From Pandemic Beginnings to SaaS Success

In this episode, James is joined by JP Leggett, Founder and CEO at Squivr, one of the leading relationship management and account planning tools on the Salesforce platform.

During the episode, JP shares his story of launching Squivr in a pandemic year through to scaling to over 120 customers to date.  JP speaks of the value of referrals, building a robust partner network and the importance of deep-diving into verticals to achieve maximum impact. JP highlights how B2B marketing has transitioned from technical marketing to storytelling and how brand-building has been key to their success.

James and JP also touch on bootstrapping your start-up, including advice on taking funding and being realistic with timelines to avoid the fundraising treadmill. 

If you are a Salesforce ISV founder with an interesting story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to podcast@unaric.com and we'll be in touch.

Transcript

James Gasteen (00:03.278)
Hello and welcome to today's scale to sale podcast where I'm thrilled to be joined by JP PP, founder and CEO at Swiver. JP, welcome to the show.

JP (00:14.343)
Hey, thanks for having me, James.

James Gasteen (00:16.798)
I always like to start off with this kind of question. Be great to hear your story about how you kind of stumbled into the Salesforce world and ended up starting Squivr.

JP (00:26.439)
Yeah, it's less of a stumble, more of a fall right into it. I've been around sales for a while, and I ended up working for some very large tech companies. And I had a chance to roll over to, at the time it was a pretty small Salesforce ISV. Their name is Conga, and I ended up becoming an IC for them, and then I also ran the enterprise team over there. And so,

I knew through my Salesforce and my Oracle experience, you know, what I was in for in context of, you know, making sure we were driving sales excellence, hitting some numbers, getting those that revenue in. So we were able to be able to scale that business quite rapidly. But throughout that tenure, it not only became very clear to me that we needed to really drive revenue excellence, but we could do that all in the comfort of Salesforce.

And so, you know, I kind of pieced together all the things I learned throughout those Oracle and Salesforce days, popped it into, Hey, can we do this in Salesforce and magically we created Squivr, which actually, you know, focuses in on that revenue excellence moment through account planning and relationship management.

James Gasteen (01:39.883)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (01:43.446)
How did you identify that kind of opportunity? Because obviously you kind of, you know, there's a scratching the itch, which is often the common way founders build a product, but like, how do you make sure that, you know, this itch that you were scratching was a much bigger problem?

JP (01:57.287)
Yeah, it's funny. So I was a boomerang at Conga and I left and I was an IC when I left. And James, I probably spent about three weeks when I left explaining just two accounts to the incoming sales team. And so I started thinking about that moment and I said, you know what, just the people, who are the stakeholders, where do they sit in the organization? That.

in the enterprise space takes a very long time. That's just within the sales department. Imagine if you sell a deal, now you have to translate that over to customer success. You have to make sure the full project team's up and running. You have to make sure the business development team is out there and going after the right folks. And so that hypothesis kind of led me into, let's see if we could build this relationship management moment in Salesforce. At least we would save that three weeks.

when we were leaving. But then when I became that leader of the enterprise organization, we did the deal reviews, we did the QBRs, we did all the sales moments there. And so walking through all of that really led me into, hey, we need kind of this full account planning suite in Salesforce. All the data lives there anyway, let's go ahead and build an application that enables it.

James Gasteen (03:19.87)
Nice, nice. Yeah, and I think probably one of the things that you probably kind of helped Pioneer is really visualizing data in Salesforce. A lot of data sometimes is, hey, great, we've got dashboards and reports. It's like, yeah, but I don't wanna run a dashboard or report to understand who my stakeholders are. I wanna visualize them.

I want to understand their relationship. I want to know if they've left. I want to see any activity. And I think, you know, you are probably one of the first few to really try to visualize that data to make it a lot more digestible, especially for the, who's the kind of the power user of Salesforce.

JP (03:51.763)
Big power user. And I think it's the visualization was key. I'm really thankful for my time at Conga because we were able to really put everything against the Salesforce database. And when you do that, there's typically some really key questions you're looking to answer, but also directionally, are you doing it correctly against the database? And are you doing it correctly within that user experience? Those are always at the top of mind for us. So.

You know, if it's visual, we love it. If it's interactive, even better. And now as we get into, you know, the generative AI moments and everything, we really feel like there's a strong opportunity for us.

James Gasteen (04:30.806)
Yeah, definitely. And what were the initial challenges you faced? Am I right in thinking that your bootstrapped? Is that right, JP?

JP (04:37.307)
That is correct. We are fully bootstrapped. I think the challenges that we face, I mean, as a founder, as a first time founder, you hop right in, you think you're gonna be able to really tackle the world. At the time, we actually started it in 2020. And we had a lot of growth ambitions and we continue to have those big growth ambitions. We started actually in revenue, zero customers in 2020. And we're up to about 120 now.

James Gasteen (04:53.751)
Okay.

James Gasteen (05:07.487)
Nice.

JP (05:07.787)
And so if we look at that trajectory along that whole life cycle, you have any number of marketing challenges, you have customer success challenges. In the market, we went through COVID, so there's a change in market dynamics there. Over the last two years, there's been a change in the dynamics, especially in that tech space. So just being able to pivot and adjust throughout these macro climates.

has been key. And so what we've opted for is let's stay lean, make sure we're able to make those pivots and stay true to our vision. And so those have really served us very, very well. But I'd say, you know, those are a couple of those challenges. You always need about, you know, five more of you to do all the things. Um, and, uh, your, your job isn't ever quite done. Uh, but it is encouraging as you get the wins and you stay true to that vision that

that you're getting a lot of that positive reinforcement as you go.

James Gasteen (06:11.178)
I think there's a real difference as well. You know, I'm co-founder of this business. So there's three more of us. My first was this. I was found for most of it. Right. And I think there's a big difference when you're the kind of the founder, which is like, right, you've got to kind of keep the team happy, G'd up, probably squirrel away through this, those secrets of those things that nor away with you at nighttime when you're a co-founder. It's like, right, you share it, divide it. And, you know, off, off you go. There's a real difference between being founder and co-founder, which is probably, you know, another show unto itself.

JP (06:40.643)
Yeah, and I think you bring up a great point. Like you want a solid, solid team and that's what we've built. I think the, you know, without my team on board, bought into the vision and making sure that we're charging the same mountain, we definitely wouldn't have gotten to this point and it's gonna serve us well as we look at the next two to five years as well.

James Gasteen (07:03.175)
And maybe going back to you, you mentioned you're at 120 customers. How did you go about acquiring your first handful of customers? What were some of the, you know, how did that happen?

JP (07:13.099)
I love this question. So I think the first five to 10 customers are always kind of within your network and you're looking at, you know, is there, are you trying to get some proof points, you're making sure that, you know, you're in that product market fit that you wanted. I think the really encouraging thing for us, James, was probably at that sixth customer, we started seeing through our ecosystem referrals.

And it was both through, you know, the, not only the network, but it started to kind of cascade out. And that was really awesome to see. So people started to reach out to us. It was through the app exchange, but it also started to come in through other channels. If you think about like what was happening, especially during the COVID days, Slack, Discord, all these collaboration channels started to kind of go off.

Everyone was doing things remotely. And so we started to get pinged by folks who were just talking about Squiver in modern sales pros, or any number of revenue channels, or the Ohana Slack channel. And so we knew we had it at that moment. I think that was one of those like aha moments for us where we started to scale fairly rapidly off of our first, you know.

three to five customers that were probably are more in our network from the get-go.

James Gasteen (08:47.854)
Brilliant. And did you find that, you know, that there was probably the legacy, I'd say category was maybe the org charts. There was a few of those in the 2010s. Was it maybe customers who'd got tired of the slightly older style org charts when looking for something new, or did you find that you were getting net new customers who'd never used visualization coming to you? You know, was it a rip and replace or was it someone just kind of coming new with a problem?

JP (09:12.367)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So the funny thing about our space is org charts aren't new, but org charts interactively in Salesforce are a game changer. So once you make that decision to really drive against your system of record and against all that data, you're able to recapture that and cascade that through the entire organization. So that said, we were fairly innovative when we first hit the market, and we continue to see a lot of

you know, coming off of nothing moments or coming off of, we see a lot of off platform players out there. We see like Excel, we see PowerPoint, we see all the, all the things everyone's used to, to hearing about in that Microsoft suite. Um, and they, they really want to drive it into Salesforce. Like how are they going to take this data, run analytics off of this data and understand, Hey, you know what, we're at this point in our relationship with this customer base or a prospect.

James Gasteen (10:12.302)
Mm-hmm.

JP (10:12.875)
Um, so that was a game changer. One other thing that happened there, James is, um, back in my cong days, I sent a lot of our, uh, actually our whole enterprise team through a training program. Um, we've had a number of sales training programs throughout the, the years. And so my only gripe with those training programs is they're fantastic when you send them through it.

James Gasteen (10:38.03)
Mm-hmm.

JP (10:38.195)
They'll be able to learn some things and some things are gonna stick, some things aren't. And so really the moment that kind of frustrated me was the day after it ended, it kind of just went away. And people went back to their old habits, they went back to their comfort zone. And so what we did with the account planning moment is let's go ahead and take that plan of success.

Let's drive it into Salesforce and start to track that as well. And so that's where we started to develop some new products and obviously build out what could be a suite of account planning and relationship management.

James Gasteen (11:17.67)
Yeah, I often heard it's like, it's the classroom then when people get back, how do you operationalize that learning so people are actually embedded or working in the right way as opposed to here's your big folder You've made loads of notes on and then you completely forget about it when you're back in the office

JP (11:33.167)
It's such a great like conundrum to solve. I think you get institutional knowledge in this world, especially with org charts and relationship management. A lot of reps just like to keep it upstairs. And they like to just say, you know what, I know those people and we're good. And then from there, if you can take that institutional knowledge and pop it into your system of record and actually, you know.

take action off of that. Even that transition point, sales to customer success, customer success is gonna be able to cross and upsell that customer so much more effectively if they're able to understand who they're working with and what light they're working in.

James Gasteen (12:17.234)
Yep. Yep, totally agree. And there you're talking about some of the ways that you acquired your initial customers in terms of like growth, you know, 2023 looking forwards to 24. What are some of these kind of marketing strategies that you found effective that you may be going to double down on in 24?

JP (12:34.511)
Yeah, I don't think these are gonna be too surprising, James. I think we love that in-person events are back. And we certainly participated in quite a few of those last year. I think that'll be keen to our strategy this year. We are pretty heavy within the socials, in particular LinkedIn. We're starting to see some momentum elsewhere, like Instagram and X. So we're gonna keep going down that social path.

James Gasteen (13:02.144)
All right.

JP (13:05.079)
Um, yeah, I think like some ISVs have gone, I've, I've heard a lot of different answers here. Some ISVs have, if you're more technical, maybe you're going over to Reddit. We haven't seen that yet, but, um, we are in kind of this, this hot space, James, where, um, Gartner and Forrester have reached out to us. They, they, they both wrote reports off of account planning tools and or account based marketing as well.

James Gasteen (13:31.819)
Mm-hmm.

JP (13:35.327)
Um, we're going to continue to foster those avenues and just, you know, continue to build it out. Um, one thing that's been on the radar for us is to really formalize a referral program and make sure that, you know, our growth, uh, we see it as a, a very strong direct model, but we also really want to start to build out what is that really strong partner ecosystem, including SIs, including other OEMs.

James Gasteen (13:46.786)
Yep.

James Gasteen (14:03.714)
Mm hmm. Definitely. And just going back to that kind of in person event, I think, you know, yourself and swive are very visible, especially in the US events, online, offline. What are maybe some of the tips you'd give, you know, bootstrap founders for really raising their awareness and visibility? Because again, that's absolutely key in the Salesforce ecosystem and maybe how to do it without, you know, burning a fortune at Dreamforce getting a fancy booth.

JP (14:03.791)
and explore those possibilities as well.

JP (14:29.155)
Yeah, I think talk to your peers. And honestly, like some of the best ideas have come from other folks who have been through it. You had mentioned Ian from Elements. I've had a lot of great conversations with other ISVs out there and quite frankly, it becomes very complimentary and it helps you scale that conversation beyond the borders you think you're in. And so...

Um, you know, of that, I would say we're probably about 60% of our customers are in the U S but I'd say about 35% of them are in Europe, which has been really encouraging because, um, to your point, we've, we've participated a lot in the U S events and we plan to do so more in Europe this year as well. I should have mentioned that on the last call. Um, but certainly do that. Um, in our case, I mean, the mothership.

in Salesforce is always important. And so you want to make sure that you continue to, you know, align to the partner team, align to the direct reps, align to any of the people around it. Don't discount SIs. I think the big five are really keen to the transformational projects, but there's a lot of up and coming SIs out there that.

are doing some really innovative things and they're gonna help you be sticky in all your accounts as well.

James Gasteen (15:56.766)
And have you found that, you know, that you've been thinking about verticalization or do you just have a kind of natural vertical and you're thinking about aligning with the wider ecosystem given that's the way Salesforce is going?

JP (16:08.647)
James, I love this question. So verticalization, the answer is always yes. Yes, we want to. I think the trick with verticalization is you have to do it. This is not like a weight in the water. This is one of those Oracle lessons I had back in the day when Mark Hurd was running the organization. And then he kind of brought it over to Salesforce. So if you're going to do it, you want to make sure that you're able to really dedicate.

the vertical if you're going into FinServe or if you're going into healthcare, jump in with both feet and drive your value proposition there. I think with the ISV community in particular, the backdrop of that is Salesforce has done that. And in order to properly align, the teams are going to look for that, those kind of best of breed ISVs that are going to help them.

do bigger and better in those verticals. And that said, if you could do it with less resources, because we all have probably less than the 78,000 people there at Salesforce, you should absolutely pursue that. I think in our visualization technology, we see a lot of momentum in financial services, and we see a lot of momentum in the insurance industry and in recruiting.

And so if you think about those, the idea is capture all that, make sure you're aware of the value you're providing to those verticals and tell that story. And don't, don't stop with a LinkedIn post or a Instagram post. You want to cascade that on through the Salesforce ecosystem. And if the Salesforce teams hear it, they hear how you're driving success for them. They're going to bring you into the next two accounts.

James Gasteen (18:06.722)
Yep.

No, that's great. I often hear financial services as being this kind of B2B SaaS 2.0, right? You know, before tech was the big buyer of Salesforce. Now I think FinServe has overtaken tech as the biggest vertical there. And again, you know, it's things I hear about wealth management, right? So private banking, they're requiring clients who are spending, you know, or investing a lot of money. And that drives AUM and fees, right? So it's exactly the same as sales. You've got prospects, you've got accounts, you've got targets, you're just

slightly different and it feels that's probably quite a good mapping within certain parts of financial services and products that we're selling heavily into B2B SaaS because again, that market took a bash last year.

JP (18:49.395)
I love that with Salesforce. Salesforce has become that platform where they've gone in so many different directions from that platform perspective, that I went into accounts and I said, oh, you're using it for HR. Oh, you're using it for financial services. Financial services cloud, you know, over the last five years has just gotten the full makeover and has become a differentiator for a lot of folks. And so you have all these compelling ISVs that are tied to that.

If you think about like Agents Inc and what they're doing in the insurance company, you think about what Incino and all those folks do in the financial services. It's just such a powerful platform that all the large corporations have adopted now, and it's not going to stop with the one or two use cases. It's going to continue to answer additional value questions across the board.

James Gasteen (19:43.37)
Mm hmm. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think in terms of, you know, going back to maybe your earlier, earlier parts of your entrepreneurial journey, what were some of those kind of maybe unexpected hurdles? And what did you learn? Obviously, COVID would be a huge part of it. I think you mentioned that already. But were there any other kind of hurdles, especially, you know, you're more from a commercial background, maybe getting a product off the ground? What were some of those? And how did you how did you learn?

JP (20:10.055)
Yeah, yeah, from a technical perspective, I have a phenomenal team and I think that's key. If you have alignment across the board, everyone has that common goal, you're gonna be great. I think from that bootstrapping question, what we probably didn't get into is, oftentimes bootstrapping is a fantastic model for ISVs. And I think the lure of

you know, that VC moment, you need to make sure that it's the right fit for you at that right time. I've seen plenty of leaders and founders out there that have had so much success in that fundraising moment, and they tend to find themselves on a treadmill that just keeps getting faster and faster and faster. And so I think like that said,

Um, your job as a founder is to keep the business going and funded. And so, you know, behind that, whether you're bootstrapped, if you're looking at that, you know, VC moment or any investment moment, um, you know, oftentimes what you're, what you're doing there is you're buying yourself the opportunity to sign those next 20 customers and ultimately buying yourself time. So, um,

For any founder out there that's looking to just hop in, I would say the amount of time you think you're going to get to a revenue number, double or triple it, and then work off of that type of timeframe because you wanna make sure that you've got the right runway to get to where you wanna be.

James Gasteen (21:48.767)
Yep.

James Gasteen (21:57.598)
Yeah, no, totally agree with that. I think a couple of things I'd add is there's no harm. And again, this was Ian's point, elements. There's no harm at all in doing services in the early days, having services around the product, doing whatever, make it stickier. It doesn't really matter you're bootstrapped. And I think number two, my first business was mostly bootstrapped, then we took funding. And I think the interesting bit is that the dynamics of what you optimize for change, when you're bootstrapped, you're optimizing to kind of maybe stay alive.

When you've got funding, you're optimizing the speed, right? If your bootstrap, you can't go as quickly as possible because you can't break eggs, you can't hire, you can't make errors, you can't open a satellite office in Australia at the same time as the US. You can only do one thing, right?

Whereas I think, you know, when your bootstrap is very much, you know, how do you make sure that there's a decent level of growth, but you're not going to put the business at risk. And I think there's, it's quite interesting to see that was almost the two levers that you know, we optimized for just that one company, you know, bootstrap time funded.

JP (22:55.143)
And I think that's what made last year so interesting. I think Mark Benioff actually said it well. It was the, you know, you were looking at growth companies. So in our early days, we were looking at Conga and we were heavy growth with Insight. And then all of a sudden it kind of right-sized when Tom O'Bravo ended up buying them. But Mark actually mentioned last year, it's about measured growth and making sure it's the right.

amount for the business versus, you know, hair on fire. We're all gonna try to get there within the next six to nine months. And we all know, you know, that's, that's a recipe for disaster most of the time.

James Gasteen (23:37.522)
Yeah. And I think also that the, you know, the old SAS days when valuations are really high, people didn't really care how much every net new dollar cost you. But I think I saw something on LinkedIn just before Christmas. And I think, you know, some of the public companies were spending $2.80 to acquire $1 of net new revenue. And if you're trading it, if you're trading at three, you know, three times revenue, three times ARR, it's not worth doing sales, right? Because by the time you've got

JP (23:55.179)
I saw that as well.

James Gasteen (24:07.716)
You're losing money per net new dollar acquired and it's that kind of like right, you know valuations come down cat goes up Is it worth acquiring new customers anymore? You know, it's gonna help you so much

JP (24:17.063)
Yeah. And I think that equation is worth looking at over and over again throughout the quarter and throughout the year. Because ultimately those dynamics do fluctuate a little bit, but you know that break even points for bootstrappers out there. You need to be realistic about it. You need to be accurate about it and make sure that you know post that moment.

that celebration should occur and smile and rah rah, but go on and get that next goal as well.

James Gasteen (24:55.114)
Yeah, and I think one final thing we're on the bootstrapped is...

Salesforce does a great job of coaching its customers to prepay 12 months. So again, it's great for cash flows when you're setting up shop and like great, you know, first invoice comes out, someone pays in 30 days, they pay 12 months upfront. And you know, you know, great. I've got my Salesforce PNRs due on a monthly basis. You know, it's fantastic. So again, starting bootstrapped also kind of, it lets you experiment a little bit, but also, you know, fundraising takes so long. You're much more better off, you know, you're much better off going to market and saying, Hey, I've,

I'm at 200K of ARR and I've got 50 customers. They all look the same and I'm going to do a little mini angel round to get the first few marketing and sales reps versus trying to raise money straight off the bat. And then you've got two problems. You've got to try and build a business and keep investors happy, which is a full-time job.

JP (25:37.288)
Yeah.

JP (25:46.515)
Absolutely. And I think that there's never like that one right answer. So if you're a first time founder, I encourage you to look at all those options and talk to the people. You know, if you're out there, reach out to, you know, myself, I'm always open to have a conversation. But other founders are going through what you're going through. In addition to the VC moment, I know a lot of folks who have taken on that.

that big investment round. And now, they're kind of collaborating together and saying, how do we slow this treadmill down a little bit?

James Gasteen (26:26.882)
keep everyone happy. And then just thinking about, you know, a bit expanding on those early days, looking back, is there anything you would have done differently in the early stages of Squiver?

JP (26:38.703)
I don't think so. I think, you know, we did go for a little bit more growth in the beginning, but I loved it. And I think that afforded us the opportunity to really sign, you know, some larger enterprise deals. And to your point, you know, we were working off of a different model at that point. I think like from a, just from a department perspective,

It would be great to invest more into marketing. I mentioned a couple of channels that we're working on, but I can't stress enough that you need to build a brand and you need to get the word out there of what you're doing and how you're going to drive that value. And so that right there is one of those things that I underestimated coming into it, that I would have loved to have been less flat-footed on in 2020.

James Gasteen (27:10.23)
Yep.

James Gasteen (27:32.798)
Yeah, that's a great one. I think I've often mistaken a marketing problems as salesperson. So I remember, you know, going about eight, nine years. Oh, I'll hire an A, I'll hire an A and a BDR and me. And it's like, okay, probably not enough to go around. We can reclose enough business to get us through the next few years. But you know, we, we had a marketing problem, not a sales problem. And by hiring more salespeople or BDR, you're not going to solve an awareness issue because they can't contact the market. They can't fix messaging. They can't build a value proposition. So.

I think it's totally right. And I think marketing as well in B2B is definitely evolved. My first business we set up in, I think it's 13 odd years ago, in those days it was very feature-y, technical marketing, right? You weren't really talking about benefits or what's it like for the end user. And now it's real kind of Hollywood style storytelling. It's definitely evolved. And I think it's a real skill and you've got to get it right because if you've got a bland pitch, people are gonna go somewhere else. There's enough vendors out there.

JP (28:31.167)
And I love that because you have to meet people in their journey as well. So you know, there's I think the numbers uptick from even 68% of the sales cycle is over by the time you get there. And so, you know, a couple things I always love to know about is where they are in their journey and then also what their goals are from there because I think that kind of cans. Hey, let's start from the get go is over.

James Gasteen (28:45.756)
Yep.

JP (29:01.632)
You have to get to what problem you're looking to solve. And that includes multiple people now. Those are buying committees now. It's not just the one person that you would have called on in the past. So that's great.

James Gasteen (29:13.566)
Yep, exactly. It reminds me of that Challenger book. It was built, they developed a lot of the research in the last recession and you can use it again now. It's, you know, multiple committees influencing different buyers and decision makers, making sure, you know, building this Venn diagram for the committee to make sure everybody has got their needs and criteria met before you can actually pass go.

JP (29:37.379)
Love it. Yeah. Matt Dixon did such a great job with Challenger and that jolt also kind of threw that kind of the data aspect into it and where you can start to meet current customers and start to build them up a little bit more too. So all that said, I think for a founder, those are really keen lessons to learn and learn them very early on and be open to a pivot or two. You're going to need to do it.

James Gasteen (30:04.75)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. And how do you envision the future of Salesforce apps and the Salesforce ecosystem, and how is Squivr preparing for these changes?

JP (30:15.943)
Yeah, I love Salesforce. I think, you know, back in the day, Oracle and Salesforce, if I just put those two side by side, one thing I think Salesforce did really well is they fostered and helped to facilitate success in their partner ecosystem versus it kind of being an afterthought. I think Salesforce has gotten bigger. It's gotten busier. There's more apps out there. We're all trying to, you know, compete for any number of value props and ultimately

the share of wallet. So I think it will continue down that path. We'll see more players come in. I do think consolidation is on the horizon with what happened last year. There's probably going to be a lot of folks who are going to look at what if we combine forces and start to drive a bigger value prop. I think that right there could be the theme of 2024. But Salesforce will continue to be a bull in the

market, I think the likes of ServiceNow and HubSpot and you know, those folks continue to be up and up and comers that I'm going to keep an eye on. You know, obviously with our offering, we do everything natively in Salesforce, but we're certainly open to helping to solve bigger and better problems as well. But yeah, it's exciting. I think there's exciting days in front of us and

I'd love for Salesforce to kind of settle up on their, their executive team. So they could just start running as well.

James Gasteen (31:50.014)
Yep. And I totally agree. I think we're also very excited about the Salesforce ecosystem. I don't think there's another, you know, enterprise cloud platform like it, right? Microsoft, not closest one, maybe Oracle a bit bitsy SAP, no HubSpot, SMB service now probably more back office. So, you know, it's gonna take a while for someone to do that. And yeah, I think it feels, I totally agree. It feels like there's they can fix the internal whatever's been happening for 12, 18 months and just, you know, everyone's aligned and focused.

as opposed to, you know, what's the next bit of bad news, then, you know, it'll definitely have a head start over its beers.

JP (32:28.263)
Yeah, I'm encouraged. I think they turned the corner. And that's it. I also think that they had some big bites in context of acquisitions. So, you know, it's taken them probably a little longer to digest some of those, but still, you know, hugely valuable, growing at a great click and a great ecosystem to be in. Just in terms of networking and being able to connect face-to-face with folks and just have great conversations

James Gasteen (32:47.156)
Mm-hmm.

JP (32:58.491)
you know, common goals. It's a great ecosystem.

James Gasteen (33:01.678)
Totally agree. I think I've been to a few other platform events outside Salesforce and they're very dry in comparison. So that is definitely one of them. And lastly, kind of my questions to kind of wrap up. What's one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were starting out at Squiver back in the pandemic era, 2024 years ago?

JP (33:22.283)
Ooh, good one. I think I always go back to that moment of, we've had so many changes in the macro. I think for any founder out there, you wanna make sure that you are passionate about what you're doing. There's going to be challenge points throughout your journey and you're gonna run into some real testers out there. And so...

James Gasteen (33:33.974)
Yep.

JP (33:51.811)
You know, just stay true to your vision, but also keep the passion there because that's going to get you over the hump. Um, but James, I, I'll go back to that funding moments. I think, you know, to start companies nowadays, you probably need at least two X, which you thought in context of funding, just to make sure you've got the runway there. Um, be realistic about how much time and effort you're going to put in. Um, you know, I wasn't as gray.

James Gasteen (34:12.295)
Mm-hmm.

JP (34:20.943)
in 2020, but it started to settle in. And it's all great, great work and I love, love doing it. I think that, you know, that right there is a testament to the passion that you put into your project and making sure that it's successful.

James Gasteen (34:22.658)
Thank you.

James Gasteen (34:39.99)
Yeah, no, brilliant. I think that's great advice because at the end of the day, after a while when you know, the startup is successful, it's a job like any other job, right? And you've just got to make sure that, you know, you've got to get up in the morning, do your tasks, do your chores. You know, you can't be building all the time. It then becomes execution.

JP (34:57.671)
Yeah. And I guess one other thing I'd add is get to market. You know that I'd see a lot of a lot of ideas that kind of fade away because the passion probably wasn't there, but get to market, make sure that you're out there and you're, you're able to recognize because the best feedback we've ever gotten were from customers and that helped us to develop a more valuable product set and a more valuable offering.

James Gasteen (35:02.719)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (35:25.022)
Yeah, I totally agree. JP, I've really enjoyed having the show. I think you've got a wealth of experience there and some great tips, especially around doing some, you know, bootstrapped and canny marketing to kind of raise that awareness. So yeah, appreciate you having the show and look forward to catching up face to face at one of the upcoming events.

JP (35:42.899)
Sounds great, James. Thanks again for having me.

James Gasteen (35:45.762)
Cheers.