WE'RE BACK!
BUT... 2020 will be 2020, so we apologize for Jared's video quality - we had a corrupted video file so we had to use the low res webcam file as a backup.
THE GOOD NEWS...
After a 10 day hiatus, Jared returns from his attempt at running 3 marathons in 3 days on the Appalachian Trail - whoah... Did he make it?!
Kevin also shares some crazy news about his career and what's next for the epic saga of Kevin Raheja. After we catch up, we get to the goods of talking about OEM (or "powered by") partnerships and how to leverage these partnerships for unparalleled customer value. Plus, discuss how every category can have businesses dedicated to serving other companies through this unique G2M motion!
This episode is sponsored by Crossbeam. Crossbeam is a partner ecosystem platform. It acts as a data escrow service that finds overlapping customers and prospects with your partners while keeping the rest of your data private and secure. Sign up for free at Crossbeam.com.
Audio:
Transcript
Jared Fuller 00:20
wearing a hat today, Kevin, matchy for once, finally wearing a hat. But we're back. I was out for a week and I screwed up the scheduling so we weren't able to get one recorded. So sorry for the two week hiatus, but the good news is we're recording to this week. So you're gonna have like, double action. Whenever this happens in the next guest, you're gonna, you're gonna absolutely love but Kevin is just you and me today, right?
Kevin Raheja 00:45
Yeah, just us too. Maybe we can, like tease the guests later in the week or something. But Jared, you had a really special trip. I wanted to talk to you about that and tell people where you went?
Jared Fuller 00:59
Yeah, I, uh, I'll get into that one. I'll get into that that's gonna be an interesting story. Before we do just a quick reminder that this episode is sponsored by cross beam cross beam is a partner ecosystem platform that acts as a data escrow service that finds overlapping customers and prospects with your partners while keeping the rest of your data private and secure. So you can sign up for free at cross beam.com. So where the heck was I? I decided to do something really stupid, which was I wanted to try and attempt to run three marathons three days in a row on the Appalachian Trail, solo backpacking.
Kevin Raheja 01:38
So what even? What even gave you that idea? That is that is an insane thing to do. What made you want to do that?
Jared Fuller 01:46
I don't know. I've I've read a lot of books this year on running like so I picked up a running habit. Like, it's a great habit to pick up last year, about a year ago, I picked it up. And then COVID happened. So like, you know, it's a great habit to have whenever you know, COVID started happening. But I've read like the rise of the ultra runner by autorun didn't finish. So good. I read can't hurt me by David Goggins. I write read. Rich rolls book. It's just google rich roll book. I've read a bunch, a bunch of different books on running. And what's so interesting about having read not just like one book, but like multiple books, is about how much self improvement can come from these types of big challenges, because I said, I read books on ultra running. Let's be clear, ultra running is these crazy people that, you know, are running 50 miles, 100 miles, 200 miles in one run. So I didn't do anything like that crazy. But I wanted to do something a little bit different because I hadn't taken time off this year. And I don't know, I was like, I just wanted to create my own challenge, because there's no official races or anything. And I thought, well, what a better way to do that than to like go, you know, it was the Bartram trail, which starts in South Carolina and ends in North Carolina, but it goes through Georgia. So yeah, I just wanted to create a, you know, crazy challenge and do something, do something different. That was a physical challenge, mental challenge, but also, it was solo. So it was, I wouldn't say meditative, but it was introspective. How about that?
Kevin Raheja 03:23
Yeah. So I saw I saw your, some of your Instagram stories, and you were really it seems secluded out there. It was beautiful. But it seemed pretty secluded, did you see many people? Or did you really get a chance to spend alone time in the woods and really digest that outdoors.
Jared Fuller 03:44
So that there's a couple points where the trail intersects, you know, other trails? So there's like some trail heads there. So I saw a handful of people in my three days, you know, for like four nights there, but like three days. But what was really weird was I saw no animals. None, zero. Like I didn't see squirrels, chipmunks, bears, deer. Birds, like I saw nothing. So it was kind of eerie. In some ways, like, I'm used to the I grew up in the West Coast mountains. Yeah. And there whenever you're, you know, hiking mountains, you know, compared to the apps apps are lots of hills, that kind of a mountain to mountains, compared to you know, the Rockies, right in the Cascades is that you could get like perspective and elevation gain. Whereas here is like you really felt like you were always in, like, even when you're on top. It's not quite the same. So yeah, it was pretty, pretty isolated. It gives you a good chance to decompress and like think about, you know, work and life and, you know, partnerships and some of the stuff that I've been working on and how to, you know, because every time that you think One of the things that people forget whenever they're in a career or they're starting a company, and whatever role you're in is like as the company changes, so to your role has to change. And I feel like I'm at one of those inflection points right now. And I felt like I needed to be away from everything. This wasn't like, I didn't need a vacation with like, you know, at an amusement park or not that you could anyways, learn COVID but like, I needed to be away from everything and to just clear the mind because I'm, what, like, I don't know what, what I can reference here, but you're most creative. You know, things come from time. Like, you're not coming up with solutions while you work. You come up with solutions during that, yeah, that in between time, I think navall which I'm reading his book right now that are not really his book. It's a like amalgamation of all the stuff of navall raava Khan, the co founder of angel list, one of my favorite, like, just I'm obsessed with navall. He is like my current jam, like, I was reading his, um, his book out on the trail. But you know, what he said recently is he's like, Look, you only have two creative hours every day. use them wisely. And most people don't think that way. They think like, Oh, yeah, I'm creative the whole day. But the reality is, you're not in we don't do enough to decompress. So like, one of the things he does and says is, you know, an hour of meditation every day. Right, like a full hour, 60 minutes. And sometimes you need an event like this to kick start, you know, that kind of practice back in your life. So that's like, one of the takeaways from this is like, okay, gotta recommit to the practice of meditation. So that way I can capture like, we're running a million cycles a second here. How can you then you know, turn that? You know, like, because I was away from everything? No, no cell service, no phone? No, nothing? Right? How can I then have a practice like that? In my daily life? I'm like, Oh, yeah, I gotta get back on the meditation kick.
Kevin Raheja 06:58
So besides just wanting to kind of do more of that be in more of a meditative state? Was there anything that either for your personal life or for your professional life, was there something that you kind of took away that you want to apply to your life moving forward that you kind of learned out there from your runner and nature induced high that that you got out there? What was it? Oh, so many lessons
Jared Fuller 07:23
a always pack lighter. Like, yeah, oh, my God, my pack killed me, like blisters all over my shoulder. But in all seriousness, I think, plans I planned pretty well. And then everything went to hell. And that's just life. Like, when I say everything went to hell, just nothing went according to you know, plan, like things were a lot more challenging in some ways than I thought. And then other things that I thought would be, you know, hardware cake. So I think it's good to deliberately challenge yourself and I, it's so easy to challenge yourself like in think your challenge yourself in your career, your you know, your work. But like, I think the thing that I'm going to take away from this is that, I don't know that I do this specific challenge again. But I'm really looking forward to my next one. And like one of my goals. So I had a goal this year of running X number of miles running wide number of marathons, and half marathons and I on, I should hit every single one of those goals this year, which is really cool. But next year, I want to run a true ultra, I want to run a 50 plus mile race, and then I want to run 100 mile plus race, and like the things that you learn about yourself, um, during those big challenges that are self imposed, like, no one's asking me to do this. There is no race for someone else. Like, I don't know, you find some. You find out who you really are.
Kevin Raheja 08:54
Yeah, I can relate to that. I mean, I've done challenging things, but I've never gone deep into the world of running. So I guess what, why did you choose that as your outlet for this? Why? What drew you to running?
Jared Fuller 09:09
I mean, there's no excuses. Right, like CrossFit, or, I mean, I don't know any other challenge. There could be some excuse of like, external circumstances, like driving traffic, whether like whatever, like running is there's, there's no excuse. There's no excuse. And you're completely in control and you don't need anything. Yeah, other than yourself. So it's like it's a discipline, sport and helps build that discipline. So just a good practice. It's a good practice. So I become, you know, addictive personalities, like become pretty obsessive over it. You know, most days are spent running X number of miles and then I try to get into a training plan once every, you know, three, four months, and try to ramp so I'm in the middle of one right now like trying to ramp towards a training plan and a specific goal. And like, that's the other thing. too is like, I think one of the things that's difficult about partnerships is that we live in such a state of flux. That like plans, like traditional sales, planning and forecast planning and capacity planning. There's kind of a model, but when it comes to BD, and especially early stage BD, the plans change so frequently, so it's nice to be able to have like a training plan and be like, this is what I'm doing this week, and it helps them build those healthy habits for yourself. So for example, right now, I realize like, I have to change my entire reporting cadence, and management cadence and like team cadence. And I'm like, rebuilding the, I don't know, the training plan for like, how we make the program better as a result of that. So that's, you know, that's one small thing, but, um, you got some big news yourself, like, during, while I was out, right, like, which I think there's a couple things you want to talk about, we go into this, you know, kind of tangent of me being out, which is, you know, hopefully people have fun with that. Um, but I guess the news is breaking now, Kevin, you're moving to
Kevin Raheja 11:03
Yeah, I'm I accepted a role at Active Campaign. So I've been at typeform for about 13 months, and Active Campaign approached me with a really exciting opportunity to manage their platform, or their app ecosystem and platform strategy. And I will be working with them on that. So they're based in Chicago, but they're hiring fully remote teams. They're actually hiring a Director of Product Marketing for the platform. So if anyone knows, anyone, that'd be great fit for that category. But, yeah, it should be fun. They just raised 100 million in January. They're growing really nicely. And they're an exciting up and coming company. So it should be fun. I start in two weeks. Amazing. So like, kind of transitioning here, like planning for that? What are you thinking about right now? Yeah, to be honest with you, I'm just reading their development documentation. So I'm just reading a lot of, you know, API docs and developer docs that they have right now. And trying to learn as much as I can about the product, what, you know, watching product demos, trying to understand as much as I can about the org chart now. But I'm also, you know, transitioning out of type form and trying to make sure that it's still in good hands and working with my team here to make sure everyone has what they what they need. But yeah, it's, um, what's interesting is I'll be focused entirely on the platform. Again, like I was at HubSpot, and I think I missed that I think, at type form, I was managing sales channel, sales and platform and it was a lot for one person to have direct reports in all three of those organizations. And so working dedicated to the platform is something that's really exciting for me to start doing again,
Jared Fuller 13:08
there's, there's something interesting to be said for like the there's typically a couple different buckets and BD, right, there's platform, there's strategic alliances, and like co selling, you know, we had Elliot on that kind of that was his stick it like in four. And then there's obviously channel where we've had people like Bobby or you know, peekapoo, to talk about it. And it, you don't really find companies that have functional leaders of like, all three separately, right? It's like, there's typically one person kind of trying to figure out all three at once. What made you realize that you, you know, platform really is where your heart was like versus, you know, channel versus whatever, like, you're kind of building a, like, quite say a specialty, but kind of right, like a or an affinity, right? Or a specialization in BDA round platform strategy.
Kevin Raheja 13:57
I just love all of the network effects that are involved in platform and understanding how important that is to assess company building out that app ecosystem and the network effects that are involved in there. But also, like, you know, this role, just like my role at HubSpot, and and at typeform. This also includes strategic partnerships. So before we started recording this podcast, we were talking about OEM partnerships, and that's what we can touch on here as well. But that's also kind of in the purview of this role as well as strategic partnerships and OEM and thinking about like, what partners can can you work with to kind of like strengthen your product? And OEM was something that we worked a lot on at HubSpot I'm not sure if you're allowed to talk about or how much you can talk about. Or like you know, if you're working on OEM stuff at at drift, but I think it's a really topic I'd love to talk with you You either right now.
Jared Fuller 15:01
Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it now, because, um, I think that's kind of the tangential topic of today is like, Hey, we're catching up and hope you enjoy. Kevin and I just got to be friends here. But the the other thing is, you know, as you make this transition, it makes me think a lot about, you know, those different functional areas of BD, and tech, being strategic alliances, and then the platform play. There's not a lot out there for guiding, like platform revolutions a great company and building an ecosystem. But on the OEM side, there's a whole bunch of powered by plays gray label, white label, whatever you want to call it, that can be really interesting for business development professionals to have at their fingertips. So I've been involved since I started at drift with one pretty significant such project. And you all can take a look at it's an awesome feature and product of drift is called drift Intel. And what drift Intel is, is we aggregate basically, data from our customers accounts to like, if they're using Marketo, Salesforce, right, we bring it into one set, so we can actually target customers with different bot messages. So like, let's say, Kevin, you had signed up for a webinar last week, but you come back to my pricing page. I could then because he'd already signed up, I knew who you were, and you're back on the pricing page, I could deliver you a message and drift that's like, Hey, Kevin, welcome back to the pricing page. Right. So it's like, hyper personalized. So that's really cool. And those were integration partnerships with like, Marketo, that we were the first company to ever do that with Marketo. Yeah, but there's this other thing, where what if it's an unknown contact? Right, so like, you've never signed up for a webinar, then you're just Unique Visitor ID 7257 bla, bla, bla, bla, right, and a cookie string? Sure, then I just have to deliver you a very generic message. Well, there's actually a bunch of cool companies out there that do things, you know, on IP data. So we partner with like six cents, and, you know, clearbit, and have an integration partnership with demand base, where we can actually do things like Well, I don't know, it's Kevin, but I know it's, you know, that IP addresses associated with type form. So I can actually be like, hey, Ty form, we help other SaaS companies like, you know, A, B, and C, accomplish XYZ. So you can deliver some of that like personalization, kind of at scale, and then create this whole other subset of experiences based on that. So for example, on the contact side, you have demographics, and on the account side, you have firma graphics, the way that most b2b is targeted, is they're going to target based on firma graphics, like number of employees, how much revenue, vertical or industry? So this isn't with data compliance as well. So with like, the
Kevin Raheja 18:05
the laws coming out of California and Europe of GDPR?
Jared Fuller 18:08
Yeah, yeah, of course, because this is the and it's based on IP data. So it's, in part, but like, what we do with drift Intel is it touches, contacted and it touches account data, you know, contact data is always going to be first party data. So like consent based, right. Whereas account data is not necessarily subject to the same, the same regulations, and it's also it's not personally identifiable, and it's not being shared, you know, across account, but that firmographic data that allows you to deliver these experiences that are really great, like, you know, hey, Pfizer, we help companies like GlaxoSmithKline, like you can build in like, why would you say Pfizer, and in reference GlaxoSmithKline? Well, think about it, Pfizer medical manufacturing company, right? GlaxoSmithKline medical manufacturing company, you can associate that vertical, right to that industry, on how you've helped other customers or whatever messaging you'd like. And we do that, but let's think about the inverse of that. Imagine trying to build, you know, your own data company inside of another company. Well, like, we got enough going on, right, yeah. So yeah, we have some work, you know, success we had Elliot on, he's one of our big partners there. And there's no way that you could build a data product for this specific use case inside of that. So these are like powered by, you know, partnerships, that where we're delivering that functionality through drift Intel, and our customers see, you know, fantastic results through it. And, you know, there's in terms of like contracting and like, make it all happen. Like, obviously, there's big agreements in place, but there's no friction to the end customer, which is what's amazing. Obviously, if you're a success customer, you can plug in your own key and get more joint value. But if you're not, you know, we don't have to start a whole new sales cycle and bring, you know, our partner into that conversation. Every time And then have multiple prices. Instead, they can get drift up and running, see the value of having this personalized messaging. And then later on, they can go, hey, maybe I should evaluate, you know, demand basic sense, you know, whatever, for helping drive more of their like ABM strategy, for example. And that's all facilitated through like an OEM partnership are powered by I should say,
Kevin Raheja 20:20
That's really cool. Are those all secured them?
Jared Fuller 20:23
Yeah, I mean, they're drift Intel's live today, like we've been running this for, you know, let's play for about two years now. So there's OEM, we call them OEM keys. But basically, there's keys that are driving this, this data for our customers, and zoominfo is another partner.
Kevin Raheja 20:41
But you have all the partnerships that, are you still seeking partnerships?
Jared Fuller 20:45
for them? Like one thing I'm interested in is like your Europe and international coverage on like IP data? Or how to how to do personalization at scale, you know, like I was, we there's other open questions about how to make driftin tell better with, you know, integration partners, like segment segment has a lot of contact data, and how can we use that better for personalization and targeting, so there's like existing integrations that we have that we're thinking about making better through this. But in terms of like a strategic, you know, powered by like Alliance, per se, you know, we, I'm very happy with the partners that we have, I think we're looking international is very interesting to me, because it's just a different game, you know, it's not quite the same. And then I know, there's more that we need to do with, on the contact side. So like, another thing that's really cool is that, you know, whenever there's an email address that comes in through, you know, drift, there's opportunity to, you know, the end customer value is we're automatically enriching that email, right. And that email turns from, you know, Kevin, dot rahasia@typeform.com, to Kevin raiza, you know, GM, you know, ad type form. And here's your profile all of the other contact demographics about you. So that way, I don't have to ask you 14 questions in the bot, right, that's powered by partnerships with like, zoom info and clearbit. Which, like, again, like that's just customer value. So like this, it's a very partner like it's a customer centric approach, that has allowed us to do a lot of really special things that drift that like I hadn't seen prior to coming here, and it's been, it's been a ton of fun. And again, like, the end customers love it, because they just get to use the end state, they don't have to worry about connecting XYZ and having everything bought and set up prior to getting value out of drift. But certainly, if they have those products in their wheelhouse, then they can connect their, their customer key versus the, you know, OEM key and get additional functionality.
Kevin Raheja 22:50
Sure, yeah. If If I saw a partner, or use case or even a category of business that we were working with, that had like 60%, or like 50 60% plus adoption, that would really trigger me to explore an OEM. So like, Facebook ads, like 85% of our customers at HubSpot, were using Facebook ads. And so we built an OEM integration with them where you could build Facebook ads out of the product without leaving to go over to Facebook. So we just brought it into the product. And we did that with with Zapier as well, just because it had that much adoption, that when you have 5060 plus percent of your users using a specific tool or a category of tools, it's worth exploring a deeper partnership. A lot of times that means OEM and bringing that partner into the product when when possible. I mean, yeah, when possible. Definitely.
Jared Fuller 23:58
You know, if it's like a marketing automation thing, like then that's a whole other story, because then you're building a giant, you know, but could you could you power, that functionality with a solution, like so data lends itself really well to this, right? Yep. Which is kind of, to some degree, how I'm using it. OEM partnerships at drift. I'm curious, how did you see that at HubSpot? You said no. Facebook, so ads is one ads is an interesting one. workflow management with Zapier, which I feel like there's always that debate but I found the blog post Kevin it's Zapier makes you happier. So it's happier. Zapier makes you happier. I think that's the original blog post. We'll have someone from Zapier eventually, because they're just such a case study and like BD kind of right, like can I get
24:42
it on?
Jared Fuller 24:44
You know, Cody Jones? No, no, we but I'd love to, I'd love to. Um, what other use cases Did you see at HubSpot? Because
Kevin Raheja 24:53
I mean, as big one, you know, like the challenge with data
24:57
did you do with that data?
Jared Fuller 24:58
Did you do anything with data HubSpot
Kevin Raheja 25:01
Yeah, Yes, we did. So we did. We worked with several different providers, many of whom you named earlier. Data nice clearbit. We're, I think some of like our biggest ones. But yeah, we brought that in so that when you populate a domain into the HubSpot CRM, it are yet auto populates with that firmographic data around that domain. So it tells you like, how many companies work there like what verticals in you know, etc. and that all populates in your CRM so that you don't have to put that in there. So that was an OEM that we that we built with. We they had three companies powering that data.
Jared Fuller 25:46
And what's interesting is the companies that end up being, you know, built around that like, that was a big difference between, like, my experience at panda Doc, versus what some people would view as a competitor of someone like hellosign. Right. And I think you were probably involved in this too. Whenever HubSpot was looking at, hey, what do we do with this document space that panda docs exploded into our CRM? Do we buy them? Do we partner deeper? Do we OEM, right? What do we do here? to like, you kind of reach that threshold of like, Hey, we need to do something more strategic. I'm pretty sure y'all we're evaluating hellosign for E signatures, because, you know, Panda dock was built for a go to market motion and hellosign was actually built more for an OEM, right? And then if you happen to Hello work and you know, actually led to an acquisition.
Kevin Raheja 26:37
Yeah, we've looked at, we looked at esign as kind of more of a commodity than what you were working on at panna doc. And as he said, they had like an API for that that was pretty easy to just plug in. So we did OEM esign functionality powered by hellosign. Ram, I'm not sure that still exists in the product. But yeah, at one point, we did that. And we were looking at, you know, OEM tools like panda Doc, actually, we were looking at Oh, yummy. Panda doc. But ultimately, the the, the debate that we were having internally was, what is this going to do to our app ecosystem, right? Like, when you favor one provider, in this way over another, it tends to kind of like corrupt the integrity of the app ecosystem, like other partners would say, Okay, why? let you know what value Am I getting out of this, if they're just going to pick, you know, like, kingmakers and Queen makers here. So we ended up not doing that. But we didn't see it as being as big of a challenge when we were working with esign. Because it was more of a commodity.
Jared Fuller 27:46
It's kind of interesting, because here drifted be like the opposite, where like, we've kind of picked the players, right, like we have a more exclusive approach. And then, you know, eventually we open that up and allow more people to play in that pool, so to speak. What what this brings up is like an interesting question where it's like, you're kind of moving from the BD seat, so to speak to almost like the CEO, the founder seat is like developing a strategy around this, I feel like a lot of the companies that I work with, where I'm trying to do an OEM or like a powered by deal, they don't really have an executive, you know, they don't have executive alignment on, hey, do we want to be an OEM herbal? Or do we want to be powered by or like, Can I turn this into a channel? Because there's really two things here, right? Like, when it comes to doing OEM deals, and this is where we're getting to the good stuff, 30 minutes. And when it comes to OEM deals, there's really two things you're gonna get out of it, you're gonna get money, or you're gonna get distribution. Right? Well, it's getting both like, you got to pick your Which one are you doing? Are you getting distribution? Are you getting, like direct money? Meaning if it's true, white label then it then it has to get money. Right? Because you're not going to get the brand recognition in the, you know, the the access to sell to more customers.
Kevin Raheja 29:04
Yeah. So So there are two sides to that, right. There's the one side where if you have a product that you want to another like a platform to OEM inside their dashboard, then yes, you're looking for money or distribution. But so what that creates then is that there's the on the supply side of SaaS providers who want to OEM into a solution like Salesforce or HubSpot. It's the supply far outweighs the demand because from the other side from like HubSpot perspective, it's not about distribution or money. It's about providing value to your users in a way that you can control the the cogs, the cost of goods. Basically keeping costs down enough where you're supplying really high levels of value to your users and not paying a ton for it. That's typically how like a platform companies have Evaluating OEM another provider. Another?
Jared Fuller 30:02
Yeah, the from the, the the sumo so to speak, right? Who's gonna be the, I guess you could call them the distributor? Right? So like you're gonna have a distributor, that situation hotspots a distributor and my the situation I'm talking about with drift, like where I'm the distributor? Yeah. It from the supplier side, right from the vendor side. Yeah, you have to make that choice like, is it distribution? Or is it there? Is it money? I think a lot of executives get it conflated. And they think it's, you know, both and, or they don't have a play on it. So for example, I've seen companies say, Hey, we're, we're not going to do any powered by solutions or OEM solutions at all, right? And then less than a year later be like, Well, actually, we're kind of open to it. But then you have these really amazing companies that you know, how to get a credible outcome on it, like hellosign, right? being acquired by Dropbox, right? Like, hello, signs goal was to be like the API for document, like they were the platform that everyone else could build signatures and stuff off of. Yeah. And I feel like for every category, there needs to be a company like that. Right? Yeah. Like there needs to be a company like that. So for example, um, I'll give you one right now, because I don't really care about it. Like, we don't want this at, you know, a drip, but like, there should be one for chat. Yeah, right. There should be like, because so many people want to OEM drift. I'll give you this example. They want to OEM drift for some, like, weird use case that's like, inside of a specialty application. And they want to like, you know, Hey, can we embed drift and power drift through this? Like, no, like a because you're not going to give me distribution? And you're not going to give me money? And I'm not built for it, right? Like to have a true OEM level product, you have to have API's and scale and authentication and account creation, so much built into your product. Yep. That, like, it's just not part of our strategy. And it never will be plus, what we care about more than anything is the relationships with the customers, the brand equity that we build with our customers.
Kevin Raheja 32:15
And I think, I think there are a couple, you know, that are doing that. So there's like sendbird, or like, I think even Twilio has, like a programmable like a chat tool that it's, uh, that's, that's like API first. And so. But yeah, I mean, Twilio is like the the business model for this. Right. Like,
Jared Fuller 32:35
yeah, the contact center. I mean, they have a, they have a chat. I guess you could do Twilio chat. It's just it's it's kind of like tied into an entire customer communications platform. It's not, it's, um, but yeah, you're right, as Twilio? Like, Twilio would be a good example of that in the space. But I feel like every guess the point I'm trying to make is that like, you know, early on, I don't think founders make or executives make a conscious choice as to whether or not they're going to have a strategy here. Are we going to play with people like this? Are we going to offer a solution like this and build our API's this way? It seems to like just kind of happen. But the ones like where I'm going with this, like Twilio, for example, text messaging, everything on the internet, that's text messages probably powered by Twilio. Right? They were very intentional about being that, you know, player hellosign, like the other example I just gave, I feel like every new category that's created, though, to some degree, like there's going to be a winner in that regard. Right, someone who's getting distribution or to get generating revenue, simply by virtue of being a supplier to vendors.
Kevin Raheja 33:49
Yeah, there almost has to be like, a tremendous demand for that, though, without, um, like, demand for a brand behind it. You know what I mean? Like,
Jared Fuller 34:03
it's a validated category, right? Like, it has to be a validated category. Right? So like, DocuSign was a pretty successful company. It wasn't even quite public yet when hellosign started, but e signatures was obviously a growing category. Yeah. into a very growing category,
Kevin Raheja 34:17
SMS chat, these are all like big enough total addressable markets where you could do that for each of those categories. But I don't know that you could do that with like, a product like, actually, you probably could, I mean, yeah, you could probably work even down to some of like, the niche categories like because
Jared Fuller 34:34
why not? If you could do it with a small team and get a 10 $20 million exit, like, that's the same as like raising money and having a $200 million exit like, I guess what I'm trying to inspire here is that like, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities for BD people that see these things that other folks don't that like there's, you know, there's something potentially interesting there where you can be, you know, a solution provider, not to the end customer, but to the companies that are serving customers. Because you get it all the time. I mean, you probably typeform to some degree, you were embedded in lots of you were embedded in a lot of companies, we know websites and marketing campaigns and customer communications. But your form builder was not. Right. Like you didn't provide the form builder to other companies to let them distribute the making up form,
Kevin Raheja 35:27
though it's almost entirely direct to consumer. Yeah.
Jared Fuller 35:30
Right. So for example, like, let's just take this, let's take this, is there a need for someone to have the ability to build forms inside of a product? Like, maybe there is there probably is actually someone there, like, there's where you can basically, you know, get the solution to be able to build forms, because forms are, you know, there's a lot of issues around forms, as you know, like, no security, right? Right. Like security, validation, if it's a phone number, if it's an email, if it's International, like, there's a lot of issues with like getting data in a form. So if you're like, we need to build this forms inside of this, you know, healthcare app or something. Yeah. Oh, my God. This is actually not the simplest undertaking. What if I could just use something that was already, you know, built out?
36:15
Yep. I think there's an opportunity
Jared Fuller 36:17
in every category as is the takeaway?
Kevin Raheja 36:22
Yeah, I think they're, they're, they're very well could be, um, you know, you people want like, more flexible. Now, these are typically solutions that require, like more technical, technical savviness, right. It's not like an intuitive freemium product. Typically, it's usually like a b2b product that you're selling to, like, an engineer may have to be on the call, when you're having, like a customer call with them, because they'll probably have to install it, put it together, set it up. So the implementation costs are higher. But with that, you get more flexibility. So yeah, I mean, there's probably an opportunity forever, every category to some degree,
Jared Fuller 37:09
right? Like JW Player for, you know, the video space. I know some sales people a JW Player, right, like they sell. They don't sell to what's interesting is like, they're not selling JW Player, they're selling to accounts to use JW Player for distribution back out into the market versus you know, like a YouTube right, that's directly monetizing the relationship, or even a, you know, Vimeo, which, you know, they they claim to do both or, you know, even a Wistia, which is more of a hosting thing. So, you go so many different directions. Like, I wonder how you could take that to Well, what's funny is, it's so natural in the b2c world, in the b2c world is completely natural. I mean, there's, like, all the way down to operating systems, right? Like Android. Right? Google has a fantastic advantage with the Android operating system and getting distribution and being at the front and center of like IoT, for example, Internet of Things like Yep, what's a perfect example like what did Android facilitate? So many things but for example, peloton, right? If it weren't for Android, there would be no peloton to be zero peloton Why? Because peloton needed the screen to serve up apps and to serve up this rich media and this great experience. And Google reaps a lot of benefit from that right from the Android product. So like in the b2c world, that's kind of everywhere. But in the b2b side, I think we lose sight of that. That market opportunity, what if there's any funds or people that like pay close attention to that? Like, yeah, you know, you see some I've seen some of it.
Kevin Raheja 38:44
funds. I haven't seen funds that are focused on like API first businesses.
Jared Fuller 38:48
Yeah, um, who bought conga is a PE firm, so it's not a early stage firm. Yeah, Congo composer they changed it to what do they change it to? Which is conga now and they're owned by someone? I forget who they're owned by up conga acquisition. We're doing like not Congo acquisition COC acquisition. Very
Kevin Raheja 39:21
different. Yeah. I think it was it was I think it was after afters buys
Jared Fuller 39:25
conga. Uh, well, that but that was they were bought by Tama Bravo's apttus aptus. To acquire but that's not even the full story though. So some a PE firm bought. Maybe it was Thoma Bravo. Thoma Bravo bought conga first, and then they end up merging and putting stuff together for basically the solution. But like Congo was the, like, document generation even like creating a document like from web data format, it's actually a pain in the butt. If anyone's ever tried to build a product and output a PDF You realize you're like what the heck? You think it'd be easy? It is not having done that I did it two companies in a row job hive and panda doc. Yeah, nightmare job. Document generation is way harder because the file formats are very legacy right PDF, been around for decades. The manual on the PDF is like, you know you it is a giant PDF. Doc x, which stands for document XML, right? Like it's an XML file, which, for any of the tech folks out there, like an XML file is a pretty antiquated way of storing data, right? Like, that's not how people store data today, but that's how it works in Word. So conga built the business off of being a doc Gen tool that other people can start to leverage. And there's other ones too, like, yeah, there's actually a bunch in that space where you can actually use their product to generate documents. So they merged with aptus for like, document generation, and then aptus for CPU, right figure price quote. But that's my point is that like, you can take these concepts and then kind of roll them up into bigger solutions. And now you actually have a full stack solution with I guess, aptus is brand now became conga, which is interesting, because I'm pretty sure aptus was bigger than conga. And at least in terms of revenue, but now they have a full suite solution from document generation to the end, or the only thing that's missing is, you know, the StG component, which they could probably just, you know, from hellosign
Kevin Raheja 41:29
That's right.
Jared Fuller 41:32
Kev, what next week, you know, we're having on
Kevin Raheja 41:38
a, you know, I get the calendar all mixed up.
Jared Fuller 41:41
It's, uh, I'm excited. So I've known her for years and years built. Actually, she was one of the big reasons that I built the big partnership at marchetto is Miss Jen rally.
Kevin Raheja 41:55
Yeah, yeah. You said next week. Oh, that's, we're actually recording that on Wednesday. Oh, well.
Jared Fuller 42:00
So this is like in two days. Yeah. So you're gonna get that one like back to back. It's gonna be super fun. Jill is seen we kind of shared Bartek backgrounds like me drift you HubSpot? Yeah, Active Campaign. But like jealousy, and literally every single one, right, Salesforce, Oracle, HubSpot. Marketo. Adobe, like, so she's like the queen of Bartek. And she is something else. So I have no idea what she's gonna say if we try to hold on to a topic who knows where we're gonna end up, but it's gonna be a lot of fun because she's seen partnerships get built inside of each of those and how how those ecosystems really developed from the front line on so we're gonna have a blast with her on both. So before we sign off, just a friendly reminder that this episode is sponsored by cross beam cross beam is a partner ecosystem platform that acts as a data escrow service. So you can find overlapping customers and prospects with your partners while keeping the rest of your data private and secure. So you can sign up for free at cross beam.com I almost had that memorized. I can't believe I still have to look at the notes every once in a while. If you guys are in partnerships, and you haven't checked out cross beam. I don't know how many more times I got to tell you that to go out and check them out. Because I think you'll I think you'll really really love it. Kevin. You're moving in? What? Four days?
Kevin Raheja 43:17
Yeah, I sold my house. I'm just going to be nomadic for a little bit. I mean, I'm still gonna probably live in California or in the Bay Area in San Francisco. But I know you're moving to
Jared Fuller 43:27
Texas, Minnesota like where you don't know yet.
Kevin Raheja 43:31
No, I'm gonna go spend like Thanksgiving and the holidays in Minneapolis with my mom and then I'm probably gonna come back to the San Francisco. So you think so You sold your house and then you're gonna move back to the Bay Area? Yeah, I'm just trying to downsize, minimize, like, I just I started to accumulate so many things in my house that it gave me anxiety and I'm trying to be more of a minimalist. So selling my house. I thought
Jared Fuller 43:55
you were you were wrecked sitting California like you should be like, get it get everyone out of California.
Kevin Raheja 44:03
Everybody's leaving San Francisco right now. It's pretty alarming. But Washington. I'm gonna take I'm gonna take a break from it. I'm gonna take a break. Go to Minneapolis. Get a cold winter under my belt and then come back and appreciate the Bay Area weather.
Jared Fuller 44:21
All right. Well, best of luck on the move. And we will see everyone next time on the next episode of partner up. So thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Kevin Raheja 44:32
Yeah, like, subscribe,
Jared Fuller 44:34
comment, do all that fun stuff. And let us know what you think in the comments. Thanks for all your support.
