So, guys, we talked about your core a little bit already.
We talked about your appreciation
for the problems of the small business owner,
your understanding of technology,
and your provision of an integrated solution.
But let's dive deeper and actually define
what your core is for us.
When we set out to build ThriveHive,
we wanted to empower small business owners to grow.
And how do you do that?
It's through an integrated software solution
that they login on a daily basis.
You know, this is where they're running their business.
And being kind of ingrained in their daily workflows
was critical to us.
You want them, once they come in the morning to the office,
they're checking ThriveHive?
Yeah.
So they come in, they check their leads.
They're checking their website.
They're writing their content, their emails,
their social media posts all from that same single point
software solution.
And to do that, we actually set out three core pillars on top
of which we build ThriveHive.
Number one is customer first.
So making sure that every decision we make,
we're always putting the customer first.
And there's always a seat for the customer in every meeting.
Number two is being data driven.
So as a company, we're super data driven, of course.
But how do we take that and bring it
to the business owner world?
How do we make that permeate our product?
And number three is delivering more value than we capture.
So we always create more value than we capture.
And that's critical to gain that long-term relationship
with the business owners.
Now, let's talk about each in depth.
On the customer first front, that
can mean a lot of different things.
It's probably thrown around a lot.
For us, it's something near and dear to us.
And it's pretty specific.
So it means, first of all, doing whatever
it takes on the support side of things
to make sure that we're solving for the customer's problem.
So we offer phone support.
We offer email support.
If it's going to take 20 hours of customer service
to get somebody who's paying us $30 a month to get to the point
where they're going to be successful with our platform,
then that's what we should do.
And we have done that.
Even though it may not be profitable for you.
But you have to think about it in the bigger scheme.
There's the long-term view where all of these customers
become evangelists.
You're solving their problem.
You're creating relationships.
They're loyal to you.
And they become an army of people
that are selling your product out there later on.
Let's talk about being data driven.
What does that mean?
The largest part of the company is the product team--
engineers, data scientists, product managers.
And everyone's crazy for technology and for data,
but how do you make that data accessible?
How you bring it down to the point where it's actionable?
And that is done through guided workflows.
It's done through the suggestions
that our recommendation engine is constantly
telling business owners to follow.
It's done through these insight emails showing
the right information at the right time
so that they can actually take advantage of the data.
And if you think about it, in a way
this data-driven mindset also kind of builds
on top of that relationship that we built having customer first.
It builds a relationship.
And then as you develop more and more data,
you get better and better at making those recommendations.
So one builds on top of the other
and it creates this virtuous cycle
where they reinforce each other and kind of helps us grow.
And in a way, protects ourselves from competitors.
And hence, your third pillar, create more value
than you capture, you want to help your customer succeed.
And you win only when they win?
Absolutely.
I think, especially when you're talking
about the small business space, there's
been a strong-- a long history of a lot of companies
selling a lot of different things.
And not all of them have always created more value
than they capture.
We see those as fundamentally instable models.
And so we've focused, really, on making sure
that we consistently generate that value.
Our pricing.
We've never changed, right?
Since we actually rolled it out.
That's the value capture is our pricing.
And yeah, it's in the ballpark.
Is it perfect?
No.
We'll fix that later.
It's much more important if you want to tackle this market
to get the value creation right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's dangerous to get caught up
in the optimization stage.
Like you might start looking at, how
can I get that extra dollar of average revenue per user?
Kind of get hung up on the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and the MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
First of all, we're like 10 times
in terms of how much revenue we capture from our customer base
because we create that much more value
than the competitors in the space.
But the more important thing here
is because we create so much more value
than we capture, we also get a lot of evangelists.
People that are going to be out there referring us and selling
our product for us.
It's an army of people selling ThriveHive.
Really curious, how did this sense of your core crystallize?
So we spent a lot of time developing our persona,
interviewing hundreds of business owners
and really understanding who we're selling to.
And as those conversations kind of evolved
and we were trying to figure out, OK,
so we know what is the problem we're solving.
We know who we are selling it to.
But how do we actually take this to market?
What is it that is going to define ThriveHive?
And I think that's when sort of the notion of success
started to come up more and more.
Both the customer success, but also just the way
we thought about things internally.
So a lot of people like to measure
happiness or their customers.
It's very important that you have happy customers.
But what we found was that's not enough.
You can have a happy customer who's
happy to deal with ThriveHive, but who's not successful.
That's not going to work out.
So we started figuring out, all right,
how can we track this success?
How can we measure?
How can we make sure we're driving for
that, we're optimizing for that?
We started calling our account managers
members of the success team.
That it's not enough to just manage the account.
You have to actually help them be successful, do
what it takes.
And when driven Dan calls your customer support team,
he knows, by virtue of you calling them the customer
success team, that their job is his success?
To help him.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's a relationship where we're
only successful if our customers are successful.
And that's why thinking about small payments over time.
We want that to be a long-term relationship.
And that's very well-aligned with the business owners
we're working with.
What I'm hearing is that this understanding of your core
is translating into everyday decisions at your company.
It's not only the success team.
When you have a problem around, should I do this or not do it?
You know, it's going to come back to,
is this the right thing for the customer?
And that answers the question without having
to come ask Adam or myself.
When the product team is trying to make a decision,
let's run an experiment.
Let's get some data.
And once you have the data, understand
which one of the options is going
to drive the most growth for the customer.
So I just had an email a few minutes ago from another person
on the team asking a question about what they should
do in a particular situation where somebody was
in a trial asking for something beyond what we provide
in the trial.
And the answer as to what that person should do
is very clearly go above and beyond.
That's the kind of attitude that we take with everything.
Make sure that you're solving for the customer's success.
And I imagine everyone on your team understands
what the core is, not just you, the founders?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's clearly communicated in everything that we do
And everything that we ask of them.
Yeah.
I think as we've built the team, we've
also looked for people who can really
relate to small business.
They feel the same passion that we
do for helping small business owners.
And communication is key, even at a small startup.
The early days, you still have to make sure everybody's
aligned.
And those key tenants is kind of what aligns our team.