Fireside Chat with Manny Medina & Mark Organ — The Business Model of Agents

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Julia Nimchinski: Up next is a fireside chat with Category Knots, category creators and leaders. Welcome to the show, Manny Medina, co-founder and CEO of Paid, formerly Outreach, and Mark Organ.

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Julia Nimchinski: Founder of Eloqua and Influitive, super excited to host you here, and we are discussing the business model of agents.

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Julia Nimchinski: How are you doing?

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Mark Organ: I am doing great! I’m really excited about this, too!

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Manny Medina: I’m super excited. I love talking to Mark, so I don’t need an excuse to talk to Mark. I will do this all the time, for free, anywhere.

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Julia Nimchinski: Awesome, let’s do this.

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Mark Organ: Yes, we’ve had… definitely had some amazing chats in the… in the past.

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Mark Organ: It’s so special to be able to be interviewing Manny Medina today. Manny is a software industry pioneer, veteran, legend, who created a category around sales enablement, really the first company to do marketing tools for sales reps.

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Mark Organ: Which was a crazy idea at the time. I remember meeting Manny,

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Mark Organ: I don’t even think you started your company yet, or you just had a PowerPoint, in Palo Alto. We were both there, I think, raising money.

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Mark Organ: And, you reached out to me because I had started Eloqua, and you were building a marketing tools company, you know, used by sales reps.

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Mark Organ: And and that was an exciting meeting, and it’s amazing what you have done with it, and I’m glad that I could provide some of my experience for Eloqua. And now we get to hear

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Mark Organ: from you, as you apply your experience to a truly AI-native category, with paid.ai. From what I can tell, this is really the first monetization

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Mark Organ: and cost tracking system for AI agents. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re the category creator here. So, yeah, very excited to be talking to you today, and maybe I want to start there about this transition from… from SaaS to AI first and pay.ai.

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Mark Organ: You know, what… what lessons do you apply from your experience at outreach?

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Mark Organ: And what feels fundamentally different about the kind of company you’re building and who you’re building it for as compared to what you did at Outreach and SaaS?

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Manny Medina: Yeah, no, thank you, Mark. So… I’m taking a catalog…

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Manny Medina: of things, and I think the catalog of things not to do is even longer than the catalog of things to do.

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Manny Medina: And, one of the first things was that, you know, we have to look at the problem.

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Manny Medina: and get, you know, make sure that we encompass the whole problem that our customers are facing. So, when I was at outreach.

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Manny Medina: we were launching agents, and when I looked at the way that we were monetizing the agents versus what the agent did, there was a mismatch in capability and the value delivery and value capture.

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Manny Medina: And, you know, when I look at my monetization stack, it was A super expensive, B, super complicated, and C, it was not built for a world of AI and some of this agentic behavior. And, like, if you draw a line, like, agents are just getting more autonomous over time.

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Manny Medina: And the… the platforms that are supporting our businesses are not

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Manny Medina: are not built for that. They were built for the transition from perpetual to the cloud, but not for the transition from software to software that, you know, is being executed by agents. So…

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Manny Medina: you know, I was timid when I was at outreach, right? Like, we were always second-guessing ourselves, where, you know, we’re building the right thing for the right person. I think we agonized over the whole, like, category creation problem for, like, a year, maybe more.

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Manny Medina: And…

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Manny Medina: You know, the question is always, like, are you a pattern… are you part of a category that exists, and you’re just a better solution, or are you a completely new thing?

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Manny Medina: Like, I don’t second… like, we decided to go this, you know, to build this thing, paid, and, like, we’re just gonna call it something different. Now, what is it exactly out of now?

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Manny Medina: But, you know, it’s definitely a new category that did not exist before. So, you know, we come from the world of, like, seed pricing and metering, and now we’re moving into a world of, like, outcome-based pricing and task-based pricing and other things.

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Manny Medina: So, the… the stuff that I… you know, one of the things that I do now is that I have… just had a lot more confidence, I think, as a second-time founder. I think that you… you would say you had the same when you started Influitive. You just blazed through Influitive, like, you were just so fast building stuff, and, like, I feel the same way now.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, no, great, and that’s great to hear. I love your story of the pain you personally experienced at outreach, and how you developed from that. Every company that I’ve started has come from pain that I personally experienced. I think it’s the best

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Mark Organ: way to start, your next company. And, yeah, no, it’s great. As I, as I think about one of the things that I really suffered, from

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Mark Organ: at Influitive, even for the second time, was it’s just so difficult to make your pricing work

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Mark Organ: for, for what your customers actually want, and to charge for the value that you create.

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Manny Medina: Oh my god, that was the bane of my existence. That was…

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Manny Medina: It’s crazy, and you know, and even as CEO, you think that we’re so powerful, and we can make anything.

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Mark Organ: we can make it happen. But we can’t, and probably you couldn’t at Outreach, and I couldn’t either. I remember going back to my head of engineering and saying, we have to instrument our products so that we can charge more for outcomes. And he said, well, you know, then you’re not going to get all these features. You’re going to have to wait 6 months.

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Mark Organ: So good luck, so I’m like, oh, okay.

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Mark Organ: In hindsight, honestly, that’s probably one of the best things I could have done is, you know, charge, you know, charge more for value and for outcomes, and it’s really exciting that you’re going to be able to help entrepreneurs be able, to do that. And, you know, it’s great. We’re talking about

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Mark Organ: distribution, Agentic distribution, and everyone thinks about, you know, sales and marketing and customer service. They don’t really think about the kind of product marketing and product management that can actually make the biggest impact in terms of your way you distribute, so… Yeah.

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Manny Medina: So, you know what’s really interesting, is that…

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Manny Medina: When I started Paid, like, one of the things that… you’re totally gonna get this. Like, when I started Paid, I’m like.

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Manny Medina: I need a little bit of a break from selling to salespeople. I’ve been doing this for 12 years.

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Manny Medina: love them all, but, like, I just want to try something, I just want to go, you know, I just want to go explore a little bit. Let’s sell to somebody else, right? So we start paid, and we start, you know, when we started paid, we started selling to founders, especially early-stage founders.

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Manny Medina: And… and that was fun, but they don’t buy much, right? So, you know, we’re building a self-serve product for them. And then at bigger companies, you know, you have a number of places to land, right? I can sell to the CEO, I can sell to the CPO, or I can sell to the CRO, or to a number of people. And what I found out

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Manny Medina: this… this is like a truck. If you sell, you know, if you work back from success… so what is success for most SaaS companies selling agents? It’s to sell the freaking agents. You see what I mean? It’s to create a landing point for all this innovation that is coming in, and that begins

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Manny Medina: with a rep, you know what I mean? Like, and it works back to, like, you know, operations, and marketing, and product, and all that, and pricing, right? So…

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Manny Medina: what I’m realizing now is that if you start from success, and you work your way back, and, like, you begin your sales cycle educating the people who are at the tip of the spear, or moving these agents, you know, into the customer’s hands.

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Manny Medina: And then you work back into, like, product and engineering, and, like, you start fitting your solution, you know, forward to backwards. It works way better.

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Manny Medina: then go into, like, the pricing committee, you know what I mean? Like, the pricing committee between product and finance and sales, and try to land something that… to a committee, right? You just go to the CRO, who has a quarter to make it, boom, you are… you are talking their language.

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Mark Organ: I think that’s so insightful. It reminds me of a concept, I’m not sure if we talked about this when we had our big meeting in Palo Alto Cafe, around the Mafia offer.

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Mark Organ: I don’t know if you’ve talked to…

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Mark Organ: Do you remember… remember the Mafia? I think this is, like, the…

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Mark Organ: huge concept. It actually comes out of manufacturing, but it’s something that I think, you know, every software company should pay attention to, and it’s something I think you just… you just… you just raised. A mafia offers an offer that no sane prospect can refuse.

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Manny Medina: Right.

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Mark Organ: And so, why not start there? Why not start with the customer and find out what is absolutely irresistible?

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Mark Organ: And then work your way backwards, and then, you know, and I think that the founder plays a massive role in this.

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Mark Organ: Is to help identify the, you know, the mafia offer, and then, you know, go back to engineering.

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Mark Organ: And say, this is what will work for our customer, this is what they’re willing to pay for, how do we make this happen?

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Mark Organ: 100%. And it sounds like that’s something, you know, that you’re… that you’re getting at with your product, and maybe with, I don’t know if you do any service around your product, but something you can help with.

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Manny Medina: 100%, and that was… so… and… and it’s funny, because if, like, what you just said.

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Manny Medina: You put it in the context of not only where you’re selling, but how you build your company, right? So, like, you start making, you know, offers that people can’t refuse.

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Manny Medina: And then you bring it back, I was like, alright, we need to build that, you know what I mean? Like, whatever they say yes to, that needs to… that needs to exist. So, it is super interesting, because there is two inside, you know, there is two contentions in the world of SaaS right now. One is.

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Manny Medina: you know, finance and a little bit of product that says, you know, I need a standard pricing and a price sheet, and, like, all these very predictable ways of, like, you know, SKUs, right? SKUs are, like, green or brown chairs, right? Like, I want those things to be moved off the shelf.

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Manny Medina: And then you have, on the other side, you have this… the people who are actually selling, meaning the CRO and the reps.

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Manny Medina: Who are going to customers and are understanding customer pain, and they’re trying to retrofit this, this, this construct.

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Mark Organ: Mmm.

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Manny Medina: into customer pain. You see what I mean? So, like, as opposed to just understanding the customer pain, and you’re selling against it, you’re actually in this magician’s world, trying to, like, you know, turn seats inside out, and create extra packages, and, like, blah blah blah blah blah, to actually try to come up with something that makes sense for the customer and for your internal, you know, deal desk.

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Manny Medina: You know, and when you… when you think about…

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Manny Medina: All your top deals, like, I didn’t fluid, like, you probably have the top 10% of your customers who would pay you above half a million dollars. All those deals are custom.

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Manny Medina: You know what I mean? Why? Because you needed to take it off the table, and you will do whatever the customer wanted. If the customer wanted to pay you a million dollars in cash and half a million dollars in rabbits, you’re, like, done.

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Manny Medina: Yeah, I mean…

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Mark Organ: It’s so true.

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Manny Medina: I gotta buy a farm to put the rabbits in, you know what I mean? And you’re done with the deal.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, yeah, that’s so true. That’s actually a good segue into, you know, how do you think about product-market fit, maybe differently now, in terms of, you know, what does… what does that look like at pay.ai versus, what it looked like at outreach or for the companies that I founded in SaaS?

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Manny Medina: I think that,

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Manny Medina: Product-market fit… so the learning that I took is a product-market fit is earned by every customer.

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Manny Medina: You know, every customer buys you for a different reason.

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Manny Medina: you have to make sure that they’re incredibly, you know, that your buyer’s happy, that your user is happy, that the user’s manager is happy, and that the customer is getting value out of it. And you will have, you know, a handful of customers that cluster around roughly the same things.

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Manny Medina: But you never let go. Like, you’re always, like, picking at the problem, right? Like, it’s like a scab. You have to… you have to pick at it for it to heal, right? Otherwise, it hardens into a crust that somebody else can come in and so, like, you know, replace you with a better… with a better solution.

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Manny Medina: So you have… and, you know, and this is not like SMB versus enterprise, this is just in general, like, as a founder, I think that we all need to obsess about, you know, updating our beliefs around product market fit.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s an, ever…

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Mark Organ: ever-evolving process and a model. Do you have, like, a North Star metric? Have you figured out kind of a metric that if, you know, your customers are achieving certain value, then it flows through your revenue and your success?

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Manny Medina: So we have…

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Manny Medina: outcome metrics, and then we have input metrics. In terms of input metrics, for us, it’s the amount of what we call signals.

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Manny Medina: So when you instrument your code using paid, if we’re getting a lot of… if the… it’s sort of like the variety of the signal, so if we get a lot of signals in a high cardinality number of events, then we know that we have instrumented everything, and that we’re, you know, they’re really… they’ve really got a handle around the entirety of their code.

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Manny Medina: And then, you know, if they do that, then we can see everything the AI or the agent is doing. And then we can create billable events. So our second signal, then, is invoices. Are they sending invoices?

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Manny Medina: You see what I mean? So if they’re sending invoices, and we have captured a high cardinality of signals, we know we can help them to bill for other things, to bill for outcomes, or bill per tasks, or bill per unit of work, or whatever that is.

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Mark Organ: Oh, I see, so if they’re sending invoices to their customers.

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Manny Medina: Correct.

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Mark Organ: Based on, you know, based on outcomes. That’s great. Yeah, it would be, yeah, it would be great. That’s a pretty good one. I would think that there’s gotta be something around, kind of, the success of your customers, like, that they’re, you know, that they’re scaling well, or scaling better,

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Mark Organ: But anyway, we’ll file that one away, but I think that’s,

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Mark Organ: I feel like getting that North Star metric, and it’s often an original one, like, it’s… and it doesn’t come right away, like, it takes maybe a little bit of time, but that’s often, I think, really important for product-market fit, and I don’t know if anyone in the agentic space has really figured that out yet.

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Manny Medina: No, no, no, no, they’re all freestyling.

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Manny Medina: interesting is that the other one that we track is that… so, like, our goal is to, is to, like, is to grow the agent economy, right? In the end, the agent economy grows when agent builders get paid, and not only get paid in terms of, like, revenue, but get paid in terms of margin.

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Manny Medina: So the second thing that we do is we also track, you know, AI consumption, tool calling, and all this other stuff. So, like, if we can help our customers wrap their head around each of their customers, so that each of their customers becomes their own little P&L, right? Like, each of the customers say, like, this is the kind of value they’re getting, this is how much they’re paying you, you know, this is the usage going up and to the right.

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Manny Medina: then we have done our job, you see what I mean? Like, we have empowered you to go make a business out of this.

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Mark Organ: I love it. I just got goosebumps when you said it. It really has the ring of truth for me. I remember, so, my very first customer at Influitive was Zuora, and… Oh my god, that’s how…

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Manny Medina: Amazing customer.

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Mark Organ: is an amazing first customer, and it was hilarious. It was me and my brother running around with iPads, signing up people at their first conference, their subscribed conference, signing up advocates. It’s hilarious.

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Mark Organ: But I had a chance to hear teens talk about the subscription economy, and it was really electrifying, at the time. So this really feels like a similar thing, and I really do think the subscription economy really did power Zora. It was a lot bigger than just building a billing system. It was enabling an ecosystem.

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Mark Organ: So that feels like something that could really end up creating, you know, creating a category around the agentic ecosystem.

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Manny Medina: I… dude, I loved what he did. Like, his deck, his sales deck was legendary. Like, people would pass it around as, like, the North Star deck. Like, you know, you may not get there, but if you shoot in that direction, you’re gonna be fine, you know what I mean? And it was an inspiring deck. It had nothing to do with billing.

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Manny Medina: Right? It had to do with this new concept of, like, the subscription economy, right? And… and I love that inspiration, like, you know, I want to replicate a lot of those stuff, too.

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Manny Medina: It took him, you know, what I don’t want to do is… I don’t want to take that long to, like, create the category, because I think it took him a few years, but what I do want to do is create that inspiration where people feel inspired to be part of this movement.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, no, I think the inspiration is good. I think the challenge was, honestly, the product was not good, for years. I know that, because I used it, or tried to use it.

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Mark Organ: And so… but, I mean, it just shows you, though, the power of a big idea, and people really did sign on, to that, and I think there are a lot of people that are signing on to the idea of an agentic future.

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Mark Organ: And, so yeah, pretty, pretty exciting stuff.

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Mark Organ: Love to maybe talk a little bit about… there’s a lot of founders who are on the call today who are listening in, so I’d love to know, like, what’s the hardest mental shift that you had to make as now a second-time founder, and now…

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Mark Organ: And I know, because I’m doing some stuff in AI now, and there are a lot of things that are really different, in terms of how you approach problems.

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Mark Organ: And I know maybe I’m a little older than you, it’s taken me some time to really change the way that I think about things to be more sort of AI-centric or AI-first, but love to know, like, sort of the mental shifts that you’ve made, and what was really challenging, and maybe some advice that you’d give other founders.

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Manny Medina: Yeah, so, I love that question, because I’ve reflected on this quite a bit.

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Manny Medina: And…

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Manny Medina: the first one was… so the way I built outreach, right, which was, you know, 15 years ago, when we started.

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Manny Medina: what became Outreach 12 years ago was, you know, engineering time was precious, right? So, like, we have to, like, always optimize for this, like, unique resource that was our engineer, like, and everything had to be around them so that… so that they were, you know, there were these fantastic human beings that would spit out, you know, turn your ideas into actual code.

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Manny Medina: And that has changed fundamentally and completely.

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Manny Medina: Like, your engineering time is not precious. What is precious is your customers.

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Manny Medina: your customers, your customer fit, your customer feelings, the ability for you to, like, to have conversations with them and their feedback, like, that is by far the most important thing. So what do you do when the customer is a precious thing and your engineering staff is not the precious thing?

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Manny Medina: You build, you ship, and when things change, you throw it away, and you build it again, and nobody dies.

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Manny Medina: Everyone is okay with it. Why? Because with the ability to, you know, with cloud code or, you know, we use cursor internally, like, you can build so much faster. Like, it’s, like, significantly faster. And so you don’t have to be beholden to technology that was 3 months old.

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Manny Medina: You see, I mean? If something else comes along, boom! Just rebuild it, it’s fine. Like, you know, there’s no product that is so precious that cannot be bike-coded.

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Manny Medina: And, like, the corollary to that is that technology changes so fast, and this is in one of your questions, in that if something doesn’t work.

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Manny Medina: you know, for us, if something didn’t work, or it was really complicated, we were like, oh, aha, like, this got to be a mode, so let’s go build it. Let’s go, like, dig into the technology, spend months into R&D to actually make it happen. So, like, you know, we built Kaya like that, right? Like, it was a real-time conversational intelligence thing. Nobody had it, super hard, like, you have to have, like, all these breakthroughs to actually make it work. Now, if something doesn’t work.

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Manny Medina: Wait! If something doesn’t work, wait 2 months. It’s gonna work in 2 months.

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Manny Medina: You see what I mean? Like, the technology’s moving so fast that, you know, sometimes just waiting it out is a better strategy.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, you mentioned the customer, but, like, what about the customer? Is it…

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Mark Organ: Is it the customer’s dollars? Is it the customer’s attention? Is it their time? Is it, is it your reputation with them? Like, I mean, if you’re building stuff.

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Mark Organ: quickly, but half of it’s crap. Does that… is that a problem? Does that impact your reputation with them? So, what… what…

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Mark Organ: Of the customer asset are you really trying to optimize around?

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Manny Medina: Yes, that’s super relevant, especially for early-stage founders. So when you’re early, and you don’t actually have a product, and you don’t have a ton of revenue, what you do have is customer pain.

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Manny Medina: You see what I mean? You have a catalog of customer pain. That is your… that is your mode, you see what I mean? And, like, the deepening and understanding of the customer pain, and, like, the… and the why behind the why, and, like, understanding how you’re gonna solve that problem, like, that is by far, in my mind, like, the most important thing, because that… that… then you can turn that into dollars.

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Manny Medina: Right? And then you can turn that into repeatable dollars, and you can turn that… you know, the ability to go find the customer paying turns this into repeatable dollars that actually grow over time.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I think of it as, you know, that insight in the customer pain, and…

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Mark Organ: maybe going further than, you know, your alternatives. I mean, that’s one of the things I guess I prided myself on, in both the SaaS companies I founded, was

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Mark Organ: I feel like I went further than my competition in having an understanding of the way that they thought. I could draw maps of, kind of, how they thought about the world and how they thought about the problem that I was solving.

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Mark Organ: And because I feel like, you know, if you have any success at all at Paid, you will have, like, literally hundreds of imitators within months, especially now that it’s so easy to code things.

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Manny Medina: So there is a YC batch every 2 months, right? So there will be, you know, 40 in each batch. If we’re successful, in the next batch, there will be 10. You see what I mean? Just rinse and repeat.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, so that’s…

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Mark Organ: How… I mean, how are you getting a deeper insight into the problems that your customers and users have that are gonna enable you to outrun the dozens of the, you know, in the YC horde that’s gonna be coming after you if you’re successful?

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Manny Medina: So I don’t have a great answer for you, and this is one of the things that have changed. It’s like, people are looking for moats. There’s no moats.

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Mark Organ: There is just… there is just, you know, good running legs.

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Manny Medina: That’s it.

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Mark Organ: Yeah.

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Manny Medina: You see what I mean? And, like, the ability to stay in the pain longer than anybody else. Like, what you said there is fundamental to a mode.

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Manny Medina: Like, the ability to understand the cost of repain better than anybody else, and, like, turning that into a superpower that it scales approaches Dame, is THE mode.

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Manny Medina: You see what I mean? Everything else is shapeable. Like, for instance, one of the things that, you know, every… I… you know, everybody gets shit on, like, you know, even I just came back from, you know, talking to a few CEOs, and every board, right, it still talks about the fact that you want to minimize the amount of professional services you do with your customers.

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Manny Medina: Why? Because, like, it’s not recurrent revenue, and the margins are lower, and there’s all this bad shit. No!

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Mark Organ: No.

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Manny Medina: You need people to understand the customer pain and custom code something. Do it. Why? Because you can always recode it later. And this is a fundamental change, too.

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Mark Organ: I totally agree.

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Manny Medina: Yeah, so, like, there’s all these myths that we have to live with, that, you know, that if you’re an independent thinker, you can just throw them through.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, no, my very first mentor at Eloqua,

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Mark Organ: taught me that. He just said, happy customers scale really well, and I think what he said is, do, you know, do that professional services. I mean, at the time, we were bootstrapped, and it also helped generate cash and whatnot, but that’s, you know, in my job as a coach, and I’ve worked with a number of

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Mark Organ: Of companies that were either bootstrapped, or they were on their way to bankruptcy, and the fastest way to turn these companies around

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Mark Organ: is to start doing ProServe, and you get a deeper understanding of the customer, you get cash, those customers that buy services from you are not going to churn, and eventually those services turn into product.

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Mark Organ: or they turn into an ecosystem, where you go to partners and say, hey, you can do this too and build a business around it. I think VCs are kind of selfish about this, because, you know, they make their money from hitting home runs.

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Mark Organ: And so they don’t want founders to diversify. They want founders to be super focused, because they get their diversification by investing in lots of different founders. But I think as a founder, it’s really good not to die, and .

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Manny Medina: Rule number one. Yeah. Don’t die.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, no, so I think, I think, I think services, if managed well, can be an incredible.

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Mark Organ: you know, profit center, and I mean, I’m… so tell me a little bit about your professional services. Are you doing services for your customers around your product? Because it feels like you’ve got a lightweight product that’s easy for people to use it themselves. So tell me a little bit about that.

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Manny Medina: So,

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Manny Medina: To get technical for a minute, so, like, the difference between our product and what came before, that, you know, seed base or metering, is that you have to lock in on your business model

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Manny Medina: you know, early, right? You have to decide, like, I’m gonna charge per seat, right? And seats are gonna be, you know, good, better, best. And I may have a variable component that I know is gonna be X, right? Like.

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Manny Medina: you know, the amount of token consumption in AI is going to be my variable component, and you have to lock it, and if you want to change it, it’s a huge pain in the ass. Like, you lived with Zora before, like, Salesforce billing, all this stuff. Like, it’s super, super hard.

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Manny Medina: Our aha moment is that if you use a telemetry-based system.

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Manny Medina: Then you can see everything that the code is doing, and you can change your pricing, you know, by customer if you want it. And you can change your pricing by product if you want it.

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Manny Medina: So, there is a little bit of hand-holding, because the mind explosion, what I just said, is too hard. Like, people just can’t wrap their head around it and, you know, so we have to gently walk them through this new, you know, superpowers.

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Manny Medina: And the way we work, and this is super important, is that every engineer in my organization, we’re not that many, gets to be forward deployed.

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Manny Medina: So they get to go and work at the customer site. So, like, when I call a customer, it’s like, the way we’re gonna work is that you’re gonna have assigned an engineer, and the engineer’s gonna fork your code, he’s gonna go and do a bunch of work in it, and then he’s gonna submit a PR. So you’re gonna assign it to a buddy, another senior engineer, he’s gonna work alongside of you, you’re gonna be done in 3 days.

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Mark Organ: Wow.

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Manny Medina: And I don’t do it, you know, I don’t do it as a… as a way to deploy fast. I do it so that my engineers get reps of being in the customer’s shoes. Because that, again.

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Mark Organ: That is amazing.

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Manny Medina: most important thing.

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Mark Organ: That’s a big… that’s… that’s a big idea.

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Mark Organ: You’re right, that’s something that would have been absolutely anathema in the SaaS era, to actually use engineers for deployed, working, pairing with your customers’ developers.

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Mark Organ: I…

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Manny Medina: Right.

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Manny Medina: So, and that, dude, I don’t know why more people don’t do it. And when I mention it to somebody else, it’s like, oh, you’re gonna create a monster, a dinosaur of, like, you know, all these different

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Manny Medina: potential solutions. In reality, you don’t. Like, you figure out how to turn that, you know, piece of custom code, or whatever you build alongside your customer, into something that reconciles into the broader… into your broader system. And it’s that hard.

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Manny Medina: Like, this is the thing, like, code, engineering time is not hard. The customers, getting customers and getting into their pain, that’s a hard thing.

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Mark Organ: Yeah.

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Mark Organ: Yeah, that’s… that’s, that’s mind-blowing. Maybe to talk a little bit about your customers. I had… I went to your website. It looks like a lot of your customers are… are really new. These are new, smaller companies. They… they look quite, you know, AI-first, or… these… these don’t look… it’s funny, because

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Mark Organ: I go see all my friends who are running SaaS companies, and you go to their front page, and none of them say they’re SaaS companies, they all say they’re AI companies now.

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Mark Organ: But we know they’re not. We know they just sprinkled some AI magic pixie dust on top of their existing model. I don’t see… I don’t see many of those at all on your,

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Mark Organ: In your customer roster.

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Mark Organ: So, maybe tell me… talk to me a little bit about the customers that you have, and are, you know, is this something that is going to transition into more mainstream companies in the future?

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Manny Medina: Yeah, no, 100%. So, like, so for us to build what we did, we had to go to the future, right? We have to go to the future to see what future companies are doing. So we went to a bunch of… because we used to have, like, I myself had 5 conversations with AI startups a day, and my co-founders had, like, you know, two, three each. So we accumulated a corpus of, like, over 300 conversations.

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Manny Medina: And then some of them became customers, and we did it to understand what does Agentic code in production look like, built from the ground up as Agentic, right? So we do that so that we can now help SaaS companies

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Manny Medina: you know, move from their… from their current, you know, from their current business model to something that is going to take over seats, right? So I have to go to the future, learn what’s going to happen in the future, come back, and like, I feel like I’m a doctor. Like, I’m going around to all the SaaS companies being like, hey, gentlemen, like, we have to change.

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Manny Medina: You have to change the seed pricing, you have to change the delivery mode, you have to care about, you know, what outcomes does your customer care about. You have to, you know, stop worrying about, you know, having your pricing packaging being consistent. You have to care more about what your customer wants. What problems are you solving for them? And how are you extracting and communicating value?

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Manny Medina: You see what I mean? But that is not normal, dude, like, that didn’t happen before.

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Manny Medina: So… so I’m a little bit in evangelism mode, is I’m taking all this experience from native AI startups, and I’m bringing it back to my SaaS brethren, right? I grew up with it, like, this is my class, you know what I mean? And try to help them out.

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Mark Organ: Are they… I mean, are they getting it? Or, like, what is needed

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Mark Organ: to, I guess, cross… I mean, cross that chasm, so to speak, you know, where, I don’t know if you have any more, sort of, traditional companies that have sort of seen the light, have got your evangelism, and… and my guess is they probably need to do more than just buy a product, right? I mean, this is a mind shift change. These are different products.

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Manny Medina: 100%.

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Mark Organ: that happen? I mean, we talked a little bit at our previous call about how pricing for many companies is something that… they just kind of do this. Like, they… they often take so much care in their product management around what features they want to deliver and when they want to deliver them. But yet, around pricing and packaging, which

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Mark Organ: I mean, arguably, is way more important. I actually challenge anybody to find a company that has really scaled like crazy.

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Mark Organ: Where… where they haven’t…

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Mark Organ: substantially made it an innovation in pricing and packaging, where they’ve not made an innovation in radically reducing a risk

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Mark Organ: from their customer to buy. You’re not going to find a lot.

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Manny Medina: 100%.

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Mark Organ: But yeah.

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Manny Medina: 100%.

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Mark Organ: Let me talk about that a little bit. Like, what changes do… because you’re right, these super modern companies, they don’t have to make any changes. They’re born… they’re born AI first. The founders are probably in their 20s, and you know, the way… the way we were back when we started our SaaS companies.

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Manny Medina: Yeah, that’s the same.

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Mark Organ: Well, that’s all they knew. Like, in my case, like, my co-founder at Eloqua built a multi… you know, built a multi-tenant SaaS system, not because he was a genius, it’s because it’s all he knew.

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Mark Organ: It’s because he was at a, you know, what do you call it? He was at a contract manufacturing company, and he needed to figure out how to control factories in China.

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Mark Organ: From here, And so the only way to do it was in the cloud. That’s all he knew.

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Mark Organ: And, you know, so we were probably more lucky than we were good, you know, on that one, so…

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Manny Medina: I think Julie just came on to tell us that our time is up.

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Mark Organ: Oh!

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Julia Nimchinski: Yeah.

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Mark Organ: Oh, we’re only half an hour? Oh, we’re having so much fun!