SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
Scaling SaaS Through Trusted Partnerships with Maxim Melamedov, CEO of Zesty
Special guest, Maxim Melamedov, CEO and co-founder of Zesty, an automated cloud optimization platform, joins the pod. Maxim shared valuable insights on how to differentiate yourself in the SaaS industry and the importance of becoming a trusted advisor to your customers. He discussed Zesty's unique positioning as a partner to major cloud service providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google.
Maxim shared his thoughts on how individuals can regain control of their spending to mitigate the uncertainties in revenue. Additionally, we explored the importance of understanding your target audience, especially engineers, and adjusting your product and marketing strategies accordingly.
Guest Bio:
Maxim has an impressive 13-year career in the tech industry, including a background in Homeland Security. He is truly inspired by the intersection of data, innovation, and efficiency. Coming from a family of business owners, Maxim saw the potential for fast scaling and exciting opportunities in the SaaS industry.
Guest Links:
https://zesty.co/
Maxim on LinkedIn
Hello, and welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that dives into the trenches with leaders of the best scale up B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today, I have the privilege of interviewing Maxim Melamedov, the CEO and co founder of Zesty, an automated cloud optimization platform. He has 13 years of experience in the tech industry, including a career in Homeland Security. He finds endless inspiration at the intersection of data, innovation, and efficiency. Maxim earned his Bachelor of Arts in Business Management from the University of Derby, and is a veteran of the Israeli Air Force. Join me as we explore Maxim's unique stories, uncover the secrets to his success, and reveal his strategies to scale Zesty successfully. Let's dive in. Welcome Maxim to SaaS Scaling Secrets.
Maxim Melamedov:Hi, Dan. Excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Dan Balcauski:I am very excited for our conversation today. Maxine, for those in our audience who are not intimately familiar with you and your work, can you please just briefly introduce yourself and tell us a little about your journey in the SaaS world?
Maxim Melamedov:So, my journey in the SaaS world started around, I would say 10 years ago. I got really interested about the concept of the startup nation and coming from a business background, my entire family are business owners that build businesses and drive business. Like, well, There is a, we are living in a startup nation and if I want to open a business that can scale fast and be, do some cool things, I should look at SaaS. So I went and kind of learned the differences and the fundamentals of SaaS, which is SDR, BDR, retention models, monetization plays, how product is being developed, how it's being deployed, how it's being. Designed different approaches, different elements. The whole it's a really cool and interesting world, and I learned through a lot through from the Grounds Up. I, my first position in SaaS was, I was a leading the customer support team, which, you know, talking to customers, seeing their experience, seeing their pain, what the pain, what pain. The company solved them and what hurdles prevented them from succeeding further. I understood how we go to market, how we bring customers, how we nurture them, how we onboard them, how we service them, how we... Develop products. So I learned a lot in that time. I understood that while I needed to kind of go up and sit around the strategic decision makers and how decisions are being placed. So I moved to another SaaS startup in a travel tech industry. As a VP customer success, kind of understanding the strategy behind launching a new product, launching new capabilities, launching new approach, how you scale, how you position yourself, how you market yourself. But the problem that we're solving today actually followed me in those two positions.
Dan Balcauski:Mmm.
Maxim Melamedov:And I was like, hmm, I understand the pain. I understand that it's the same problem, but it bit me from two different angles. Like, why is that still annoying? It's not a matter of somebody's failing to fix it. It's a bigger problem. It's a more holistic problem. And then we started to kind of think about the future, what the future would look like. What things would make sense in the future, what things would not make sense in the future, what should change sooner rather than later. And once we kind of understood that, we're like, well, we know the fundamentals and the basics that we need to build something that's supposed to scale. We need to build something for a target audience that is different than I used to work with, which are engineers. Engineers have different consuming habits than your salespeople, so you have to do something for them. You have to adjust the infrastructure to make it scale, because if you don't have that, so you build the fundamental elements on the tech, and then you kind of look at the things you can do that follow a logic that is easy to explain to an engineer to say, well, assume that you would do. And I would do exactly as you would, but I'm a machine. So there is no magic. There is nothing that is, wow. There's no big words like, well, we would follow what you would have done if you had a limited resources. That's the impact and how you gonna take it to market? What's the play in ethics? That's kind of was the evolution of of the i ideation process from day one. But this is, that, that was for me, the fundamentals of. of a SaaS. SaaS is not, you're manufacturing, you can scale infinitely. That's the biggest advantage. If if you have a big product, if you can take it nicely to market and well position it, you can scale to tremendous sizes.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I do want to come back to Zesty and what you're working on now in a bit, but I do want to focus a little bit on you first and some things that you mentioned there, which I absolutely agree with, which is being on the customer support and customer success side. I can imagine how much. Customer Empathy you built, cause it's one of those jobs that you're constantly exposed to customer pain. And I think not saying that any job at a company is easy but you know, a job that confronts you every day with the struggles that customers are facing and trying to use and deploy your product. That's such a great learning route. I'm glad you were able to experience that. Maybe, I'm sure as all customer support people, you maybe had, didn't have the best day every day. But you know, it definitely probably built that muscle. It's been very valuable for you. Ultimately for all of us, there's a pivotal moment that changes everything for a person, like I call it a superhero transformation moment. The, your example you're Peter Parker, you get bit by a spider, go to sleep, wake up, everything is different.'cause now you're Spider-Man. What was that moment for you in your journey?
Maxim Melamedov:Actually a phone call with a decline from an investor.
Dan Balcauski:Tell me more.
Maxim Melamedov:So, the whole concept of fundraising it's different. There is no, there's no cookie cutter,
Dan Balcauski:Mm,
Maxim Melamedov:And there are some hacks that if you served in a specific unit. In the Israeli army, have a hack. If you have a degree from a specific university or specific knowledge, you have a hack. When you don't have those hacks it's a different journey. It's a completely different journey. And I published on LinkedIn as well. We're starting a startup doing something in the cloud efficiency space. And I had, was reached out by multiple investors. And one of them was like, well, we should chat. And we spend around, usually the meetings were like between 30 minutes to an hour. Those pre COVID days. We spent three and a half hours in that meeting. They really digged that deep. Like it was a really interesting meeting. That once we left that meeting, me and my co founder was like, well, They're going to say no, because like, we understood that we weren't baked enough,
Dan Balcauski:Mm
Maxim Melamedov:but let's keep going. And usually the declining process is kind of like either you get nothing or you get a canned mail saying, Hey, thank you. It's too early for us. Let's chat sometimes in the future. This time it was a phone call and the phone call says, well, listen, we really, you, we usually don't call, but I meet what, I mean what I say. I think you have something interesting. It's not fully baked. It's too early for us. But if you need an advice, if you want to do something, like my phone is open, reach out. And I was like, listen, like, there is something that was in that meeting that made me say, well, there is a person on the other side that I understand I'm not going to work with them right now.
Dan Balcauski:mm
Maxim Melamedov:But... I really want to work with them. It was that kind of moment when we say, well, we have something, we have to kind of keep grinding it a bit further, like fine tuning this, fine tuning that. But there is a potential play there.
Dan Balcauski:mm
Maxim Melamedov:And when you're trying to raise funds, it's like one of the, it's one of the difficult tasks when you don't have those hacks. And now if you see the economy, the hacks are over kind of. So it's really brutal because. It's like an SDR job. It's like the entry level position of a sales where you're to pitch to everyone. it's really intense. And you have to adjust yourself to the statement of, well, either you get no, no reply at all. Like, just, okay, we spoke to you, we invested X amount of hours and now we're disappeared. Or you're gonna get well, no, it's too early for us, or any kind of the canned answer.
Dan Balcauski:Mm
Maxim Melamedov:Rarely people would go and actually invest the time and actually tell you, like, listen, this is the things. This is the reason we think it's not a good fit for us now, but let's keep an open conversation. Those are really rare occasions. And as time passed, I learned that the people who would invest time in giving that feedback is people who you should keep in touch with and keep working with, because regardless of of the outcome, it's valuable.
Dan Balcauski:mm
Maxim Melamedov:So that was kind of the, that phone call of a decline was a no point. Year after we actually got. A term sheet from from that person. So that was kind of
Dan Balcauski:Was it? So it's, that's a great story and obviously it had a very powerful transformative effect on you. Was it because you felt that they saw some potential in you and your team and your idea? Or was it the feedback that they gave you that what do you feel like that was that really?
Maxim Melamedov:The amount, the type of questions that were asked and the attempt and the will to actually understand, because it's, you have the basics, right? Like. Tell me the idea, usually usually pitch is like 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 2 minutes, a minute, 30 seconds, there's a lot of, there's different theses about the duration of your pitch, right?
Dan Balcauski:Yes.
Maxim Melamedov:But you're not the driver of the conversation. You finish your chat and then you finish your part and then it's a Q& A session. And Q& A usually is timed by 30 minutes or an hour. And at seed stage... The focus can be on the idea or can be on the person. The focus that we had in that meeting was so on us as individuals, on our background, how we did what we did, and what we overcame, and why we do what we do, and why, like, it was a really in depth conversation about us as people, us as individuals, because amount of times an idea that you start a company with, to the idea that the company is successful, to get this hurdle, and this hurdle, and this hurdle, we'll fine tune, we'll change, we'll have, you'll have to fine tune it a bit, you'll have to change it a bit, but on seed stage, you don't really know that. It's about you. It's about you as a persona, what you overcome, how you think, how you position yourself and getting to know you as a person. And that kind of differentiated, that actually made a big impact.
Dan Balcauski:Has that situation or that experience, has that shaped how you lead your team at Zesty or your vision of how you kind of culture you want to create it? In your company?
Maxim Melamedov:Yeah, it's people first. Because at the end of the day, right? All of us want to make impact. I rarely know people that waking up every morning say, Well, I wish this day to be over. If you're that kind of a person, most likely you're not in tech. Most likely you're not in startups. Most likely... I'm not, I'm trying not to be around those people. I don't know that many people that have that mindset, right? If you're waking up every morning, you're like, well, I want to do something. I want to do this. I want to check boxes. I want to be successful. I want to innovate. I want to make sure that made impact. I made positive impact on the world. So I believe that the vast majority of people are like that. And it's about how you create an environment, how you create a platform, how you create this environment where it nurtures that will, it guides and shows the missing pieces, and it offers kind of complementary elements or in a really friendly way saying, listen, you know what, you want to be a rocket scientist? Dude, I understand this is a great ambitious, we're a rocket science company, but I see that it doesn't kind of work out because this is what I've requested you to focus on in the last half a year and none of that was done. So I think you should, you can be a great at this. So maybe you should look at your life from a different perspective. And we had some people that transitioned from a position A to a position B. And we had some people that said, well, I understand. I would look, I would go and look elsewhere. So it's not that necessarily it's your first decision on a first place. It's the right one.
Dan Balcauski:Mmm.
Maxim Melamedov:of building that reality where you're surrounding yourself with positive people who are as yourself. You want to learn, you want to try out new things, and you're kind of, having the ability to say, hey, what's your idea about this? How do you think we should go about it? And that's, for me, it's fun.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. I love that approach of putting people in positions they could be successful and identifying if they're not gonna be successful in a current position, how can they be successful somewhere else whether inside or outside of the company. I think it's a great perspective. You mentioned this idea of hacks in the fundraising process. I've heard you talk before about there being a difference between taking shortcuts and cutting corners. I don't know if you throw hacks in the same milieu. What's the difference between taking shortcuts and cutting corners? In your mind.
Maxim Melamedov:So taking shortcuts is you identify the quicker path to victory. Cutting corners can be risky. Cutting corners, sometimes you would end up paying tremendously more because you didn't cover all your angles. Taking a shortcut, let's say I can sell to each company individually. Right? Or I can partner with someone who can do that at scale.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Maxim Melamedov:That's a shortcut. Cutting corners, say, hey, the probability of this is unlikely, or I'm not sure this will ever happen. And that's cutting corners. So don't have to do everything perfectly, but you need to understand the risk reward, right? Risk reward is critical. If the risk is. not that high, but the impact is huge and you shouldn't do that. So it's kind of fine figuring out what should I risk? What's the reward? And if it's a, if it's a huge risk, don't take it.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm. Has there been a decision, a fork in the road that you've had along your journey where you maybe got presented with an option that looked like a shortcut, but you ended up not taking it because you realized it was, would actually be cutting a corner.
Maxim Melamedov:Yeah, of course. We, we always have decisions that you understand that it's a shortcut. It's a shortcut, especially comes with with people.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Maxim Melamedov:Cause those are the biggest decisions are on that place. If you do if you do a shortcut with a person and that shortcut is actually cutting a corner, it's scary. It's risky. It's risk because the amount of impact you have on that is huge, tremendous because the way, the best way for me to scale company, right? is to let go because I know that I am not the expert in finance. I'm not the expert in HR. I'm not the expert in tech. I'm not the expert in marketing. I'm not. And for me, the goal is to kind of bring people who are smarter, more experienced than me, tell them what I know, share with them my perspective, my experience, so they can say, Hey, I understand this is This makes sense. This doesn't make sense. Can you give me an example why that doesn't work? Ah, I understand now I can make it work.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Maxim Melamedov:So when you bring that you on hiring we try, we do everything not to cut corners.
Dan Balcauski:I appreciate that perspective. I do want to pivot. and talk about Zesty. So, for those of the audience who aren't familiar with Zesty, can you just give us a high level of what Zesty does and its mission?
Maxim Melamedov:So our mission is quite simple. We we empower businesses with ML to achieve and maintain higher cloud efficiency.
Dan Balcauski:Please.
Maxim Melamedov:On infrastructure the way we do that is we understand that, especially in today's reality where everybody's trying to optimize their spend is being one of the top line spends of a company. There is so much that a person can do. There is a limit to how many optimization actions you can achieve without hurting your stability or hurting your performance. Because your application is constantly changing, it's dynamic. Your cloud is dynamic. It enables you freedom to be as flexible as you want, you just need to capture that freedom. So we're helping companies to say, hey, I'm able to leverage the full cloud flexibility to the edge of it without any compromise. So by leveraging all the flexibility, I'm actually able to save tremendous amounts of money. I'll give you an example. Right now, let's talk about this platform that we're on. We're on Zoom. Zoom doesn't really know how long this conversation would go, right? It can be an hour, it can be two hours, it can be five hours. It's unknown. The worst thing about us as customers or us as users is that if this application would crash. in the right? So they're making sure it would not crash, right? The amount of information that is being shared over the Zoom is also unknown. Nobody knows how many data sources will appear in this meeting, right? Can be you, can be, we can be five people, we can be 10 people. We can share information on chat, right? So the amount of data that's being processed, it's also unknown, right? So Zoom prepares for this? Because they need to ask the cloud to allocate a pretty defined amount of resources, right, to cater to this conversation. Now, the amounts of conversations happening and their duration and the amount of data is unknown, right? So they have to constantly change their setups. Think about millions of conversations happening in the same time or tens of thousands of conversations happening in the same time. That's not humanly possible to do that. to adjust each zoom call to make sure it's efficient, right? But they're trying to avoid fear. So they're taking more. Or if you're doing machine learning, there's lots of use cases where the fear of crash puts you in a reality where say, well, you know what? I'll put more money. I'll create a safety net that it would not crash. And that safety net is expensive. So that's not leveraging cloud flexibility to the fullest.
Dan Balcauski:Thank you for that very concrete example. That helps give me a better sense of the power and complexity of the problem that you're trying to solve with Zesty and apparently having some good success with it. The overall macro financial climate has been say quite volatile especially for technology companies, which I'm sure are many of your clients. But obviously that has probably affected, Zesty, everything from changes in, in interest rates changing valuations to, fears of recession or possible recession, who knows what we're actually in right now, the weight to the longest anticipated weight to a recession we've ever had in history real record high inflation, et cetera. What part of these kind of changing winds in the macro environment has most impacted you and Zesty as you've tried to scale over the last several years?
Maxim Melamedov:We see them as tailwinds.
Dan Balcauski:How so?
Maxim Melamedov:Our value proposition is, listen, if we're not saving you money, you don't pay us, right?
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Maxim Melamedov:that's nice. And if we'll save you a dollar, we'll take a quarter out of it. So we're an ROI positive company, right? And if you have to look at. Your spend, the biggest spend is your headcount for every company. The second or the third, you have cloud infrastructure versus marketing.
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Maxim Melamedov:So you're saying, well, how can I optimize? Because you're trying to avoid Letting people go because that's your most valuable asset, right? You invested a lot of time on sourcing them, hiring them, training them, have them deliver, execute. This is the firepower. So you're trying to avoid that. So you're looking at ways where you can optimize and cut. And if we can help you save on cloud, well, that's a great offering.
Dan Balcauski:I did want to touch on monetization a bit later, but since you brought it up, so obviously this is a very compelling business case that you put forward in terms of, if we save you a dollar, we take a quarter, you get 75 cents. Was that apparent to you that that was the pricing monetization model for you guys from day one? Was that something that you, like, how did you land on that?
Maxim Melamedov:so that, that was day one. That was day one because the goal was. To have a value proposition, like, as I mentioned, my background is not from sales, it's from customer success.
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Maxim Melamedov:My CTO is an engineer, right? So we don't have sales background. With that being said, we thought that we have to build a product to engineers. Engineers usually do not have large budgets on tools, even though they do, but they don't. Yeah, CISO have large budgets, marketing have large budgets, you have fundamentals, but to have an engineer to push for a tool, it's not that easy. And also engineers try to try out things for themselves before they buy, right? So having a capability for an engineer to try things at his own pace and then be a star that says, Hey, listen, I found a tool that helps the business to save money. It's kind of positions that head of DevOps, that head of cloud infrastructure, that DevOps as a person who is helping the business rather than being only an engineer. So it's kind of, a lift up. So that was kind of our position to say, Hey. What would be the ideal play that can help us scale fast?
Dan Balcauski:Mm. So there's a sense of. It's difficult to sell engineers, and you're definitely not the first person I've heard that from engineers tend to be very critical, skeptical buyers, and also tend to be the folks who be like, well, I could just... We could just build Like, why would I go buy? Yeah, I'll do it myself. Right? So, and then want to, test every single aspect. Right? So you're very skeptical group in general. And I say this with all love. I have a computer engineering undergrad degree. I started off a developer. So I am one of these people who's, who's
Maxim Melamedov:likewise. I also have an under undergrad undergrad engineering degree.
Dan Balcauski:So all love for my software development brethren out there. But yes, a very difficult nut to crack. And also you're right. I mean, just generally their budget is not necessarily as liberal as say, what's given to the sales and marketing teams because they're, on the front lines of driving revenue. And so they usually have a little bit bigger purse strings to sling around. So. This idea of the obvious ROI trade off, it was sort of a seed idea. And that's been, you found that that has been generally well accepted by your market, or has there been any, any lessons that you've learned from running that model?
Maxim Melamedov:Yeah. You have to adjust that model. You can, you have to offer more at large scale. You need to offer something that is more predictable.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Maxim Melamedov:Right? Because once your bill is starting to spiral up, right? At some point, the procurement say, hey, why are we paying you so much? What are the things that you are doing we can do ourselves? And then you start this endless discussion about how much. I need to put engineers to do what you're doing versus I'm giving that all to you. So it's kind of having that discussion about
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Maxim Melamedov:do it in house versus do it, give it to you. And that's kind of an end of the discussion. So we're saying, well, we can talk about a structure of base plus variable, a platform fee. So it's like, it's kind of, it resonates differently across your buying persona and the size of the company you're selling to.
Dan Balcauski:Cause I did see on, so I, for audiences not aware, I spend a lot of my time in the pricing monetization world, and I did see on your pricing page, you have both a sort of pay as you go model and a subscription model. So the subscription model is there to address those types of concerns of like, well, if you just want more of a fixed kind of price, you can go with that approach.
Maxim Melamedov:Yeah, listen, at the end of the day, as you mentioned, the financial markets today are the last thing you can say about them. They're extremely predictable, right? They're not, we're not sure if they're going to be recession, if they're going to be recession, how long the recession will be, what will be the interest rates, how the inflation will behave. We're currently in, in reality where unsure reality. And one of the things you kind of want to see is that you can take your spending and put the control on them. Because you're not really sure about your revenue. You have companies that stop buying, you have companies that are laying off people, you have companies that are merging, being acquired, companies that are being shut down. So there is this stability in the market. So everybody wants to say, hey, at least I'm taking something that was out of control and I know how to predict it.
Dan Balcauski:That makes a lot of sense, because I think the conversations that I see is this around, for example, usage based pricing is, well, it's such an attractive risk mitigator. For companies to try and then they could just use. And if you're in Google sheets or Excel, you can show a very nice curve that has exponential growth as customers scale, they're going to continue paying us more and more. And it looks very nice on a spreadsheet until you run into this type of situation where people are like, Hey I've often said of a snowflake. I'm sure everyone's jealous of their 185 percent net revenue retention rate, but they can't continue that way forever. Otherwise, they're going to be the entire GDP of the planet at some point because everyone's money is just going to go all to all the snowflake. So at some point that party ends and people are like, hey, we're paying you, we're paying you quite enough at this point.
Maxim Melamedov:I'll give you another example, the hyperscalers, right? Your Amazon, your Google, your Azure, it's a it's a great model. And you have today companies saying, Hey, I understand. I want to think about buying servers and on prem and not everybody abandons servers. So the on prem world kind of still exists. Right? So, the unit of economics needs to make sense. It's a different unit of economics for different scales. To your point, you don't, you would not be able to see Snowflake or any company grows continuously. In that curve.
Dan Balcauski:100 percent agree. I want to go back to, we touched on monetization. You know, I often said that there's three ways to really grow a scale of a SaaS company. It's acquisition, monetization, and retention. So we touched on monetization. I do want to touch on acquisition because you did talk about, one of your fundamental buyer personas, or at least user personas, is this engineer, engineering team. What have you learned about acquisition and your go to market model as it pertains to making an offer that is compelling and actually sellable to engineers? What are your thoughts about that?
Maxim Melamedov:Can you kind of crisp the question in slightly different
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you've made the point that, you know, or, we were just discussing about engineers being, quite skeptical, wanting to kick the tires and can I do this? And maybe they don't have budgets. How have you modified or what are the lessons have you learned about your, go to market and acquisition to make your offer actually purchasable and attractive to that? Buyer or user persona
Maxim Melamedov:So it's about how you would invest your message, right? How you would distribute it. Because regardless of what you're selling, there will always be a market trend, and right now the market trend is most likely 50 or 60 percent of companies in the world, regardless of what they're doing. Statement is we're saving you money. We're saving you money on marketing. We're saving you money on sales. We're saving you money on customer success. We're saving you money. Everybody is right now today of saying we're saving you money, right? So you have a lot of noise in any market because this is the time to save money.
Dan Balcauski:Mm
Maxim Melamedov:So you have to, like, we had to kind of think about different tactics and different ways to say, Hey, we understand that you want to save money, but let's, we want to kind of separate ourselves from everybody else. And the way we look into that as we said, Hey, one of the, one of the things that drive. The business decision maker is his trusted advisor. And if you have to look at your account management at Amazon, at Azure, at Google, the account managers are actually responsible for business. And we kind of became their wild card. So if you want to save money, you most likely not go on and we wouldn't, we are not likely to reach a hundred percent of AWS customers, right? It's unlikely. But if we can. Educate the AWS teams and the Microsoft teams and the Google teams, that, hey, listen, we are a part, we are your partner. And if your customer has a problem and he struggles with this reality, you can refer them to us, right? That will create a trifecta. The customer will be happy because you helped him. We will be happy because we made impact. And you as the account manager will be happy because you have a customer that you actually helped outsource a problem he was struggling with. And it made sense for him
Dan Balcauski:hmm. That's counterintuitive that the, those, you wouldn't think these, those people would be like, oh, well we are trying to make more money, not less, but I guess when they look at the long-term lifetime value of that account, is that the,
Maxim Melamedov:again, everyone has an alternative. That's that's the biggest, that's the biggest thing that companies should remember. You mentioned Snowflake 180%, right? At some point. Not, I'm not sure somebody will pay a billion dollars for Snowflake a month or a year, right? You'd have to, you at the company at some point say, Hey, you know what? We're spending too much money on this. Let's figure out why we do that. So there's always an alternative to what you're spending on. If can be moving to a different cloud, it can be going back to on-prem. It can means doing something different. So if you want to maintain long term relationship, you have to kind of work on it. And sometimes you need to bite a bullet saying, Hey, I was going to make less money this year because my customer is upset and I need to help him. So I would. Introduce him to a tool that would save him money, but I am most likely not to kill or not to lose that customer second year, third year. He would be stickier with me, right? So I'm guaranteeing revenue forward thinking.
Dan Balcauski:mm Well, I love this, which seems like a very consistent theme of making the potentially difficult. Short term. Painful decision in order to serve the better long term goal. That seems to be a consistent theme across all these topics that we've talked about which I love. Look, Maxim, I could talk to you all day and there's a bunch of questions I didn't get to ask you, but to be respectful of your time and our audience's time, I do want to start to wrap this up with a couple of rapid fire lightning round questions. Are you a game for that?
Maxim Melamedov:Sure, of course.
Dan Balcauski:Maxim, nobody of any level of success, and I view you as successful, gets there on their own. Has there been a close mentor, other CEO, other leaders that have really helped you on your journey?
Maxim Melamedov:So, the answer is always yes. And I think that the biggest credit would go to the person who is spending the most of my spare time with, that is there for me, it's my wife. That's kind of, maybe it's cliche, but being a CEO is the loneliest job in the world and you would need... Someone who actually knows you in and out, because you don't work CEO from 9 to 5 and from a 5 to 9 you're a father or a husband or something else. A CEO's founder job is something that is you. You don't disconnect. So it kind of goes with you everywhere you go, everywhere you travel, it's there 24 7. And, but life doesn't stop there. So I'm bringing a lot of my doubts, a lot of my concerns, a lot of my joy to my day to day and my wife kind of like, she has a degree in psychology, so she's like, well, what about this? What about that? This is another thing. So it's kind of, it works. So she's helping, she helped me out throughout hardest points of my life. So if I have to mention one person, she would be it.
Dan Balcauski:I absolutely love that answer. And maybe one takeaway is founders go marry yourself, a psychologist that might be a good move.
Maxim Melamedov:The whole concept of partners, and this is kind of, this is, I would broaden a bit the circle. The whole concept of partners is fundamental to success, because you need to have blind trust, completely blind trust between your partners. If you don't have that, you have a problem. Ego has no place. There's a lot of things that I've learned throughout this process that like, this is our goal. Let's figure out how we get there. We're all in one team. If you need something, I'll be there for you. If I need something, I know you'll be there for me. And having that structure of Your day to day partners, your venture partners, some of them are fabulously amazing. Having that team, that makes something to win. It's not, it's never one person. It's never a one person.
Dan Balcauski:I couldn't agree more. Well, if you had to give advice to other CEOs trying to scale their B2B SaaS company, say I gave you a billboard and you could put anything on it. What would you say?
Maxim Melamedov:Always think about the following thing. What got you here, not necessarily will take you there. Challenge, reality, all time. If it's, if it doesn't, if you hit a block and you're failing to overcome it, think differently. Maybe you can jump it. Maybe you can dig under it. Maybe you can go around it. Maybe you can do a U turn and go find another path. But if you hit that, it one try, give it another try, then stop. And before give it the third and fourth, stop, think, and strategize how to, how, what you should do differently.
Dan Balcauski:Persistently challenge reality. I like that.
Maxim Melamedov:It's it's a concept. It's a difficult concept and one of the things that you should also do is start up this kind of playing chess, right? In chess, there's no element of luck. There's absolutely zero element of luck. So if you lost, right? You made a mistake somewhere around that game or around that journey to a lose can five moves away Ten moves away 15 moves away, but you made somewhere you made a mistake. It's on you, right? So it's really important when you're saying you made a mistake, it's one finger pointing at you and three fingers pointing at yourself, right? So figure out that, work on yourself, which is extremely hard, but it's fundamental.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I absolutely love that. Maxim, I've really enjoyed this conversation. If listeners want to learn more about Zesty or follow you, is there anywhere around the internet that you would point them?
Maxim Melamedov:Sure. So if you want to follow Zesty, if you want to try it out, so Zesty. co, or you can reach out directly to me on LinkedIn, Maxim Melamedov, available, I'll reply.
Dan Balcauski:I appreciate that conversation. We will put those links in the show notes for our listeners. Everyone that wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. A massive thank you to Maxine 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.
