How This SaaS Company is Driving 3X per Year Growth Using SEO

everybody welcome back to another episode of the sass flow show as always I am your host Trent deer Smith and I'm here to help you discover what is working for sass companies today by shining a light on the tools the tactics and the strategies in use by today's leading sass founders on the show with me today is Vincent and Sherpa Neal Vincent is the entrepreneur and product designer sorry weather is an entrepreneur product designer combining his background in design business and software development to build products that deliver great experiences Vincent co-founded and currently serves to see CEO at content King a cloud-based sass platform providing real-time SEO auditing monitoring and content change tracking for businesses all around the globe Vincent thank you so much for to make it's time to come and be on the show about to be here so let's start off with just some overview on your company here in part one of our interview today so in your own words what does your company do right so what we do is we essentially mimic Google and other search engines by continuously 24/7 monitoring websites and doing that primarily from an SEO search engine optimization point of view so what that means is that we have a stateful index meaning we keep track of all the pages that exist on the website and we continuously audit those for problems problems that limit the visibility in search engines and we also monitor those for changes so whenever you add pages or remove pages or you make changes within pages we flag that and we make it very easy for you to see those and on top of that we also sent proactive alerts so whenever something breaks or unexpectedly it changes in your website we proactively alert that to you so you get a select notification get an email it can jump right on it and the goal there is that you can resolve the problems before Google actually noticed those problems she actually are in a position to fix them before they actually hurt you so the major value proposition is obviously making sure that you're not penalized an SEO or that you don't lose the traction that youth work so hard to gain yeah it's essentially two things growing your rankings solving issues that we flag and make sure that you keep those rankings by resolving problems as soon as they happen okay how did you come up with this idea seems like a rather obscure idea well that's the thing this is a problem for businesses all around the globe if you care about SEO you need to keep track of what's happening to your website and we actually had a background in digital marketing so me and my co-founder and our team we ran in the internet agency before where we were doing a lot of web development a lot of consultancy SEO specifically and as her company grew and we got bigger and more serious customers all of ecommerce it happened over and over again that something went wrong in the website something's broke or changed unexpectedly because the client decided to improve page titles across the entire website or developers push to change that wasn't well tested everywhere and the client would notice it and would give us a call which was the worst that happened or we would catch it if we were lucky in a monthly if we were very lucky in weekly Scott it run but overall we were always late it was a change happened something broke and it took us days at best to to find find out about that problem that's why we built come looking in initially it was an internal tool to just keep track of our client websites and because there was nothing on the market back then still we're the only ones doing this let's go and we realized immediately what the potential was there but this is a problem that every company that cares about Google who cares about search engine findability is dealing with and we solved it so we closed the the agency we sold it to to some other agencies or we sold our client portfolio and jumped fully on on that internal concept which became completely okay so you built it really to scratch your own itch not thinking at all that it would ever be a commercial product at some point in time you realized hey this is probably a commercial product but did you go through a process to validate your idea at all before going jumping in with both feet yes and no of course the idea is also Rishi over time a good example of that is the the change tracking feature we have so in Kentucky you can one click you can see okay what happened on my website in the past week what content was added what content was was removed what was what pages were deleted and that's a feature that came pretty late in the development of Kentucky it was initially just an alerting system whenever something changed you could see that you could get the alert so there the initial idea was validated by ourselves by seeing okay this is a real problem and if we have the problem as an agency there must be at least other agencies and potentially other businesses that have the same problem aperture how did you know they were gonna how did you know they're there yes and money to solve that problem right so we build an MVP basically consisting only of designs so we were working on the engine the monitoring engine and at the same time we were designing the app usually user interface and we build a prototype of that using innovation where we just click that created a clickable prototype and we would go and meet customers or customers of the existing agency that we had at the time and we would also meet with other agencies we would show them what we were working on and ask them if this is something they would they would use goodbye and we've got a lot of positive feedback there and that's when we're onto something and so at that phase because I've done research and surveys and that things like that before and what I found is that people are they'll quickly say oh yeah yeah that's something I'll buy but then when you say okay great pull your credit card out they change their tune yeah oh did you do anything did you get people to vote with a credit card before you Dovan or did you just do those surveys and think you know this is given our own experience combined with these opinions this is a sufficient amount of validation for us to move forward yeah the letter actually we didn't we didn't ask for the credit cards at that time and doing it all over I think I would I would do that a bit more because to be honest you're absolutely right that's happened it happens a lot that people yeah I would fight which comes to shield sit down we got lucky in a sense because those people that said they would buy a it actually did buy ok I can imagine that there are definitely cases in which it doesn't happen and so if I would have to do it over that's one change I would implement ok now your target customer in the result did you have a target customer in mind and now that you're a ways into it has that target customer changed yeah absolutely initially we focused a lot on agencies which still is a I would say the primary customer for us especially when it comes to revenue and retention later on we also started focusing on and future businesses and mostly in the SMB space and they're actually we figure it out ok there is another market which is the enterprise which we're not going after and we discussed internally why is that and it basically it was a very stupid reason but it's because our agency was focused on the SOB space so that's where we where we knew how the game was played how do you sell products how do you talk with these companies and we didn't know how to do that with enterprise so from a functionality perspective we moved from agency to to end-user businesses that was mostly products changes and then once we were in targeting those two segments we moved into the into the enterprise second as well but to be honest that's something that happened like 10 10 months ago or something so it's pretty pretty recent and another segment is publishers so large publishers with websites hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of content that's that's another segment that we didn't take into account at the start and are now also we're getting more and more traction in that space as well so yeah it's really been a learning experience for us like you figure out who is your customer what's the pricing model look like yeah we're actually in the middle of changing it a bit simplifying a bit right now we have three different pricing plans or pricing models we have standard pricing which is for end-users there you pay for the number of websites or per website and the number of pages then we have 18 surprising and agency pricing is based on page bundle you just purchase a certain number of faces you want to have monitored let's take 500, 000 pages and then you can pick different plans based on features and based on that yeah you defied the page bundle the 500, 000 pages across as many websites as you want and then we have the enterprise model which is completely custom we're simplifying this right now into a single pricing model where you have four different plans and the the approach we will take is the page bundles so you pick the total number of pages you want to monitor it could be as little as 1, 000 and goes up to ten ten million plus you can divide that across the website so your average payer customer is paying about how much per month it differs enormous lis per segment so if you look at the the end user segment that's about $60 per month if you look at the agency that's about $150 per month and enterprise that's yeah but anyway like the range is very big that's that second okay and you launch this commercially win so we started five years ago when commercially well the first customer we got at the mid 2016 but really commercially I would say second half of 2017 that's when we first started getting our real customers the people that we didn't know the first customers were all in our network friends and so how many customers do have known so we now have between 500 and 1500 customers can't be more specific than that you can't be know okay and how about a are ya there I also don't want to I can't go into that right now yeah so I mentioned before we're currently in the second round talking to various potential investors so I don't want to reveal that information at this okay you're over your grocery yeah that's been for the past two years it's been three times so two thousand three times per year or three times over that period of time no no per year yeah fantastic yeah it's going going pretty well and and we're gonna talk in part two of our interview we're going to talk a lot more about the marketing that's driving that growth so if you're curious about that know that we're definitely tune in for part two because we're gonna talk more about it how many employees do you have right now right now we're 15 people altogether a split across two locations so we're based in the Netherlands and we have an office in Czech Republic most of the team is in Czech Republic right now and we're actually working on opening an office in India West because we have a lot of traction in that market and the timezone difference makes it very difficult to properly support those those customers what city you're looking at Raleigh North Carolina okay so you've raised money so how much we raised so far yeah we raised three hundred fifty thousand euros so that's close to four hundred thousand dollars that was in October 2016 okay did it take long to do that no not at all what we did is we approached the clients we had from our agency days because we focus on SMBs we it was all the c-level people that we were talking to and yes small medium business owners so they liked the idea and they liked how you becoming an angel investors most of them never invested before so it was pretty pretty easy relatively easy for us to get the money together how many people did it take to grace 310 I believe so there's some some put in quite a lot and then there are some friends and family who put in less so what advice would you give to other SAS founders who are in the seed stage about raising capital what will help us a lot is that we actually had a product already and we had some customers we had 20 customers or something at the time that helped a lot that Felidae that's the idea at least of course there's still the question okay how big can you make it but it's a it's a lot easier I think to invest in something that actually works the whole model is there a payment handling etc it adds value so if possible see if you can get some some products up and running if you can get some early customers even if they would pay if a fifth of what the regular pricing should be I think it helps a lot too to get something up and running all right so now we're going to finish off part one with five quick facts so short answers Vincent what is your favorite business book yeah that must be right now obviously awesome from April Dunford on product positioning must reads okay and what's your favorite online tool for growing your company yeah it's probably is boring but I would go with Trello I just use it every day it makes everything much easier how many hours a week you work 60 to 70 so family situation married kids or no yeah soon to be married and son 14 months Wow congratulations okay and what do you wish your younger self knew I was thinking about this question because I initially wanted to say you will get there don't worry but then I was thinking if I knew that at the time would I have put in the same amount of work same ambition to actually get where I am today so I would say nothing I would say exactly what what I knew already because it brought me up to this point at least alright so that concludes the first part of our interview make sure you tune back in tomorrow for part 2 where Vincent and I are going to be going into a lot more detail about growth strategies all right welcome back to part two of my interview with Vincent van sure pensil founder of content King if you missed part 1 make sure you tune in and check it out because we talked to a lot about the company the overview what type of customers how they raised money where the pricing looks like over your growth rate and a whole bunch of other very interesting facts today we're gonna talk about growth so Vincent tell me about your customer acquisition systems right so basically the the one single channel that really worked well for us is content marketing we put a lot of effort in there complicating and we have Pathak approximately 50 very very well extensive guides and articles on our website and that's driving the majority of our traffic and a majority of our trials and customers actually so what we do is we have this content marketing Sprint's we try to adopt some scrum like features where every two weeks we start a new custom content marketing sprint and we plan okay we're going to create this article we're going to write the article about for example Magento how to do SEO for Magento and then we in the next spring after that we promote that article so we do like social sharing of course we include industry experts ask them to contribute to the article and to share it within their network and of course being in the SEO space we put a lot of effort into making sure that the content will rank well that we target the right queries and such so I wanna dive a little deeper into that first of all what you said if I heard correctly is she'll spend two weeks creating a piece of content and then you'll spend two weeks promoting at that piece of content is that correct yeah yeah well it's not like that's the only thing we do in there in the two week so every sprint we work on two to three articles and the sprint after or sprint after that one we promote those articles and these these reference guides they're there it's like a full week of work to really research it and to write a good article and do the illustrations etc then we also do interviews of course expert interviews so there are a lot less work to put together blog articles also on external sites so usually Press print we do free articles creation and three articles of promotion and so these articles are they like a typical blog post or are they more far more in-depth how many words are they yeah they're super in-depth to be honest I don't know the word count but if you check it out contacting Capcom slash Academy you will find the articles there it's not really a block it's more I I called an encyclopedia it's completely covering multitude of topics so to give you an example we have an article about robots.

txt what is it why is it important how do you make sure that search engines don't have a problem with crawling your website and it's it's I think six pages of content all the best practices pitfalls pitfalls to avoid lots of examples a lot of these articles also have downloads like cheat sheets for example these are really in-depth articles it makes a lot of sense for us first of all it drives a lot of traffic but it also helps us enormous Lee with supports we've got a lot of questions about the topics that we cover like okay how should I decide what page titles I I should use or what should my XML sitemap contain no these are the same questions coming up time and time again and before it just took a lot of time to answer those and now is just pointless people today to the Academy which is really available so not only does it help us get traffic it also helps a lot in offloading support questions so do you publish a blog in addition to the Academy or is the Academy the sole part of ya so we have a blog as well there we post our future announcements so for example we added Google Data studio connector last week and that's something that we then announce on the blog we also publish our interviews there with industry experts so it's indicating a blog you will find you find that content the Academy is more evergreen content that's that's the content that we also keep up-to-date at all times so we whenever their industry changes we reflect that in the in the articles okay so the meat of your content that customers would be searching for is in the Academy the content that's on the blog is more about your company and your product and announcements to keep your customers informed as to what's going on with the app would that be a pretty reasonable assessment yes it is the only odd one out there are the interviews they're currently in the blog maybe we should make a section for those in the Academy not sure about that yet I know you're in are your interviews a text-based interview or they podcast like this no they're text-based text-based okay interesting I've not I've interviewed a lot of people over the years about content marketing and I like your strategy I might have to actually consider using it ourselves it works very well for us I can definitely recommend them so it that is the primary growth strategy are you running paid ads or a partner program or outreach or anything like that a little bit so we're running some ads with kaptara some Google ads mostly agree marketing actually so the lion's share of our traffic is because of the complete marketing one thing I want to add to that we do translate are all our content to five languages so we work primarily in English and then we get it translated to Dutch French Spanish and Czech and that helps a lot as well because in the English market there is a lot of competition but in the other markets there's far less competition so that works well for us to get these articles times like that and invisible and French Google for example what do you use to what service to use to translate them we do it ourselves we have some part-time people on the team that helped with translating and they also do support for these markets I like it also another very clever strategy so was this two things then so how much how much traffic is the site getting per month how is that and how has that grown over the last year for example yeah so that's now between fifty thousand hundred thousand visitors per month how it grew this year the growth was a bit slower I think fifty percent and the year before we doubled it so your customer count is actually growing faster than the traffic on your blog so that means your conversion rates must be going up yes although we also getting more word-of-mouth traction so a lot of people are recommending us right now also because we're the only solution in the market that can handle monitoring a dis enormous skill so we're seeing a lot of that and you just ask about channel sales or like an referral system so we have a certified partner program that's for payin customers they can get certified and when they then bring on additional customers they get a commission revenue Commission and they get a little badge that they can use to marketing material and we also from time to time we get leads people who ask for consultancy services which we don't offer we just offer the software and we pass those on to the to the certified partners as well and do you put a lot of effort into your partner recruitment or do they come and find you it's something that we need to do more actually we have the whole system ready for it and we got would say ten percent of our customers through this channel but I think it could be a lot more because these agencies they they they have usually can have 50 clients and because complicating is so easy to use they actually actively advise complicate to their customers but I think we could do more a better job at helping them from marketing materials sent to them the day can then give to their customers etc so yeah it's definitely something I want to focus on in 2020 okay how about your cost of customer acquisition differs but it's overall it's about 300 euros so $350 and how many months to get your money back yeah that depends on the segment so it's anywhere between two two months two to six months so the LTV is now so that difference let me pull up the data so LTV again differs for segments it's between in dollars thirteen hundred and seven thousand dollars I'm excluding the enterprise's here because there that's all over the place okay and is the LTV at that amount because eventually customers drop off or you've just only been in business long enough to get data for that amount of time and you've got customers that go we do have to earn of course like every sauce company has we see more turn in end user segments it makes sense because a lot of these customers they come in two to optimize the website and then when it's fully optimized they have solved all the issues they done and all the time they turn they don't see so much the value of ongoing monitoring so that's something where we need to do a better job agencies they turned much much less most we lost we lost a couple but usually weird reasons like going out of business not focus in an SEO anymore or there are smaller agencies and they're losing big clients what we do for every customer that deterrence of course if we reach out well why do you want to cancel we have a whole survey that we run with them which is insanely useful in figuring out how we should improve the product but so overall churn is how much like I said it differs per segments businesses about 6 percent per month and agencies two percent approximately two is good yeah it's very good let's talk about customer success your onboarding new customers you need to make sure they get up to speed on the platform you mentioned it's easy to use but what type of customer success system to house right so again it differs per segment because if you have an enterprise customer that's at page 20 $30, 000 per year you can put a bit more effort into it than somebody who pays a couple hundred dollars per year so first of all we have excellent customer support we aim to answer any question chat or email within 15 minutes during business days regardless of the plan you're on and also the support it's not just limited to the app we really try to help our customers know if they have SEO questions digital marketing questions in general so let me interrupt you right there you said aimed for 15 minutes how do you actually enforce that how do you because as volume grows of course these things get more difficult so how are you going to stay on top of it yeah so that means hiring new sales agents or support reps in in time and what we do is we optimize your workflow as much as possible so we use a lot of templates for entering where possible you see okay that's that kind of question we use templates to quickly create a draft and then modify where needed we also make the workflow for working with accounts so if a customer has question okay I can't edit this website for example then we can do it for them and we make it very easy to jump into the system and to continue where they left off so a lot of effort is put into being productive and being efficient so that this is sales rep you don't sort of support them they don't spend a lot of time looking up information finding okay what was exactly the workflow here we try to put it all in one place we're using intercom right now not really so happy with it it works there's some issues with it but what we do there which is nice if we could not have create a lot of segments to segment users into okay this is an agency type customer and there you can expect these kind of questions we have a lot of data from our database synchronized to two intercom so that you see what plan are they on what user role do they have we try to put all the information in one place have you investigated any alternatives to intercom yet because I know we've got something actually we're looking at in our software company right now and my CTO who is will say cheap is look because an intercom can get very expensive as traffic right so are you looking at any alternatives yeah then they're definitely a few good ones out there the cost for us which in a way because we have this tied integration it could easily take I don't know five developer days to switch over and have it all tested and that means five days not working on features so yeah that's the real cost blocks what are one or two of the names of the alternatives that you've had a look at yeah so I like the what's called crisp crisp chat it's a french french company okay they do a pretty good job i think others help scout which is also nice and kai something yeah kya co they spell o'clock o ka Y AKO so those are the free that i'm looking at or was looking at up there they all i think do a good job with just a matter of switching that's another another tip I want to give like really think about okay what is the software you're going to use what's the stack you're going to use because when we started I thought okay we don't like it we just switch but the real cost is in actually once you have that implementation done once you depend on the system switching over to another is painful it just takes development resources away from from your actual products aside from what you've described already are there any systems that you have in place to help you reduce churn yeah well of course the usual stuff like we we have these notifications like these users are inactive they also send out emails when we did this okay somebody hasn't logged in for 30 days we asked them we have continued for a while could you share with us the reason why they can answer okay I've just been busy but I'll be I'll be back soon or I don't see the value of come looking anymore whatever there's for questions for answers once the click depending on which one they click they get a follow-up survey we offer them Amazon giftcards to give them incentive to answer to these questions so yeah basically detect the people are at the risk of turning and reach out and if there are lots of counts of course we give them a call instead of the email and see what what's up and for larger accounts of course we have regular account management calls so every three months we try to get in touch with with these customers and ask them how they're doing show them new features with relation and what we're working on cetera okay so in terms of growth and marketing before we close out this section of our time together is there one actionable piece of advice that you would like to give to the listeners oh it's a cool tip marketing it's the it's the only marketing effort it really compounds if you write a good article good reference guide or whatever it is and you actually start ranking its it means getting traffic every single month and then doing another article like that you build on top of it and I think that's what what more a company should should focus on and and not cheap simple content like like cheap expert roundups whatever but really invest in high quality usable content and one thing I want to say there is if you check our Academy content the articles that are there are it doesn't matter if you use cooking or a competitor or no tool doesn't matter it's applicable advice regardless of what what tool in your arm it's not trying to push comb the King down your throat it's it's really useful information if you want to succeed in digital marketing and when you are constructing a piece of content and you're actually writing it are there any tools that you're using that are helping you to make sure that you've got all the right relevant keywords and the frequency and all the things necessary so that your on-page SEO is as effective as it could be yeah I can't really answer that question because most of the content marketing is actually done not by me but with my colleagues or if I'm a co-founder Steven he shares a lot about his workflow actually in our Academy also how to do keyword research how to pick the right keywords and how to put them to use them throughout the article and he also writes for various external websites which is the Content Marketing Institute where he shares how how he actually creates the articles so definitely something to check all right I will definitely be checking that out because SEO is a gonna be the pillar of our growth as well so that wraps up section number two we have one more part to go so make sure you tune in tomorrow for section number three or part three of my interview with Vincent alright everybody welcome back to part three of my interview with Vincent van sure pensil co-founder of content King founder co-founder I'm sorry co-founder co-founder of content monitoring app called content King in the first two parts of our interview we've talked to both the company and statistics and raising capital and all of the things to do with that phase of his growth and then we talked in part two about growth strategies and deeply into the details on how the company is has tripled their growth per year over the last several years so if you missed out on that you'll definitely want to tune in and check it out today we're gonna be talking about leadership people and process so you talked a lot or not a lot you mentioned the word workflow a number of times in part two of our interview together and for those of you who know what my company is it's an SOP platform so workflow is a word that is near and dear to my heart tell me about how SOPs have helped you to grow and and scale the business yeah so we try to put everything down into processes and process descriptions and that's that's been working very well for us so whether it's its support of core support is a very great example there's a lot of processes involved there but also in sales in the car management we define okay what are the tasks what are the information we need for that once you complete the task what's the the output where do you where do you leave that output so yeah we use that extensively asking where do you put your your content for SOPs does it live in a Google Doc or do you use an application yeah that's Google Docs right now which is not ideal but also there we're looking into knowledge management platforms just to see if we can use something better than Google Docs because it's easy to edit but it's a bit hard to keep a good hierarchy of the documents and to make it easy for other people to find it especially new new people on the team mm-hmm not to mention the more people you have the more workflows that you'll have going on the bigger the challenge it will be a manage those workflows because every single workflow has various people that it's been delegated to and they have differing due dates and unless you have software or a system in place the wheels will eventually fall off the bus and things start falling through the cracks yeah so I think you said earlier and maybe part one that you have around 15 employees I remember that correctly yeah that's correct okay and how quickly are you adding headcount and talk about per quarter yeah so it's been it's been hard to hire for some positions so we need developers desperately and that's a very tough tough role to fulfill we've been adding I think one per six one one team member for six months but yeah we definitely want to ramp this up and like I said we plan to open our office in the US and there we want to hire sales reps and customer support reps three to four we're looking for initially so that will be big big big bang basically hiring three four people at once usually we you know we just keep the vacancies open we look what candidates come in and if anyone is good we try to hire them as soon as possible but yeah on effort I would say one one four six months okay how many are in sales marketing versus engineering yeah that's that's the thing right now we have most of the teammate actually in engineering or product not just engineering but also product management or design sales and marketing it's just me and my co-founder right now so he's writing all the content yep he's doing all the content he's doing all the relationship with the community social media everything he's talking on event events okay and how who promotes the content does that him as well that's him as well yeah okay and was so what's your role in the marketing side yeah so that's more a strategic level okay what channels are we are we focusing on I'm doing the little bit of all I spent that we do the PPC I do that right now although I'm looking to hire a PPC manager for them things like pricing and it's also my responsibility but marketing he's mostly doing do that part and I'm mostly doing the sales part okay do you have systems in place for attracting talent or do you just leave the posts up and run ads for the posts what does that look like yeah we don't have systems for that yet I think it's something we should be doing because it's – yeah – chaotic right now to be honest so we have the vacancies up and yeah we we got decent amount of candidates for that but it's not something that scales so well and how about your interview process do you think you have a good systematic approach to job interviews or is it just kind of do we like them does it feel good what does that look like differs a bit / / / position of course like for engineering it's I would say for engineering it's much easier to assess whether somebody is a good fit at least them on the knowledge side of what they bring to the company in terms of skills so basically what it typically looks like is every candidate gets interviewed by three people so that would be me and my co-founder and then domain expert so for example we recently hired a new designer and he got interviewed by front-end developer and the product manager because they'll be working closely together engineers they get interviewed by our live developer so yeah three rounds of interviews with different people so you don't do use any behavioral assessment tests like calipers personality tests that kind of thing no no we don't to be honest I've never really thought about using that either we primarily will look okay do they have the skills that we need and do they fit in the culture that we have we're a small team with a lot of customers a complex product so that you can imagine the stress is pretty high pace is really pretty high healthy but still you need to be able to to to take that it's not an easy easy company to work for I would say it's one of things happening so how does compensation in working for your company compare to industry averages yeah we our salaries our industry average I would say what we offer on top of that of course is equity so we have in the team equity pool and they also I mean working for a small company that does what we do means you have a lot of responsibility and the people that we're looking to hire love to have that responsibility so we hired quite some people who would be able to get actually a better salary and other companies but they they went for us for the for the responsibility that they would get here okay have you had any issues with retention well yeah of course although the really good people we never had somebody leave yeah we had one we had one engineer leave but he moved abroad so what can you do about that but we never had anyone leave who were very very sorry about the day that they left so I would answer this with but no I wouldn't call it the issue with retention okay in the area of leadership people in process before we wrap up is there anything that I haven't asked you yet Vincent that that if you were interviewing yourself do you think oh well you should definitely ask me this well what what I want to share on this what I think what I learned during this this whole endeavor where we build outcome tacking is in the end it's the the recruitment is done by the by the CEO I think or at least by by sea level people at this stage of the company you can't delegate that you can maybe delegate okay find me candidates but to sell the fishing especially in the early days when when it doesn't look like much it needs somebody who has what has that vision internalized and that's usually the yeah it doesn't have to be CEO but at least one of the co-founders or somebody very very close to it somebody who really gets this part really gets why we're doing this what are we so from here and for who and what's the what can it lead to in the end if everything goes well I think that's really important get people who or when interviewing people you sell the company and you can't outsource that don't don't how towards that do anyone that end let me offer you a book title if I may it's called vivid vivid vision it was written so in North America there's a company that is from where I'm originally from Vancouver BC called 1-800 got chunk and their CEO o Cameron and I forgotten his last name now but if you go to Amazon Google vivid vision and they've been a monstrously successful organization I've read the book and we actually have a vivid vision posted on our website for our software company because it is I think what you're mentioning is a really important issue is that new employees it you know they need to know where you're going and what the what it's going to look like in the future and and a vision statement you know where you have two or three sentences that's not gonna cut it at all in any way shape or form a vivid vision is like one of your guides it's a very very detailed document that talks about the product and the customer and the growth and the marketing and the culture and all of these things that people who are looking at joining your team would care about so hopefully that'll get some help okay thanks I'll check it out any other actionable items tips that you want to give before we close out mmm yeah don't don't neglect the culture cultural fits may be a bit of a cliche we had some people leave within the first two three months because it just didn't fit on the cultural level especially when we just started out I thought okay as long as we bring the skills that we need it will work but that's not true especially in the startup when the pressure is high and you just did that's very important it's get people who fit in the culture that you have whatever their culture is the other the last thing I want to share is what's very difficult is when you have a group of what I'd like to call a player's employees who really really are performing it at a super high level we're extremely skilled have vision you can't add people to it at least now that stars who don't have that same level of competence or that same drive that will not only will they feel they will actually track down the rest of the team it doesn't work we've had a couple of people come in who okay they were there good enough we can maybe train them or get them get them to the highest level it never works and that's one thing that I'm curious about okay how does how does how does a company go from 15 people to 50 200 to 500 people and still maintain the culture I think there's always going to be some some pain here and there but yeah if you have a player's hire a players because anything else will will not work and I think to make any startup successful you need those same players ya a players don't want to work with B players yes absolutely Ari Vincent thank you so much for coming on the sass flow show and sharing what has made your company successful for anyone who might like to get in touch with you to talk about a business partnership or joint venture of some kind or young Linkedin yeah I am so well my name I will include a link lewd you'll get an email after this asking you for links to send me that I'm going to include in the show notes and your LinkedIn profile will be one of those so make sure you send that back over to me reference will do.