Welcome to episode thirty-six of the SaaS Backwards podcast, where we interview CEOs and CMOs of fast-growing SaaS firms to reveal what they are doing that's working, and lessons learned from things that didn't work as planned.
You can listen to the full episode directly below via Spotify, or visit SaaS Backwards on Buzzsprout or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Preparing for recession marketing starts now
With Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle
Edited for clarity and readability
Ken Lempit:
Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CMOs and CEOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle, a SaaS that offers other SaaS companies a completely different approach to their payments' infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payment-related apps and services, it acts as a merchant of record for its customers. Hey, Andrew. Welcome to the podcast.
Andrew Davies:
Hey, Ken. Thanks for having me on.
Ken Lempit:
So Andrew, tell us a little bit more about Paddle, make that make sense for us, and tell us also about yourself.
Andrew Davies:
Sure thing, Ken. I think you did a good job there giving a quick introduction. The way I think about it is that if you're a SaaS founder, I was originally, we sold a business before I kind of started joining other businesses, including Paddle, and if you're a SaaS founder or a SaaS executive, and you are trying to adopt particularly a product-led growth approach to market, there are really a bunch of complexities that emerge when you build your business and Paddle aims to kind of solve those for you.
Andrew Davies:
So if we think about it, you want to sell everywhere. You want to sell probably at a reasonably cost-effective price because you're selling to the user, not the kind of economic buyer in a PLG motion. And so being everywhere really counts. And so you start off with some kind of basic payment tool and then some subscription management tool and then some fraud tool and then some sales tax compliance tool and a bunch of engineering hours and a bunch of finance hours on global tax compliance and Paddle takes all of that away. One simple price, one simple provider, and you can go all the way from zero to IPO on that single stack. And we manage that and optimize that globally. So that's really how I think about Paddle.
Ken Lempit:
Paddle. I think that's a powerful way to describe it because certainly our business, we've helped our clients to assemble that constellation of different applications. Each client has a different kind of set of them and it means that we're maintaining all these integrations among all these different things on our own, as opposed to having a single source to provide that for us. So that's great. Before we dig in, just tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you got to Paddle.
Andrew Davies:
Sure thing. So, as I mentioned, I was a SaaS founder. I was the co-founder and CMO of Idio, which was a personalization business selling into large enterprise tech lines. So we powered the kind of web and email personalization for IBM, for Salesforce, for SAP, for a whole bunch of large enterprise tech businesses. Pure ABM play, small business, small team, offices in London, New York, and a small one in San Francisco. Bought some massive blue chip clients. And we exited that in November 2019. We sold to Insight Venture Partners and they wholly own a company that was called Episerver, which was a Swedish based CMS. And we became the kind of personalization analytics piece of that content management system. And with Insight Venture Partners' money, we went on an acquisition spree. So we were the first of five acquisitions. And so I was on that journey being bought by a 450 person company.
And we scaled it all the way through to about 1500 people by the time I left through those acquisitions and organic growth. And so I ran global corporate marketing for them. And while I was doing that, I was able to jump into a couple of friends' businesses and people I'd met, acquaintances' businesses, helping them with their go to market. So messaging or ABM. And that kind of short, sharp look at a whole bunch of businesses was fascinating for me and Paddle was one of those. And so I looked at the business, fell in love with it and decided to leave Optimizely to join Paddle. So Optimizely was the name of that roll up after we bought Optimizely the largest of the acquisitions we did. And so that's been the journey of the last few years.
Ken Lempit:
I think we need to dig a little bit deeper into what was about Paddle. You said in our prep call that it was the, "hell yes." And if there's a couple of things in there, first of all, it's making really good use of your time on the planet, right? You want to only do things that are really important, but what was it about this company that was so attractive?
Andrew Davies:
So the three things that really stood out to me when I looked at Paddle were number one, there was massive ambition and there still is massive ambition in this business. The founder Christian, his co-founder Harrison and the entire executive team is wanting to swing for the fences. Secondly, it's a really strong financial proposition. Really strong unit economics, which means that we've then got the ability to go and raise capital to fulfill that ambition. And the third thing was the people, I loved meeting all the different team members in the marketing team and across other teams and the way they were working, the way they were challenging each other. So those three reasons, the ambition, the financial foundations and the people were really the three reasons why it had a massive "hell yes" from me.
Ken Lempit:
That's awesome. Think that it's an unusual combination of circumstances there where they had all those cooking at the same time. But you touched on the fact that you had been doing some consulting work beforehand, and I'm wondering in what ways acting as a consultant helped you prepare for this role and also to recognize how attractive it might be.
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. I mean, as a founder of a SaaS business, you go super deep into one sector and one area of specialty and one team. And I felt I was deeply experienced in a very, very thin part of the industry, a very thin narrow slice of the industry. And so I can remember before we got acquired, I went to the board of Idio and said, "Look, we don't have big L&D budgets here. There's not lots of education programs we can send people on. I'd love to learn more about other businesses by just doing some paid, some informal unpaid advisory work, just to understand more of what goes in other businesses, the challenges that they face." And they allow me to do that, which was fantastic. And then I repeated that when I joined Episerver and then, into Optimizely.
Andrew Davies:
And for me, there's a pattern recognition that comes from seeing many, many different circumstances. And often, if you are in a long loyal career and I worked for Idio for over a decade and I would've stayed at Optimizely for a long period of time, if this opportunity hadn't come up and I'm bought in a Paddle all the way through to IPO and beyond. I'm not someone who flips around from one thing to the next. And the curse of that loyalty and the curse of being in something all the way through to the end is that you do have this really thin view of what's going on out in the market.
Andrew Davies:
And so to balance that I found consulting work, advisory work really helped me build that pattern recognition by jumping in deep with leadership teams of a whole bunch of Series-A Series-B Series-C and a few much more scaled enterprises, SaaS businesses predominantly, and seeing that some of their challenges were challenges that I'd faced before in my business. But otherwise there were challenges that I'd never seen, but there were mental models we could build up and frameworks we could build up to help them. So yeah, I found it a fantastic part of my learning journey and a real good way of broadening myself away from the single experience I was having.
Ken Lempit:
Now, was that consulting work always, you were employed with these other firms, was it never fully independent?
Andrew Davies:
So I've done it in a variety of different ways. It goes from as simple as just grabbing a coffee with someone who's been introduced or a friend that's been introduced and do hundreds of those and love those. And I've got interesting reasons why if you're interested later. And then yes, with some people, it's something they want to dig a bit deeper into. And therefore we work out how I can give them some more time over the next weeks or months in order delivering them some audit work or some understanding and diagnosis of their situation or some strategy work. So it really depends, but it would either be completely informal or if it's going to take a longer period of time, then we'd work out some kind of project. So I can commit a bit of my evenings and weekends to make sure that I can see through what they need to see through.
Ken Lempit:
Interesting. Cause I've certainly seen the value with some of my friends and professional acquaintances in taking time away from the career ladder to being a consultant. And I almost feel some folks are reticent to take that time and pursue the consulting path for one, two or three years. And I'm curious what you think about that in terms of, what does it look like in career arc and what do you think the outcomes, the potential opportunities are?
Andrew Davies:
Yeah, so I look very positively on it in people I'm looking to hire. I think again, it broadens their experience. It also just depends on your personality. Other people can find this level of breadth through more formal education or other methods. I think for me, it was deeply rooted also in my personality.
Andrew Davies:
I remember we did a leadership program, one of the few L&D pieces we invested in at Idio. And after a long period of being interviewed by this psychologist and doing a bunch of psychometrics, they said that, "Andrew, you're a very rational thinker. And one of the challenges is that you will have a ceiling on your leadership if you don't get more in touch with your intuition, with your feelings, because that's one way of making good, fast decisions. And you've got to lean on that and your decision making process."
Andrew Davies:
And so they gave me a bunch of ways to tackle that. And one of them was that they asked me to keep a 30 day diary of how I'm feeling. Am I happy today? And I've got to be honest, little young rational, Andrew thought, "Gosh, this sounds totally stupid, but go on then. We've paid a lot of money for this advice. I'm going to do it." And one thing that came back to me, Ken, through that period of 30 days of keeping that diary was that if I went a week or at least a week and a half or two weeks without actually speaking to someone outside of my context, to understand their situation, help them out, learn a bit more about a different industry, I found my days got boring and frustrating and I got myopically focused on the things in front of me and I didn't enjoy it.
Andrew Davies:
But when I went multiple days with having little coffee conversations with friends or other people in the industry, it sparked my imagination and I could bring back learnings from their situations to mine. And it challenged my mental models about how I was looking at the world. And that process just made me learn that part of managing my own psyche, managing my own personality is that I need to constantly be reaching out to people outside of my zone of control, outside of my role, learning from them because it also made me happier and it made me learn. And so yeah, that's part of why it worked for me.
Ken Lempit:
That's really interesting. I had a similar experience at a friend's birthday party over the weekend and I got really pumped up talking with him about his business. It's a really small IOT sensor business. And I was able to bring to him experience, having worked with a couple of clients in that space. And I'm never going to work with the guy, his business is too small, but it made me feel so good to help him and also to draw upon these things and kind of revisit topics that I think helped me come into this week kind of energize. So I feel that too. And I wonder how many people are in touch with that.
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. I wonder too. You mentioned you felt good because you helped him. I do also think that there's that situation in many of our worlds where if we're doing the same thing all the time with the same people, it doesn't even matter how empathetic and supportive and championing everyone around us can be. There is a sense to which for some personalities that you want to be able to go outside of that crowd and actually help someone else or speak to someone else because what you can bring in that situation, actually you can help them go a lot further, a lot faster. And then you get the reward of feeling like you've been beneficial to that person. So I totally understand where you're coming from.
Ken Lempit:
Yeah. So this is really interesting. So it's not only good for us, our own psyche, but, and our own careers, because we now have more to bring, but I think there's maybe more reward also from spending some time either, evenings and weekends or one, two or three years between career jobs kind of taking on these extra assignments. And then instead of being defensive about the period of time as a consultant, taking a look at that as a big opportunity to say, "Hey look, I've been in 15, 18, 25 companies over the last three years. I think I can bring some perspective to the decisions and concerns that you have in front of us."
Andrew Davies:
Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioning that makes me think of where it came from, which speaks to the power of peer mentoring. Cause it was sitting down with a fellow CMO of mine, Nicola and she's wonderful. She's the CMO over at MyTutor. And she was the one who challenged me years and years ago to go to my board and say, "I want some time away from the business, just a fraction of time each week with your permission, not hidden so that I can go and do this learning myself." And it was her challenge to me that made me go and formalize that whole process. And yeah, I think it's fantastic to have those people in your life who can prod you to action.
Ken Lempit:
Wow. That's like a whole other topic, right? The way that CMOs have to support each other. It's a little lonely at the top, not on our list of the topics to talk about, but-
Andrew Davies:
Next time.
Ken Lempit:
But I think it's important and I think we can bring it back into this, which is we're trying to figure out what to do and we need to lean on our peers sometimes. And I think this will get us into the demand generation and the demand generation strategy topic. We're looking to our peers sometimes for their experiences, trying to solve similar problems. And a seminal problem for CMOs is this, "how do I fix today or the next three to six months? And how do I set us up for success over the next couple of years, like two, three, five years?" So I really want to pivot our conversation and take us to your entry into Paddle. What was going on there, your assessment, how you assessed what was happening and how you started thinking about the business and how you were going to help them achieve their goals there?
Andrew Davies:
Sure. And you know, joining any organization, I think it's important to go in with some intentionality about how you can help and what you're planning to do rather than let that stuff happen to you. But it does come from sitting and seeking to understand for that first period. And fortunately, I've been looking under the hood for, I think five months before I actually joined formally full time. And so it gave me a long time to think through and have a chance to reflect on what I thought was happening.
And Paddle is a business that has grown extremely rapidly. I think five years in a row, they've been on the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 in the UK because of their growth rate. So there's a huge amount that's gone right. But when you are on that very high burn growth, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you just don't attend to and can't attend to because it's not the most burning fire in the room.
And so the business I walked into, I think it would be fair to say had a very simple tactic mix. They were doing one or two things very, very well and with a huge amount of optimization, but it was only one or two things. They were focusing almost entirely on demand capture rather than demand creation. So everything was about hoovering up the demand in market in that quarter. And if you weren't really in market that quarter, they didn't really want to speak to you or have a way of nurturing you. There was a lot of quite clunky messaging. I think it's fair to say, and we've worked hard on that. We still got a long way to go. We can dig into that if that's helpful. And so there was lots of confusing verbiage and things that were invented inside Paddle.
And in fact, that's another point. This business has grown from two founders who are super smart, but started the business super early. It's their only business experience. And a bunch of other people on the team were very smart. But in terms of career arc, reasonably junior in terms of not having other experiences. So there's lot of stuff that are being made up internally rather than just pulled from best practice around the industry. And so those were a few of the things that I walked into and then I guess as well, a sense of not knowing or not investing at market norm for the stage of business we were at. And so I think for the amount of sales we wanted to go and make, we weren't investing enough to go out and get those. And so there was a real sense of prioritizing efficiency. But the investments we needed to make to go to the next level, hadn't really caught up with that argument. So those were a few things walked in on. I don't know if that's helpful, if you want to dig in on any of those.
Ken Lempit:
I mean, that's like a masterclass in being the CMO of a high growth company right there. Let's dig in a little bit on it. Very interesting that you had to bring these founders along to understanding what it was going to take to invest, to get to where they wanted to go. How did that go? And what were the ways in which you helped them to get their heads around the level of money they'd be spending?
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. Christian CEO, the founder here, I think he's super supportive. He really gets marketing. So in terms of bringing him along, it wasn't so much that I needed to go and make a case and bring him along. It was more, just painting a picture of what we needed to do. And there was a default, "yes" that followed that. So I'm very fortunate in that regard. And obviously that was a key part of choosing this role. There was a business and a leader who was really bought in already. I think he'd be looking for someone who was going to articulate with him, what this next phase looked like so that we could spend the money. Rather than needing some very detailed business case as to why.
Ken Lempit:
This is a really interesting thing, so you said he got marketing. So I think he must have felt the power of it, but maybe didn't know how to harness it, how to plan for it. So it's probably what you brought him, right?
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. Hopefully so, and I think we're still on that journey. There's huge amount of thinking and dreaming still ahead on other things we need to do, but I think we've made a good start on moving the needle fast on a few different projects that up the level of creativity, up the level of support and help that we give to our market, making sure we're being a bit clearer in how we talk about things. And yeah, he's been super supportive on all of those fronts.
Ken Lempit:
So the crux of this, I think was the idea that we were only focusing on the people in market at the moment. And how did you bring forward the idea that we needed to look into the future to bring those people to us when they were ready?
Andrew Davies:
Yes. I mean, I think the numbers in the business showed that we'd not been focusing on future pools of audience. Because as we had scaled, we'd started to see some drop off in our attainment rates in terms of demand gen, our BDR activity. So the way I see it is that as a CMO, you've got to carry two timeframes in your mind at all times. You've got the first timeframe, which is this quarter and next quarter's demand, how you're making sure you've got full pipeline, you've got pipeline coverage for what your sales team need. That it's the right type of opportunity that they've got the best opportunity to go out there and hit their numbers. The second timeframe is not as urgent, but as just as important is then your two year out view of where is this business going to be? Where are we positioned in the market? And what is the audience that we're going to be selling to in two years time? And how are we now warming them up and positioning ourselves and making sure that audience is as big as it needs to be for our future sales goals?
Andrew Davies:
So two timeframes, neither of them more important than the other, but one more urgent and therefore gets a lot more love. And honestly, it probably would've been crazy for Paddle to have done much more longer term stuff earlier in their cycle, because they were so busy and productive hoovering up that in market demand. But we really needed to start investing in those future pools that we could fish from.
Ken Lempit:
I think also this kind of solution sort of being an all inclusive financial engine for these SaaS. I mean, some folks weren't going to make that decision right away. They're going to think that through perhaps in a way that others won't.
Andrew Davies:
Absolutely. And that was something that showed up in perhaps anecdote rather than data. We had this story in the business that everyone believed that we won lots of second and third time opportunities, but our Salesforce CRM didn't really show that data picture because we were losing track of what was going on if they went away and come back again. So to your point, we do see a huge amount of businesses come to us. We speak to them for a few months, but because we are urgent looking at this next quarter, we mark them as lost when they don't want to make a decision right now and then get really surprised six months later when they come in and sign a deal in 30 days. Whereas really, you and I both know that's one op that's probably just taken nine months to close. It's not two separate opportunities that had a 30 day close lost and a 30 day closed won. And so yeah, taking a bit more of a broader perspective on that was really important.
Ken Lempit:
That's very cool. I'm wondering if it's a good time to talk about messaging at this company. Cause that was one of the things I thought was really interesting in our prep call. The idea of taking a whole bunch of messaging that was maybe not end to end telling the story of the company and how you simplified that. Because you said that was one of the key things that really helped you in your role and drive results for the business.
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. So I mean just referring back to some of the advisory work. When I looked under the hood at a whole bunch of 15 or 16 different SaaS businesses that I helped over that few years period, one of the most frequently reoccurring challenges was that their message was their least optimized piece of their marketing mix. They'd gone hard on optimizing many other elements, but the core message and the story they were telling was usually founder drafted and usually had not had much feedback and critique on it and therefore was very detailed or very clunky or didn't really take you anywhere.
And so when I walked in the door at Paddle, we had a very compelling top level category creation type statement. I think they called the business a "revenue delivery platform". Now, lots of good work had gone into that, good insight gathered from customers, some good strategists working out what we should call ourselves.
The problem was that from my perspective, coming in from the outside, revenue delivery sounds like some kind of sales tool. It doesn't sound like a finance tool. Cause revenue is really kind of affiliated with the sales intelligence tools and the sales tech that CROs would buy. And secondly, I just felt that we weren't in the situation to go out and create a category yet because if you are preaching a category creation strategy and no one else is using those same words, it's just not a category you're creating, it's another tagline. And we are in a situation where we felt this was new category to create and the whole market was disagreeing with us because no one was picking up on that message.
And then to think about that further, this was the first business that I walked into where Gong was already fully in place and all of the calls were recorded and I could just dive in and listen to how sales people were dealing with objections. And so I went in and listened to how sales reps were describing the business and they'd use phrases like, "Well we call ourselves a revenue delivery platform, so let me just take a few minutes to explain to you what that actually means." Or they'd say, "We've just rebranded our company and the marketing team came up with this phrase, revenue delivery platform. So why don't I just take a few moments and explain what we do."
And there was just no confidence and clarity coming through our sales reps. And for me, if you don't have confidence in that simple message, then it shows there's a challenge there. It might be a training challenge, but in this case I felt it really did undermine the foundations of why we were using that wording at all. And so that was a trigger for me to go on a bit of a process to say, "We've got to change this headline message."
Ken Lempit:
That's really incredible. There's a whole bunch in there. First of all, I don't know about you, but plenty of times in my career, people are convinced they're creating a category and they go out to do that and they don't have the money or influence to do so. And it makes things harder. But then all the way down to the thing that I love to do, and it was interesting to hear you say this, I love to listen to sales calls. In fact, with our clients, when they do record sales calls, it's one of my key resources. It's like a gold mine because we get to hear the actual market and product come together sort of in the crucial moment, that moment of decision and discussion. I wonder how many CMOs marketing leaders actually get to that level of detail. It's great to hear you talk about that.
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. And with those tools like Gong, I think it becomes really possible. And so it's one of the things that when people onboard into marketing, it's the first thing I ask them to go and do as well. Maybe not just about the core company message, but listening to the way that sales describe it, the objections that they come back, the list of calls that you go and listen to for positive or negative reasons. I find it a fantastic resource and adding that level of transparency into our organizations. I just think it is a fantastic step forward in most commercial orgs.
Ken Lempit:
Yep. So you get down in there and you're hearing all this stuff and the revenue delivery platform message is not where it's at. So what happens?
Andrew Davies:
So I think there are several approaches to messaging. And the first thing I like to think about is what is that overall company narrative? What's the journey that someone needs to go on with us? And if we just wind this all the way back to work at Idio, when our CMO there of the business we founded, we learnt by trial and error, lots of painful mistakes, that on that journey, there was a couple of key pivots in our story that if someone believed that reframe, that we knew it was plain sailing from them all the way through to working with us as a business.
Andrew Davies:
And so in that scenario, we were personalization technology and we also provided customer interest data. So the topics people were interested about. And if people from large global enterprise tech companies came to us wanting personalization, but they bought into the fact that a better personalization engine without good data was never going to give them better results, and that doing content personalization required content topics in order to personalize more effectively. Once they'd understood that, then we could run them through the process to close with very little friction.
Andrew Davies:
And so part of this at Paddle is trying to find out what are those reframes? What are those pivot points in the journey that, not just our top level message of how we describe ourself when we come to that, but what are the parts of that journey we want to walk someone through that when they philosophically buy into our new version of the future, that then we know it's a much smoother conversation. So we simplified the top level message. We've just called ourselves a payments infrastructure for SaaS, complete payments infrastructure for SaaS. It's still quite clunky. It does what it says on the tin.
Andrew Davies:
But what we did when we tested this and we used winter.com, I find fantastic as a method for testing with prospects and customers. When we presented the former messaging, the question that came back first was, "what is it?" And when we presented the second messaging of something a bit more, does what it says on the tin, like payments infrastructure for SaaS, the first question would be, "Oh, how does it compare with Stripe?" Now, suddenly we're in the right type of conversation. It's still, we need to give loads more detail, but we've positioned now alongside something that everybody knows and understands and uses. And we can have a detailed conversation about how our method of using Stripe is different. So that's the first thing.
And then secondly, when we think about this reframe one of the reframes in our journey is that we are a merchant of record. So we take, with this layer between the software seller, with the business and their customers. And that's how we take complete tax liability. That's how we take all the complexity out of their financial infrastructure.
Now until a CFO understands that model and understands why it allows them to focus on their customer and their product and not to invest all of these hours and times and costs into maintaining this cost infrastructure themselves, it's very difficult to get them all the way to close. But when they do understand that's part of the reframe is that there's a two horse race in the market that we're trying to create, and it's not a vendor two horse race, it's a do this all, own it all, optimize it all, carry the risk of it all yourself, and have absolutely complete control. But you also carry the can for everything that goes wrong or hand it over to a long term partner like Paddle. And that two horse race to me is really important as a core part of that message.
Ken Lempit:
So there's a thing in journalism and marketing in general called "burying the lead". And this is the reward for people that get to the end of the podcast, because I think this is one of these fundamental ideas that I really want to dig in just a little bit, as we finish up here, the idea of creating a decision framework, I think you call it a two horse race. Should I do this or should I do that? And now you're in the business of getting people to make a decision and maybe buy from you. And can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that with Paddle and how you came to realize that was the opportunity, because it's not always an opportunity but frequently. So let's talk about how you figured it out.
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. So I think there were a bunch of frameworks to help you think through what is the journey you want to take a prospect on. So, you can look at the hero's journey the call to adventure, the road of trials, the meeting with the goddess, the boon, the flight, the return threshold, the master of two worlds. There's this kind of journey you can Google have a look through there. There's the challenge of sale that we've referenced. We'll come back to in a moment. I think Andy Raskin does a great job of this with his kind of setting out the new future, the new way the industry works, the undeniable shift. I think he calls it, selling the change. His process and corporate visions to a whole bunch of work here on unrecognized needs.
So there's a bunch of different frameworks you can use. And fundamentally it's about finding one that fits you like a glove for your industry, for your sector, for your team, for your stage of growth. And for us, we've really, we've partnered with Challenger and that's something that we're adopting. They're consulting with us, they're helping with our sales methodology. And so as a CMO, as a marketer, I want to be fully behind that same process. I don't see that as something over in sales, that's happening. I want the entire team in market to understand what the challenge of sales process is.
And we understand that you have this warmer, which is where you get the heads nodding. You're giving someone a bit of insight about their market that they probably know to be true, but it's giving them some new information. And then you take them through a reframe where if they follow your thinking and they're looking at this problem in an entirely new perspective. And then there's this rational, drowning, where we drown them with all this information about how good or bad it could be, give some emotional impact, go into a value proposition and then present your solution.
And so in marketing, we need to provide loads of warmers for our sales team and we need to be really good at that reframe phase so that as people come to us and get into conversations, and it's not just via sales team, we've got a self-serve motion too. And so it's in our marketing and our content as well at our events. Can we walk them through one of these, several different reframes, such that when we go through that journey and whether they're with sales or self-serve, they can go faster with less friction because in marketing we've paved that first few roads for them?
Ken Lempit:
That's awesome. And I think this two horse race thing is really good because this is sort of a polar opposite to the way people are running their business often today, where they're assembling this constellation of solutions. And the idea that they're going to flip a switch mentally, it's a big move. So I think the idea of there's the way everybody else is doing it and there's this kind of new way and maybe we're the only folks really in the race at the moment. I think it's a really powerful opportunity for that exact thought process.
Andrew Davies:
Yeah, completely. And really for Paddle's future success. If everybody in the market, everybody who is building a software company understands that there's two options for how they could do this go to market infrastructure. Then we've won. That's all that needs to happen. Because right now we are just eating into the very, very small percentages of software businesses that are considering how to build their business.
And so building that philosophical two horse race, the fact there is two ways and you can just focus on your customer and your product and leave a whole bunch of this. I think it's a really effective conversation to have. And you can use some great metaphors there like AWS. 25, 30 years ago, a software founder would have to walk into Best Buy and buy cables and racks and servers and a whole bunch of their time and money will be spent on building up this software infrastructure, the hosting industry, the hardware. Whereas now you get a credit card go to AWS and you're ready to go. And so there's some good metaphor we can build on there as well in terms of the two different approaches that people can take.
Ken Lempit:
That's awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to land our podcast. Andrew, I want to thank you for really this personal journey that you shared as well as I think the thought process that you're taking with Paddle. If people want to find you, what's the best way for them to reach out?
Andrew Davies:
Yeah. Andrew Davies on LinkedIn I'm @JDavies on Twitter and then Paddle.com is where we all hang out. Would love anyone to reach out, connect, ask any questions, give me any advice, super up for all of those.
Ken Lempit:
Thank you. And if people want to reach me on LinkedIn, it's LinkedIn/in/KenLempit and at austinlawrence.com. Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't, wherever podcasts are sold, we're given away for free. And Andrew, thanks so much for making this a great episode.
Andrew Davies:
Thanks so much, Ken really enjoyed.
Thanks for listening to the SaaS Backwards podcast brought to you by Austin Lawrence Group. We are a growth marketing agency that helps SaaS firms reduce churn, accelerate sales, and generate demand. Learn more about us at www.austinlawrence.com. You can email Ken Lempit at kl@austinlawrence.com about any SaaS marketing or customer retention subject. We hope you'll subscribe, and thanks again for listening.