Transcript
Eric Boduch
[00:00:00] As founders, we all had product backgrounds … we all understood this pain … like we all had this issue of how do you get data about how your software is being used? … and the only way you can do that back then was instrument things, right? So you’re pulling engineers off of building things that are really important with you to build instrumentation and that just kinda sucks! Forget all that. Yeah. You know, we want something we like as product managers. We install a snippet of code and then it just works. It captures everything that’s like super empowering to me as a product manager. So I think that was the fundamental vision behind it.
Stephen Cummins
[00:00:51] Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS! The show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world’s most remarkable SaaS scale-ups!
Episode 97 is the second of a 2 part conversation with Eric Boduch, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist and VP of Marketing at Pendo. He’ll talk about why he loves helping to drive Pendo’s growth, and there’s a few tips in there for founders too
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[00:01:14] You’re a very upbeat type of guy, Eric, and you talk about learning experiences … so does that mean you didn’t actually go through a dark period after either of those experiences?
Eric Boduch
[00:01:24] After Cerebellum was a little bit of a dark period in part because, you know, that’s all I had known. Like out of school I was running my own thing … now, what do I do? And I … you know … I needed to make some money. I never had paid myself well as always … I was like, ‘Yeah, I got the equity. I don’t need a lot of money’. And I never really thought about taking care of myself during the good times … or at least paying myself close to market. So I just had a different mindset. So there was a little bit of a dark period after that … and I got to my own personal dark period … ended up getting divorced at that point, too. So there is definitely some different trials I went through after that.
Stephen Cummins
And that’s one of the hard things about being an entrepreneur can can hit a lot of things …
Eric Boduch
Yeah. Smash my dark period was really during the end of it. It was the struggle at the end feeling like, you know, the positive exits are narrowing out and like your best outcome is at best meh. Right. Or decent … maybe on the upside, but not great. Right. And so it was like the last, you know, even two or three years of Smash …. for the last period of time with Smash was darker for me than the period of leaving. I just finally got to the point where, like, I can’t I can’t do this anymore. Like I needed to I mean … I felt I felt like I needed to do better for my investors. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. And no matter what I was doing, it just wasn’t getting there. And so we tried to do something with Mindmatrix …
Stephen Cummins
So how did you and or your co-founders of Pendo come across the initial problem that you were to initially address?
Eric Boduch
Yeah. So as a product, people … you know, I worked in the valley and ran marketing. I owned part of the product organization. I worked in product marketing before … and a lot of product experiences at cerebellum. Back then, I owned product. Product management was part of my organisation that kind of reported up to me throughout the whole life of that company. We had a couple of CEOs we brought in, but even when I was there, as CEO or not, the product org reported up through me, oddly enough,
Stephen Cummins
So just to remind listeners it’s a product experience platform …
Eric Boduch
Yeah, so Pendo … we like to describe it as a product cloud. So we help deliver user guidance, user communications, user insights for digital product teams. So you can think of us as like usage analytics, in-app messaging and guides, sentiment, things like polling NPS. We just bought a company called Receptive that’s now Pendo feedback. So we handle feedback management. So all of those things incorporated together. And then I just took over working with Josh Sandman on a product line called Adopt, where we actually extend our guidance to employee training. So if you want to be trained on how better to use smart recruiters as like, you know, a big company, you can put your own training on top of smart recruiters and deliver that out to the world. So as an example …
Stephen Cummins
Very good. Now, you’re the leader in the product analytics category, even though that’s not maybe the phrase you use to describe yourselves, in G2. You’re the very clear leader. What separates you from that pack do you think in that product analytics space?
Eric Boduch
[00:04:33] Wow. What separates us? I mean, I think, you know, one of the big things is a lot of people in the analytics space, their products came from somewhere else … meaning that their original persona wasn’t necessarily product. Right. They’re building something for the marketing people or they found that they were building something for the marketing people and found out that more product people are using it. So why don’t we start selling the product people. From the get go like … we as founders … we all had product backgrounds. Sure. Todd, our CEO, ran product at Rally Software, among other places. Erik Troan, you know, the first VP of engineering I believe at RedHat – was one of the first engineers there – if not the first – had a strong product background, in addition that ran product at some of the organizations he worked. Rahul Jain, great guy. Wow. Shout out to Rahul out there in DC. You know, he did product at Cisco and other places.
So we had this product background, we all understood this pain … like we all had these issues of like, how do you get data about how your software is being used? And the only way you can do that back then was to instrument things, right. So you’re pulling engineers off of building things that are really important …. to build instrumentation. And that’s just kind of sucks. I mean, you kind of need to do it sometimes. And then not only do you need to do it, but when you change your product, you need to update it. So a lot of the analytics vendors that are out there, not only were they built for other people, but they required instrumentation. And we’re like, forget all that. You know. We want something … we’re like as product managers, we installed a snippet of code and then it just works. It captures everything
That’s like super empowering to me as a product manager. So I think that was a fundamental vision behind it. And then from there we, you know, we always focused on making sure we are doing the right thing. One of our core values is maniacal focus on the customer. So, like, ‘Are we meeting our product managers’ needs? Do we make their life better? Right. Are we empowering them? Do they love us? You know.
Stephen Cummins
So you guys were your sweet spot customer …
Eric Boduch
We were our sweet spot customer. So that made it easy. That’s how it’s expanded out into a platform too … because we’re like, ‘Oh, this is great. We can see that in Pendo people are struggling to set up staging servers … and like ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do something now instead of having to wait till we fix that?’ … You know. Make it easier, like, ‘Oh, we could do it at messaging, we could do these pop ups, we can do walkthroughs, we could build it on top of our data – so we could even see that if people weren’t going through the right funnel and path, let’s send them the guide. So that that gave birth to, you know, our guidance product, our walkthroughs, our, you know, our banners, all of that kind of stuff. All of that guidance inside the product was driven from, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we could do that?’ And then we added, you know, things like sentiment, NPS polling on top of that … and now feedback … and now adopt where we’re doing, you know .. think of bespoke training, you know, employee training …
Stephen Cummins
[00:07:08] Very you strike me as a very geeky company as in like your mad into product dev and stuff. So have you any kind of community play … are you building any community around Pendo?
Eric Boduch
[00:07:17] So yeah, we have we have a conference called Pendemonium. that’s kind of like a background of our community. We run local events called Pendoramas. That is more like we’d get our customers together to share stories of how they’ve used Pendo with other customers. Because there’s lots of different ways you can use us. You can use us for user on-boarding to make that process better. You can use us to optimise your trial conversions. You can use us to deflect support tickets. You can use this for all these different kinds of end user or objectives. Right. But we want them to share. So someone who’s saying like, ‘Oh, I’ve never thought about optimising my trial conversions … Well talk to this company over here who’s telling their story right now about how they do it. And they can be a resource for you going forward about the process they went through, how they thought about it, what they did, what they didn’t do, how it worked for them.
So, like, that community stuff is great. And then we have this thing called ProductCraft. Right. Which is what we call, I think, a digital magazine as we were describing it. And it’s all about us getting other product leaders out there to share their stories. Independent of Pendo. It’s branded completely as ProductCraft. We just sponsor it and we get people to share their stories. And that’s where my Product Love podcast lives, right?
Stephen Cummins
[00:08:28] When I listen to all of that, I start thinking of a kind of seed and grow play where, you know, the product dev guy or lady is working with it … and will go into the company and start singing the praise … Do you go in that way … or do you press the flesh and meet big ticket customers ….? Are you in the enterprise space or are you in the SMB space?
Eric Boduch
So we sell to people building software. We were bought by a company of three people the other day. Which I was like, ‘Sweet!’ I mean, that’s amazing! When you think about it … there’s three people … and they put so much focus on getting product right. Like, isn’t that inspiring?
Stephen Cummins
Yes.
Eric Boduch
Right. When you think about it, it’s like product is important to a company of three people. Right? That’s awesome! It’s like great, amazing!
Stephen Cummins
But you’ve got big iconic customers.
Eric Boduch
Customers like Salesforce, right? So big companies … And then big companies on the traditional side! Right. That are using us … you know, it’s amazing. I was just, you know, telling stories of all these companies that are now building product management practices that you wouldn’t think of. Like I met 40 product managers from Home Depot at the industry conference last year … well I didn’t meet them all. I met a few of them that said there was 40 of them there, which is like super inspiring. Right! You know, you take a company like Home Depot, which you don’t think of as like … ‘Oh, yeah, there’s gonna be a couple of hundred product managers … but they do! Because they’re investing in innovation. They’re investing in their software. And that’s really inspiring to me. Right, as a product leader. As like, ‘Oh man!’ … it gets you excited, right? Those companies are investing in my craft! Yeah!
Stephen Cummins
[00:10:05] I’ve only time for two more questions. It’s running fairly tight. You’re founder, board member, VP of marketing, Chief Evangelist of Pendo, and it’s a hyper-growth company. You’ve grown 148 percent in staff in two years. You’ve over 350 employees and six offices. So what are your priorities right now? Like, how do you handle all that?
Eric Boduch
[00:10:28] First of all, I haven’t done all those at the same time. Right. OK, just to be clear, there’s different dates for each of those. So I started out when we were smaller. I was sitting on the board. I was with three founders on the board back then. We don’t have three founders on the board anymore. I don’t sit on the board anymore. You know, I’m still involved. As you know, I’m one of the four founders …
Stephen Cummins
Are you primarily an evangelist right now?
Eric Boduch
Interestingly I was primarily an evangelist. So I ran marketing for the first four years, moved over into community – more externally focused. I tend to have a personality, I guess, that people like.
Stephen Cummins
You do.
Eric Boduch
I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder. So I spend more time externally focused on things like community, evangelism, speaking, best practices like, getting customers to share that stuff. So I’ve been doing that now for a little while …. and then I’ve recently taken over … I still do Product Love as part of that … and I’m going to continue to do Product Love … but I’ve scaled back some of the community work because I’ve taken over and I’m running with Josh Sandman, a product line called Adopt, which I mentioned before.
Stephen Cummins
You did, yeah.
Eric Boduch
So it’s our new product line where we do employee training. In essence, teaching people how to use software like Salesforce or others better. Right. Which is a great, great opportunity, I think for us. It’s a great new market for us to really go after that bespoke training marketplace. Because when you when you buy software … right … you don’t necessarily always use it exactly like the vendor thinks you’re going to use it. You’ve got your own way you need to do it. Like if you’re AWS and you’re using Marketo, you probably have your own way to build out campaigns that you want your people to follow. And you want to enforce those policies. And you want to train people in context inside the application, and don’t want them to have the refer to a webinar, or an email or, you know, a training session from three weeks ago,
Stephen Cummins
It’s an adoption platform. It’s called ‘Adopt’ the course. Yes. Because you’re training them in context. And when you’re measuring how they’re working, you’re able to in real time see what their actions are.
Eric Boduch
Yes.
Stephen Cummins
In real time see if their behaviours align with that which, you know, is a good way to create an opportunity. I’m doing Salesforce now … or work with cases. That’s brilliant.
Eric Boduch
[00:12:35] Yeah. And we do that in conjunction with our partners. Like we’re taking this in a market in conjunction with people like that. OK, so that’s one of the cool things I think we’re doing is like we’re giving them a new offering that they can take out to their their customers. Right. And generate new revenue and partner with them to do that. So that’s exciting.
Stephen Cummins
Last question for you, Eric. If you were to give one piece of advice to any budding entrepreneur, you conly ould tell them one or two things …. In one minute what would you tell them?
Eric Boduch
[00:13:05] Oh, one or two things … Learn from others is like one thing. I’m like … especially if you’re a budding young entrepreneur. And, you know, the Internet has given us so many great resources. Like when I was on stage, I’m talking about all these cool things you can learn about, like Get Buidl has a ton of content out there that’s amazing. Dan Olsen. I’m just naming product people. Dan Olsen, Teresa Torres, Cindy Alvarez. They all have a ton of great content out there that you can learn from. April Dunford, who spoke the other day on positioning. A ton of great content, great book. You know Nir Eyal, all about building habit forming products to learn from people. And then the second thing, you know, is … well there’s so many different things you could do … But I think you need to, you know, keep an even keel is one of the things. I don’t know if that’s the most important I’d pick, but I would say keep an even keel. You’re gonna have big ups and you’re going to have downs, but you want to stay steady through the process.
Stephen Cummins
Eric Bolduch, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, your insights, your wisdom
Eric Boduch
[00:14:00] Super fun! We can we can do this again! I’m always up for it!
Stephen Cummins
You’re the second person in a row I could do a series with like, you know.
Eric Boduch
Thank you Stephen. I loved it!
Stephen Cummins
In the next episode we have one of the most incredible SaaS founders alive today. Godard Abel. He’s been deeply involved at the foundation stage of 4 start-ups, built around the buyer experience, and he’s been CEO of 3 of them – so far. 2 companies that helped people buy complex products in the real world – Big Machines sold to Oracle for 400M US dollars, Steelbrick sold to Salesforce for pretty much the same money. And now he drives G2 which is revolutionising how we buy the invisible – how we buy software. And … he’s a slightly quieter, but still major figure behind Threekit, which helps us visualise complex products – ones that have a myriad of options and combinations and dependencies that we buy online. But the thing I love about Godard is his humanity. He built his first company to help solve a problem for his Dad’s business. And he’s built phenomenal teams and taken them with him from successful startup to successful startup. Don’t miss the next 3 episodes. I don’t think there’s a human alive that can listen to Godard for 14 Minutes and not learn.
You’ve been listening to 14 minutes of SaaS. Thanks to Mike Quill for his creativity and problem solving skills, and to Ketsu for the music. This episode was brought to you by me, Stephen Cummins. If you enjoyed the podcast, please don’t forget to share it with your network, subscribe to the series, and give the show a rating
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