DA: 02:04
Hey Kasey. Thanks so much for joining me today on the SaaS breakthrough podcast. Really excited to have you here today. Really excited for this conversation. Want to talk a lot about what you guys are doing and the journey that you've gone through at your time at Postman some really interesting topics, but I would love for you first to explain a bit about Postman maybe when it was founded, who are the customer bases and what you guys are doing uniquely in the market place.
KB: 02:28
Cool. Thanks so much David for having me here. This is one of my favorite topics, which is Postman and all the cool marketing stuff we're doing here. Postman is a startup. We're based in San Francisco, although we started at Bangalore, India and like a lot of technical startups, we started as a side project of our now CEO. He was with a particular pain point he had when he was working at, I think it was Yahoo and working with APIs and so he's much articulate about this, but the gist of that is he just saw the need for a tool to make his life a little bit easier, so he created it and then he put it on the Chrome APP store and that was about 2012. It became massively popular, so popular that he decided that it was a good idea to create a paid version and a company around it.
KB: 03:17
And so the company was founded in 2014. So our target market at Postman is anybody working with APIs and it really started out primarily as who you, developers who work with APIs, back end, front end, Qa, Devops, people, anybody who is other testing an API or creating one or trying to figure how one work so as to incorporate it into an APP or a website. Now it's broader actually, there's a lot more people now work with develop work with APIs rather than just developers, developer advocates or evangelists, product managers, you know, we actually just had our first Postman conference a month ago and we had a CEO of a small startup who is mostly a sales guy, give a presentation on how he uses Postman to sell. So it's broadening, which is really a very cool thing to see.
DA: 04:11
Yeah, that's really, really cool. And it's so interesting how many startups happen that way, right? Just finding out one small problem to solve and it just explodes because you're solving a great problem. And so 2014 came the real business. When did you actually join the team and what does it look like from the business perspective, where there customers at that time?
KB: 04:30
Yeah, so I joined summer 2016, our CEO moved here to San Francisco from Bangalore to start an office and move our headquarters because it turns out most of our customers are in the US and Europe. So it made sense to start a sales marketing customer success location here. At the time, you know, we had launched the minimum viable product, a paid product about six months earlier, so he had a couple thousand customers. It was still pretty new. The vast majority of our team was in Bangalore and it still is right. That's where product and product design and engineering and Devops is all in Bangalore. Not so much on the marketing customer success or sales side. And yeah, so we had at the time probably about $3 million free users. A very small number of them were paid.
DA: 05:21
That's incredible. That just shows the attraction that was already taking place at that point with just those free users. So you're getting that minimum viable product out there. You're brought in to help with marketing. What was the big challenge that you were requested to come in to solve? What was going on at that time that you guys are really starting to hone in and obviously the minimum viable product now, how to get out there. What do you do?
KB: 05:45
So typically you know, this is, this is, this is why I joined Postman, right? Typically with marketing, your challenge with a small company or a new product is that no one's heard of it, so you have an awareness and a lead generation issue, but we still don't. We didn't have that problem. We still don't have that problem. 3 million people at the time used our product more like five, probably close to six now and so it's really not an awareness problem. It is an interesting awareness problem from a business standpoint because the developers knew who we were, but not necessarily the business folks. I have this great story right after I joined Postman that I went to visit a friend of mine who's a CEO of another small company in the city here and I went and sat with him at his desk. We were just chatting. It was in big old room. It isn't most startups, and he was kind of giving me a little bit of grief that he'd never heard of this company I had just joined and I said, well, I'm sure your developers have. And he kind of gave me a little bit more gap and I said, I turned to the room, stood up and said, who here uses Postman? And a bunch of hands went up and I'm like, see, you're right. It was really cool. Right. So that we don't have an awareness problem, which is really terrific. We have what I describe as a, what I call the five percent challenge. Like most of our users are what I would describe as a five percent user of Postman. They use about five percent of the features of the free product, which is just really a very rich and deep product and working with every portion of API in every stage of their lifecycle.
KB: 07:14
They probably done the very basic center, sent a request, exam the response, made sure the parameters are correct and moved on, which is terrific. Then for a Postman, that's a great use case of it. The thing is that if you're a 90 percent user of our free product, the value proposition and the, uh, the value preposition of the paid product is completely clear and really compelling. So if you're a 90 percent user, whether your organization needs the paid product and how you would use it is like kind of like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And I get that and I could use those two extra pieces and the additional use limit rate limits would help me totally make sense. But if you're a five percent user, the value proposition to the paid product just doesn't. It doesn't compute. And so the marketing challenge isn't persuading people who using the free product to become paid users. It's persuading the five percent user to become a 90 percent user and that is 100 percent education. It's completely education about how the free product can make your life a little bit easier as an API developer or product manager or whatever it is that you use the product.
DA: 08:23
So all of a sudden it becomes about how do we get you utilizing the product more, utilizing more of the feature, is to understand the value prop that we have to upgrade you. So now you're coming in, you've got to focus on education, you recognize the problem, you've circled the solution. What steps do you have to take to start dialing in that education? Obviously education is something that is a expansive things like it's more than just products, talking about how to use it.
KB: 08:52
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, the thing about too is that, in this case, when I started, we started with what is going to sound like the tritest most captain obvious statement, but bear with me for just a minute, I said, hey, do we have a newsletter? Because we should send out a monthly newsletter to these 3 million people who are using our product, and we had sent out one or two, we were getting like a 40 or 50 percent open rate. And our, our engineers were like, wow, there's something wrong with the news. Only half the people are opening it. And I kind of went, wow. Yeah. So I don't think that's so bad. And the great thing about our newsletter, having done these in the past and developer marketing in other places is that, we also are blessed to have lots of content, our community writes all the time about how, how they use Postman to do something. And so our newsletter from the minute we started was, was more of a curation activity rather than a, what are we going to write about it, write about this month. So we had this newsletter, people like it, you know, people open it and they click on it. And really we're just going for the lightest touch. This is kind of the pieces of what the community is doing with Postman and then since then we've added to that a feature reviews, so tutorials that are focused primarily on features so that again, the goal is to get people from five to 90, five to 90 percent as a user and some of that is awareness of features and some of that is use cases. We also did a number of case studies when, when customers are willing to talk to us because again, they were kind of a more concrete use case or tutorial and then going forward in all this content we're thinking about more like sort of deeper use cases, really like solutions, if you will.
KB: 10:47
How is it that you could really transform your, let's say QA function with all of the features in Postman and some examples on how to do that. So that's kind of the direction, but you have to start with a very basic stuff on newsletter, was the first one. We've also done a, a lot of presenting and meetups and conferences. As I mentioned, we did our first Postman conference in early June, which was terrific. It was really like a lot of education, like we did two days. The first day was all about Postman and the second day was all about using Postman and the second day were speakers from lots of different companies and all these interesting use cases. So it was a really like kind of a great set of material and content and community, which is a lot of, a lot of developing, a developer marketing of course.
DA: 11:40
So you're talking about education here in the newsletter and talking to them with case studies. But my question really is around how do you know to speak their language that way, you know, you're coming into marketing position or an education. You could easily have gone the route of education with a harder upsell, pushing harder to move to the next level. It's just really just from your experience in the past with developer markets that you know, that they only respond in a certain way or, or why did you choose to go such a kind of softer approach to, to move them forward?
KB: 12:15
Well, a couple of things, so it turns out of all things. My undergraduate degree is in software engineering, so I left it, I haven't done that in quite a while, but I feel like I come from the space in a way that my reaction to marketing in general is more consistent with the average developers, I think that it is to the average consumers. The other thing is I have experience in marketing to marketers. I'm a couple of years ago, a couple of companies ago, I worked for a company and our target market was marketers. Well, it turns out that marketers are just as skeptical and snarky and cynical about advertising and marketing as developers are. So I feel like I have. I am like the intersection of tough customer right when it comes to this. So I think that some of it. I do come from a place where my skepticism is deep and so I. I personally will always like kind of cocked an eyebrow when, when somebody is trying to pitch me on something. I think the other thing about developer marketing is that even though all of us humans have a short attention span in a short memory, you can't, you can't go back, right? And if you. So starting out slow, low and slow almost always is the right path, you know, you can always get a little edgier or a little pushier, but getting, starting it, starting out that way can be very jarring. And then lastly, I would say I, you know, I, I joined relatively early in Postman's life, but we, we, the company existed. There was already a brand and a voice and a personality of the brand and the most, honestly that the inclination when you start in an organization as a marketer is to sort of upgrade the brand.
KB: 13:58
And I, I feel like the first thing you should do is know the brand. And so I joined Postman and we already had a kind of a quirky sense of humor inside the APP. A little Star Wars jokes as the APP is loading, you know, the, the brand visual vocabulary is kind of retro space, a little bit of humor, adorable space person. So there's a, there's a lot about the brand that it would have been even inconsistent with the brand to push too hard to an edgy buy it now kind of thing. So I think all of those are kind of brought to a gestalt of this is how you should, we should talk to our customers. And I, I do feel like it's most also very consistent with an education goal. If our goal is to educate, you know, you can take the, you can adopt the tone of, I'm pretty sure this is going to help you, right? And without necessarily having to push to a sale. So I think all of that feeds together with it being clearly a strategy of starting quiet. The last thing I'd say, and maybe this was the first thing I should have started with, is there's really no substitute for talking to the customer themselves and in marketing and as company grows. As a company grows, it gets harder and harder. But you know, going to a meetup and talking to a customer is, there's just no substitute for hearing the voice firsthand in my experience. I've, when we've hired here and in marketing Postman, I've been really clear with everybody that there are technical companies where you can be in marketing and not really understand the product but we're just not one of them. We have to, we all have to be able to go to a conference and stand on the floor and ask answer the first dozen questions about the product very quickly as somebody with a very specific question about how to do, I don't know how to integrate Postman into their CICB pipeline. I can do about two answers into that before I get lost because I don't do that for a living. I do something else for a living. But, you know, we have to be able to answer those first couple of questions and you know, again, that there's no substitute for being able to talk to the customer and hear what they have to say and how they talk about themselves and their challenges.
DA: 16:14
That makes a ton of sense. And I mean, you gave us so much great information. There are so many different pieces of that. And I think it's also, it goes back to the goal there and I think so much of that was related back to your ultimate goal and I love the idea of the brand and upgrading that voice or to keep consistent with that voice that you think is really so great. But what about the community? You talked about that for a second. But you guys already had, when you joined, did you already have a community?
KB: 16:40
We still have a small online community. Actually, when people say community, my brain always cramps slightly because it can be so many different things. So let's start with what is usually what somebody means in that case, which is an online community. Right? Often that's when people are (inaudible). We have an online community that we host on Discourse. We originally hosted it on Slack. It's one of a couple of places. If you were a developer and you're trying to sort something out on Postman, there are a couple places you might go. Certainly might go to stack overflow and you would probably go to our community too. It's a we, if there's actual technical problems, we have both our customer success folks and our engineers look there if there are questions of: gee, this isn't working and I don't know why, the additional mix and that is the community contributes. We hand out a little bit of swag to people who answered a lot of questions and that's pretty cool in it so that, that community is nice and growing. But it's one of a couple of places that people might go. Twitter is another one, like we get a lot of conversation on Twitter, and we have one voice there but we're pretty open about letting anybody in Postman respond as a, as a Postman engineer. I know some companies don't do that, so we have a Twitter account that partially is, but we kind of used to promote new features and stuff and answer questions. But if, you know, if in the middle of the night somebody who's having a problem, typically people will respond directly from their accounts. And so in some sense that's a, that's a pretty open community and vice versa. People might respond if they have a to it to, you know, keeping us out of the loop if it's something that they've seen before. And then lastly I think of, I think of people contributing to Postman in general and maybe that's a combination of conferences and meetups and other things. And so I think that all of those together make a gestalt of are you part of the Postman community?
DA: 18:45
Yeah, I know. And I think that's such a good opportunity to learn from them, to hear from them. You're probably hearing the problems. How can we bring more education to x, y, and z because we're seeing this in our group, we're seeing this on Twitter more often. More people are talking about that. So you have this very close to the ground approach just gathering where education needs to be stronger. How do you guys kind of bring that into that customer ascension model? Are you guys looking at what that feedback is and just saying we need to make these videos or are you starting to think about things like how can we personalize the APP more to give education at the right time for the right people, is it like, is it deeper than that?
KB: 19:28
That's a really good question because it goes right to the point of, of scalability, right? And in some sense the input we get from customers from whatever form is, is small and we have to find a way to make it translatable to a much larger audience and accessible to a larger audience. Right? So we have a couple of things going on that we are, probably creating a more formal learning. We will be creating more formal learning modules for our, for our website. We, you know, we, what we do now is sort of a series of videos on whatever top set of topics people have told us they did. So if you were to go to our youtube channel, you'll see a five things to, five things to try if you, if you just started with Postman and there were a couple of videos and then there's more advanced features and you know, those, those will probably be making those more formal as we go forward.
KB: 20:30
But in addition, really, and I think this is true of a lot of SaaS products, the real gold standard would be to have that learning accessible in APP, right? Because you want to have an option for folks to learn what they need to learn without breaking whatever they're doing. We're breaking their workflow and you know, that's kind of tricky to do. Again, you can do it very quickly and very easily in an, in your face method. I mean, I'm sure we've all gotten the tool recently and had that had the equivalent of clippy trying to get you to do something and, and you know, the fact is that clipping was a really good idea. It just, it really is a great idea that you're, you're there and you know, and I as the APP know that I'm going to use Postman language for a minute. You know, I know that you've created a collection but you haven't created an environment. And I know also that, that when somebody learns about environments, their whole world opens up. So how do I, in an appropriate and non annoying and accessible way, offer you exactly the right education at that time that will let you progress without interrupting what you're trying to get done. And so that, you know, that's really the gold standard. That's where we want to go and that is, you know, that's of course a marketing perspective, but it's from a product perspective and like everybody in the company agrees that that's, that's what we want and how do we do that? How do we know, do we were looking into how to gamify like is this, is, is the, is the trick to this making it something that feels entertaining or feels, feels part of the flow. Again from my perspective, because I come from a marketing background and I'm one of those people that kind of thinks that well-placed advertising is better than content, right? As long as it's relevant, it works for me. So I'm all about the contextual clues, right? We want to have really deep information about how likely it is. If you've done these three things that this is going to be relevant to you. You know, just to go sideways...
DA: 22:49
Do you do surveys for that or is just behavioral?
KB: 22:49
We do, we do surveys and we look at anonymized behavior, summarize behavior. Yeah, but, but it's a, it's a tricky one, right? Because if you ask some, I don't know, there are only two times you can ask people to tell me what, tell them what they want to do without changing what they actually are doing. So it's tricky.
DA: 23:08
Yeah, absolutely. And you start to go down all of these very long paths of just so many different behavioral areas that people could be and all of a sudden you have a hundred different pipelines and you're trying to think of the perfect education for each one and it can get really tricky, you know, I think for us, especially when we started to do this, it was like what are the major ones? And we can break it down later, but just understanding that. And so do you think like in-app education is like, we use Intercom and we have specific endpoints based on what users do and then we have in app messages that pop up based on that and it's just like a bottom right pop up that comes up with, you know, a little message. Do you think that is the idea or do you think it's more like the actual product itself needs to have new UI that is gamified interface focal point? But not too in your face with marketing.
KB: 23:58
Yeah. You know, so we use Intercom also and I do think that there's a way we don't use it exactly like that, but you know, I'm fine with saying that, you know, with this sort of situation, you have the very best, web real estate on the planet, right? Because you know exactly who your customer is right there. But I, I do think that the trick is to integrate it more into the app, right? That it rather than a rather than a slightly smarter banner ad, not that a slightly smarter banner ad isn't the greatest, isn't a great thing because it really is right. Even a slightly smarter banner ad would, would help my life in almost any situation. But I do think that having it integrated in the app in a way that it feels a little bit more authentic has a much better hope of reaching the customer at exactly the right time.
KB: 24:55
And then of course, you know, implementation is this, the devil is in the details. Having that very small snippet of education or information that lives within the app provide a visual or an educational or a logical path to out of app learning, is pretty critical. So if I have, back to my example about environments, if, if we've, if we have a nice little piece in the app that helps someone understand how an environment and an environment variable can improve what they're doing, there has to be a backup on the website, in our learning center or in our, formal courses that we're creating that, that visually and from an educational standpoint are connected to that. So you got this little in-app piece, got that. Oh well that actually looks pretty interesting, where do I go to learn more about that and know we really have to provide that backup because otherwise it's, you know, the necessary shortness of what's in app will just hang there and not be sufficient. So I think there's a lot to get right at the same time with that.
DA: 26:05
Yeah, absolutely. No, it was a ton of, lots of variables there. Lots of things to test, right? Like the best, the best word for marketers. But I would love to know, you know, later this year, I know you guys are just kinda going through the brainstorming session right now, what does this look like? I would love to learn later this year how things come out, what you guys decide to do and what that becomes as far as results and speaking of results, if you guys aren't necessarily always focused on acquisition as your main marketing goals, it's more about education, customer ascension. What are those KPIs that you use? Is it mostly just related back to the sales or is it like customer happiness? How do judge education as a marketing initiative?
KB: 26:46
Yeah. Yeah. So we have lots of KPIs. I have a long list that we keep track of, as an overall marketing goals though we have, we have some broad goals. One is, and they're all things that we believe add up to the revenue goal, right? That we're trying to get to. Right? So that's the thing about KPIs is you have to, like at every level have to believe that if you do these 10 things, the two things that feeds into it will get done if you do these 20 things or 10 things, right? So, so top level we have a goal about just app downloads, right? We have to continue to grow our, our base of people using the app. And we have a goal about the number of customers, number of paying. So really a number of app downloads which feeds into number of free users both on goal and then we have an aspiration to reach 100,000 paying customers this year and you know, we're good, it's still a goal, but you know, it's great. And then we have marketing goals underneath that, right? That you have to believe add up to that. And it's everything that you imagined you would measure in marketing, number of visitors to the site growing, bounce rate going down, usage of certain pages. So all, a lot of website goals, bunch of social media goals, a bunch of content consumed goals. How many videos watched and we don't actually gate any of our content because we just, I'd rather have the person read the white paper and look at the case study and watch the video, then get their name and know they did it. So I just, we just keep track of not how many leads we get, but how many people did those things. And you know, so maybe 20 or 30 of those that add up to, you know, number of downloads, number of free customers (inaudible) paying customers.
DA: 28:38
That makes a ton of sense. I actually like that non gated approach because you're just looking at usage increases and is this being consumed. How long has it been consumed for. Kind of make those numbers a little simpler to look at and the whole process easier for the customers?
KB: 28:53
Yeah. You know, it's a very controversial topic. The average. I would say that the average marketing person thinks I've, I've taken leave of my senses on that and I, and I can't really argue. I just can't. I just really, if our goal is education and we believe that people understanding what we're doing, it will make a difference. I can't put anything in front of they consuming that content or it's just not, it's not strategically consistent. But I have that argument once a week with, you know, with lots of people about how you're not keeping track of the person, how can you, you won't, you won't be able to market to them later or you won't know that what they've done. You won't be able to track exactly what kind of ROI of specific which incidentally every one of those criticisms is true. It's just that if, if our goal is to educate, then we, we can't, we can't, we have to make it super easy.
DA: 29:46
You said strategically consistent and I absolutely love that phrase. It's like having values that you're basing in marketing almost like your company values, but you have marketing values and you have to base on that. And I absolutely love that. We've started to take that same approach. How do we have marketing values that we can lean against? And I'll end this last section here by just asking like what has been the biggest winner, but it's been about a year and a half since you've been there almost two years. What's been the biggest win in those two years? Obviously you guys have grown immensely. Just hearing the number of users your goal is to get to. So congratulations on that. But, but what's been, what's been awesome?
KB: 30:20
Well, I'm going to shift when you said that the thing that popped to mind is something that we haven't talked about so far, which is, which I think is related to the developer, understanding the developer community. One of the things that we do is we have what we call our API network. And not to get too technical, I apologize, but essentially when people create, work with APIs in Postman, what they, what they do in creating a collection is essentially a really good record on how to use that API. Maybe their own API. And what we discovered is when people do that, people like, I don't know the square API, if you used it, they can download their version of Postman that gives you everything you need in one little package into your version of Postman, how to use the Square API. And so we created this thing we call the API network, which is essentially a very nice curated list of, of APIs. And it's not just a list though, it's not just the Square, that Square has an API, it's, it includes the ability to download a really detailed technical description of the Square API created by Square. So we knew this was you know, this is kind of motoring along and people were giving us things occasionally and that seemed like a good idea. And, and last I think I want to say December we sent in one of our newsletters, we decided to promote this and we promoted it slightly before but not in our newsletter. And we gave it a little bit of a lead spot. And we articulated what the value proposition, which is, you know, our API Network is everything you need to know about all the APIs you want to know.
KB: 32:12
And I think I was on vacation when we did this. I don't, seem like a bad idea. Like it had the most overwhelming response. We get thousands of emails responding to like try. Like it was really overwhelming and like I just, I guess I don't know how to replicate that necessarily, but I would say that it was the perfect storm of, you know, a nicely laid out communication and a pain point, a real pain point. And I like, it exploded. Like I, you know, it was, it was really fascinating and really, and we felt like we could really do something for the customer this way. It had, it has a benefit for Postman too. But that was almost, it was kind of a nice to have. And I just, I wish I could say that there's an obvious formula but this no clear communication and pain point. Wow. That again, back to captain obvious. But that was a really big win and one that, you know, I really try to replicate like what, how can we get that nice combination for the customer?
DA: 33:12
Yeah, I think you did a good job of trying to look at it from like retrospective, like what works here. And it's sometimes the simple things work best, right? Like how do we find something that is a pain point in our community and we solve that and communicate it. Well, I mean that is the basis of marketing. So it sounds like that really was a big win. And sometimes people ask for advice or they want to hear things in this, you want to say something complex, but sometimes you just say the simple things and if they can figure that out, it's like, that is truly the biggest takeaway you can get in your business. That's amazing.
KB: 33:42
Exactly. Exactly.
DA: 33:44
Yeah. And what about later in 2018? Where are you guys taking things? Is anything changing in marketing for your team?
KB: 33:51
I think we are, we're thinking more about, about solutions as I said how is it that we can not present just a feature to the customer but maybe an entire solution around a pain point and maybe that's what, you know, maybe that's like my, my earlier comment about the API network. Maybe that's what it is, is we provided a small solution not a solution. So that's a good deal of it. I think we're going to be, we're going to be getting a little bit bigger in terms of the team, but we're still pretty small and I, you know, I think we have a, we have a lot to educate on, so just a deeper and broader on, on education.
DA: 34:31
Yeah, absolutely. Well you guys are doing absolutely incredible. Sounds like growth been amazing and you know, just excited to see the journey. Would love to check back in again later this year and see how that education does go. It sounds really, really interesting and powerful and I'd love to learn exactly what you guys do, but let's do this. Let's jump over to our lightning round questions. Just five quick questions. I'll ask you if you want to give the best piece of advice that you have. First thought that comes to your head. It's really fun little time. You ready to go?
KB: 34:56
Sure.
DA: 34:57
Yeah, let's do it. Alright. What advice would you give for early stage SaaSs companies starting marketing today?
KB: 35:03
I would keep it lean and listen to your customer.
DA: 35:08
Love that. Absolutely. What marketing skill do you think is vital for marketing teams to improve and build on today?
KB: 35:15
Ah, easy. Easy, easy peasy on that one, understanding the product. You have to be a product expert. You have to be the person, I once was at a conference and someone said, wow, are you a product manager? And I'm like, nope. I'm just marketing. That's what you need.
DA: 35:31
Such a great answer. So many people overlook that part of that in marketing. What about the best resource you'd recommend for marketing education?
KB: 35:38
Marketing education. Whew. Wow. That is a good one. I think the best place I've learned about marketing is when is it? Various times in my life when I've been able to have a community of marketers in similar companies, like sometimes if you're a small company, your VC, might have a marketing round table and they'll invite all their portfolio, company marketing people in. That is absolutely the best source of information. Sometimes you can set one up yourself, but really the couple of people like you need a network of people in companies, roughly the same size, maybe similar businesses, not super the same. Those are people doing it are the best source of information.
DA: 36:21
Yeah, that sounds amazing. Do some type of marketing round table mastermind event where people can just kinda network and get together. That'd be really cool.
KB: 36:27
Yeah. If i didn't already have a job I would do that, would make everybody's life better.
DA: 36:30
Totally. Totally. Feel you on that. What about your favorite marketing tool that you can't live without?
KB: 36:36
Yeah. Nowadays, oddly my favorite marketing tool is Airtable. It's kind of like a, it's like a spreadsheet only much, much better. It's just a good way of organizing things. I use almost all marketing tools, I've used all of them all, you know, and you know, they all have quirks and depending on the day I have favorites, but my new favorite, all of my new favorites when you asked me about a tool are going to be about project management tools. So my current favorite is Airtable.
DA: 37:05
Used it, love it. Great brand, great company. What about a brand business or team that you admire today?
KB: 37:12
I am very impressed with Airbnb. I just, I don't know them per se, so I'm only a consumer of their external marketing, but I'm very impressed at how they've extended the brand in a way that doesn't interfere with their core value. Like I've never used any of their excursions, but you know, they're interesting to me, like an eye they've marketed to me in a way that doesn't keep me from doing what I, what I usually use it for, which is, you know, instead of a hotel in a major city. But I, their brand is very, very sophisticated and a very nice light touch.
DA: 37:50
Oh, I totally agree. I love their brand. And you said that very well and I think that's almost exactly what you were alluding to before, which is like how do we educate about more parts of our product without being in your face and that's what they do really well with those excursions.
KB: 38:03
Maybe that's why I like them.
DA: 38:06
Well that's awesome. What, first of all, I just want to thank you Kasey, so much for, for being on the show today. We talked about a ton of great stuff. Again, I'm excited to see where you guys go. See if you guys set your goals by the end of the year and we'd love to have you back on the show, but ust a big, big thank you for myself and the entire SaaS breakthrough community for jumping on and sharing with us today. So thank you so much.
KB: 38:26
I really appreciate the opportunity, it was lots of fun.
DA: 38:28
It was a lot of fun and wish you a great day ahead and have a good one. So a big thank you and shout out to the Postman team and the Postman company, especially Kasey for coming on today's show. It was an incredible podcast. I hope you guys learned a ton. It was really the first time we've talked about education in this light, where you actually have a tougher market and acquisition isn't really where you're putting all your effort. Instead you're looking at revenue expansion. How do you grow lifetime value? How do you increase product usage, so we're seeing education in a totally different light. It was a wonderful episode. It's really exciting. I'm excited to see where they take this education this year, so we'll definitely look forward to bringing them back on, seeing what their experiments kind of churn out, what they're doing, the organic style of of education inside the app that they want to do where it's not too shabby. (...)
About Kasey Byrne:
