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Guy Yalif, Co-founder and CEO of Website Personalization and Conversion Optimization tool, Intellimize. We learn about identifying opportunities in highly competitive categories, hear a unique take on product-based differentiation, and find out how a strong values-based culture helped Intellimize grow and succeed. I weigh in with my thoughts on product-based differentiation, how to use brand as a moat, the advantages of having a narrow focus, and why you shouldn't be naive about the competition.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
How Guy Yalif helped Intellimize grow and raise $30 million in Series B funding
Guy Yalif (00:03):
25 years of AB testing every year. Wouldn't that be helpful?
Peep Laja (00:10):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck and how do they win. This week, we speak to Guy Yalif co-founder and CEO at Intellimize. Launched in 2016, Intellimize entered an already highly competitive space, AB testing and personalization tools. Guy saw an opening using machine learning to drive intelligent web optimization. Their success has caught their attention of many, having recently raised 30 million Series B. And they're growing three X this year. So how did they do it? In this episode, we learn about identifying opportunities in highly competitive categories.
Guy Yalif (00:52):
We were like, all right, there are these secular trends that are not going to change.
Peep Laja (00:56):
We get a unique take on product based differentiation.
Guy Yalif (00:59):
With humility. I'll say, I don't think that's enough.
Peep Laja (01:02):
And hear how a strong values based culture helped Intellimize grow and succeed.
Guy Yalif (01:07):
Our ML is not the hero of our story.
Peep Laja (01:10):
Let's get into it.
Guy Yalif (01:14):
I used to design airplanes for a living. I then spent 10 years as a product guy, 10 years as a marketer. The last 15 years I spent in ad tech building and marketing ad systems. And the last job I had, I was the customer. I was VP of marketing at a programmatic advertising company. Was very, very fortunate to have a team of 30, 35, an eight figure budget that we optimized fully. We tuned that spend, we personalized messages. We drove everyone to our website and then we did nothing to tailor that experience on our web site. Made no sense to me at all. We spent so much energy personalizing the paid portion of the journey and not the bottom of the funnel where leads were generated, where my tail and my head of demand gen's tail were on the hook to go drive a bunch of leads to sales.
Guy Yalif (01:56):
So I looked at the tools that were out there and thought, this is fantastic. It's data driven. This is wonderful. Knew some of the co-founders, but then thought, wait a minute. All the works on me. This is manual, but in paid ads for more than a decade already Google and Facebook would say, give me five ads. I'll figure out which one to show whom. I'll show the good ones more, the bad ones less. So how did we think about competing? We thought about making a better experience for our customer by giving them, in some sense, the experience they've already gotten used to as a buyer and paid ads. They've gotten used to it as a consumer because of Yahoo, Netflix and Amazon teaching us to get personalized experiences.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
We like to think at Netflix of our service as really not a single service or a single little product, but 140 or so million products because each user, each profile gets their own customized, personalized experience.
Guy Yalif (02:54):
We thought let's go create that. My two co-founders, they were the two most senior engineers that led a several hundred person team that used ML to personalize the Yahoo homepage for more than half a decade when it was the most popular page on the internet. And so we thought this background. ML to personalize, ad tech, we're the right ones to go after this. So then we ran a test. We talked to more than a hundred marketers. Literally more than a hundred before we left our secure high bank jobs to see, Hey, is there a there and there? And resoundingly saw that there was. We as marketers are increasingly data driven, able to buy tools, used to this personalization, been doing this out in the open.
Guy Yalif (03:31):
And frankly, there's too much money sitting in solving this problem. We spend 120 billion every year in the US driving people to websites to turn them into customers. And we fail at that task. 98% of the time. In what world is that okay? How are I and every other marketer out there not fired immediately? Joking, of course, but we saw, okay, big opportunity, differentiated approach. Real need. We then saw CXL and saw a couple thousand person conferences where this is a career path. We were like, all right, there are these secular trends that are not going to change. CRO, demand gen, growth. These titles, this data driven mindset. It's only going to get bigger. And so big part of the bet early on was to say, great, let's go help them by being super powered. By accelerating what they are doing and used to doing.
Peep Laja (04:26):
It sounds like this is classic product based differentiation. And obviously bringing innovation to a space is a great way to grow quickly, What was your idea of the moat like? The established players, let's say, Optimizely or VWO who were already there or Adobe. Couldn't they just copy all that stuff and then you have nothing?
Guy Yalif (04:46):
Great question. So how do we think about differentiating? You're right. Better product is one of them. Two is a mindset around customers. This sounds silly, but we think it's pretty foundational. One of the CEOs of those companies who did an amazing job and created a category and did amazing things, said, "Hey, my job's to build a product. To create a great product and give it to my customers." With humility, I'll say, I don't think that's enough.
Peep Laja (05:11):
In emerging categories, all the pieces still up in the air and everything is still possible. Product led differentiation can be huge. In mature categories, product based differentiation is a minimal. Most everyone has every feature. Even if you match category leaders in terms of product, that doesn't mean you'll win. The stability of brand positions in nearly all mature markets is simply astonishing. There is just too much customer and market momentum. Every SaaS tool, and every agency, fits into a job to be done box in somebody's mind. For instance, Hot Jar goes into the heat maps for SMBs box. And HubSpot is CRM for scaling companies. CXL is digital marketing training. Depending on the person, we only keep three to five options per box typically referred to as the consideration set. Once a tool gets established as number one in our job to be done box, that becomes a tool folks recommend first, meaning it has the highest mental availability.
Peep Laja (06:10):
And here's the kicker which companies are in that mental jobs to be done box has nothing to do with personal experience. It can. But it's mostly reputation based. Once that consideration set exists in somebody's mind, it's very hard for new companies to get in there. As a marketer, your goal is to get inside that very limited consideration set. So you can either buy your way in there just like monday.com did, or you can create a new box. The way to build the new jobs to be done box and grow your business is to grab a fundamentally different position in the market or to innovate, and ideally both.
Peep Laja (06:47):
True product innovations are a way to dramatically accelerate growth, but those are transient advantages, not sustaining competitive advantages. Sure, you can't be objectively worse but if you achieve and maintain feature parity with a top in a category, it's mostly brand game on from there on out. To win on brand, your story, your messaging, your positioning, etc., you need to invest accordingly. You should invest in developing your point of view, your strategic narrative, brand identity. Building a media machine for content on your point of view. Measuring messaging effectiveness to see what resonates with your audience, or not. And in the end, you have to know more about your customers than others. And not just that, you need to know the customers better than they know themselves. Merely knowing the customer is mediocre. As Bernadette Jiwa said, "Whoever gets closest to the customer wins."
Bernadette Jiwa (07:40):
My belief is that we need to start with a customer story and not start with our story. Let's just listen to people and try and understand what they want to do. And in our panic to succeed, we do the other thing. We do the opposite.
Guy Yalif (07:57):
You know the pragmatic marketing trade where they're like, you need to deliver the whole product. It's not just the SaaS you slide across the table, but the other things that get in the way of your customers being successful. So we think there was differentiation there as well. How did that manifest with us? We were talking to non-technical marketers which is most of them, they couldn't get the time of day from engineering. They'd go to engineering and say, "I'd like to build this. I'd like you to build this test." And engineering will say, "Wait, what? You want me to build this thing? You don't even know if it's going to work. Get in line. I'm building the core product." And so, although they had a tool, they couldn't practically use it, one.
Guy Yalif (08:31):
Two, they needed ideas. Often they had some, but they wanted to know best practices. And so we stood up a services team that would help them with ideation. Nothing like what Spiro would do. Spiro literally is a whole other level. This was basically pattern matching, heuristics, which was helpful thought starters for them. And we framed it that way. We were like, you own the ideas. Here are thought starters. We stood up a team to do front end coding. Not because it's our core competency, the ML is. But because it unlocked their ability to go try a bunch more because as you and I, I think, both believe, this is a probabilistic game. There aren't rules. If we knew every button should be red or every headline should be inspirational, you don't need a whole bunch of companies and this career path is simpler.
Guy Yalif (09:20):
So if it's probabilistic, you want to be able to try a bunch of ideas rapidly in parallel. And so we stood up those two things as part of this customer mindset. And the third differentiation, which helps a lot in our marketing, goes to company core values. We have six of them. The two top ones are one, make our customers wildly successful. And to us that does not mean they give us money. It means they're heroes. They get promoted, they get up on stage and say nice things.
Speaker 5 (09:49):
The power of Intellimize to do this all within one unified platform to really analyze the lift has really been a game changer for us.
Guy Yalif (09:56):
And two, everyone who works here says this was the best professional experience of their lives. That this was an inflection point in their career. That first one is a lot of how we differentiate in our marketing. We can say we've got a better tool. Okay. We can even say it in ways that are meaningful to our customers. Okay. To have our customers get up on stage and say it as they've done at CXL Live and other places, that's a big part of the differentiation for folks to say, "Well, gosh, if all of those folks had success with this, shouldn't I try it?" Or ideally, "Wouldn't I be silly if I didn't use this?"
Peep Laja (10:28):
So you set up a services team, like customer success, to help them be successful with your tools, applying them with ideas and set up coding. But weren't also many other players in the market doing that? Adobe and Monetate. I think now most big players are offering managed services of various sorts. That doesn't sound like a sustainable competitive advantage. So how has your product strategy and also competitive strategy evolved? So now in 2021, what are you competing on now?
Guy Yalif (11:02):
So interestingly, we included it as part of a fixed monthly fee. I'm not aware of others doing that because this focus on the customer. If I need them to get promoted, if I want them to be a hero internally, if I want when they change jobs, they pull us into the next one ... Marketers change jobs all the time. I want them to be able to test a lot so that they can hopefully have great ingredients. Maybe through work with Wynter, through work with Spiro, through work with others. And then test those rapidly, find more winners and drive a bunch of business value. Could others decide to do that? Technically they could. They need to make the business decision to effectively be long term greedy. The short term, everything goes the way the customer, everything that could possibly happen day in, day out. I want it to be in the customer's favor, not irrationally, but still to focus there so that you create that long term success.
Peep Laja (12:01):
So you bake managed services into your regular fees. It is not something on top. And so that's a strategic choice, but it's also a trade off. So by doing that, what have you decided not to do?
Guy Yalif (12:15):
We waited on some self-serve capabilities early on. We then built them. They're built their live. People can end to end self serve. But in the beginning we said, "Hey, we're going to help you do this." That created magical experiences when folks could say, "I don't have exit intent modules on my site. I'd like to do them." We'd create them. Because it's a repeat pattern that tends to drive lift. Our focus is you getting lift. But then when they want to make a text change, to do that through a service, that can take longer and be less magical. And so we create and continue to create new tools for the them to be able to do the simpler stuff more easily while being able to do technically more complex.
Guy Yalif (13:00):
And we've come to the realization that I think Ben and Spiro and others have come to a long time ago of, it's not the technical complexity that drives the value. That unlocks degrees of freedom, but it's the quality of the ingredient. It's the quality of the customer understanding leading to hypotheses, leading to good tests. And our hope is that with the product differentiation, by automating the daily checking of stats sig and AB testing by automating a bunch of that work, that we create more time for customer intimacy in our customers. So they can try better hypotheses that lead to better results.
Peep Laja (13:35):
So you are all about the customers' success in the sense that that person will literally become the hero. And then also then when they switch jobs, they were so successful they'll bring you with them.
Guy Yalif (13:46):
Very much so. Our flywheel is I think a pretty classic B2B flywheel where we serve customers, make them successful. Marketing is a small community. People talk to each other and that'll enable us to serve more customers, which creates the revenue that allows us to hire more people to create a better product and so on. I think it's a pretty vanilla one and we've chosen to do it mid-market all the way up. One of my co-founders and I met 17 years ago and worked together for four years running most of Yahoo's small business. We see a lot of strategic competition in self-serve product led growth. We've chosen not to do that explicitly because we believe, to serve the SMB market, it's a different go to market motion. It's probably a different front end product experience. Same ML underneath, different product experience and quite a different mindset. And so we have chosen not to go there and never have. We never started there. We've always been mid-market all the way up.
Peep Laja (14:50):
Innovation is a way to rapidly gain market share and grow quickly in saturated markets. Innovation leads to awareness, differentiation, and new jobs to be done. It makes you stand out and get into people's consideration sets. Tesla took the number one position for jobs to be done for electric cars by being first, a category of one, and then ruling with innovation in that category even as other players enter the market. Every car maker though is coming after them. So their innovation advantage will eventually cease to exist. All the innovations are transient advantages. Whatever innovative things any company shipped, the competition always caught up.
Peep Laja (15:26):
Many use fast follower as their deliberate strategy. What this means is that once you're ahead, you need to invest in modes. While you're milking your short lived innovation advantage. You need to be building modes and or cook up your next innovation advantage. Odds are that Tesla tool will start competing on brand just like every other car maker out there. Brand is just one of the modes you can have, but perhaps the most powerful one. What in this case is your mode? So if a richer player comes along or one of the existing players decides we're also going to go that way. Obviously they can't copy your existing relationships, but they could like put a bunch money into hiring people to go out there and build these relationships and bake in managed services. So how are you thinking about your modes? Are you actively building any?
Guy Yalif (16:18):
So the product one, it's a self-reinforcing lead. The more we learn, the better we get. And by we, I mean the ML. The better we get at predicting human behavior on websites. And so we can actually drive more lift with the same ideas. If our customers come with the same ingredients, same batting average, they will get more lift, one. Two, when that big company does that, with humility, there are 30 or 40 people in the world that are really good at this kind of ML. We're really fortunate to have a bunch of them. A highly, highly, highly paid freshly minted CS PhD is brilliant and very unlikely to go tackle the problems we've solved in this way because the books haven't been written. The science itself didn't exist five years ago. Forget the AWS or Google Cloud capacity. Irrespective of that, the science approach didn't exist.
Guy Yalif (17:08):
There is time there enabling us to continue rapidly iterating on the product to create better experiences for our customers. So they go tell more customers to enable us to stand out in this crowded market. And down the road, there are things we can do with customers own data that will be very differentiated even again, that because we have the data that we have because we know what works for whom that can enable us to even better serve our customers down the road.
Guy Yalif (17:37):
What we're not doing, what you don't hear us saying is like, "There are a lot of shiny objects around us." Our customers have asked us to apply this approach in a bunch of different places. We haven't. We have focused, actually just like you and I were talking about before we got started on whom are we great for why are we going to be great for them and doing that thing extremely well, we hope extremely well, continuing to improve it. Rather than, you know what, let's go open up five fronts in our battle. Five fronts in our war. We had decided to be more focused because, humbly submitted, I think given that we're tackling a big problem and have product market fit, failure will come through lack of execution or mismanagement of balance sheet.
Peep Laja (18:24):
Focus brings its advantages. When a company has a narrow focus, it increases its ability to take a hit. The more focused you are on any one thing, the bigger attack on that one thing you can take and remain standing. This is robustness. All too many companies have unclear and unproductive positioning because they elect the discipline to say no to attractive looking revenues that don't fit the other shiny objects that Guy mentioned. If you go after the dollars in a market that's not your core focus, in the end, you will lose to highly focused competitors. Organizations also need resilience. The ability to stand up when you have fallen down. And overly narrow focus can eliminate that capability. Surprises will inevitably come along that hit you so hard that they challenge the strategy at its very core. Only a matter of time. So tell me, how did you figure out who the right buyer for your particular, let's say, use case is and who is it if you can share?
Guy Yalif (19:25):
So the right buyer for us is someone who is a non-technical marketer who gets up in the morning with a number on their head. Somebody who's accountable for more revenue, more customers, or more leads to sales, depending on the kind of business they're in and feels that pressure day in, day out. It's in their MBOs or OKRs or whatever objective system they have. That person tends to be more data driven, tends to have already tried some approaches and is reliably feeling some pain and quickly sees how this can help be an accelerant for them. The key use cases, we observe AB testing and personalization often as two teams, two strategies, two budgets. With humility, we'll say they're both in service of making more money. They're both in service of more revenue, more customers, more leads to sales. And so we think this approach, which really combines the two optimizes for revenue because you don't treat everyone the same.
Guy Yalif (20:19):
And I'm going into product differentiation here. And you do dynamically adjust over time. What use cases do we say no to? The most frequent one is when customers ask us to out-GA GA, Google analytics. They'll say, "Hey, I like your reporting. Can you slice it this other way?" And the large majority of the time we'll say, "No. Here's an API where you have white box visibility into our machine learning. It's not a black box. You can see every single decision it makes in your own in-house analytics. In fact, we have prebuilt integration to GA and a bunch of other tools so that you can slice and dice your heart's content." We built this to specifically answer four or five questions around conversion rate optimization, around website optimization. That is the typical use case we'll say no to. That's the one that comes up the most often.
Peep Laja (21:04):
I guess you are also assuming then a level of sophistication that they would appreciate that the ML, which sounds like one of your competitive advantages, how good the ML is. So they appreciate it and know to all want it.
Guy Yalif (21:21):
Great point, Peep. So yes and no. The thing we seek is someone who has decided they're going to do data driven marketing. Typically we see that because they're doing AB testing. They're using data to guide their decisions.
Peep Laja (21:34):
How do you know that?
Guy Yalif (21:36):
There are tags on their website. Datanyze, BuiltWith, other tools out there, show that somebody is doing this already. What we don't ask them to appreciate is the death of the ML. We don't say, "Oh, hey, dear non-technical marketer, can you please choose between ... I'll make it up. A boosted decision tree, a neural network and a linear regression." Most of us didn't in marketing school, get trained on how to differentiate between those. What we do hope they appreciate are the impacts of the ML. So again, this focus on the customers, we don't talk about how shiny the ML is. We talk about the impact it has on what they're able to do. We talk about how it helps them accelerate their testing, how they will learn more, how they will make more money. And then we talk about it in ways that are impactful to their customers. Our ML is not the hero of our story. Our customers are, and their customers are.
Peep Laja (22:28):
Competitiveness is about what customers value, not what you think you're good at. I used to think that you need to be better to win. Then I thought it's harder to be better so it's more important to be different. Now I'm convinced that you need to be both better and different. To win, you need to be objectively better at creating winning customer value for a particular set of customers. So in terms of your go to market message, then what is something different that you say? Because if you look at the people in your space, everybody says more money, more revenue experimentation. So what are you doing differently in your marketing?
Guy Yalif (23:05):
A couple of things. One, we talked about it earlier, having our customers say literally anything we can say better if they say it. More believable, more credible. Two, quantify it. We've got a set of numbers we use in our marketing that either you have to be blatantly lying or this is amazing. One of the two and those numbers are ones that we can all appreciate. They're not in the bowels of the ML to pick off one of them. If you could do 25 years of AB testing every year, wouldn't that be helpful? That's one we can all internalize. That's not talking about how the ML works. That's talking about the practical day to day impact. And there are a whole bunch of others. What we haven't done ... For example, one of our customers is Drift.
Speaker 6 (23:54):
That's where Drift comes in. Drift connects our sales team with qualified prospects and target accounts in real time with the right insights to generate more pipeline and close deals faster.
Guy Yalif (24:05):
They have an amazing CEO, amazing marketing team, an enormous amount of money the CEO was able to raise to spend on among other things, marketing, to build an enormous brand, that we haven't done.
Peep Laja (24:17):
How often are you looking at the competition in terms of what are they saying? What kind of product stuff are they shipping?
Guy Yalif (24:25):
Less often than you would think. We don't get up in the morning thinking our mission is to beat the competition. We do get up in the morning thinking how do we intimately understand a day in the life of our target customer to go make them wildly successful? Why? Partly the values of the company and our previous battle scars from previous lives. Partly the practical reality of this space. It has so much growth left in it. It's something like 50% ballpark of the top hundred thousand websites do AB testing. Something like 30% do personalization. You go to the top million, the numbers are, I think, half that.
Guy Yalif (24:59):
So it's clearly a category. You've hosted conferences where it's clearly a career path. But yet there's so much growth left to be had that actually we don't spend our time thinking, how do we land a punch on our competitor? We do spend time thinking, how do we make our customers wildly successful? It's not that we're blind to it. That would rightly be a business mistake to be naive about what our competitors are doing. But that isn't what we get up in the morning thinking about. To be explicit, it's a business reality and philosophical choice. It's not a arrogant or humble choice. It's not that at all.
Peep Laja (25:31):
We don't look at the competition. I hear many companies say that and all this sounds self important. Sure, don't obsess over the competition, but make them a part of how you do things. Guy says being completely naive to what your competitors are doing would be a business mistake. They are real living breathing people who are trying to do better than you. Think of them as smart people who are moving faster than you. Use it to motivate creativity. Look around. Don't copy the competition, but do learn from them. Choose to adapt what you find or do to complete opposite as a way of differentiating your own strategy. You can combine ideas from different competitors or adjacent industry players and create something new.
Peep Laja (26:13):
The ex-CEO of Blackberry used to put his own product in the center of room during meetings. The idea was to talk about how to improve the value of what was offered to customers. Not looking outside, blinding them to external competition and innovation. They were stuck inside their own product thinking. It's better to have the very best of your competitor's products surrounding yours, challenging you to do better. What would you do to improve your competitor's products? What could the competition do to wipe you out? How would you respond to the best your competition could do? When you find something you can do easily, that's great, but we are really interested when you find something that will be hard to do. That's your mode. I talked to Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell who said similar things that most companies are not using any type of subscription metrics tool at all. So that's where the biggest growth is coming from. However, the easiest customers to land are those who are already using something. So as if you're targeting customers of the competitors, so somebody who's already problem and solution aware.
Guy Yalif (27:18):
Many of the ways that our product, to your point about how our a competing product is differentiated solve pains that people feel when they're doing AB testing and it enables them to achieve the things they wanted to do with AB testing. Just more. Just better. Objectively, quantifiably, validated with customers. We actually think it's a much longer road to go from intuition driven market marketing to data driven marketing than to go from AB testing to intelligent website optimization, which we're doing.
Peep Laja (27:50):
So you guys are clearly sales led as opposed to product led. Usually in B2B, unless it's a super strong personal referral, companies are looking into multiple options. They'll talk to you and they talk to some alternatives to you as well. So in those situations, when you're pitching, are you also saying, "Why, why choose us against competitor X and Y and Z?" Or are you just, this is our pitch. This is why choose us.
Guy Yalif (28:20):
Great question. And I know when you said sales led versus product led, you meant in our go to market, because as a business we are customer led, but totally in our go to market, it is sales led. A hundred percent. In bakeoffs, we, as a business choice, tend to focus more on how will we make the customer successful. But if you know who else is in that bakeoff, you can frame how you will make them successful in a way that you believe when they look at what their saying and what we're saying, they put these two together, we'll look better. We believe that's objectively true. It's just, you need to choose what from a thousand things to say, do you choose to highlight with a given customer or prospect.
Peep Laja (28:56):
Guy, tell me about the future. So what's the dream. Do you have a specific, let's say a milestone? Next, you want to hit this glorious milestone.
Guy Yalif (29:05):
We're tripling this year. We will continue on that pace next year. There are a bunch of functional milestones we want to hit. For us, they are all around how many customers have we made wildly successful and are up on stage. But these customer testimonials, that's true north for us. That's actual success for us. So the dream is a lot more of that. This is the best job I've ever had. I don't want to stop doing this. And so the dream is to be able to do this for a lot longer.
Peep Laja (29:32):
I think you probably also have some sort of milestone, especially if you raise money, investors are expecting certain outcomes. So here you are now. And then there's a revenue goal or whatever it is. And some obstacles in the way that you need to overcome. So how you going to do that? How you going to win?
Guy Yalif (29:49):
We are making bets across the board. This is a problem that's worth having a hundred engineers working on. So we're hiring a bunch. But hiring a hundred X folks among those 30 or 40 in the world that are really good at this kind of ML. We are trying a whole bunch of different approaches in our go to market. Rapidly refining, going to create scalable repeatability where we know, hey, this set of messages delivered through these channels to these prospects are motivating, engaging, tee up a good sales conversation where you are reaching somebody in the right moment for them. It's meaningful for them and will help them advance their career in that moment. And so there is a lot of refinement in investing in marketing, in sales. And then in our customer success motion, that'll never stop refining. We will perpetually be tuning that to go shrink and to shrink and shrink the time to customers having great value, wow moments so that they can go tell others.
Guy Yalif (30:48):
What you're not hearing is I'm going to go launch this whole other product line. We're going to go into this whole other geography. We see focus easily enabling us to go achieve the goals we have this year, which are significant ones, as you said, because we have chosen to raise money and we see a large and rapidly growing market that's giving us clear signals to grow faster. Transparently, the biggest challenge we're having is finding more great people. Feel fortunate that's the challenge rather than people don't understand the message or product's not working or there isn't product market fit. Feel very fortunate that's the one, but it's very real. The year we all lived through was terrible in a thousand very meaningful ways. One of the silver linings is it's now a whole lot easier to hire everywhere.
Peep Laja (31:30):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Guy.
Guy Yalif (31:31):
Thanks for the insightful strategic conversation.
Peep Laja (31:36):
So what are the three key strategic decisions Intellimize has made in order to grow and succeed? One, their marketing flywheel is about making their customer, the specific person, bringing them in, a hero. They have strong values based culture of making customers wildly successful. When customers change jobs, they bring Intellimize with them.
Guy Yalif (31:57):
Our ML is not the hero of our story. Our customers are, and their customers are.
Peep Laja (32:02):
Two, they've chosen strategically to only focus on mid-market and up and have a sales led go to market motion. Not interested in pursuing SMBs as that would require a different strategy and a different front end product.
Guy Yalif (32:14):
And so we have chosen not to go there and never have. We never started there. We've always been mid-market all the way up.
Peep Laja (32:20):
Three, they focused on culture and people. You can't get ahead with a mediocre team. So they've been super diligent about hiring only the very best to get in. 100X people as Guy put it. Prioritizing hiring only the best is a strategic focus.
Guy Yalif (32:35):
This is a problem that's worth having a hundred engineers working on. So we're hiring a bunch but hiring 100X folks among those 30 or 40 in the world that are really good at this kind of ML.
Peep Laja (32:46):
And that's how you win. I'm Peep Laja, for more tips on how to win follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.