Unveiling SaaS Spending Secrets with Sid Sridharan, CEO of Spendflo

Dan Balcauski sits down with the Co-founder and CEO of Spendflo, Sid Sridharan. They dive into the complexities and challenges of managing SaaS spending in today's business landscape. From the impact of budget constraints on software spending to the crucial role of effective communication within teams, they unpack valuable advice for SaaS CEOs and industry professionals. Sid shares his personal journey, his experiences in scaling a company, and the lessons learned along the way, providing actionable insights for anyone interested in the world of SaaS. Tune in as they unveil the secrets behind successful leadership, cross-border team management, and the rituals essential for company growth.

Guest Bio
Siddharth Sridharan, Co-Founder and CEO of Spendflo, is celebrated for his innovative approach to controlling SaaS spend. His expertise extends beyond SaaS spend management; he has played pivotal roles at companies like Zap Mobility and Volta Charging, honing his skills in business operations and supply chain strategy. Renowned for creating value through intelligent procurement strategies, Sid is dedicated to empowering modern finance leaders, harnessing the potential of SaaS as a catalyst for growth.

Guest Links
spendflo.com
Sid on LinkedIn

Transcript

Dan Balcauski: 0:10

Hello and welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that dives in the trenches with the leaders of the best scale up. B2B SaaS Companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Sidharth Sridharan, Co-founder and CEO of Spendflo. Sid is celebrated for his innovative approach to controlling SaaS spend. His expertise extends beyond SaaS spend management. He has played pivotal roles at companies like Zap Mobility and Volta Charging, holding his skills in business operations and supply chain strategy. Renowned for creating value through intelligent procurement strategies. Sid is dedicated to empowering modern finance leaders, harnessing the potential of SaaS as a catalyst for growth. Join me as we explore SID'S unique stories, uncover the Secrets to his success and reveal his strategies to scale, Spendflo successfully. Let's dive in. Welcome Sid to SaaS Scaling Secrets.

Sid Sridharan: 0:55

Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much for having me as well. truly appreciate it.

Dan Balcauski: 1:00

I'm very excited for our conversation today, Sid. For the listeners in our audience who are not intimately familiar with you, could you please just briefly introduce yourself and tell your journey in the SaaS world.

Sid Sridharan: 1:09

I'm Sid, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Spendflo. I grew up in India. then, I actually wanted to, join like a high growth startup, so had to get to the valley in the best place to do that was to get to grad school. went to grad school in Boston, then joined a couple of, early stage startups in San Francisco. The last one I joined was a company called Volta Charging. we went from seed to IPO during my time there, and I had like a. I like, I learned a ton, right? Like it was like learning on, learning at the fire hose. honestly, so it was during my time there that, I like the entrepreneurship bug really bit me. I saw people creating companies. I saw a lot of my friends doing it. but also not that, it just, I felt A group of people coming together and creating something. And I saw that and I was part of that movement. It really inspired me to go start something as well. I didn't know what it was, but, a bunch of ideas and like a bunch of problems that I faced, and that's how we actually ended up at Spendflo.

Dan Balcauski: 1:59

Just so I'm aware and your audience is aware, the Volta charging though, that was not in the software space specifically, it was more kinda hardware space. Correct.

Sid Sridharan: 2:07

Yeah, it was actually, we, Volta was like, we built the largest free electric vehicle charging infrastructure network in North America. So, it was very different business. but we did build a lot of software, but it was like a hardware, software, supply chain, media sales. It was a very different type of business. But what it did have is a ton of software spend. so that was when the. that was where the idea for Spendflo came about because my CFO and I never got along and I was the guy buying, and renewing a lot of the SaaS. So Sapen, she's she used to walk up me every quarter and say, Sid, I think you're spending too much money. Go figure out what it is and we'll cut it by half. That was when like, okay, great. I. This is an ongoing problem. I started asking around, I'm like, I don't wanna do this job. Like nobody, nobody gets paid to buy or renew SaaS inside a company. It's super hard job. It's extremely complicated. it's post, I think after a, maybe I. Like a merger and acquisition or something. It's the second most complicated type of agreement that you're working on in the company. Because, I mean, let's face it, we vendors make it really hard with those agreements. and pricing is really hard, like super opaque. It's decentralized buying. Average company uses 120 different SaaS stalls. There's eight different stakeholders in the buying and renewal of SaaS, right? So. It's a really hairy problem. that's when I decided, okay, let me go solve this problem, right? it was me first, and then I, convinced two of my co-founders to join. And, yeah, now we're about like 120 people now. So it's, it's been a great journey.

Dan Balcauski: 3:30

Well, that's a fascinating story. you started, your kind of journey into, Hey, I wanted to get to Silicon Valley, and, so I go to Boston and sf, but if we had to rewind the clock a little earlier and it was a researcher that was. Looking at, young Sid, from 12 to 18, would they have noticed anything unusual? any spark that would, pretend path for you?

Sid Sridharan: 3:51

so I grew up, around entrepreneurs. My dad was an entrepreneur, so that really helped. He was a first generation entrepreneur. So growing up, that's, I thought that was the only job like that everybody had, right? I didn't necessarily have, a bunch of professionals around me. I didn't have like family that were lawyers or family that were like doctors. most of my family was like actually entrepreneurs. And, growing up I saw that, my dad did well for himself. He created a thing and I saw that he struggled, he succeeded. There was a lot of things that he did. He went through, and I was very sure that I never wanted to do what he did. that was actually the crux of it, the business that he like, I never wanted to do that. And I said but The joy of having a team around you and like them, coming over. They used to come sit down with me when I was at like, I was a kid. They used to come say hi to me and they used to like work with me. They're really smart people. that truly kinda, made me realize, I'm like, Hey, like I get to work with people that I want and I get to do what I want. That type of freedom is, I was always clear that I wanted to do something. And honestly, a part of me kind of feels wanted to get, get away from like my father's shadow, right? Like in some way or form. So I think that's, that chip on my shoulder still exists. It's something that makes me, said Hey, the 12 to 18, yes, that's the chip that I had

Dan Balcauski: 5:08

you said like I, I know I never wanted to do what he was doing. I don't know if you were referring to entrepreneurship in general

Sid Sridharan: 5:14

No. I think like his industry, he was in construction. So that's a very difficult, very different ball game altogether. he used to be in construction, and that's a very different guy. that's something that I never wanted to do. Entrepreneurship. Yes. That's something that I really wanted to do.

Dan Balcauski: 5:30

Because I could very easily read that, two different ways you know, I mean, entrepreneurship's not an easy path. So, it could be easy to draw that lesson and be like, yeah, I don't wanna deal with the stress and the

Sid Sridharan: 5:39

no. I did, I meant like construction, which is the business he was in. not so much the entrepreneur. I, love the part about him assembling the team and him working with the team, him growing as well. It is like I saw it in front of my eyes. so that was something that I had really inspired me actually.

Dan Balcauski: 5:56

you already, kind of introed a little bit about, Spendflo and kind of how you idea for that. I wanna pivot a little bit, To talk a little bit about, your experience, growing, that company. before we do that though, before, we press record, we were talking about, our mutual acquaintance, Randy Wooten,

Sid Sridharan: 6:11

Oh yea

Dan Balcauski: 6:12

And, one of the, fascinating sets of conversations that I had with him and, Maxio has Maxio Institute where they publish, benchmark reports. think, Spendflo is in a kind of an interesting similar area where you guys see a lot of spend going through your across, companies. I'm, we are in an interesting time. let that, the old Chinese curse may live in interesting in SaaS world. what are you seeing from your perspective, are the notable spending trends you're in the SaaS market given your position at Spendflo?

Sid Sridharan: 6:44

I'm glad you mentioned Randy. Randy's been, Randy's been like, Amazing, inspiration for me and how we operate. So, I'm truly, truly lucky to have met him, So in terms of the benchmarks, right? so we've analyzed about two and$2.3 billion of SaaS spend over the last two and a half years, right? that's a lot of SaaS spend in terms of what we've analyzed. And, most of our customers are in the mid-market, so we don't necessarily deal with enterprises. so it's not a very good reflection of enterprise software spend. It's a very, it's a good reflection of mid-market software spend. So what we are seeing, in the last year or so. We're seeing a lot of the SMB, the lower mid-market segment cut software spend. and I, when I mean cut, it's like a 30% deep cuts, right? Like 30% or 25% cuts in terms of actual software spend. and I mean like just not renewing, right? So NRS have got hit hidden, like we see the spends dropping on a large section of these SaaS tolls. but at the same time,

Dan Balcauski: 7:38

Just elimination entirely. Just not even like

Sid Sridharan: 7:41

entirely, no.

Dan Balcauski: 7:43

like we're not gonna use those tools.

Sid Sridharan: 7:45

Yeah, I think it's a combination of like budget. Yes. CFO is really asking the question that you really need this, and I. and it, when, when you are laying off like 20% or 15%, your software spend is gonna get cut in even deeper than that. so that's something that we're seeing, that we saw actually. it's already done in, in, in our view, most of the pain is already out of the system, is what, what my sense is. we think what we are seeing is an uptick in terms of just because Q4 is annual budgeting time and there budgets, you spend, we're seeing a little bit of an uptick this, this quarter, specifically on net new, additions, right? People actually spending money on Yeah, I need to grow again. Let's start spending money on your GTM stack because nobody spent money on GTM stack, right? that's something that people are spending money on. people are spending a little bit more money and thoughtfully this time, not like thing, oh, thoughtfully spending money on, on software, sales cycles have has. Like the average sales cycle outside the Spendflo system in the mid-market, 92 days or so. 90, 90, 92 days. inside the Spendflo ecosystem is about 42 days. So, but now even inside the Spendflo ecosystem, it's become like 52 days or so, right? Because people are taking their time to make decisions. That's something that we're seeing in terms of like sales cycles and buying cycles. and in terms of spend, we're seeing an uptick now in Q4, but we see, we see that the SMB segment has gotten, hit a lot more than the mid-market, uh, mid-market per se. So, that's something that we're seeing as well, and we think it. It'll get back to a sense of normalcy. And I mean, by, I mean, normalcy is 2018, 2019 levels of SaaS normalcy. Not like 2020 no, that's not gonna happen ever. Like for at least like the next or seven years. So, but I mean, It. what people don't realize is a lot of these tools have gotten really sticky, right? So like it is just that the number of SaaS tools has exploded the last three years. Even if it comes down by 20%, it's still 40% higher than what they used to spend in 2018, right? So, or 2019 it's still much, much higher. So it's still going to grow at about 10% or 11% this year to next year. So. it is just rationalization that's happening.

Dan Balcauski: 10:01

Yeah. And you said you are seeing an uptick, on spend in Q4. Is that, so, we would expect, sort of, you see this monotonic increase, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, kind of on a repeating pattern. But are you seeing an increase, over say 2022 Q4 to 2023 Q4? are you

Sid Sridharan: 10:19

No, I'm just doing quarter to I'm still, I'm talking about Q3 2023 to QQ 4, 20 23. That optic Q4, 2022 is everybody is still spending money, so it's not a very good, comparison to

Dan Balcauski: 10:33

we're still down year over year.

Sid Sridharan: 10:34

Yeah. Yeah. It's still, it is still down year over year. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think like 2021, 2020 20, 20 2022. Is gonna come back necessarily in terms of like absolute growth, but in, so it, it's still really, it's still really strong market, right? there's no question about it. People who get stuck to their workflows, you still need people to get their job done, right? and the question is that People will not work without the tools that they really want. And that's something that we've learned over and over again. And that's why building a community around what you're building, building, building some, building that sense of like brand and community around what the tool stands for, is, is becoming even more important right now.

Dan Balcauski: 11:16

and you made a distinction early on in, in, when you were answering around SMB versus mid-market spend, understanding that Spendflo's, customers are not necessarily an enterprise. So, so at SMB mid-market, are you seeing, what, I guess as you compare SMB versus mid-market, are you seeing any different trends there than just outlined?

Sid Sridharan: 11:37

Yeah. Apart from the, the drop in spend in the SMB, the mid-market, the beauty of the mid-market is that it, they're actually getting a lot tighter and a lot more operationally efficient, so you can actually see that happening versus in the SMB, it's just, it's a little bit of whiplash, right? it's like reactive. So they go down and spend one quarter. But some like just one or two tools though in the next quarter will bring them back up because the, they're not dealing with millions of dollars of software spend, but, now the mid-market is getting a lot more conscientious about how they spend money, how they control their spend, is it gone through the right process? So, and that's reflecting in sales cycles now. So that reflection in sales cycles or buying cycles is now a thing, but. I think it's short term. And then if people become, people really follow the right processes and the right systems, and have the right teams and the right people, I think, buying cycles will drop, right? Like significantly. I think, that's something that will happen. it's gonna take some time because honestly has had, like a finance teams have had a really tough time this year. So, they don't wanna be buying more software right now.

Dan Balcauski: 12:43

if we, have some SaaS CEOs or leadership, listening to this right would you have any advice for them on, how they could, avoid getting on the chopping block? have practices or strategies work, better than others? I mean, than just be good and be indispensable

Sid Sridharan: 12:59

yeah, it's easy to say, right? but honestly, like 120 tools, in a company with, 200 employees or so, 120 tools are not indispensable, right? it's just not fundamentally possible. Uh, I think I think being somehow integrated to their workflows becomes extremely key, right? So if that means providing free onboarding, free support free, help to get them, get your system to be integral to, somehow connected to their daily workflows, even if it's like just one part of that workflow, right? So, and doing that To drive value to the customer. post-sale is something that I think, a lot of companies don't, just don't do well, right? and, if you do that really well, it becomes incredibly useful, right? because I. you might have, you are the hundred and 10th tool in their stack. They don't really care that, so that much about you after three months, right? but until you really form a relationship with them, you go meet them, go meet the people behind the tool, understand what they want, understand how you can automate a little bit of their lives. understand, I, I think honestly, I. CEOs and founders, we need to do better work over there. We can't just leave it to our customer success teams because, it's up to us to go deliver value at the end of the day as well, right? Like as an org as well.

Dan Balcauski: 14:20

Yeah. Well that reminds me of, there was a, someone smarter than me in the world of B2B product strategy. They had found an insight, related to retention where it was like, as soon as your product had like more than three integrations with other tools, it became that much harder to rip out. So it was things like, trying to understand that the usage data, like are there things that we should build that make us, as you're talking about, you're integrating with the workflows. It's okay, if we, it becomes this Gordian knot of if I pull this part out, then these other things fall over and now I can't remove that thing,

Sid Sridharan: 14:53

Exactly. and honestly, the customer also wants that to happen, right? they don't, you're not, The thing that, at least the insight that I've had, like in the last, I'm still learning a lot, but the insight that I had was, the customer truly just wants to not worry about this. That's why they're buying you, right? Like that. they don't wanna worry about this problem. They don't, they're not looking for like a report. They just don't wanna, I'm like, yeah, I want the result, right? I don't want to have to do your job for you as like a system, if. I'm still maintaining shit on a Excel sheet versus like your, versus my, versus something else. If I'm still using Excel sheets to do my job, something's wrong. And you better make it your life's goal to go automate that Excel sheet in your tool. because that's why they bought you. so, but you can't do that until you meet them and. It's become a lot harder, I'd say, to go meet your customers primarily because everybody's remote now. Everybody's working from different parts of the world. They're not in a room together, so like you have to schedule time. it is a lot harder. that also just means that you, we have to work a lot harder as well to go get that done.

Dan Balcauski: 15:58

Well, let's take the other side of the fence, in case there's any CFOs or folks who are responsible for controlling that, SaaS spending budget. are there any sort of pitfalls that you see from, customers or maybe your non-customers? Maybe they should all just be Spendflo the, is the Yeah.

Sid Sridharan: 16:12

yeah. I mean, the thing is right, obviously as, as much as we want everybody to be a Spendflo customer, right? I think it's just like three steps. You put in place. Some form of a requisition and, and like an approval process, right? and make them aware of where the budget is of whoever's requesting for it, right? and make your department heads aware, like just send them like a monthly, Hey, this is what you've consumed against your budget for your SaaS spend. You have money. You don't have money, Just let them know. that just giving visibility to your requesters and your department heads on Hey, this is what your software spend is, this is what you're using. just power of information honestly is like super useful in this particular case because they're all responsible human beings. As soon as they know that they don't have money to spend, they stop spending money. And the second thing is that I think, You need to get like after you get like your three systems of records, which is your hire to retire your, order to cash and your procure to pay, right? You get all of these three systems, right? everything else is an add-on. So just know what your bare minimum SaaS spend is going to be look like. Just know that's gonna consume 60% of your budget or so, and then everything else is just icing on the cake. So just know that and be confident to make the decisions because they're all reversible, right? you will make bad decisions. It's not so many software implementations go wrong. You are gonna buy the wrong tool. just budget it in, right? just assume that you're gonna make that mistake. Assume that you're gonna have to experiment, but just keep 60%, like your bare minimum. I need this to operate my business. And then the rest can move. just from a leadership standpoint, just knowing that is very important. and then the third is right,.Get an expert to kind of handle this. I'd say, because like I said, after m and a agreements, this is the second most complicated type of agreements that you can ever handle. So if you have an expert, you're not You're not shooting your, like the thing is the SaaS agreement really easy to get started with, but it's two years, three years from now, you're gonna get like in a lot of pain if you don't structure that first agreement well, so structuring the first agreement or the renewal actually pays off dividends three years from now. So it's one of the most long-term things that you end up doing because once the tool gets sticky, you don't wanna move. The cost of moving is so high. You might as well structure it, right? and, I think that's the third one. Get an expert, some way or form. Just make sure that you can get an expert. and you don't need an expert necessarily. If you have like less than 250 K in SaaS spend or something, right? or less than 300 K. But you have, if you know that you're gonna scale that SaaS spend double this year or something, get that expert to make sure that they're buying for you.

Dan Balcauski: 18:56

you're referring specifically, so these, agreements, obviously they're, they could be incredibly long, you page contracts sometimes. and just under someone who can understand, okay, hey, all these clauses mean? what does this mean when we come up for renewal? What does if we expand, what does this mean if, we get acquired, all these kind of, caveats, et

Sid Sridharan: 19:15

Exactly. Yeah. Because like we work in a lot of situations where like people have signed things that they should not have. and like people don't have the contracts centralized. Like those are the worst type of situations because somebody really wants to get this right, but they don't know where to start. that's just because like you've, uh, you don't necessarily have, you're not thinking about all this when you're starting, right? Like. When you're like small and tiny, you're not really Hey, I need to worry about my SaaS spend, but it, it catches up on you. So I think a good time to start thinking about it is like when you're over 60, 70 people and you are, you're Scaling and you, you can start thinking about it right then because like software spend, what we're seeing is that people start spending money a lot earlier than they used to. They're not waiting, they're not waiting to go live with Salesforce. They're not waiting to go live with NetSuite. They're not waiting to go live with these systems. They will actually want to get them live. ASAP. it's just become the way of life now.

Dan Balcauski: 20:10

you, segued nicely into our, next topic. I do want to talk about Spendflo and your experience Scaling a company to, I think you said around 120, folks now. if you maybe put yourself, back in your shoes when you were just starting the company, maybe what were your, potentially, untrue wisdom that you thought were gonna be the challenges of Scaling the company that ended up, I was like, oh, this is actually, it was actually entirely different. what, how did you think it would go versus how it did go? Is there any specific sort of wisdom that you thought oh, this is how it's gonna run?

Sid Sridharan: 20:41

I honestly assume that, because I've been through that journey before, but not as the CEO, but as one of the early employees, I got to see my founders. I worked with them. I saw all of that in person, like in, just in front of me. I kind of assumed that I knew how to do this, because, hey, I've been through this. I, I just don't have to make the same mistakes that they made. I, so I just assumed, like I, I made sure that I didn't make those same mistakes, but I made a lot of new ones. and I just didn't know, there's so much more to it than what meets the eye. And, I think that the things that, I. Very simple things, right? Like I, we run a cross-border team. We run teams in the North America, we run teams in India, we run teams across the world, right? so a lot of cultural nuance, building cross-functional teams. A lot of communication nuances as well, right? Like people are working. Honestly, we, transplant flow is working 24 7. We have folks working, Sometimes India times, sometimes E-S-T-P-S-T, we were all around the world, right? Like across the world. So, how does that affect, our team's health? How does that affect, performance, a bunch of unknowns, right? and we made the clo like I think every SaaS business kind of makes this mistake, and every sass CEO kind of has to make this mistake is you you raise capital and the first thing you need to do is go spend that money, right? but one thing that you don't do is your spend always hits a hundred percent, but your revenue's never gonna hit a hundred percent as, as quickly as your spend is, right? So, that classic mistake everybody does and they tell, and everybody tells you, that you're gonna make this mistake, but it's just a mistake that you have to make, right? it's not necessarily like it's something that you do and you learn from. I think I. we've made all of those classic ones, but we've kind of avoided a lot as well. At the same time, we've built a bunch of rituals around the company that, that kinda holds us together, right? And, good, bad, in how we take them. How I've personally evolved, or my co-founders have personally evolved how the leadership has personally evolved, I mean, it's truly been one of the best experiences, right? Like I, I actually, have enjoyed the, like zero to one was a lot of fun. as well, like it was pretty quick for us. we had an amazing early team that week we were able to get together. and the Scaling stage has actually been a lot more fun actually because, my learning curve is much me, I'm a lot steeper as well

Dan Balcauski: 23:04

Yeah. Well, as you mentioned, the financial, getting ahead of your skis on spending versus revenue. I think we al also, a lot of people got lulled to sleep in the, the free money environment. for better or worse that we were in, we were just like, oh, well if I were, we were, we were low on money, I'll just go raise another round. And then the music stopped. you did mention something there in terms of, I really keyed on when you said, we built, rituals.'cause you were Scaling a team, it's a cross border team trying to build a, leadership, know, around you that, that kind of first or second level of leadership. Can you talk a little bit about, what rituals, did you establish try to, as you started managing the business, sort of one step removed as you grew as an organization.

Sid Sridharan: 23:39

yeah. I think like the thing that we did really well is actually go and hire leaders pretty quickly. Like literally in the first quarter of this year, we actually had, like the first two quarters of this year, we actually had most of our leaders in place. and, they brought a team with them in most cases, right? Like they brought people who worked with them trust them. and we built it like we built, we have leaders in, in, in North America. We have leaders in India as well, right? so, it's truly been that, that journey has been, we've been pretty lucky that way. We've have pretty good leaders. At the same time, right? Like first time CEO. So, you can imagine it, it, it becomes, when you have these really smart people around you, you better get really smart really quickly as well, right? Because you gotta learn and that's the, a very steep learning curve. So, I actually got this advice from, a good friend of mine, old school, really thought thoughtful private equity operator, right? And he asked me to read this book called The Advantage. guy called Patrick Lencioni. Kind of wrote that book and,

Dan Balcauski: 24:35

Oh yeah, wrote, the Five Dysfunctions of A Team. over I haven't read, I haven't heard of the Advantage. I'll

Sid Sridharan: 24:39

Yeah. It's actually a pretty, pretty solid read, It talks about you just need four meetings to run a company. And it's like a weekly catch up with your leaders. You do a daily standup, with them and you do a monthly strategy review, which is just to, Hey, am I in the right direction? Are we going in the right direction where we messed up? Or do we need to learn? Then we do a quarterly leadership off site, right? but nobody teaches you this, like my, it's not like my board is telling me this. My investors are telling me this I used to run them at my previous company. I never understood why we did it. It just started right? Just thought it was a waste of time, honestly. but but they, all four have to happen. Like for it to be successful, you just can't do a weekly catch up and not do a standup. You can't just do a weekly catch up and just go meet at the quarter end or something. It has to be a ritual that you create and honestly. We started putting that in place in like Q3, Q2 of this year. when we raised our Series A and we started Scaling, right? so, when we did that right, it really helped, create that ritual. What that, I, what I was hoping for was, that ritual enabled our, my, my leaders to create that ritual with their teams, right? And it's slowly happening. It's taking a little bit of time, but I think that ritual was very key. And actually the second ritual that was super useful, I think I still do it, every week. this is like the CE of JumpCloud Raj. He was the one who taught me this. he said, they're like 850 people, fully remote team. He sends out like a weekly kind of newsletter to the team on what he's thinking, like what is his priorities, what he is thinking about, for the week and everything. So I, and I started doing that as well. Like I started getting my leaders to send me like, we have an internal slack, kind of think of it like an internal Slack Twitter thread, like with updates from every department lead. On priorities for the week, highlights from last week, right? And it goes to the entire company. I pick up things that are important to me from that, and I send out that weekly, Hey, this is like CEO, top of mind for the week. so that we call it the, this week at Spendflo, emails a lot of people now make fun of it now, but, I add like the song of the week for me, the podcast of the week for me to that, just to keep it

Dan Balcauski: 26:47

of course is gonna be SaaS, Scaling

Sid Sridharan: 26:48

Yes, this is gonna be this one, It's gonna go out next week now. so, I add that I, I also send like a monthly kind of like an investor type update to my team as well, right? So that's something that I think has been truly helpful. Wish I. could do more. I want to keep doing more, but, these are some rituals that we follow.

Dan Balcauski: 27:08

I love that idea of a weekly newsletter because I think, this is a lesson I, I grew up in, in a lot of the product management product strategy world, and you, it becomes grading'cause you're like, I feel like I'm in the meeting all the time. Just the same story of hey, here's the strategy. This is why we're not doing that, this is why we're doing this instead. and you just. You forget when you're in it that everyone else is not in it as much as you. And like even if you know yet, same newsletter probably was 80% the same week on week. It would probably have value for the people in the company because they're, it's just oh no. Oh yeah, I totally forgot.'cause I had a week of, customer support. I've made angry customer calls. It's oh, why are we doing this again? Oh yeah. That's why we're doing this. when you talk about rituals, I wanna tie kinda rituals and culture together.'cause I, I am curious, you talked about you built this international team, this cross-border team. you've scaled, leadership as well as, individual contributors, quite rapidly, There was a good article. There was a guy, John Cutler, who I absolutely love, really brilliant strategist. He was, head of evangelism for Amplitude for a while, and now I think he's over a toast. but just, he writes a amazing blog and he wrote recently about this. He talks a lot about the tragedies that happen in product and development teams. and one of the things he was talking about in one of his recent posts was, when we have like agile, scrum has this idea of a daily standup, right? it depending upon the culture you're in, that standup can either be empowering where The team is supportive and collaborative and Hey guys, I'm blocked here. And everyone's brainstorming and helping each other and it's a, it's almost like this design, atmosphere. And then you can have entirely other cultures where it's I keep my head down my daily standup update. Was pretty much, could have understood it by just looking at Jira and understood what,'cause I'm just gonna tell you the status of the ticket. Like my only job in that is to not get yelled at or called out. so, so you can have a ritual in an entirely different culture and it can be

Sid Sridharan: 29:09

Yeah.

Dan Balcauski: 29:10

dis, it can become dysfunctional. So I'm curious how you about the culture that you've built and how do you think about making those rituals effective so they don't just become this empty, time suck.

Sid Sridharan: 29:20

I, so I'd learned this the hard way as well. Like I sometimes I, I was part of both, right? I've been part of both type of standups. and the one that I really enjoy is where we don't necessarily talk about work. Honestly, like the thing that, I realized this, right? I'm like. I go to that standup and I speak about all kinds of things. We smile, we laugh. We kind of talk about I truly enjoy those where you're just like, you're pulling up one of your colleagues on something and you're like pulling his leg on something or there's somebody's pulling my leg on something. you're actually having like a, it's just a bunch of friends coming together and you're like having that. And then if it's something really important, then you get into it, right? but the click the time between you can't really time it. It's not like you can, um, you have to talk trash for the first couple of minutes and then you get into work. That really works. But if you don't talk trash for the first couple of minutes, and it's okay, right? Like it's 10 minutes of your day, like it's 15 minutes of your day, perfectly fine. Nobody's that busy, right? and honestly, I started doing this. I, I consciously do this now. Like I talk trash for the first five. To five to seven minutes. And I do that consciously, so that then everybody kind of frees up and I'm like, Hey guys, what's the blockers? that's it. because I kind of get your updates like, what do you nearly need? What do we need to get to? Hey, this is what I'm working on, right? rather than it being like something mundane, as well, that's been something that I think I've been doing. but it's something you have to be really conscious about because like on the leadership level, I can do this because then I have control over it. But does that translate to the rest of the organization? It's, I don't have that much control over that. at this point, it's, not every standup is gonna be the same. not every team standup is gonna be the same. and that's, if I start worrying about that, I wouldn't be running a company right now. But

Dan Balcauski: 31:08

I think it's particularly difficult because especially as we've gotten into, it sounded like, have you guys always been a remote first or a hybrid

Sid Sridharan: 31:15

actually, so we actually have a high, like we were remote for the first, honestly, we only went in person in India, in the Indian teams, four months or five months ago. Before that we were completely remote. We're remote in North America, but we have two offices in, one in Chennai and one in Bangalore in, in India. So, we're still three days a week at the office. We still meet in the office. There's a lot of like thing and in in the Indian offices. But, yeah, it's hybrid and it's confusing. That's what I call it.

Dan Balcauski: 31:44

Well, I was just to say that because, I think we lost some of that in the, the shift to remote or hybrid work because, always, I remember, back in, I was working in more of a corporate job and you'd go to a conference room and it takes, everyone's literally having to travel between rooms, so. as people filter in the meeting doesn't start yet. And so it just naturally you have this, time to be like, oh, hey, what are you working on? What, how are your kids? Whatever. And then we went to this world of a Zoom meeting where it's just everyone's calendar is back to back. there's no time to go to the bathroom. There's no time to, to check your email. There's no time to do anything. And then the meeting starts. And I, and I think, I, it's, I'm glad you mentioned sort of you're trying to drive that from a leadership Aspect, because if you don't have that, it, you can feel like, oh, I'm intruding on everyone's time because everyone's back to back and we just gotta get to the meat of it. because we've lost that cultural acceptance of that time to kind of just gel before that we get to business.

Sid Sridharan: 32:41

I'm trying to like consciously. just not talk about work in before starting any meeting. and I'm, that's something that I am consciously doing because honestly oh, in the middle, it was just like, Hey man, I'm just doing eight hours of meetings every day and I don't know who I'm talking to. it's really hard to personally connect with people, right? if you don't have that and this remote setting. That I think has been the hardest part, I think, of, starting a company in 2020 or 2021 and 2022 or anything like, I think that's, honestly, it's just a new way of operating. I don't think you could necessarily put like a, the CEO of a 90, 90, 90, 90 company in charge of a 20, 23 version of a company. No way. I don't think they'll survive.

Dan Balcauski: 33:25

it wouldn't be, No. Jack Welch, even on his

Sid Sridharan: 33:27

No, Jack Welch is not gonna, nah. Jack Welsh is not gonna be able to run this I'm like, I think he so pissed. He's I'll fire everybody. Let everybody go into the office well,

Dan Balcauski: 33:38

well Sid I could talk to you all day, but, I do wanna respect your time and, start to wrap it up. So, I got a couple lightning round questions. Are you ready?

Sid Sridharan: 33:44

Fantastic. Yeah, let's go.

Dan Balcauski: 33:46

All right. Alright. Well, Sid, how do you define success?

Sid Sridharan: 33:52

Um, I think for me, personally, for a couple of people in Five, 10 years down the line, or it, leave Spendflo and they go start their own companies. And just because they were part of the Spendflo, way, or the Spendflo rituals that they follow, the journey that they've been at Spendflo, they become ridiculously successful because of that. Like they, they actually are able to create something. And we played a small part of that, journey. Like that for me is success.

Dan Balcauski: 34:20

Amazing. Are there any habits that you've cultivated that help you stay on the top of your game, either via, kind of intellectual or mental or emotional?

Sid Sridharan: 34:29

Yeah. I like, just emotionally, I did start meditating after starting the company actually so, in the mornings a little bit. but just working out every day is super important. I think for me it's just getting a walk in something right. just makes me feel a lot more on top of my game. honestly, and I think the third is I, I. I wish I did this more, but I take some time to just read, right? Like I, I spend as much time as possible just reading. I have like I listen to amazing podcasts like yours, Dan and I listen to like amazing, like books I like, I'm just like consciously absorbing stuff. I think that's something that I've learned. I learned how to like, do that a lot better now.

Dan Balcauski: 35:09

Yeah, my, it was I plus one on the meditation and also I got my Spotify wrapped and it said I spent 20,000 minutes this year on, listening to podcasts. So maybe to maybe I need to back

Sid Sridharan: 35:19

Yeah. cut listen. now,

Dan Balcauski: 35:21

if I can give you a billboard and you could put any advice on there for other B2B SaaS CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would you put on the billboard?

Sid Sridharan: 35:32

I'd actually say run that weekly ritual email, like that weekly newsletter. type it, like honest to God, it is been one of the most transformational things that has happened to me. it's helped me a ton, right? Like it is just the most tactical, practical thing to do. stick it and run with it. There's no excuse for you not doing it.

Dan Balcauski: 35:49

Write a weekly company newsletter update. Love it. Sid, thank you for sharing your journey insights. Before we wrap up, how can our listeners connect with you or follow Spendflo's? Ongoing story

Sid Sridharan: 36:00

Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place to follow us. and me personally. So pretty active there. happy to help with anything. I will also shamelessly ask for help as well. I'm pretty shameless that way, so, feel free to reach out and, happy to do anything. thank you so much, Dan, for taking the time.

Dan Balcauski: 36:16

Appreciate it. and we will definitely put links in the show notes for listeners, everyone that wraps up this episode of Sass Scaling Secrets, a massive Thank you to Sid for sharing his journey, insights, and valuable tips for our listeners. If you found this conversation as enlightening as I did, remember, subscribe so you don't miss out in future episodes. Till next time, keep innovating, growing, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.