The Entrepreneurial Paradox: Goals, Happiness, and Continual Climbing with Ariel Assaraf, CEO of Coralogix

In this episode, our host, Dan Balcauski, sits down with Ariel Assaraf, CEO of Coralogix, to uncover the incredible journey behind scaling a SaaS company. Ariel shares his experience transitioning from highly classified systems in homeland security to founding his venture, Coralogix. With competition from established players in the SaaS space, Ariel dives into the importance of pricing and the business model in shaping customer perceptions. Get ready to learn about the secrets of effective pricing pages, the value of mentors and investors, and the constant pursuit of overcoming challenges in the world of SaaS scaling. So, grab your headphones and get ready to uncover the strategies and insights behind Ariel's incredible journey with Coralogix in this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets!

Guest bio:
Ariel is the CEO of Coralogix, which is revolutionizing how companies analyze their operational, application, infrastructure, and security data. Ariel co-founded Coralogix nine years ago, serving initially as Chief Product Officer and taking the helm as CEO in 2019. From his early career in Israeli Military Intelligence to his leadership roles at Verint Systems and now Coralogix, Ariel has amassed an enviable blend of technical prowess and strategic acumen. Known for his tenacity and innovative spirit, Ariel brings a unique perspective to our conversation.

Guest links:
Coralogix.com
Ariel on LinkedIn
Coralogix on LinkedIn
Sales@coralogix.com

Transcript

Dan Balcauski: 0:03

Hello and welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that dives into the trenches with the leaders of the best scale up B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Bakowski, founder of Product Tranquility. In each episode, I bring you interviews with CEOs navigating the challenging journey from startup to scale up and beyond. Today we have the privilege of welcoming Ariel Assaraf. Ariel is the c e O of Coralogix, which is revolutionizing how companies analyze their operational application infrastructure and security data. Ariel fo co-founded Coralogix nine years ago, serving initially as Chief product Officer and taking the helm as c e O in 2019. From his early career in Israeli military intelligence to leadership roles at Variance Systems, and now Coralogix, Ariel has amassed an enviable blend of technical prowess and strategic acumen known for his tenacity and innovative spirit. Ariel brings a unique perspective to our conversation today. So without further ado, let's dive into Ariel's journey, the secret to success, the strategies he's used to scale. Coralogix. Let's dive in. Welcome Ariel to SaaS Scaling Secrets.

Ariel Assaraf: 0:57

Hey. Thanks Dan. Thanks for having me.

Dan Balcauski: 0:59

Well, I'm excited for our conversation today. For our audience, could you just briefly introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about your journey in the SaaS world.

Ariel Assaraf: 1:07

Yeah, of course. So I think you, first of all, thanks for the intro. It was almost embarrassing. I, I think that the initial steps we made in SaaS world were actually Coralogix. We came from, my background was Homeland Security and then private company that does Homeland Security. And so, My main experience was more of the on-prem, highly classified systems. And then when we started Coralogix, it was a lot of it was also a new market in general SaaS. We, we started in, in early 2015. There were already a lot of players, but it wasn't as mature as it is today. And in our space, there were a few big ones already that we needed to compete with. And I think one of the biggest things that we've learned, Creating a SaaS company at the time was how do you price it the right way or what's the power of price and what's the power of, of, of the business model you serve your product with to customers and how much it affects the way that they perceive your brand and they perceive your company? We, I think. In any product, but in SaaS products beyond anything else. Even more so when it's a a zero touch, bottom up product-led growth, the pricing speaks messaging probably more than any other page on their website. And, and that's one of the bigger lessons we've learned.

Dan Balcauski: 2:37

Well, that's fantastic. And you're, I promised the audience, I, I didn't pay Ariel to say that. For those of you know, I spent a lot of my time in the pricing world. We will touch on that here in a little bit. But I just wanna ask a little bit more about, so you said you spent more time in the on-prem defense world into Coralogix. What, what prompted you to start the company?

Ariel Assaraf: 2:58

Yeah, and so when we started it at VER, we had. Massive, massive deployments that are, nation state. Scale, and we had to monitor them obviously, and everything was mission critical. And the system we've ha we've had back then were ultra expensive, hard to maintain, hard to use didn't give us the productivity we needed. And me and a, and a couple friends actually from, from very at time, decided to go ahead and start something. When we started, we didn't, we didn't even think of it as a SaaS product. We just said, okay, let's do something better than what we used at Verin. And we started meeting VCs and we presented this concept to them. It was fully on-prem and one of those VCs, which is the great Israeli vc actually that just closed their first fund at eight out of eight exits, and the partner there sat with us. He heard the full pitch and he said, you guys are very talented, smart people. But all this pitch of deploying in the customer site, heavy enterprise deals, That, served as a, a Windows application. It feels like the eighties. And so I, I'd probably rather not, not continue with you guys. And we sat outside and we said, first of all, we had a good laugh at it. We said that's, well, we had a lot of nos in the beginning, but that was certainly the most insulting no that we had from any VC at the time. But it was also a wake up call for us. You you many times, even more, when you have some experience in managerial and over manager experience in corporates, you can get a little arrogant in how you see the world or how you view your, your knowledge of a certain area and you're like, yeah, I read a couple memos. I probably understand the topic better than a lot of people, but you don't. And we, we really started digging into the, that DevOps movement it was called back then to understand what, what is this all about and how big is migration to cloud and how scale and the way people manage and distribute system changes in a way that makes, actually makes the on-prem solutions obsolete. And, and we, we understood that we have to completely change our vision at that time. And we said, okay. And, and really back then in our space, we're talking early 2015, we didn't even know Datadog. It was like a tiny company. Sumo was very early, was like a high flyer, but, but an early company, maybe series B or C. So we were looking around us and we saw. When we started from logs, so we saw, we saw Splunk. It was Elasticsearch obviously, but was all also early on, and there was AppDynamics and Log Logic, but they were all on prem. We, we didn't think that there was a market that's interesting enough. But when we, the more we learned about how these new environments look like, we understood that, this is probably our way to go. And I think the, the biggest thing that struck me at that point when you think of motive, motivation to start a company and motivation to start this company was, I, I understood that I actually don't know, like after all these years at corporate and, and, and, and 8,200, I actually don't know anything about this huge movement that's happening. And this is where we actually got a lot more motivated to, to go ahead and learn. And, and build core logics and, we, we will talk about the story. It took like three years to really get the idea. But at that point, things started really hitting off

Dan Balcauski: 7:03

So many good things. There number one, when you go into a VC pitch meeting getting compared to technology in the eighties, not a great outcome. So unless you're going in wearing neon, And slap bracelets. Just hoping for that comparison. Probably not the outcome you're hoping for in, in a general sense, but, but that's a great story nonetheless. And so one, one thing that's interesting though is that it, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe core Logix has, has transformed from a pure log analytics solution to more of a full stack observability platform with logs, metrics, a APM, and security. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution? What prompted that shift?

Ariel Assaraf: 7:42

Talk about the broader perspective we have. Logics had transformed maybe four or five times, and it is transforming every year. We're, we're operating at a very high paced market and we have tough competition and our competition reinvents, or the good competition reinvents itself also. So the first evolution was when we started the idea was let's create machine learning models on top of existing tools. And then we said we got involved to something that also collect the logs because people want everything in a single place and that also didn't go too well. And then somewhere 2018, mid 2018, we said, okay, we have to evolve to a streaming engine that analyzes data and stream cuz it gives better performance to our clients. And then we evolved again. Into streaming engine with a way for the client like externalized to the client. He has a way to determine which data pipeline his data goes through to save costs. That was the next evolvement. And then we said, okay, let's also do security cuz it's similar to logs and sim. That was the next step. And then we said let's do full stack observability and. Let's do everything in stream. That was the next evolvement. But then we said, let's create a remote query engine. So we don't store any data with us. And now it's a, it's a vision. This is, so what we're doing now, we call this the data list, data platform. We don't store any data with us. We stream and then we put it on your own archive and we create that remotely. And, and, and now something that's kind of. In process is how do we make this an infrastructure that is not only our product, but larger companies that want to serve observability to their clients can use that because it's efficient, stable, easy to run, high value to the customer. And that's another evolution that we'll go through. In, in general, the more you learn about a market, the more you evolve and, and understand the customer's needs. And to your specific question, I, I think today companies in our space that wouldn't serve at least the three main pillars of logs, metrics, and tracing and probably security are gonna have a very hard time. And then there are a bunch of niche solutions around it, like synthetic monitoring and realism monitoring and ci cd monitoring. That are also in our target and, and everything is converging to single large platforms that do observability for UN security.

Dan Balcauski: 10:43

I could definitely appreciate the, the pull of the DevOps or IT professional that wants sort of single pane of glass. One of the challenges I'm sure you've always run into, in, in scaling Coralogix has been alright, we. Startup scale up limited resources even, even when you're at a large company, it still feels like you don't have enough resources to get everything done. How did you manage that tension of okay, we, we have log analytics, we we're starting to add these other things, what is the tension between, Really nailing the, the use cases we have versus going into those other markets. You said, I, I think it sounded like one poll on that was definitely your competitors were evolving. It seems like, obviously Datadog, you mentioned before they do, everything and they're always constantly adding on, how did you what was that conversation like and how did you guys avoid getting too far over your skis by going, going broad and, and not deep enough? How did you manage that?

Ariel Assaraf: 11:41

So, Think it, it depends on how you look at it. You can say, you guys are doing logs very well. Why? Why would you get into new markets like tracing and metrics? Or you can say, well, the market had changed. There's no more logs, metrics and tracing. There's monitoring or observability and, and it's one product that has everything and then it, it's just a necessity in terms of resources and focus, R and d is still two thirds of Coralogix. We're 300 people. And the majority of people here are still engineers. There's a lot of investments that we're making there, that's for sure. And one now that we're going and looking at the next generation of products that we're, we wanna release, we're also starting to look at inorganic can we buy a company that does real user monitoring very well? Can we buy a company that does synthetic monitoring really well? So for me, there was never really tension. And another thing that contributed to that is that the way that our products built, there's no database, like a logging database and then a metric database and the tracing everything is the same stream. So I'm, I'm, I'm mainly focused at. Building the use cases. Our key constraint here is not the backend and technology. It's domain expertise and product people that understand the exact needs of the customer.

Dan Balcauski: 13:14

You saw basically an overall evolution of, of the market demanding observability and that, you had the sounds like technical infrastructure, agility to be able to accommodate those use cases and meet that market demand. That's, that's excellent. I wanna switch a little bit into a shift to some of your challenges in, in scaling the company. And so you had mentioned in. A previous conversation that in 2016 Coralogix almost ran out of funds after a potential investor pulled a term sheet. You tell us a little bit more about that situation and, and how you managed it. I imagined it was a, a, a heart stopping moment for you as a, as an budding entrepreneur.

Ariel Assaraf: 13:55

I think. Almost e every quarter between 2016 and 2019. We were on the verge of running out of funds in in 2016. So what happened? We'd launched at end of 2015, and I think a few of the things that we've done wrong is when we were validating the product, instead of really understanding what our customers are looking for and what they need and what are the pains that they have, we just. Pitch them what we're building and, and, and hope that they say, yeah, I want that, or, I like that. And, we came to a bunch of customers and said, do you want a machine learning company that will analyze your data on Splunk automatically? Yes. I, I definitely want that. And so we were building that out. And when we launched it, a bunch of people signed up. I think that couple, first couple months, we probably had more inbound than we have today. I'm talking. Tens of signups every day from very interesting companies like Fortune 500 companies, because there was not a lot in the market. And we did some good content PR and we were talking about a big pain point. It was a big pain point, but then everything exploded out of those hundreds of signups. And tens of POCs, we've ended up with like three small paying accounts. And then we met that, that investor, that, that genuinely saw the potential and said, well, you know, probably we just need to fix the tech, which in, in my view, it's not easy, but investors see that, oh yeah, that's the easy part. And then he gave us a term sheet. But what happened then is the company had. We were just six people, but three, three founders and three people that were hired and the company went through so much crap at the time with all these customers and every, and everything that those three people just got tired of it and left. And said, we don't care about funding round or anything. We, we, we just don't believe that this is possible. And they just left. And then the investor just freaked out and pulled the term sheet. And the funny thing is that it's a reputable investor and it was a nice, a round. And when we had that term sheet, we went to the Microsoft Accelerator and they're like, oh, great. You guys have this term sheet and this investor, and it's interesting technology you're in. But then meanwhile he pulled a term sheet. We're starting the accelerator and there's a bunch of funded successful companies there, and there's us three people with no money in a bank and no customers. And, and, and I remember the, the table next to us was spot inst that later became spot and sold to NetApp for like half a billion dollars. And we were sitting there just. Looking at each other, having really nothing. The system was nothing. And hearing them shouting, yay, 60,000 m r r great. And, giving high fives. And I was looking at them and I remember saying to myself, how do you ever, ever get to 60,000 a month? It, it seemed so impossible. But it, it, it saved us because I think if we didn't have that so we could not cancel because, we took a spot there and it was a long process to get in, so you don't wanna just back off and leave your space empty. And so we just, we went there and, and, and, and so even though we didn't have customers or employees or money we were still sitting together every day for like 10 hours. And so, We started planning and those, that accelerator made some intros to some VCs, and a couple of them actually saw the potential and said, one of the, he's a, he's a brilliant guy. He was one of the, the first employees at Microsoft and then he was the project manager from Microsoft 95. And then he's moved to Israel and opened the Microsoft r d center here with thousands of people now and billions in revenue. And he said, I've been through the first generation of, of, of logs. Splunk was the second generation. This is the third generation of logs and I want in. And then out of, really out of nowhere, we got like a 1.8 million funding round. And that was the, the second ev, the, the first evolution of Coralogix of building the, the full product, not just the algorithms. Brought in a new team and we started building and we had like half a million dollars credit for Major cuz they gave, we got it in the accelerator. It was, it was actually, it's funny how when you go back and all those things happened and for somehow it paved the path to exactly where we are today. And then we launched this new product and we did a product hunt launch and it was great again. We were first place at a day where Apple released something and MasterCard released this new smart card, whatever, because the product looks good and we did a good job in marketing and, and, and, and we did a nice animation. But again, all those customers crashed on the system this time. The system didn't crash they were able to, to log in. They were able to send data. Everything was okay, but it was just not valuable enough. And we had like 10 customers that were rather small. I remember, dude, I flew back then from Israel to San Francisco for two weeks to close a$600 a month customer. And I, I worked so hard on that customer, I was so proud that we, we nailed that one. But we started, at least started feeling what it's like to close a customer and have someone using your, your product. But then it, it didn't take off. And in, in a couple years later, when we started 2018, The, the CEO had left and the CT O had left because it was just no one was seeing where this is going. And obviously the board wasn't very satisfied at the time. But they still believed in us, which was interesting. And this is where we started this second evolution of, okay, we need to think of something that's fundamentally different from an an, an infrastructure point of view. No, it's just. A feature, not just a, a small nuance, but how do we find something that's ultimately different in a way that people can easily understand? And this is where we came up with stream our engines. We had a lot of knowledge in Kafka and Kafka streams, and it's just knowledge that we had in our team. We said, okay, let's use that and start moving some of the services to the streaming engine. It'll make us more stable. Allow us to handle large customers even though we're small. And, and, and we came up with the first feature that was based on that was called tags, which was a automatic version comparison. And this is where we started feeling that something's happening. We got to like 10,000 a month, 20,000 a month. 30,000 a month, I thought at the time. Okay. We made it 30,000 a month. Oh my God. This is like,

Dan Balcauski: 21:54

You're halfway to that 60,000 a month, you, you thought you'd never get to.

Ariel Assaraf: 21:57

exactly. I saw the 60. I didn't see a path to a million a year, but I saw the path to 600 a year, 700 a year. But the board probably more experienced these things, saw a real potential and gave us a bridge loan of two and a half million dollars. And then things really started hitting off and we started moving more and more services towards that. We ended 2018 at a million dollars. And that was a turning point for us with some big clients.

Dan Balcauski: 22:33

There's so many things I wanna touch on it there and I could talk, you might have to come back for round two cause we're not gonna have enough time to touch on all the things I wanna talk about. But so, so that's an amazing rebirth story. It sounds like, multiple times it was looking like the end of the road. It lost some folks along the way who maybe didn't believe in the, the end vision. And so you start to see subtraction 2018, I believe. In 2019, you decided to turn down an acquisition offer, so things start to bubble up. What led to the decision to remain independent?

Ariel Assaraf: 23:07

Well. Interesting question. I think in, in beginning of 2019, that's where we're like 1.2 million. We had an acquisition offer that was low tens of millions. I'm not even 30 at the time. So it's like nice amount of money for me way beyond my expectations. When we started the company, it was, it was a good offer and we, we took the term sheet, we signed the term sheet and we started the process. It was longer than we thought. It was like three months of due diligence and legal, and everything's ready now, and there's an s p a ready to go. But there's something about having that s p a ready to go in front of you. That, and that's, that's, a sad and, and good thing about humans. Whatever is yours is immediately your baseline and you don't care about it anymore. I don't know how to explain that, but. You'd want something so bad. And once you have it, the only thing you're, you think about is, okay, what's what now? And having a, an agreement that's ready to sign with that number and you know exactly what you're gonna get and having it on a table for a few days is sort of having it. And only then after chasing it so hard and all the dreams that you thought like that was your dream when you started. Only then it's like, okay, you have it and you really are able to ask yourself, okay, what's next? What now? And I and Yoni, my, my, my partner, our cto, we just sat together and we said, you know what? We're not gonna, we're not as passionate about anything else as we are on this. We just started a journey. Things look good and. One of our board members was at the m and a committee they assigned a com, assemble a committee. I, I spoke to him one-on-one and I said, I, I don't wanna sell. He said, you know what? I, I support you. He resigned from the m and a committee and said, okay, let's do a, let's do a funding round. The problem was we didn't have money even to pay the salaries for that month. We were counting on that acquisition. Miraculously I found that I had a reseller that owed us$250,000 that we never collected. Cuz I was in charge of collection. I was sitting on bill.com, they had this utility to create invoices and I was doing the invoices every month. And I started calling their c e o and telling you gotta pay me this week, dude. You have to, and they paid slowly on the 29th. We got the last check and it was in the 30th. And then the first we paid salaries on time. Now we have a month, but the SBA is gonna expire, the agreement. And we have a board meeting Monday to approve it. So I call. A partner at Olive, that I've known for a while. His name's Aaron and they, they rejected us twice at the committee. So I call him and I say, Hey, listen, it's me, the CEO now. That's the offer we have to sell. is where the company's in. This is the potential that I see. I think it could sell. Like 10 million easily, which at that point seemed to me like the wildest lie that I can tell to get him excited. But again, we're, we're far from there now, thank thankfully. And he said, you know what? Let me give you an offer. I said, great. And he said, let me set up a committee next Monday with my team, and I'll push this. I said, well I, I have a board meeting next Monday, so I can't wait. He said, but we're abroad, we're not even in Israel. They sat down at this room, no one heard anything. It was like 30 minutes. And I had to get away from the office to do that on Zoom. No one heard anything. And they were like, okay, just, just do it. Just let, let, let us send you an offer. And I texted him, great, but I need an offer now. So he WhatsApp me the terms of the term sheet because you wait for a lawyer and it takes too much time. So he WhatsApp me and I said, dude, I can't go with that to the board. And he said, just tell them there's no chance we're backing off. We're doing this. And I said that to the board and they took it. So, and then we rejected and then we took the term sheet and then they got in and. That year ended at 2.5, and ever since we weren't behind a hundred, 150% every year.

Dan Balcauski: 28:25

Oh my God, what an amazing story. I'm gonna start calling you the Phoenix cuz you keep on rising from the ashes of what looks like the end of the company over and over again. Avoiding almost certain annihilation and, and pulling it out and doing quite well on the, on the other end of it. Props to you for the courage of your convictions. What a epic series of events there. A couple things you pointed out. The, the term we were talking about before, the baseline, the psychologist call that the hedonic treadmill. No matter how much pleasure we achieve that or we are baseline resets, unfortunately, the sad reality of the, the human mind. And you pointed out another. Paradox that I, I hold to very much so in my life, which is that we simultaneously need to have goals because they direct our attention and focus. But the paradox is we have to also know fully that achieving those goals won't make us happy. We need to have them because it, it focuses on the future and, and directs our energy so we don't feel like we're wasting our lives, but also, that achievement. You walk across the stage, your graduation, you were the top of your class, senior, and now you're welcome to the ranks of the unemployed when you don't have a job. Or the low man on the totem pole in your company, or, or the entrepreneur that nobody wants to buy their product whatever it might be. So always another hill to climb. But no, that's fantastic. You tease at the beginning. There's so many more things I want to ask you about the scaling a aspects, but I've often said there's only three ways to grow a SaaS business, acquisition, retention, monetization. Spend a little bit of time talking about monetization cuz you brought it up at the beginning as one of the, the key things that you've learned in your time growing Coralogix. What have you learned about pricing a monetization as you've grown your company?

Ariel Assaraf: 30:14

We've learned that the pricing page is a critical page to the messaging of the website beyond just, oh, here's the price that you're buying. And I always give the same example to people. If you went on an e-commerce now that sells t-shirts and you saw a t-shirt of a brand that you've never seen before and you don't know anything about it. Not the, the fabric, not anything. But then you go and you say, add the cart, and you, and you see that t-shirt costs$2. You already infer a lot. If it's a hundred dollars. If it's a thousand dollars, you already have something in mind about that t-shirt. You have thought schemes that you already built around how price reflects in the product that you're buying. And so, When we looked at pricing, we said, we build this technology that's very hard to explain to people what's special about streamer and instream analysis, and then query from remote and everything. But if my pricing page tells a story that's completely different than anyone else's story, that helps people understand my technology and how I'm getting there. So he said our pricing page will explain. How you can choose exactly which data pipeline your data goes through, and then you pay only for the actual analysis that you need instead of just storing everything and then exploring it at the same rate for any data, any type, any importance. And that resonated with people. The other thing is, and it's funny, we say that to customers. We say we make good money, we make good margin, and still we cost a third of the closest competitor. In some use cases, we cost a 10th of the closest competitor. You infer from that on how better, more efficient our backend end technology are. And so when people enter the pricing page, they see an architecture diagram, not just numbers and prices. They see how it reflects for the different data use cases they see q and a. How does the pricing work, but also how is technology enabling that pricing? And when we looked at customer journeys on the website, it's almost always the same. It's main page, obviously product pricing and about page that we've learned. That's also very important. Okay, I see this company that's interesting. Let's see the products. Okay, I need that. Let's see the pricing. Oh wow, that's great. It's actually a lot cheaper than what I have today. Who the hell are these guys? Is it a serious company, serious people? Are they well funded? Do they have enough customers? And so they go to the about page, they're like, oh, 2000 accounts. Oh, they have Advent and Brighton Park and others under board. Oh, great. The founders. They've been there for 10 years and, and so on and so forth. So from a. What we've learned on pricing is that if you use it correctly and make the customer understand, not that your lower price or higher price, but exactly why is that, and how much work have you done to provide him with that specific price. Once you're there, then they fully get it. It's like clothes or, or, or stuff. That have, have handmade written on them, they usually cost more. The reason is, and you think about it, you, you buy a, a pot okay, and it says handmade, and it's a hundred bucks. You say, oh, well, okay, it's handmade. Now you accept it more. It doesn't, it's not only for cheaper stuff, explain me why it's cheaper and better, but also for expensive stuff. If your pricing speaks the. The philosophy of your company, then people get it. And you have to be coherent. And being coherent here is not easy. It's not charging overages sometimes, even though you deserve them. It is helping out customers in need. It's giving out a free plan that's very extended. And it, it's basically, or when a customer needs an extra quota for the day, just give it. And even though it has its take on a little bit on the margin, a little bit of friction with the customers, but what it adds is a coherent message. And sometimes there are conflicts. For instance, I, you mentioned, I mentioned we were looking at maybe acquiring companies and then we were looking at this phenomenal company, but their product was a premium price product. In their niche field in the overall scheme of observability. If I add that product, I'm still way, way, way lower cost. But you can't come to someone and say, I'm the most efficient, I am the best value for money. Oh, but that product out of five, that's actually more expensive than any other product in the market. Because even if the bundle is still worth it. You, you end up not being coherent. Okay? So that product's cheap. That product's expensive. It's not a philosophy that you believe in. It's not a core value of your company to be efficient, to be innovative, to analyze and stream. It's just an opportunity that you've found in the market. So that's, that's another thing that we've learned on price.

Dan Balcauski: 35:46

Oh my God. So many good takeaways there. Number one, I highly agree. Pricing page. Usually the second most visited page on any b2b website that has a pricing page. A strong opportunity for anyone not taking advantage of that to make sure that users understand what they're looking at. And then it looks well you're communicating. Number two, you highlighted very well you supported your. You told your value story. It wasn't just about communicating pricing, but it's, it's this is what we do. This is why we're better as an opportunity on your pricing page. Right. That's, and then proof points, was number three of why, you might be surprised, is this some fly by night company that's barely scraping by? It's like, no, we've. We have a superior architecture. You're selling to a technical audience. I wouldn't say that maybe that would apply in every market, but the buyers that you have are technical buyers and they will appreciate the fact that, yeah, no, we've really gone out of our way to optimize our infrastructure and. We're passing that savings onto you as the old above marketers would would say, so, so why are you gonna pay for someone else's bloated infrastructure for the same end, end result? We can give it to you much more efficiently cuz we're amazing engineers and we believe in supporting other DevOps pros. So that resonates all the way through. And then the fourth thing you mentioned, which was just icing on the cake, was this whole idea of. Your pricing strategy aligns with your overall company strategy. It's, it's what is our overall positioning in the market, and then making sure that you're, your pricing aligns with that. So amazing know, set of knowledge bombs there. Ariel, Ariel, I could talk to you all day but I wanna be respectful of your time and our audience Time. To wrap things up, I just wanna ask you a couple quick closing questions. None of us get here on our own. You've, you've mentioned, different investors along the way, who, who wrote you checks at moments of need are, are there any close mentors, other CEOs other than leaders who have helped you on your journey?

Ariel Assaraf: 37:42

Oh wow. There's a bunch actually. So, I mentioned Mosman, who's been super helpful. I mentioned Tal, the investor that helped us skip the acquisition I mentioned No, all our, our investors though they have interest, but I think Navu the guy who led the Microsoft Accelerator at the time and, and helped us through rough times. And at some point we have so many great advisors around that. I I, I make it Basically, I speak to every board member and advisor at least once a week, and we have a scheduled meeting at least once every two weeks, like a half an hour update which may sound specific, like updating the same numbers, the same things over and over eight times a week. But if you're open to listening and getting feedback and learning and you're. You make yourself coachable. And our, our company Moto is hungry, humble, and smart in that order. That's what we're always saying. If you're coming humble to these conversations and you're speaking to smart people and you're presenting them with the same, actually presenting them with the same facts and hearing different opinions, that's, that's the best way to improve and also to keep everyone aligned. So I, I'd say each and every one of them, of our board members and advisors today are. A huge part of, of where we got.

Dan Balcauski: 39:13

That's, that's amazing. Glad you could build that supportive community around you. If you, if I had to give you a billboard, you could put anything on it, other advice that you would give to other CEOs trying to scale their B2B SaaS companies, what would you put on your billboard? I.

Ariel Assaraf: 39:29

Wow. That's for me, that's easy. Have the right partners, have the right person that works with you. You're the right co-founder and have the right investors around you. That's, that's the most important thing. If you look at Coralogix. The team changed. The, the, the market changed. The products changed three times. The c e o changed. Okay. The only thing that stayed our, the people like the me and Yoni and Lior who started the company together, her and the investors that walk this way with us that that's being, having good partners. That even in rough times, it was always pleasant, always communicative, always open and honest. That's the most important thing beyond success, even for your, mental health. I'd say. With, with all that you're gonna go through in the, the years of scaling up.

Dan Balcauski: 40:25

Choose your partners carefully. I, I love that. Ariel, I loved our conversation today. How can folks learn more about you, follow you learn more about Coralogix?

Ariel Assaraf: 40:37

So Coralogix.com, that's the first answer. And of course, we're LinkedIn, Twitter, pretty active, and very welcome to add me on, on LinkedIn. I try to reply when it's explained well enough, and I understand that it's not anyone selling anything to me.

Dan Balcauski: 40:55

Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. We can all use a little bit less LinkedIn spam in our inbox. I appreciate that. Ariel, it's been a pleasure. That wraps up this episode of SAS Scaling Secrets, a massive thank you to Ariel for sharing his journey, insights, and invaluable tips for our listeners. If you found this conversation as enlightening as I did, remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. Until next time, keep innovating, growing, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.