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Always Be Testing explores the experiments, insights, and growth stories shaping the future of affiliate and partner marketing in B2B SaaS. Hosted by industry veterans, the show dives deep into real-world lessons from the people driving measurable impact at companies like Google, HubSpot, Ramp, Webflow, G2, and beyond.
Each episode uncovers what happens when today's most innovative marketers challenge assumptions, run smarter experiments, and build programs that scale revenue through meaningful partnerships. If you’re in affiliate, partnerships, or SaaS growth — this is your front-row seat to how the best do it (and what they’ve learned along the way
Tye DeGrange (00:00.975)
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing Podcast. I'm your host, Ty DeGrange, and I'm really excited to talk to Vikram Chalana today. Vikram, how you doing?
Vikram (00:12.438)
Hey Ty, good. It's it's a pleasure to be here.
Tye DeGrange (00:16.079)
Happy to happy to have you. former Seattle guy here to a Seattle guy now. And big World Cup day yesterday. So our team didn't win, but it was fun while it lasted in a great, great tournament. is your
Vikram (00:29.326)
Fun.
Vikram (00:33.4)
Yes, absolutely. It was really good. See Seattle was a was a destination city, was a ho one of one of the host cities and so I was able to catch one of the games here. the yeah, Iran and the Egypt Iran versus Egypt game. And it was fantastic. It was really fun. Really fun. Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (00:44.621)
I love that. Which one?
Tye DeGrange (00:50.671)
That's crazy. Wow. How was it? Yeah. I mean, S Seattle's a great city. And, you know, I didn't go to the Sounders a lot when I was living there, but it's it's just magical from what I was told. And then it's a good soccer city, right?
Vikram (01:08.108)
Yeah, it's I and now I'm gonna go. I'm gonna I'm a big fan of football now. Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (01:14.031)
That's so cool. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people got hooked and excited and into it. So happy to hear that. Amazing. Well, Vikram is an amazing leader and a great person to have on the pod. CEO and founder of Pictory. Has had some amazing experiences prior to that. And so I think you're in for a treat today to talk about his journey and and all that he's learned. It's quite a lot. And so should be a good one. Thanks for thanks for having coming on.
Vikram (01:44.014)
Awesome, thank you.
Tye DeGrange (01:44.328)
let let's get into you know, you spent years as a builder, you've built wind shuttle, you've been in the in the SAP data space, you've scaled big companies, you know, beyond 300 employees. It's very impressive. Were there any light bulb moments for you that made you kind of go, Okay, I this this AI generated video thing is is the next wave. I'm gonna build Pictory. What what kind of inspired you?
to build pictory and just curious to learn more about what sparked it all.
Vikram (02:18.988)
Yeah, so I'll tie it to our Wind Shuttle journey a little bit because at Wind Shuttle, what we did was we had this software that we built for SAP users, not IT people. So everything was controlled by IT, but but we were able to provide empower business people with something to do data loads, data transfers and stuff. And
What I realized is that that empowering business people was a really good business. It's a great story. It feels really good that hey, you're like they're able to do something they'd never been able to do before. So I as I was exiting Wind Shuttle, I was thinking about okay, what other areas in business have a similar sense to it? Where
Business people feel disempowered. They want to do it, but they can't do it. And from my personal experience, what I'd found was you know, videos were taking off a few years ago and they still are. And it was just very hard. Every time I needed to get it get a video edited or or created from scratch, I had to go to this one video person we had in the entire team of 350 people.
Tye DeGrange (03:22.809)
Mm-hmm.
Vikram (03:47.945)
And and then only to realize that her queue was like packed. Marketing wanted videos, training teams wanted videos, HR team wanted videos, sales teams wanted videos. Everybody wanted videos, and there was like this bottleneck. And people wanted to be able to do it themselves. I picked up Adobe Premiere because that was like the the tool that I that had at that time of choice, and I got lost in it. Like I literally like I struggled, floundered.
and and I'm like, there has to be a better way here. And the inspiration really came from Canva. Like what Canva was doing around design and kind of disrupting Photoshop. we I I figured this somebody has to just disrupt that premiere and the video space and empowered business people to make videos as opposed to
Always counting on that one designer or that videographer.
Tye DeGrange (04:49.947)
I mean it's a great it's a great use case and a believer and I think for for an organization like ourselves so many like it it's just it's there for the taking so that's super fascinating. You talked a little bit about this, but tell us about the road to product market fit and kind of that journey with Pictory and like what you learned through that process.
Vikram (05:13.312)
your podcast is always be testing. And so I think like I really literally we adopted that from the very beginning. It's like, you know, we gotta find the product market fit. We have to iterate, iterate, iterate, find it, and and figure it out. So we started with different teams in different companies, larger companies, marketing team, product marketing team, product management teams.
And we we tried a bunch of different audiences and we kept changing the product to kind of fit fit a given audience. it wasn't working. Like it was like we got we got to about 40, 50 customers and it just wasn't wasn't growing. Because you hear about product market fit as like, you know, okay, when you find it, you'll know it. And and we knew that we weren't there yet. so
A Hail Mary experiment for us was we launched on a platform called AppSumo. you may have heard of them. They're in your Austin area as well. and and we said, okay, let's let's see how this works because it's a slightly different market from what I was trying to sell into. It's small businesses, agencies, entrepreneurs, and I'm like, if this
Tye DeGrange (06:19.449)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Vikram (06:38.538)
If this works, I know like it's a different market. Maybe the same product will have a better fit here rather than in in larger companies. And and that's one experiment I was completely surprised by because that was one question we wanted to talk about as well. I'm like, we went from within 30 days, we went from 50 customers to 3,000. And then the next 30 days we were at 5,000 customers.
And so we knew that worked. and that was the l like the product market, everything broke. Support couldn't handle the load, we our systems were couldn't handle the load.
Tye DeGrange (07:20.055)
So I'd love it's a huge one. So like we talked about Appsumo. What what else was part of that like huge, huge improvement in your view?
Vikram (07:32.863)
so I think the main thing was realizing that actually the same product worked in a for a different market. The problem we were trying to solve is was something that small businesses faced a lot more acutely than the large businesses who had agency relationships, who have very strict brand considerations. And the this small businesses
Agencies serving small businesses had the same need, but a much smaller budget. And and that was like the that was a big eye opener for for us is that okay, this the same product, the exact same product. We didn't change anything. It wor just worked on a different market. So product market fit can be arrived in two different ways, right? You can iterate the product or you can iterate the market. In this case, it was iterating on the market.
Tye DeGrange (08:18.265)
Yeah. Yeah.
Love that.
Tye DeGrange (08:27.579)
Yeah.
I love that. I love that. And you've had some experience there. And so to be to be open-minded and to adjust is is super interesting. we talked a little bit about some of couldn't be more perfect learning conversation for a theme of the podcast than your report, right? You guys have looked at 1.5 million videos. You found professional teams that are using workflows. what?
Nine times the rate of personal users, you're you're learning all these things from this state of the video report that you state of the video report you guys put out. Tell us about methodology, putting it all together. What was the big aha's and the and the takeaways for people listening and curious about about video and AI video and what you guys are doing and what you've learned.
Vikram (09:21.73)
Yeah, so we have now a lot of professionals. We have 30,000 customers, users using the the product on a kind of regular basis. And we were able to look at the patterns. So we were able to look at the videos, the time they create the videos, the length of the videos, the the the source of where the the material that
Tye DeGrange (09:33.317)
Congrats.
Vikram (09:51.663)
creates the video, the type of the videos, and and we just like we have all this data that we have in amplitude, and we just like went berserk on it. And a couple of a couple of really interesting things that that I found was one is we f like we have a bunch of AI features in there like avatars and generative
videos, generative images, generative videos, voiceovers. And the one interesting thing like geographically was there is no Silicon Valley bias anymore about AI. It's people talk about diffusion of AI and I feel like at least in the video space this AI diffusion has happened really fast. and and so that that was one
one very interesting finding for us is because we thought, okay, maybe West Coast US will see more use of AI features and less in Midwest or or or other parts of the world. And I I we didn't kind of see that pattern. Like Florida, Indiana like popped out as things states that use a lot of AI of different of different kinds. the other the other interesting thing was I thought
that you know, hey, marketers were the main adopters of of AI videos and they would be the the one most interested in it. But we find that a lot of teams are interested. training teams, learning and development teams. They're they're usually part of HR or sales teams, product teams. so we find we find adoption kind of also diffusing across roles.
within within companies as well. So so those were some yeah, some interesting findings that that we we saw in the report. there's some interesting things in there about geography and and some variations in video length by country. There's like s just some interesting but the the overall theme was, you know, hey these are these are like
Tye DeGrange (11:52.259)
It's interesting.
Tye DeGrange (12:05.305)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Vikram (12:15.694)
AI is here to stay and it's diffused across roles and across geographies.
Tye DeGrange (12:22.647)
Yeah, I love, you know, you brought up the Canva, you know, example as an inspiration. Like, how are you sort of this is sort of off script, but like how are you sort of like navigating the the competitive landscape of tool explosion and AI? And where do you think that's kind of I know you've talked a little bit about the market and the you know SMB, but I'm curious to learn a little bit more about like
how that's popping out, how that's differentiating, maybe like where's that that sweet spot. You've kind of alluded to it, but I know it's a it's a busy, growing, changing quickly space. Where do you guys like this fit in and what are you seeing there versus in that crowded space?
Vikram (13:05.26)
Yeah, it is it is indeed a super competitive space. I I didn't like when we started it wasn't like Adobe Premiere was the the choice or Camtasia or something. And now there's so many tools out there. so it is competitive, it is super busy, but a couple of things we find is this was
One of our design principles, we had two design principles when we started the company. keep it like Canva or PowerPoint. So keep it keep it simple. Don't give people the premier like timeline experience. Cause where I got lost was in that timeline. I'm like, I don't know what what this means and how to think of of layers on timelines and just like it was it was just very hard. I was a PowerPoint user, so give that PowerPoint-ish experience.
To the end user. That was one design principle. The second design principle we had was
The blank slate. You don't you shouldn't have to start with a blank slate. when you open Premiere or Camtasia, it just like opens a blank canvas and then you gotta figure out, okay, what are you gonna do? so our design principle was always give people a way to get started on the video. Whether now it's all prompt, everybody wants a prompt, but but our core core.
thing has been about repurposing content. So whether you have a PowerPoint or a PDF or a blog or an existing recording, our our whole goal is like we make it really easy for you to bring that piece of content and turn that into a video. And and to some degree that's kind of our differentiator, that's our category maker, that we we repurpose content to to video. And
Vikram (15:10.572)
And people are sitting like I'm sure your company, like you have so much blog content that you've written. You probably have so much so many PDFs, so many PowerPoints that you use in the company and and instead of starting from scratch, wouldn't it be great to convert some of those into videos to begin with?
Tye DeGrange (15:24.4)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (15:31.33)
It's it's perfect use case. I mean I I'm I'm it's almost too perfect. our problem isn't the production, it's the and I think it's true for so many of like how do you pull out some golden nuggets, how do you continue to publish, how do you continue to add value, how do you stay consistent, how do you repurpose because the thing you wrote about five years ago is actually maybe really needed right now for somebody or
really helpful for this individual or this particular use case. So I I love that and I think it's a a common problem.
Vikram (16:10.252)
Yeah, and there's there's two access to this as you can imagine, Ty. One is the personalization access that you talked about, like okay, now somebody needs it because you're talking about it with them. but there's also channels, right? Like, okay, now there's this new channel, like people wanna create TikTok videos and and Instagram reels and and so so you wanna have the same content which you had maybe a YouTube video for that that you wanna create a
a TikTok short or a YouTube short from the as an example. I mean th again there's so many channels that that videos are going into now.
Tye DeGrange (16:49.343)
absolutely. And I think being channel specific is is valuable and it's interesting. And I'm I I I got my little trial set up. I'm excited to play around more because it's it's timely for us. We've got a lot of tools going, but excited to to jump in. it when you talk getting AI going at scale and like even for brands that are maybe on the smaller end of the overall spectrum but want to get
AI video volume up significantly. Are there things that you your the product's able to do in terms of like auditing existing and then saying, hey, this is what we're this is what we can do for you? Or is there a way to like maybe highlight like this happened for a company that kind of plugged into the pictory as a system? Because I get some of the use cases and like I love the differentiation, but
Is there like a how or a like how it how it landed in terms of a story? I'm curious to to hear more about that, maybe.
Vikram (17:46.328)
Those are
Vikram (17:53.827)
Yeah, those are those are some good ideas that we are constantly talking about. We we haven't built that into the system. But one common theme that we hear from customers, especially in this training department, but even in marketing teams, my content changes, but my videos don't always reflect that. Like so my my training material changed, the the
Tye DeGrange (18:18.435)
Mm.
Vikram (18:22.574)
core of it changed because of some regulatory changes or because my product changed. But the videos that we have online don't reflect that. So if like that to me is one of the biggest drivers for many customers trying to look at better tools. But also that's that's one that that we can build into the product that you know hey we sync your source document. We know what
Tye DeGrange (18:37.317)
Yeah.
Vikram (18:52.426)
source this video was created from so that when that changes we give you a a notification that hey you should yeah. So those are some roadmap items.
Tye DeGrange (18:55.428)
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah, and I you know our world of partner marketing, I think with SAS it's super interesting because you've got reviews, you've got influencer creator, you have you know publications that make sense. There's there's the opportunity to look at like a value-added reseller of some sort where their job is to basically recommend this or implement it for a brand as part of their workflow, like a content creator.
The other one is an interesting bucket of like the technical integration. And I think like my brain starts to think about that of like, if this is your current stack, I don't know if you're using lovable or something else, or even a product like this, Riverside for for pod. I'm curious if there's conversations or if you've already gone down the path of like, okay, we're sort of plugged in. I'm I'd love to hear your thoughts on integrations and just.
Vikram (19:56.152)
Integrations.
Tye DeGrange (20:01.519)
Where does that sit for you guys?
Vikram (20:03.284)
Yeah, so so we see it as two kinds of integrations. The input source documents where they're coming from. So that's often, you know, like Google Drive or or Microsoft 365 or or sometimes it could be like Notion articles that you published in Notion that you want to convert or Atlassian con con confluence. So those are like the sources, then the destinations sometimes can be the same.
Tye DeGrange (20:21.413)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (20:26.627)
Yeah.
Vikram (20:32.728)
Like you wanna publish that video back into your Confluence page. or the destination can be YouTube or Vimeo, or in case of a training video, the destination often is a learning management system, an LMS system. so so the there's like a whole bunch of different inputs and different outputs. And in the marketing world, it could be like WordPress or Salesforce or
Tye DeGrange (21:00.421)
Yeah.
Vikram (21:01.559)
hub spot as kind of the you know the where your knowledge lives.
Tye DeGrange (21:04.09)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (21:08.143)
Yeah, I I could see that working really well. We're big Notion fans also. So power users there and those connections and like the explosion of MCPs and folks leveraging proper APIs to do this stuff is is super interesting. obviously you talked about your, you know, big aha around market change and that test. Are there other experiments or other
Vikram (21:25.208)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (21:34.829)
tasks that you re you want to reference or share with the audience either at Pictory or in your past great experience where it's like, wow, that outcome was really not expected. That was a learning that really is really fascinating to share with people.
Vikram (21:51.093)
so as a SAS company, like we're constantly running experiments, right? Whether it's pricing experiment, landing page experiments, experiments on checkout flows, experiments on you know where certain features fit and stuff. And sometimes we find like small changes have have a big have a big impact. we
I think just today I was reading from my product management team did an experiment about the checkout flow, where it was a multi-page checkout flow and they converted it to a single page checkout, and and it improved the conversion rate quite a bit. And I'm like this is like simple, small experiments, and and kind of these things build on top of each other over time.
And there's there's many that we wanna still do, but but yeah, that's that's one example of a very recent
Tye DeGrange (22:56.057)
Yeah. With the report, you kind of highlighted some of the learnings. The geography thing was really interesting where like Oregon was super overindexed on some of the image generation. Were there other geographic takeaways that you found interesting? And you kind of alluded to them, but they're love to dig more into the report of of sharing those learnings with people as it relates to like how they think about market or or AI image generation.
Vikram (23:24.959)
since we were talking about the World Cup, we found that Spain, Spain had the longest videos. Spanish people generated the longest videos. So I was I was talking to my colleagues who speak Spanish and and I'm like trying to understand this. So obviously there's there's two reasons. you know, the different kinds of videos are of different length depending on what you're trying to do with it.
Like a social media video that goes into Instagram or TikTok is usually under a minute long or usually and so on. Whereas if you're creating a YouTube video, it's kind of seven, eight minutes is kind of the right length for it. And same thing with training videos. Training videos, the optimal these days, the micro learning videos are about three to four minutes long. So so we looked at the Spanish videos that
training videos. So they should be around three minutes, three and a half minutes long, but they were about seven minutes long. And and then understanding that from our from our Spanish speaking colleagues, what we understood was that it just the the language is like to say things, it just takes longer. It just is a that's that's how and I don't speak Spanish but but I can understand it from a being a bilingual speaker that you know some languages
it takes longer to get to what you're trying to say than than in other languages.
Tye DeGrange (24:56.013)
Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm thinking of like I saw Will Farr I wouldn't know if he was on the SBs or something. he the great comedian who's Hispanic was doing a bit with Will Farrell and they were riffing and Will Farrell was translating for him and clearly giving absurd answers that were not the correct translation that was absolutely unbelievable.
The s the comedian would say something like one liner and he would and Wolfrail would go on for like an hour describing this absurd scene. It was so good. of course promoting his new show, which I heard was was decent and pretty funny, so I'll might have to check that out. you're a leader, you're an entrepreneur, you've lead led led SaaS companies in the past, you're leading Pictory.
Vikram (25:26.635)
It expanded.
Tye DeGrange (25:50.53)
For aspiring CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders in tech, those that are de diving into AI like we all are, what is some advice you can give just from a career perspective of maybe some of the lessons you've learned into something that that can be digestible for them to say, okay, I can take that and hopefully use it to help my journey to be a leader or an entrepreneur or a CEO?
Vikram (26:20.237)
Yeah, I'll I'll tell you how I use it personally as a CEO. and and I use it a lot. I use Chat GPT and Cloud both. And I use it obviously the the obvious use case that people have is like emails and stuff. So connect your emails, connect your systems to it, make the harness work really well for you, right? So we connect Slack and Google Drive and
and emails so so I can actually get specific questions. So I'm preparing for a board meeting, for example, and I'm asking it to give me the highlights of last quarter and and give me some top things that I should tell the board about. And that's like a simple use case, but it needs a lot of your data, your connections to your systems too. And it did a relatively good job to to come up with
that kind of information. so that's more productivity stuff and and that that we use it for. but then recently I've started building Claude skills. So that's another one that you could you should everybody should be exploring that and and anything like the repeatable that's a repeatable thing that you can and
Tye DeGrange (27:42.585)
Love that.
Tye DeGrange (27:46.639)
Yeah.
Vikram (27:48.078)
Yeah, and I trained it on certain types of documents that hey, I wanna I want you to create these kind of files and and then then I'm I'm just giving it some input and saying, Hey, create this kind of file for me and and it works really well very repeatedly.
Tye DeGrange (28:00.931)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. If you wouldn't mind sharing like, you know, one CEO to another, I am curious, there's always these, you know, wave of adoption, right? And you're an AI company. So I would imagine you you all are your engine of your company is built around AI, so it's a requirement. But in terms of maybe like the the non-technical teammates that are supporting and there's various degrees of tech, like how have you gotten
How have you implemented AI adoption, if you wouldn't mind maybe just sharing? And like where do you think that balance is striped striked? Like how do you kind of measure success on that front? Because I think about it as well. And I think we've done a very good job. we're smaller, there's you know, there's we're different. We're service-based business, we have technology to support the service that then complements other technologies to give people the best, you know, partner marketing offering.
Vikram (28:58.35)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (29:02.393)
You guys are a core engine that's basically generating content, you utilizing AI at scale. how are you adopting it in the non-technical and and how much are you demanding that happen and when as a as a fellow leader? I'm just curious.
Vikram (29:07.395)
Yeah.
Vikram (29:18.349)
Yeah, I'll give you our best one of one of our best practices. I think it's been well received. so every two weeks I have a how we use AI meeting. Like I do my all hands monthly, but but how we use AI happens every two weeks. And and every team, every individuals can volunteer to present. But but people see each other using tools, how they use it.
and and then they're inspired to to use it and and i've asked every team to use it finance team accounting teams the mar marketing team obviously uses a lot of ai and as you can imagine the dev team is super heavy cloud and you know cloud code users so they're they're all constantly so
Tye DeGrange (30:15.695)
Love that.
Vikram (30:17.183)
I checked with my CTO last and he said about eighty-five percent of our code is is touched by cloud, it's cloud generated. so so I would say hundred percent of the team is using AI in in different different levels and yeah, in all departments.
Tye DeGrange (30:38.415)
Yeah. Yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah, that's really impressive. It's funny because we we do a we call office hours, but we have a very similar structure on our check ins of like show and tell learning. It's it's really been great. And I think it's fascinating because this came up on the SAS class podcast where
You know, it's not necessarily a binary thing. There's there's things along the continuum, but I think that having that human there's like there's jokes and memes and stuff of like I can get something out the door that's pretty minimum MVP and an hour that's like a full fledged app and then, you know, it takes me it could take you weeks or months to get it right. And I think that's a fascinating thing, right?
Vikram (31:26.287)
Production ready. But but as a software company, that's another really good use case that we've found is our product team will basically create apps in Replit or Lovable. whenever they wanna create a new feature, they will actually create instead of using mock-ups that you used to do before, now they'll actually create working prototypes and and and share it with the engineering team. And then the engineering team has an easier time adopting it.
Tye DeGrange (31:47.715)
Yeah, just build. Yeah. Love that.
Vikram (31:56.046)
Design team do that, product teams do that. So I think that that's that's really good.
Tye DeGrange (32:00.815)
Love that. I love that. when you think about like the long game and you zoom out on all this stuff, like what gets you most excited about bringing video to so many people and being able to like empower people to create video at scale?
Vikram (32:24.063)
It's I mean I feel like it's already happening to some degree. A lot more people are able to create videos than before. I wanna I wanna see I mean there will be a lot more personalization now because now it's possible to easily create videos. videos will become more interactive moving forward. I so we're already kind of doing some experiments around there that hey
If it's an educational video is knowledge checks are automatically inserted within with the video. So it pauses, forces you to ask questions, answer the questions, then moves to the next step. so I think I feel like those two are the ones that are are gonna be next, like personalized choose your own journey type videos and then and then these interactive videos that that will again kind of
The same idea is choosing a journey. So it won't be a passive experience anymore. at least in the business context. I feel like there'll be a lot of specific to you with with more active.
Tye DeGrange (33:37.07)
Yeah. Yeah, the personalization thing is crazy and it's it's a fascinating thing. Vikram, this has been awesome and I just appreciate you taking the time to jump on and and give us your perspective. There's a lot here to share with people and the success you've had leading up to Pictree, the journey you've had with Pictree, the ability to like find that right market, and really
truly test and learn in in the spirit of the pod, it's it's really appreciated. Just kind of coming down the final stretch of like some more rapid fire and then some personal questions to get to know you a bit outside of your appreciation for World Cup soccer. is there a tool that's like kind of caught fire for you or your team? I mean you've you've highlighted a bunch. So is there something that's non pictory related that's like, wow, that is an AI tool that is
I have a feeling you might say what I think you're gonna say, but I'm I'm curious if there's one that's notable that you wanna share that's maybe a little underrated or under the radar.
Vikram (34:40.479)
I don't know if it's under the radar, but I have personally adopted Whisperflow. I think now they're rebranded as Whisper. and it works really well from transcript perspective. Again, CD does a good decent job, but what I like about Whisperflow is like I can just dictate whole emails to it and it does the formatting, bullet pointing, all that stuff. and and I use it for prompting, I use it for a bunch of things. So
Tye DeGrange (34:48.633)
Yes.
Vikram (35:10.479)
So that's been one really fun tool for me recently.
Tye DeGrange (35:14.821)
Great example. I down I admittedly download the app. I've heard great things and I it takes me a bit to like get into a habit state on these and I'm not quite there on Whisper, but I've heard it's off the charts. So I appreciate the reminder.
Vikram (35:22.414)
Yeah.
Vikram (35:27.177)
It's it's great. Yeah. And and the team I think the team has just been fascinated with cloud code and cloud core work and and stuff and everybody's been kind of using it. And then and we do have an enterprise license for Chat GPT and I I hear really good things about codecs and people have been using that as well in our team.
Tye DeGrange (35:38.938)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (35:49.156)
Yeah. That's bumping up on my radar just in the comments and the the people calling it up like a a a new it gets more it's getting more attention of late to your point from what I've seen. is there a metric in SAS and the dashboards that you're like, okay, I could deprioritize that or maybe get rid of it and not be upset.
Vikram (36:01.837)
Yeah.
Vikram (36:12.472)
that's a good question.
Vikram (36:20.079)
I think the the some there are some things that I'm looking at because I'm just it's a habit to look at like you know ticket density as an example, like how many people reach out versus the number of customers you have. and and I think our support team is doing such a good job that I don't need to look at it anymore. That that's an example of like when it when it when it goes
bad then you wanna look at it, but when things are going well, you don't you don't care about I don't know if that's kinda the qu that's the intent of your question, but but that's one at least from my metrics that I I don't need to track.
Tye DeGrange (37:04.441)
Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think everyone has like different the you can't look at everything and I think it's like good to like get it a sanity check on like what matters to for you and what could be deprioritized. So it's it's good to get your perspective.
Vikram (37:20.493)
But w one of one of the things we do every quarter is we'll focus on one metric that we'll all work towards. Like, we had two quarters ago we had churn. We were all like focused heavily on churn, right? Now we're like this last two quarters we've been all about activation rate. So just just work on improving activation rate because it's such a leading indicator that if you get good activation, better activation, it'll lead to conversions and and
Tye DeGrange (37:34.361)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (37:49.209)
Yes.
Vikram (37:49.613)
retention as well.
Tye DeGrange (37:51.888)
Yes, I love that. I love that. I couldn't agree more. That that's a actually a big one. You could we could almost have an episode on that, like for a set like getting the activation right, getting the onboarding right, getting that aha th those aha's and that setup right so that they are less likely to turn later. What a great what a great call out. Yeah.
Vikram (38:13.399)
Exactly. Conversion is higher, churn is lower. It'll it it's it's a really good leading indicator.
Tye DeGrange (38:21.209)
Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything there that's like maybe you want to double click on that's worthy of of sharing on the on that setup or that onboarding or that activation? Cause I think that's a really cool concept that a lot of people forget when they think about churn that are maybe not as familiar with SaaS or growth.
Vikram (38:41.417)
I think you can make it into a vanity metric, like because you can define your activation metric to be anything. So you can define it to be somebody set up an account. That's not really activation. Activation really is, you know, the value that you're trying to deliver or it promise your customers. Do you get to that value? Does the user get to that value?
Tye DeGrange (38:57.871)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (39:07.833)
Yeah.
Vikram (39:10.087)
And and that's that at least that's a minimum what it should be. Now, whether that leads to sticky behavior or not, that's still a separate question. There is a actually like I would say I we don't track it, but there should be an adoption metric. Like, okay, like we were talking about whisper flow, like you probably tried it once and then it just hasn't become a habit. But maybe there's an adoption number to it, like okay, if I tried it three or four times, then it becomes a habit, then it's like.
Tye DeGrange (39:31.79)
Yep.
Tye DeGrange (39:37.369)
Yeah. Yep.
Vikram (39:39.725)
So so there is like a difference between that. So a a well adopted product is also gonna be highly converted and and better retained.
Tye DeGrange (39:45.103)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (39:52.496)
Yeah. How do you get them into habit soon enough? one of my favorites. we talked a little bit about books, my enjoyment of books. We have a RBL reading list, might be a bit of a bookworm, admittedly. Good and bad. you have a nice little shelf behind you as we discussed. Is there it doesn't have to be a book, but is there a resource? It could be a pod or a site or a post or a sub stack that's like
You gotta suggest it to the audience. It's too good not to.
Vikram (40:23.209)
well, I'll do both. Like again, these days my reading list, I'm also like a bookworm like you. my reading list kind of varies every time. But these days it's it's more leaning towards Buddhist philosophies and stuff. I'm not a Buddhist, but I'm learning about it. So there is the there's something called the Tibetan Book of Death, which is an amazing read. It's not just about death, and and it's about
Tye DeGrange (40:39.941)
I love that.
Tye DeGrange (40:48.549)
Dang. Yeah.
Vikram (40:52.547)
death and the process of dying, but also like how you prepare yourself throughout your life for that. and so it's that one is really good. It is heavy. It's heavy, but it's it's fantastically done. and the other one, the podcast that I that's my favorite, my always go to is Lenny's podcast. So if if you're a SaaS person, product person, that one is fantastic.
Tye DeGrange (40:58.489)
Wow. Heavy hitting.
Tye DeGrange (41:06.041)
Wow, that sounds awesome.
Tye DeGrange (41:16.089)
Yeah. he's off the charts. I came across him through the Reforge community. I was a total junkie through that and got to know a lot of the a lot of the leaders and entrepreneurs and residents. And we did some projects for them. They're just such an amazing group. And now part of Miro. And I think that's how Lenny came across my radar. And so then I was just hooked once he once he launched. He did such an amazing job.
Yeah, that's a that's a really f phenomenal call outs for on both fronts. anything anything final that you're excited to try for the business or test between now and the end of the year or an experiment that's like, man, I I would like to try that, or and you don't have to sh say if it's top secret, but just curious to know.
Vikram (42:05.959)
It's not talk secret. So I'll tell you like something we're trying right now. And and again, Claude is a big part of this. so you know, you've heard about generative videos, like all the stuff Sora was doing it and VO3 and and all that stuff, and the generative imagery and stuff. The the one other thing that's happening in this video world is code-generated videos. So
You write code that that then renders as HTML or something that that's actually a working video. so you can imagine motion graphics, you can imagine animations, you can imagine all kinds of things. So that's something we're really excited about. we're digging deep into for the next version of Pictory. And and that one has been yeah, that one has been a very
Tye DeGrange (42:48.717)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (42:54.723)
Wow.
Tye DeGrange (42:58.511)
Wow. That's interesting.
Vikram (43:05.305)
passionate project, passion project in the last couple of months, and and we'll have a new version of Pictory that will include this.
Tye DeGrange (43:11.713)
Yeah. You just are you just reinventing Flash? Just kidding. I'm just kidding. But no, that's interesting because I guess, you know, from there you could be consumed in more formats and more easily produced and distributed, right? Isn't that the idea?
Vikram (43:16.535)
I know, that's w no, no, I like I was thinking exactly that. That it HTML created videos, it's reinventing flash here.
Vikram (43:36.247)
And all those interactive things that we were talking about, like making making videos interactive, it just makes that possible now.
Tye DeGrange (43:39.109)
Mm-hmm.
Tye DeGrange (43:43.897)
Wow. It's kind of wild to think of where this is going, because everyone could see a different version. You could in you could kind of tweak a video for your own experience. That's that's wild. well so cool. I mean, Vikram, this has been perfect. We nailed it on the timing, we nailed it on the learnings, like
Vikram (43:45.305)
Code generation has gotten so good. Yeah.
Vikram (43:58.307)
Yep.
Tye DeGrange (44:07.813)
Think we just yeah, it was really a pleasant surprise and I appreciate you coming on. anything that you wanna share that maybe people don't know about you or where they wanna connect and learn more.
Vikram (44:21.165)
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn all the time, so hook hook up with me on LinkedIn. That's my that's my place. And yeah, if you're ever in Seattle, look me up and we'll go have some Starbucks over caffeinated city.
Tye DeGrange (44:26.767)
Let's do it.
Tye DeGrange (44:33.669)
Beautiful. I love it. Yeah. I won't I won't I won't hesitate to take you up on that. And I love the reserve location that they did. Is it on 2nd Street? My memory serves me.
Vikram (44:44.407)
Yeah. It's it's closed now by the way. I know, it was beautiful. They he made it, I know he made it like the Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and it was like the motive. Yeah, but it's it's closed. Yes, we'll find lots of shops.
Tye DeGrange (44:48.858)
Yeah.
Buzzkill, literally.
Tye DeGrange (44:57.485)
I love that place. All right. Don't worry, we'll find another coffee shop in Seattle. I have a feeling. Vikram, you're the man. Thank you so much and appreciate you and thanks for joining.
Vikram (45:11.14)
All right, Ty, it was great. Thank you.
Tye DeGrange (45:12.582)
Take care. Bye.