. ah Let me end with the this question. ah Who is going to disrupt content stack? And I'll tell you where I'm coming from. So if you look at a company like say Adobe, now content stack is disrupting Adobe. Figma is disrupting Adobe. Different parts of their businesses are getting disrupted. Figma might have been seen. So let's take the example of sub-stack. You heard of sub-stack, right? Yep. yep So sub-stack is like a newsletter tool.
01:59:51
Speaker
It's a very small push short market, very narrow use case, and Figma must have started like that. They've done pretty well. yeah i mean They've done pretty well. Yes, yes, yes. So would you know who would disrupt contents? Would someone like a sub-stack kind of a tool become ah what the next generation version of a CMS would be, or what do you think? I think you're putting on your... Remove yourself as...
02:00:20
Speaker
You're putting my finger on you putting on your finger on a topic that I think about every single day. right um and And again, you know as you as the companies grow bigger, there's a whole lot of challenges. you know We're still innovating.
02:00:42
Speaker
um But to your question, like what do you do with these companies that come out of nowhere, right? um No, that's not my question. and My question is who will disrupt you? I'll get to that. Without putting yourself in the CTO role. I'll get to that.
02:01:01
Speaker
the Who's going to disrupt us, I think is, again, like there's two different motions going on. Okay. So the disrupt for me is always going to be these edge companies that we think it's edge. Okay. And eventually it kind of just takes over, but how do you find those things? Right. Um, the answer to your question is going to be content stack is going to disrupt content stack.
02:01:25
Speaker
Because I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful of that. and And I'm doing things to ensure that um we disrupt our own self. That's the only way we will survive. You know, disruption typically comes from these edge companies, as you said. Who are those edge companies which could possibly be future disruptors?
02:01:50
Speaker
Hey man, they fight because I know Contentful is listening, you know, our competitors listening. ah king gar and i I'm just kidding. i think So I'm very curious, you know, i concept just as a techie, I still kind of keep looking at a lot of new things and I'm on a lot of different like feeds and stuff like that.
02:02:11
Speaker
There's some interesting things coming. I think there's, a in my opinion, there's a tsunami like coming at us right now. ah As humans, I think, overall, ah the AI um like change that's happening is insane. It is insane. It's a tsunami that's not 200 miles out. It's like right in your face.
02:02:31
Speaker
ah You're in the epicenter of that AI in content kind of a tsunami, right? Do you have those built-in tools now? like ah ah A content team doesn't need to do anything much other than a few prompts and the content is auto-generated? Absolutely. and we're In two weeks, we're going to announce some like crazy things. um and Remember the iPads that we built?
02:02:52
Speaker
um You know, that same team came back from software AG to content stack and we built that whole solution in like two months. And and we we have a whole automation engine and guess what, in AI,
02:03:05
Speaker
with an automation engine, it's like a game changer. um So the multi, multi issue that I talk about with the content where you create content, you got to translate it to 90 different languages, and then you got to create like 90 different variants of that. So you can see multi, multi, multi. But with an automation framework in AI, you can just automate that whole thing, right? Right. and so we're we're We're excited to announce this in a couple of weeks, and I think maybe before this podcast comes out, ah in our in our yearly conference that happens in Austin this year, ah the first week of June, ah we're announcing some some really game-changing sort of ah capabilities with AI and it's going to provide the value you know to our customer. And and you know we jumped on the AI thing like before our competitors and all that. And just me, like I always have this like gut feeling and maybe some paranoia you know um that these new tech will take you over.
02:04:12
Speaker
yeah So like I said, I'm always like trying new new tools and and trying to apply it to the the problems that we have. And if I'm successful, the content side will disrupt content side. Because the AI, the way I always look at things, you know it's like the problems are the same. you know It's very very rarely that a new problem sort of arises. There's solutions for problems. There might not be the right solutions.
02:04:41
Speaker
The solutions for problems, um when a new tech sort of comes by, you have the ability to squeeze like tremendous value out of a new solution to the same problem, if you know what I mean. right And that's how those companies are starting, right the new companies are starting. And so it's important to be on those edges, because one of those tech solutions and new tech solutions, especially with AI might actually be the solution that we were, right? And would provide like tremendous value and we'll be gone. So I'd rather be that. Like I want to make sure that we're there. Are we going to be successful? I don't know. We'll definitely give it a try. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. lis It was a real pleasure. I appreciate the talk, Akshay. Thank you so much.