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
When Grit Isn’t Enough with Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics
Dan Balcauski speaks with Dean Guida, founder of Infragistics, about his journey from Wall Street side project to a global leader in UX development tools and his latest venture, Slingshot. They discuss key transformative moments, the principles behind sustainable tech companies, and the critical importance of culture in scaling businesses. Dean shares insights from his recent book 'When Grit is Not Enough' and explores the challenges of change management, the role of data in driving business outcomes, and the intricacies of implementing OKRs. This episode is essential for understanding the balance of grit, collaboration, and strategic execution needed to build and scale successful SaaS companies.
00:58 Dean Guida's Entrepreneurial Journey
02:41 Infragistics: A Multi-Faceted Company
04:14 Insights from 'When Grit is Not Enough'
06:27 Building a Resilient Company
13:04 The Importance of Culture in Business
19:29 Maintaining Company Culture Across Regions
20:22 The Role of Leadership in Culture
21:06 Effective Communication and Storytelling
23:24 Implementing OKRs Successfully
28:11 Introducing Slingshot: A New Direction
33:00 Challenges of Organizational Tools
Guest Links
Company website: www.infragistics.com
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infragistics/
Company Twitter: @Infragistics
Personal website: https://www.deanguida.com/
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanguida/
Dean’s book, When Grit is not Enough
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up, B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to speak with Dean Guida. Dean founded Infragistics in 1989, building it from a side project while working in Wall Street into a global leader in UX development tools. Over 35 years, he's grown the company to serve a hundred percent of the s and p 500 more than 2 million software engineers using their products. Most recently, Dean launched Slingshot, a work management platform and released a book in early 2024 when Grit is not enough, detailing his insights and building sustainable tech companies. Let's dive in. Welcome Dean to SaaS Scaling Secrets.
dean guida:Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
dan balcauski:I'm excited for our conversation today, Dean, I wanna start a little bit on the personal. I know you have had a long journey in your career, but there are different moments that stand out that transform us. I like to think of them as superhero transformation moments. You're Peter Parker, normal high school student. You get bit by a radioactive spider. You go to bed, you wake up, you're Spider-Man. What moment was that for you in your journey?
dean guida:there's probably a couple of moments. One, one was in eighth grade, I attended this course that talked about entrepreneurs in America, and I just like, loved hearing about how they created something new. We're very engineering and scientific oriented and created a whole industry and a lot of value for themselves, the company and the whole market. So that was really inspirational. And then in business there was a pivotal moment where we were finding ourselves with a 580,000 a month expense structure and having$618 in the bank. And so we were kind of legally bankrupt and, it makes you realize, I never wanna experience that again. So you really start to put in better processes expand the expand the burden, basically delegation and leadership and and build a team and not just like, work 24 7, don't take a paycheck, don't take your own paycheck. That doesn't, that never when you get to a certain size that doesn't fix things. And so that was a big moment. We survived obviously, but we didn't have to survive.
dan balcauski:Well, I love both of those moments. And for those of you out there never too early to introduce your children to the world of entrepreneurship, as we heard in the first snip that you gave there. Both I'm sure very powerful moments. And we may that they may be a common thread throughout our conversation. We'll see where it goes before we get further in. I gave a little bit of an intro about infragistics in the. Beginning of the episode, but could you just give your take on the 32nd overview of what infragistics is?
dean guida:Yeah, I mean, we're really four companies now. We UI UX tools that we sell to our biggest markets, ISVs, other software companies, and then and then to the enterprise really excel across all verticals. But that's been the founding product. But now we also have Reveal Embed, which is a analytics dashboarding engine that we sell to other SaaS companies. We have App builder that's for pro devs, that's a low code tool to produce applications. And you can go from design to code very quickly if you're, you have a design team and and Slingshot, which we've been running the company off of for six years, we're really excited by it. It's a, an AI data-driven work management tool that really drives have your objectives and key actions go to market, get the signals from across all your business systems. Telling you what's happening, and usually things don't go well. So then collaborate with your team, with your signals that the, from yours, your sales and marketing and finance systems, and come up with experiments to, in a systematic way, drive better business outcomes. So, that we're a global company and we have a, pretty big customer base and, but we're now separated into four companies.
dan balcauski:We've got a lot of space and market different markets that you play in. But all related to different software products help, it sounds like common theme through it helping software engineers, ux, UI designers do their jobs better day in, day out. I wanna talk a, at the beginning of this part, of this conversation about your book. your book is titled, when Grit is Not Enough That You released? Early in 2024, I guess, with so many business books out there. What was your hope for adding this one into the mix?
dean guida:Well. I think my hope was that after 35 years, I wanted to share how with other entrepreneurs to increase their chances of success. And so I didn't find there was one book out there capturing a lot of things I've learned. So, and I try to be succinct. So you can read a book around strategy, blue Ocean, or and, you read, you get a couple of good tidbits and then you have to spend 200 pages on. Case studies. And so I was kind of more succinct and action oriented and, but I cover everything from go to market planning strategy to creating trust being data-driven, the scientific method of business outcomes, coaching, hiring. And so really my goal was just to share all this experience to help other entrepreneurs. I wish I would've had it and into winning. And then the title, I'm sorry. The title. So every entrepreneur has to have grit and every entrepreneur has to be like, very optimistic.'cause otherwise you're you never do what we do. It's like, it's, there's so much pain, of course, so much fun and happiness too. But it's a rough road. And so, grit, we all know grit is, you just stay focused on a long-term objective with all the ups and downs and see it through. And so when grit's not enough, yes, you need grit, you need optimism, but then now you need to get to the next level and build out good teams, culture, company, and good. Go-to market processes.
dan balcauski:And yeah, so I you've a couple points there. You've definitely read a lot of business books because I completely agree. You get the first chapter where they introduce the concept and then you've got 20 more chapters of case studies and you're like, I think I get the point already. This could have been one chapter. So, I appreciate you putting it in one handy guide for everyone. Was there a specific moment in your life that sort of, made that concept of when grit is not enough, like super concrete for you that made it made you challenge that common narrative?
dean guida:Yeah, I mean, I shared that one story where we were pretty much outta cash and had to come up with$580,000. That, that, that was a defining moment. There there was many other moments. When you're 10 people, when you're smaller, like you cannot take salary, you can work harder and you can impact things, but that doesn't create a scalable, resilient company. And so, over time through reading a lot of books having coaches, taking a lot of seminars and just having this very, which we all have as entrepreneurs this open-minded growth mindset. Keep learning, keep improving. These are just important lessons, in the book that that you need to execute on to have a sustainable business. And so, I think all through life you keep getting knocked down and trial and error. And I think, and that's where grit comes in, that you get back up and get back in the game. But but building a resilient company and culture and team is is critical to long-term success.
dan balcauski:Well, you do cover quite a bit of topics that, potentially listeners of our podcast will be. Aware of things like OKRs and psychological safety and building trust in teams. I'm curious, like has it could be those or anything el else that you've adopted as you've grown, infragistics over the years, has there been concepts or these type of business frameworks or advice that you initially sort of resisted but eventually sort of saw the promise after it ended up embracing over time.
dean guida:Yeah, there was. So first of all, I love people and like people and people's the most important thing. But I went I went to this place called Center for Creative Leadership and they had psychologically interviewed me. They interviewed my wife, they interviewed my team. And I scored on a score of one to five, five being the best, a two for caring about people. And I was like, heartbroken. I'm like, that's impossible. Like I care about people. And so what happened was I went to the, I went to the center and I learned that like I just was so focused on getting work done that I didn't create relationships with people. I was just very, just very driven and I missed the whole part of connecting with people and creating the relationship. And so, that was a big lesson. But at that Center for Creative Leadership which is an amazing program, I learned another thing, which was the first day. So they put you on these teams and they, first of all, psychology is so scary. They know everything about you. They and what they did, the way they made you learn was they put you. You learn through experiential learning. So they put you in these bad situations to pull out all your bad habits and all your strengths. And as we learn and know, like your strengths can also be your weaknesses. So the first day they had me next to this girl and it just happened to be a girl, but she was like crazy cuckoo. And I was like, oh my God, I hope she's not on my team. I hope she's not on my team. Well, what do you think? She's on my first team.'cause they put you in these team settings and. We had to throw this ball around and and tell a great team experience. And so we're throwing the ball around and then they told us, okay, in the order you threw the ball around you need to do it under a minute. So there was like, 10 teams of 10. And so we're like, oh my God, under a minute there's too many people throwing the ball around. And then they put pressure on you. Like, what's wrong with you guys? Like, everyone else is done. What's wrong? What's wrong with you guys? And we're like, oh, crap. And then this girl. Came up with this great idea. She goes, well, let's get outta this circle and let's just stand in the order that we threw the ball around randomly and we ended up putting our hands together like this. And we did it in seconds. We rolled the ball down there. So one of the big, that was a big learning for me, which was I always hired people that thought like me, talked like me, and guess what? Harm harmonious team, we always got along and it was easy to manage, but we always solved the problem the same way. And so like. I learned that you have to have diversity of thinking. You need to have different people. Don't hire everyone like you because then you'll come up with way better ideas. So someone that thinks different will make a right turn. Then you can build on that solution. Now it's harder to manage and run teams with diversity of thinking because you don't always agree you have conflict. But if you're into solving problems the best way and being creative, it's amazing.
dan balcauski:That's like a great story. And yeah, even going back earlier in your story about getting that feedback some of those three sixties or assessments you get when you've, especially as you've advanced in your career, and they can be pretty painful to hear and they're painful usually'cause they're accurate, right.
dean guida:It. No doubt. It's very
dan balcauski:If they were just totally off base, it wouldn't make, it wouldn't emotionally hurt you, but I mean, it was, you were just like, oh no. There's that blind spot I've
dean guida:you're you're you're first in denial. But then if you're true to yourself, well, first of all, you get curious like, what, how could that be possible? And then you learn how it's possible. And that led into like our whole coaching process that, you need people to give you feedback and so that you can uncover those blind spots. And and even if you don't agree with the feedback you're getting, like still it's a perception that people feel that way. So why not improve it and work at that? And so, coaching's a huge thing we believe in too. Always work on improving both soft and, hard skills and be real focused at continued learning. you know, individually.
dan balcauski:Well, I'm intrigued by, the, depth and length of your experience in the software industry. I guess as you look today at the SaaS landscape, what do you see as sort of the most common misconception about what it takes to build a elastic software company?
dean guida:Well, I think everyone knows this so hard'cause it is really hard. I, it comes, there's a couple things. You definitely need to have competitive advantage and value, clear value of the market. And it is true. You have to find product market fit. It's not easy, it's not obvious. You could do all the research and analysis in the world, but until you go and. Start selling something and asking for money and winning over competitors and getting to a point where you can have a repeatable process where you don't have to have like a super sales person or the CEO doing every sale. That, that, that's critical. And so, creating a great software company starts with a good idea and a competitive advantage for sure. Clearly articulating that. And then it's all about the people building your team, sales, marketing, engineering. Design. I mean, you just need a great team to execute and and then create a culture that's, end up being curious and problem solving and and staying focused on quality and not just time to market. And so there, there's, are these other elements as well, but it's it's people, it's competitive advantage and and then it's, find a product market fit because that is a hard thing to do.
dan balcauski:Well, and you, in your book you talk a lot about building culture, but also mention that, a lot of leaders fail at, the idea of even thinking about culture'cause it's fluffy. Like how do you think about making it more tangible for folks?
dean guida:Yeah I used to be a freelance consultant. I wrote software down on Wall Street at IBM and I. Not that IBM was a bad culture, but I just saw a lot of bad cultures and I, so even before starting my company, I knew I wanted to intentionally have a great culture and culture's actually simple. It's like. People you work with, enjoy working with you, enjoy problem solving and building with you and going to market with you. I mean, and then people stay. And how do you attract really good people and keep'em for a long time? Some of the joyful things I have is I, we have some geniuses working for us for 20 years, 15 years, and they can work anywhere. And so being intentional about building a culture as it starts with hiring, look for growth minded people. What did you know, questions like, what did you read in the last six months? What. What, what do you wanna know and learn over the next year? People that are really into learning and expanding and being open to that. And then, so soft skills are so important that you hire for people that fit your culture itself. And and you share that even in your, how you're posting and what it's like to work with you and what you're working on. And then it comes to, I mean, there's so much to it, but creating trust is so important. So like. Like we try and I say try'cause it's always a work in process progress, but, have blameless problem solving. So if you really want people to share problems, collaborate on problems, you need to have that safety that you talked about earlier. That people feel safe about asking a question, sharing a problem, and then asking for help and working on problems. And so intentionally creating that problem solving safe, collaborative, trusting environment is key. And and then I'll just wrap up. There's a lot more to it, but being data-driven helps a lot. You just have so much more productivity when you're introducing data into the conversations around solving problems.
dan balcauski:I, well, and I'm kind of curious,'cause you'd mentioned, you'd seen Wall Street and I don't think anybody would say Wall Street culture is a culture they probably want to emulate inside their technology firms Very Silicon Valley versus wall Street. Very different in terms of how they think about their. Their, they're people and et cetera. But you know, I guess was there a, in your mind, was there a formative experience either at infragistics or before where you kind of saw culture, like have a negative impact?
dean guida:Well, I'll share a negative and I'll share a positive, I mean a positive. So I worked on Wall Street at banks and insurance companies, so I worked on product teams building software. So it wasn't like the broker wall, the Wolf of Wall Street kind of experience. It was smart people building complex systems. So I was at a IG down in 99 John Street. We had an amazing team. It was unbelievable. It was early days like our, the it was a, our, we built a client service system. I mean, this was a long time ago. It was like over 35 plus years ago. And we had DB two as our backend. We had data adrenaline laptops as a front end. And that team was amazing. We went on to create infragistics, part of the team, and part of the team went on to create another product called, logicworks a database entity management tool, which and so that was a great experience. It was just a team that wanted to get things done, wanted to build quality and collaborate. Then I worked on another company. There was like 30 consultants. There's probably a hundred people on the team and everyone just show up at meetings and talk and look good. And meanwhile, like me and two other people did all the work. And it was a culture of people not caring, and. I loved writing software and and so yeah I just didn't like people just talking and showing up and not really caring about the work at hand.
dan balcauski:So making sure people are really sort of committed to what the company's about. And I think you I guess you know where that sort of leads me is, I think like when people think about culture and corporate life you'll often hear talk about, mission statements or vision statements, and those can often. Release a collective groan from a lot of frontline employees who are like who we're now getting baked in some, heavy corporate jargon. I guess h how do you think about, like, I, is that a part of how you think about culture and like, is there a way to like, break through that as you're trying to like really help the, like, everyone sort of get behind what the, it's like, Hey, this is what we're here to do. So kind of the antithesis of what you're describing.
dean guida:Well, you have to be real and true because that's why people groan about a purpose or a vision statement when it's just not true. So, so you have to like be real truthful in what you're doing. And so for example, for us, like I said, we, people stay with us'cause they like the people they're working with, they like the products they're working on. They like they like how we do get things done. And so there's not labeling people, not finger pointing. Of course we have, we're not perfect and we have all that as well, but to a lower degree. So, so like intentionally you talking about intention, we build a really beautiful building. We introduced like, food into meetings and we supported a lot of community events and we, like, we'd share monthly share teach people programming, design. We shared it. We shared our, we have this beautiful space with the boy scouts with the high schools. And so just part of like, sharing and we spent a lot of money to like make a very warm, relaxed environment. Introduced food and stuff is just part of it. And and then just solving. Important problems in a collaborative way. And so people want, they, a culture is like, I enjoy how we get work done. I enjoy working with the people around me. And so it, it comes down to that, that's what attracts good people. They recommend their friends to come work there. And and so you're intentional about it. Like at one point we used to have cubes, but then we had beautiful offices and then we cared about, everything. We cared about creating trust. We cared about managers and execs that we hired that wouldn't break our culture. We cared about who we hired. And so it's an ongoing work effort. And then once you get bigger and you get regional, every, like we're in Japan, we're in Eastern Europe, we're in Europe, in London we're in South America. Like each one then starts to have their own mini culture.
dan balcauski:Mm-hmm.
dean guida:can't help that. But then the overarching culture of the company needs to kind of see it through. So, I mean, leaders have a big thing to do with it, but then you have to like communicate the culture you want and like I, I meet with every new employee and give'em an onboarding and sometimes'cause they group'em up, it may be a couple of months before they, they join the company. They've already been in the company a month or two sometimes. And I talk about values and the culture we want and I say that. Because it's up to them, the new hires to, if you like this and you join us'cause of this, you need to keep it going. And what's rewarding is when they say, wow, like that is what I've experienced here. What I described. I'm like, okay, well we've gotta keep this thing going and you own the culture as much as me, so let's keep this thing going. So it's So culture is real. It's like how you get work done and if you just put marketing spin on it, it's. It doesn't work. People see through it and the quality people will leave.
dan balcauski:Well, you mentioned something in your last response there that was kind of jumped out to me, which is I think a lot of companies, once they hit scale, start to deal with, which is alright, now we're in multiple countries, multiple time zones. Like, we used to be 10 people in a room and we'd, be, we'd split a pizza and like everyone would just, swivel around in their chairs and Right. And like now we're. We're not, we don't see each other every day. Right. And a lot of people, especially with covid went hybrid, et cetera. I guess, can you talk a little bit more about like, how you thought about, like, you talk about, hey, like there's a, there's sort of, individual office culture, but then the, the corporate culture has to, be this, somewhat, coherent as well. Are there ways that you've thought about like, pragmatically, like helping that along?
dean guida:Yeah, I mean I I get in front of the company once a month and I talk about what's happening in the company. Um, we have myself and all our leaders and managers, when you tell stories, people listen to that. When you say, oh, these are objectives. But when you tell stories, and those are those stories which are real stories, embody the values and culture. You want people listen to that. And your leaders, you have to know, everyone's watching you. Everyone is watching you always, they know everything. And so, like, know that and and always, communicate and physically and emotionally and keep telling stories and reward people around stories that, that are real, but impact the, the values in your culture you want. So, so, so that's one way. Then me getting in front of the company once a month is. Really important. You know what happens is when you have satellite offices, people make their own narrative, make up their own thing what's going on, which can have a life of its own, which is usually not good. And so, and then I write a in, we use slingshots when slingshot I write a a post once a month talking about what's happening in the company. And so the, these things help reinforce it. But it's not one thing. It's like a lot of, it's a lot of things that you do. First you hire, right? Then you create trust, then you create this, problem solving, curious culture. Then, and then you you're very clear about what good and great is like through a clear objectives and key actions. And I mean, it's many things that create a company, a culture that people enjoy and enjoy to be part of. It is not one thing, but it needs to be intentional, especially by the CEO founder and leader.
dan balcauski:Yeah, absolutely. And it's a gnarly topic. And I thought you covered it well in your book which is why I thought it would be a useful topic to help break down because it's something that you're right, like people give a marketing spin to of a, it's, this is what culture is, and then that's kind of where the guidance is left. A lot of leaders, you're like, okay, well, I don't know how to affect that, so I'm gonna go. Worry about the things I ca I know how to actually approach. But obviously you've been incredibly successful both, on the longevity of the company in general as well as, keeping employees for decades it sounds like at at times. So, that's no small feat in today's business world. For sure. You did just hint at things like OKRs, right? I, and I don't know, there's probably not a person who's listening to this podcast who's never heard about OKRs and. Much like mission and vision statements, they may exhibit an eye roll because I, there are a lot of companies that. You try implement them, implementing them, and just, it just goes sideways. I, there's often a gap between, knowing where Right. Business practice and actually implementing them effectively, I guess as you've sort of, adopted them, I am assuming from, our conversation you're actually using something akin to OKRs at infragistics, I guess what surprised you about actually putting them into practice? And I guess is there anything you've learned for how to like make them actually very. Useful in an environment versus just sort of this? Oh, yes, we have them. So I can tell my board this. We have them.
dean guida:Yeah, I mean, I'm a huge fan of OKRs and as Andy Grove created it the founder of Intel like in the 1970s.
dan balcauski:got high output management on my bookshelf
dean guida:yeah, and so the thing about OKRs, it's a simple, lightweight framework, but it's actually hard to implement. And so it took us a couple of years to get really good at it. And what do I mean by that? Like. If you just measure activity and not, they say focus on business outcome, that's a bad thing. And so, so just writing good OKRs is a, is hard to do. It takes repetition and like, we're all smart people, but it took us a couple years to get good at it. So that's why it's hard. So if you have it takes time to get good at it. And then the other, what I really like about OKRs is that or this is how we do it. You don't have to do it in a hierarchical, cascading way, but that's what we do. We create our annual plan. That supports our three year strategy and we created at a high level, so we're setting objectives that are measurable. We're defining prioritization.'cause you can only really put three to five key actions to support that objective, which makes you really think about what is most important to execute and have priority. And then typically those can be measured. Sometimes you can't like. When we first started learning account based marketing, like one, one key result of delivering revenue on a BM was we had to learn a BMI mean, you can kind of measure it, but you can't measure it, so, but that was a critical action. We all learn about a BM best practices and but what we do is, so we create this annual plan set of OKRs, but then we push it down to the teams that have to execute on that. So that they then will create OKRs based on these high level objectives of the company. And then you get that process of, with the team coming up with the objectives and how you're gonna achieve those objectives is critical.'cause you get alignment, you get collaboration, you get discussion, and and you get intrinsic buy-in to it. And the other thing you get by pushing it down is you get innovation. So like I could set the objectives of, okay, we're gonna drive$5 million in new sales. We're gonna do it through digital sales led, product led. Okay. That's what I do. Now, the people that are responsible for product led that can have that, okay, we're gonna deliver a million dollars in product led as the objective, but what are the key three to five key actions we could take for that? It may be have to be, designing the onboarding experience. It may have to do with. Content, but whatever it is. And so, I, one, it's hard repetition makes everything high performance. It doesn't come easy for anyone. It's a simple framework, but it's hard to do. And what I love about the the key result part is that you are then, as a manager, you can delegate some of those key actions. And it also keeps you very focused on priority. Data and to achieve the objective. So I love the framework. It's it works really well. And then we expand on that with and which is some of the thesis of Slingshot, that, okay, now we're taking our signals from all our business systems, of our metrics for each of these OKRs and key results. And then we're collaborating and using experimentation to drive a better business outcome'cause. What happens is things normally just don't go well. Oh, your customer acquisition cost is too high. Your conversions aren't right Through the customer journey and funnel, all these things you have to optimize to increase sales. Your OKRs are helping you execute, but then data and experimentation is helping you adjust and win and be agile and win to achieve your objectives.
dan balcauski:Yeah. And I love that you talked about, it's, it is hard. It's deceptively simple in practice. Yeah.'cause I don't know anyone who, on principle says, objectives and key results are a bad thing to have. I think everyone would sort of say, oh yeah, goals are good. Right. And and then I, the. Valley is littered with companies that have unsuccessfully tried to implement such a simple practice. So yes, repetition definitely helps you improve over time. You have mentioned slingshot a few times now in the conversation, so I'd like to go there and this product, as I understand it, departs significantly from infragistics historical focus on dev tools. I guess, what made you decide to tackle this? Organizational systems problem after, decades of focusing on developer tools.
dean guida:Well, one was a business motive and two, that we wanted to implement this thesis. I keep talking about that there wasn't a product implementing this thesis of, okay let's align people on action to, to execute on our strategy and then let's use collaboration and experimentation to drive business results. So. There, there was, there's lots of pieces of systems out there, but there was nothing pulling it all together. So, so one was from the business point of view is like we wanted to operate in a bigger market, a bigger a market that we could make more money in. Developer tools is a great market, but there's, some of our tools are, are niche and there's a top threshold of how much share you can acquire of that market. So we wanna operate in a bigger market. So that was a business motivation, but I think the bigger motivation was really, there was nothing out there, that we could use. We use a ton of SaaS systems, like we use so many and some of the problems of using these SaaS systems. Is data gets locked up in these systems. They get locked up in spreadsheets, they get locked up in PowerPoint. And even our company who's very data driven, if you don't know how to get to the data you're making decisions without it. And it happens all day, every day. Oh, but we have CRM, we have a BM systems, we have, automation of this, we have analytics of that. And so we wanted to make it easy. One of the things we did in Slingshot was. We implemented conversational analytics using, LLMs and AI so that you could just have a conversation and say, well, what's my how did my Ruby Camp digital campaign do? Oh, that was$60 per lead, oh, okay. Well, where's all my leads coming from? Oh, they're coming from organic here, from PPC here, from social here. Okay, well now I have all this data. Let me collaborate with my team. Oh, we wanna reduce our, we wanna increase deal closure. And we wanna, we really need to bring our lead costs down. So then, using Slingshot, you could do all these things. You can look at your objectives, you can look at your metrics across all your business systems in one place. So you're not you don't know where to find the data. And then you're going from that to experimentation and trying, you hypothesize, oh, if we change that targeting or that messaging, or we had a faster follow up on a lead. Could we get that discovery meeting at a higher rate? And so, this whole flywheel of staying focused on objectives, prioritizing how you're gonna achieve it through OKRs, getting the data and the signals and experimentation is a modern way to really be agile and drive business growth. And so there wasn't something like that out there that, there's Monday and Asana that do work management, but they don't pull in data from across all these systems and. So being data-driven is another simple thing to say. It's hard to do even with all these SaaS systems.
dan balcauski:Yeah, I guess,'cause I guess many vendors would claim that they're sort of unlocking data silos and I guess I would say the entire bi industry will say that from the rooftops. But it sounds like what you're pointing to is that, it's not only the data, but then it also being able to attach sort of the work, like how the work gets done based upon that as well.
dean guida:Yeah, it's the fluidity of the whole thing. So yeah, BI tools definitely unlock data silos business systems create data silos, but the problem with a lot of BI systems is that they stop and end there. Then you have to like, have an analyst go and do something for you, or you have to know. Where those dashboards or data is. And so we solve some of those problems with a data catalog inside the collaboration platform where you can just quickly search and understand where the metrics are. And so you don't have to know how to get into the financial system or the CRM system. But still all the security is still built in there. And then through ai, we're making it even easier too, where you can just, in a chat conversation, get at the data. Now you don't even need to know where the dashboards are, what's what? You just ask the questions and then it puts up beautiful visualizations and it creates trust. So a lot of people don't trust ai. So like we, from a user experience point of view, we give a very quick answer to your question, but then you could drill in and see the how we calculated it and what data sources we use, but. Everything has to do with speed, user experience, and fluidity of execution, and that's what we modeled in Slingshot.
dan balcauski:Well, and kind of going back to, you know how I, we started talking about slingshot, which is, this is a divergence from the dev tool space, and you explained sort of the market opportunity that you saw there. I guess given your time in market so far, are organizational tools harder to make successful than developer tools?
dean guida:Oh yeah, because the hard thing is change management. So like I talk to so many CEOs, mid market CEOs, and they can agree with me, but we all know, including myself, including you, how hard it is to introduce a new tool, improve process, change management is hard. And so, our key go to market is mid-market CEOs and go top down because. The CEO's usually driven to, for growth in a better way to win. We and so like we stay away from the enterprise. Too many decision makers, too much tech, too many people to convince. We do go departmentally in there for marketing teams, but this, the concept I've been talking about is more organizational. So yeah, the hardest thing is change management. And and that just won't, that won't go away.
dan balcauski:Well, I, there's a million more questions I could ask about that pivot, because I think it's, there's a lot of gold to be tapped for other folks who kind of, you know you're not alone at a certain point. You do tap out kind of current market. You're like, oh, this could be promising over here. And then you realize there's a bunch of reasons why that turns out harder than you thought. But in the interest of time I wanna pivot and start closing out with a couple of rapid fire closeout questions. Are you ready?
dean guida:Yeah, ready?
dan balcauski:How do you define success for yourself today?
dean guida:Well, I mean, I'm trying to go rapid fire, but the way I define success for me today is I feel very successful already. I'm very grateful for what I've already done, so I already feel that. But I've set the next bar, which is like, I really want, I really like, I really want slingshot to be in the billion dollar club. So that's why personally like a personal goal, but success is like, yeah, enjoying your work, having people enjoy building some really cool stuff and customers appreciating you. I mean, that, that is always been the energy back to be successful. And that's probably the main answer is just that.
dan balcauski:Enjoy your day to day. Got it. And when you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to work with, is anyone who just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect in the way that you think about building companies now? I.
dean guida:There's no one person, but I'm always amazed that where you get these geniuses that do, the work of 38 plus people. I just love those people and and I cherish them. And so like, when you are a just really driven, motivated, smart person and and wanna win I just love them. And there's been a lot of them at our company and over my career. I just love people like that. They're, they just wanna do good work and then they end up doing the work of 38 plus people. It's amazing. It's incredible that they can do that.
dan balcauski:That's amazing. Look, in your book you lay out a lot of practices that you stand by and adopt, I guess, let me ask you the antithesis of that. Like, what's something you've observed other companies doing that looks good from the outside, but you know, doesn't work in practice? What should everyone else stop doing?
dean guida:I think if you read every business book and you think that it, including mine that's it. Learn it. You go do it. It's gonna work. Nope. It's a framework and so you have to certainly learn it, do it, but it's about adjusting and learning from doing it. So that's the main thing. Like all these business books make everything sound simple and you just do it and you're gonna have a successful company. I believe in, in, in learning and trying these things, but it's actually doing it and then learning the market's reaction and adjusting to make it successful. That's the key.
dan balcauski:Yeah. If we could all just adopt all those habits, all the books tell us we need to do, like, we'd all be super skinny and super fit and millionaires, right?
dean guida:It just doesn't work that way.
dan balcauski:I've read all those books, it's still, I'm still waiting for it. I love that response. Look if I gave you a billboard and you put any advice up there for other B2B Sass CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would it say?
dean guida:It's all about the people. Like yeah, care about your people, care about the culture, and make it a place where everyone loves to solve problems together.
dan balcauski:Care about the people. I've absolutely enjoyed this conversation. If Dean, if our listeners want to learn more about infragistics or follow you, how can they do that?
dean guida:So I have my own website dean guided.com, and then I, you can then connect to my book and then we have a lot of websites now as a company four. But so, but infragistics.com is our main one, but there's slingshot app.io. There's reveal bi.io, there's app builder.dev. These are all our, sorry, it's so complex answer, but those are ways to get connected.
dan balcauski:Those are fantastic. I will put them in the notes for our listeners so you don't have to scramble down if you're out walking your dog or whatever. There'll be in your there'll be links of the show notes. Thank you so much, Dean, everyone. This wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. Thank you to Dean for sharing his journey, insights, and valuable tips for our listeners. You found this conversation as a lightning anxiety to remember, subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes.
