In the following exchange, Goldcast’s co-founder and CEO, Palash Soni (@palashsoni), chronicles how their deep understanding of (and focus on) the ICP allowed them to endure in a SaaS category that likely experienced the recent boom-and-bust cycle in its most potent form.
— Avoiding a category-standard horizontal approach
— Patterns and convictions that led them towards niching down
— Why most customers aren’t looking for best-in-class tools
— How Goldcast survived the post-pandemic headwinds
— The need for creating a “salesy” CS org and an ROI-first product
Avoiding a category-standard horizontal approach
I definitely believe in the merits of niching down.
Primarily, because of my own experience working at InMobi. While I was there, I spent half my time doing (what we call) customer success and the other half in product.
One thing that we really struggled with was: we were not specialists in anything.
We had been early to market. We had a broad base of customers. We had strong brand recognition. But, ultimately, we had no defensibility because we were not great at anything.
Let me add some context to that. InMobi operated in the ad space. And we all know, there are all sorts of ads across different cuts (video ads, display ads, mobile/web ads, etc.). Today, there are companies within each of these cuts that are bigger than InMobi.
Despite InMobi being the first with an horizontal approach.
We saw something similar playing out with Goldcast’s market as well. When we began, four years ago, the space for virtual events was pretty hot. Everybody was taking a deliberately horizontal approach and I could see flashes of InMobi.
Because ads as a category can seem like this one big splash of uniformity, but it’s anything but that. It’s a very complex world. Events are similar. We realized it was way more helpful to think of events as a channel first then a medium.
Going along that line of reasoning, we found that each channel has a driving objective. Which mattered a lot to some teams. For us these were B2B marketing teams.
And I’ll be honest, I didn’t know how big/small that niche would be eventually.
Then also, to me, the state of the market matters more than its size. That is, is it a strong enough, recurring wedge into a team’s workflow? Will it open up adjacent opportunities for us to expand into?
We knew, for instance, that the then-ballooning, digital events space wouldn’t be big forever. We also knew that it was a great way for us to get in and grow into solving adjacent B2B marketing problems.
Having known that from the beginning, we’ve always positioned ourselves as a martech product vs an event marketing product. We showed up in communities, podcasts, and conferences as just that.
We also talked about the entire context of B2B marketing teams and addressed a broader set of folks on those teams, not just the marketer who managed events (ex: my co-founder once ran a podcast called CMO Diaries).
Patterns and convictions that led them towards niching down
For a moment, I’d like to go back to the idea that we didn’t know at the outset how this category will fare in the end. Because this was a new space and its fault lines weren’t clear.
Before the pandemic accelerated adoption for anything to do with virtual events, webinars had also been a category of its own. And that was rightly subsumed under the former as nothing of note happened with webinar tools.
Unlike Butter (the example you cite) where they were able to identify a fault line in the video conferencing category around more sophisticated collaboration and grow from that as a beachhead, we weren’t sure whether our bet could be placed with similar clarity.
But we did see some patterns.
A few things held true for our chosen ICP (B2B marketers) that weren’t true for other users who were conference organizers, community managers, or trade-show managers.
One, they were extremely resource constrained. Always under pressure to cut budgets, to be more efficient, to do more with fewer tools.
Instead of using a different product for hosting webinars, one for running big events, one for delivering trainings, and so forth, they wanted something that could solve all those use cases.
Of course, when you’re building all-in-one tools, there are conscious trade-offs to make. We couldn’t do all these types of events and be the best at all of them.
That bet defined our early product architecture and a lot of what we’ve built since. Something other players are still catching up with.
The other thing our target persona cared for, way more than other users, was integrations.
How are you getting data from that system? How deeply do you integrate with that other workflow? Crafting all those core integrations well from the beginning, has also been a competitive advantage.
The third (I would say, very counterintuitive) thing that we discovered was that they cared a lot about the specifics of branding. Trade show folks were fine with basic branding as they cared more about sponsor brands.
In B2B, though, everyone seemed to obsess over details such as fonts, colors, gradients, and much else.
So, yes, even though we weren’t absolutely certain about picking this particular niche, the choice (especially made early in our journey) definitely helped maintain focus and has resulted in a better product.
Why most customers aren’t looking for best-in-class tools
Most people aren’t looking for best-in-class products. They’re not looking to innovate with their stacks. They just want to get their jobs done with the minimum amount of hassle and context switching.
This is especially true as you enter meatier segments such as mid-market and enterprise. And it’s truer today, given the saturated state of most markets in SaaS; unless there’s an anomaly and an entirely new category opens up.
Which is why HubSpot’s example (going all-in-one and actually prioritizing breadth from the start) is so prescient. They got this right, way ahead of time.
The way forward, beyond, say, 10m/50m/100m ARR is to become a compound product: How can a product solve a massive problem holistically for a persona and become the preferred centre of command around that problem?
Bundling is the way to go. That’s the direction we’ve picked for Goldcast.
We still get customers who ask us, “oh, we want to spin up this big, in-person event and we’d need a ticketing solution and xyz on top of what Goldcast has, if you don’t do it, we’ll churn.”
Which creates immediate pressures for sales and customer success.
That will happen.
The best thing I can do as a founder/CEO is to pre-empt the shape of the market and then ensure that we stick to that vision. To make sure that our teams are okay saying no and okay with such losses.
To say: “It’s fine, we’ll have lower gross retention/sales targets because we’re okay making this trade-off for the sake of the long run.”
How Goldcast survived the post-pandemic headwinds
What did the pandemic mean for us?
Well, we all saw the tailwinds it generated in tech.
Such tailwinds matter for early-stage startups. Suddenly everyone wanted to get a video tool. We just had to prove that we were the right product for one specific segment that we really wanted to go after.
That helped us pass the 0-1 phase quickly.
The one challenge it did create was that there was too much competition.
As this was the category that took off even before the general tech markets took off. Which led to massive amounts of capital flowing in. Which meant that many more startups were funded. Translating to a lot of noise and eventually confusing both customers and investors.
That frenzy took some time to die down, but it did die down, in the end. I think people overestimated this market’s potential and failed to understand the fault lines.
How did we survive when a bunch of other VC-backed entrants have now closed doors or continue to struggle?
I’d say the focus bit that I touched upon in my previous point was a big win.
We understood from the get-go that we didn’t want to become a horizontal product as it’s really hard to build a recurring revenue business when you’re super horizontal (for one, you face churn from all sides).
We had learned that this would become a channel that marketing teams would want to return to for its positive ROI. That choice has proven out.
Our base has never been shaky.
That’s why we’ve been able to grow and have good retention even after the pandemic. We did not, perhaps, grow as crazily as some of the horizontal players did back then but we also didn’t face sudden churn/de-growth when the bubble popped.
A product insight that we got right (by focusing on a well-defined persona) was that digital events were not a replacement for in-person events. They’re just a different channel. And were more a content play, than an events play.
In-person events are a great channel on their own but they serve a different purpose. That of driving 1:1 connections, creating that intangible vibe which digital just can’t replicate.
Because we framed digital events around content, our product’s evolution took a very different direction.
If we had followed everyone else’s assumption (that virtual events are the only future, essentially) we would have the same kind of problem that, say, Zoom has today. They’re boxed as a video conferencing product and there’s no tailwind to drive new growth.
The need for creating a “salesy” CS org and an ROI-first product
When I say our sales and post-sales teams need to be more connected than your typical B2B SaaS business, it’s again driven by the market.
Marketing products are bought on promises. Let’s say the CMO is under pressure from the board or the CEO to push the pipeline radically fast. And one of the things they’d look for under pressure is a stack that can drive outcomes for them.
‘We have the following underperforming channels; what tools can we buy that can help us do these better?’
Goldcast fits into this category. So does every martech product, really.
The trouble with rushing to buy these tools is that they end up with a promise-driven stack but they still haven’t thought through exactly what their goals are and what exactly it’ll mean for them to be successful.
Which means our CS org has the job of constantly selling customers on the value, the product itself, and everything else. We have struggled, at times, to inculcate this rather salesy DNA in this team, but it’s a fundamental requirement for us.
A related fact that influences this approach is that marketing teams/leadership have among the shortest lifespans at most companies. With engineering, the CTO averages 3-4 years at least, unless there’s a COVID-like anomaly.
The average CMO tenure on the other hand is around a year plus a few months. That means, Goldcast’s original champion at a business will most likely leave before the next renewal. Hence the need to have a thorough reselling motion.
The same thinking shows up in our product as well.
What we have to be very mindful of is how we actually showcase value within the product in the easiest way possible. So we’ve spent a lot of time going deep in terms of integrations and analytics.
Because we want the always-under-pressure marketers to have access to what is really happening on each screen and help them prove the ROI of their efforts and their investment in a tool like Goldcast.
Related reading from the Relay archives:
— Pulley’s founder, Yin Wu, on avoiding “obviously large” markets
— Butter’s co-founder, Jakob Knutzen, on taking on incumbents by targeting a beachhead market
Ultimately we aim to save our customers double digit %age at the least if they adopt our full suite of products in lieu of the multiple point solutions they have. That guides our ultimate price point. The mechanics to get there can get challenging though.