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
Riding the Opportunity Wave with Rytis Lauris, CEO of Omnisend
Dan Balcauski speaks with Rytis Lauris, Co-founder and CEO of Omnisend. They discuss how Rytis bootstrapped Omnisend to $50 million ARR, the challenges of scaling during rapid market changes, and the strategies Omnisend employed to maintain and grow its customer base. Rytis shares insights on the importance of customer communication, the balance between qualitative and quantitative data, and delegation for successful scaling.
00:27 Meet Rytis Lauris: CEO of Omnisend
02:13 The Journey of Omnisend
08:06 The Impact of COVID-19 on E-commerce
13:57 Scaling Challenges and Solutions
20:02 Embracing Vulnerability in Business
21:29 Remote Work and Organizational Restructuring
24:00 Delegation and Leadership Lessons
29:58 Balancing Data and Customer Interaction
37:56 Final Thoughts and Advice for SaaS CEOs
Guest Links
https://www.omnisend.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/omnisend/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rytisl/
Who's Got the Monkey (HBR)
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 Rytis Lauris, co-founder and CEO of Omnisend. over a decade of experience in digital marketing and e-commerce, Rytis has bootstrapped Omnisend to 50 million a RR by staying prepared for pivotal market opportunities. When he is not scaling his company, Rytis can usually be found riding his bike, enjoying time with family, and pursuing his goal of reading a book a week. Let's dive in. Welcome Rytis to SaaS Scaling Secrets.
Rytis Lauris:Hey Dan pleasure to be here and thanks for inviting.
Dan Balcauski:I am incredibly excited to chat with you. Before we dive into Omnisend, I did notice that you had this goal of managing to read a book week. How do you make time for that while running a fast growing company?
Rytis Lauris:That's a good question. And that's a goal to be honest, I'm not succeeding with that goal, like in the past couple of years during okay, 2 circumstances like that. They used to be years when they accomplished this goal. It was covid that was very favorable for that because no, no business travel and not much to do outside of your home. And that's the first thing. And second thing, the back in COVID times, we only had one kid, now we have two. So, so that degrade. So let's see, last year, and it was kind of like. Quite away from this goal, but I read about like 20 few books, so it was like two, two per month. So twice less than the goal is, but there used to be years when then I succeeded. But I think in general, you always have to be to have ambitious goals and and in this case it's, that's okay that in certain years I fell and I didn't push myself too hard, but still have it as a north star.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I think that's still quite impressive. And even if you're not meeting that book a week, I think a lot of people would feel very happy if they got to check 20 books off their reading list last year. I gave a folks a little bit of a intro to you in the the beginning of the episode. But could you just briefly introduce us to your journey in the SaaS world?
Rytis Lauris:So sure. So Omnisend is this marketing good automation platform that is built mainly for those who sell online. So basically, if you own online store and you sell sell like physical or digital goods, et cetera, we help to retain your existing customers by sending them emails. SMS messages, web push notifications. So basically communicating and inviting them to come back and to purchase again and again from you. So, yeah, so this is purely SaaS business. This is my first start at that attempt, type 12. I failed twice prior. None of those. Okay. Second startup attempt was, kind of SaaS business similar to what Slido is now? Probably this is the company that succeeded the most of all out of all those attempts to build some similar product. It was just more kind of. Built towards like individual speakers. Those were on stage and want to engage with an audience. So that was a kind of a first SaaS attempt. And Omnisend is a second. So yeah, failed twice. And then start, so basically the first product. Then we, when I started building that, and that like audience engagement tool, or polling tool. That was what, 12 years ago or something? Or maybe 13 years ago? Yeah, so since then I fell in love with SaaS. To be honest, it's a very good business model. And the subscription business model is very good business model. So it really takes away a lot of headaches to be honest. From any founder of business person.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Well we all if you'd hit this amount of success on your first try I think we'd be even more jealous of you. So good that you had a couple of failures under your belt to to get those lessons learned. you and bring you back down to earth.
Rytis Lauris:that's a journey. I think that's a journey. It's very important. And and then there are still parts of the world where failure is being a negative thing. You are from the states which I admire, what I admire. I'm from Lithuania and that's where Omnisend was founded. So, so that's what I admire about like US business culture, but failure, it's just a part of learning and a part of the journey. And it's mainly each failure leads you to success. And the faster you make failures and the more you learn from those failures the better chance for success you have in your next attempt.
Dan Balcauski:Well and you already gave a little bit of a taste of Omnisend, but for an audience who maybe is not familiar with Omnisend as a company, can you just give us kind of a 32nd overview of what it is where you play?
Rytis Lauris:Yeah, so it's it's e-commerce enablement, so those who sell online, those who sell online. So we help them to communicate with their customer base. So. Whilst, while customers are purchasing for first time, usually there is a loss for the business to acquire new buyer for those who sell online through meta like Facebook, Instagram ads or Google ads for basically like this op list global you, you pay more than actually you earn on the first transaction. So if you run an e-commerce store, online, store, your business model, that you have to retain those customers and calculate lifetime value. So once, once Dan is buying something for first time the online store, lose money, they start earning some profit once Dan is buying for a second time, third time, fourth time. So it's very important to welcome back, to invite back by presenting new product lines new updates promoting some sales, et cetera, et cetera. So, and, email, email it's the best performing retention, marketing or communication, direct communication with your existing customer base channel. And so far. And I mean, there were so many, like Chad gonna kill like every, like, there were so many killers of email. But email is the most effective revenue driver retention, revenue driver for any business and especially those who sell online. SMS. Really adds on top really great web push notifications. They're very effective as, as well. They are a little bit or not a little bit a lot underestimated. And then I think online stores don't use them enough. Back in the days we tried also, like Facebook Messenger WhatsApp, et cetera. None of those worked for marketing purposes. They're great to, to, to service as maybe support tool but they did not work out for marketing purposes. Yeah, so that's what we do basically help to collect all, connect with your existing buyers and retain them. And probably the most important thing that we help. To automate a lot of that communication. So basically you set up automation, you put your customers in segments, you prebuilt segments, and the system that Omni Send does it's absolute automatically for you. So the example would be, Dan is browsing something and we set up automation that once we're identify that Dan is browsing for an. A tires, let's say. Why not? If you have a car, we identify what kind of tires is like, is it motorcycle, is it car, is it a truck, et cetera. And we start like automatically promoting that specific products phone. For Dan, when Dan is purchasing something, we have a lot of like post-purchase sequences. Okay, thank you for order. We have dispatched, can you leave us a review, et cetera. After one or two seasons maybe we promote avatars for you and it's all automated. You set up it once and the system does the job. Omni understand does the job on behalf of the marketer or the owner of online store, and you don't need to like set up everything again and again.
Dan Balcauski:Well I appreciate that overview and given we just got on the other side of the holiday season and I did really well in shopping for my girlfriend for the holidays. I probably have you to blame for the state of my email inbox at the moment partially so I forgive you, but you're also out there doing good work. So, but I wanna kind of just so, so. That's kind of the external facing, but you did mention, so in the business world, the winds of change can blow quickly and unexpectedly. And you brought up this Covid period where, obviously got very into book learning, but you know, I imagine, your world of e-commerce shifted, nearly overnight. Take me into that period, kind of running omnis sin. Like what did you see? How did you react to what. Look like an entirely sea change.'cause you, we shut down, most retail in the US right? Everything you bought, you had to buy online. How did that affect sort of what you were dealing with as a leader of Omnisend?
Rytis Lauris:So I have a bit, like more broad than just a covid concept. So I have a strong belief that that and it's not just belief like that there is a gym calling offer of books like good to Great Built to Last and never. So in his book, like Bill to Last, he analyzes what is common, between the companies that stay on top for many years. So basically kind of he, and fine, just to simplify it, like my take on from his inside, two things. First one is like ability to ride the wave. Whenever it comes the opportunities arise and they, the opportunities arise for any business. And the second is resilience in the hard times, and any company, any business, any person, we have good times and challenging times, difficult times, bad times. And that's one of the thing that matters. So that's what I always say to the team as well. The main pivotal VA waves, they are coming unexpectedly and you cannot predict them. and it's like for any business, and sometimes they come quite often, sometimes you have to wait for decades for those pivotal waves to come. But you have to always be ready to accommodate that opportunities that arise. So it's like, wind surfing. I didn't do windsurf, but like I imagine it's very similar, like, like, like that. At least when you spectate that. So basically you do a hard job physical job and once the wave comes, either you are able in that short period of time to jump on the wave. If you're ready, physically, mentally, you have skills for that, then you ride the wave. And it just, brings you somewhere. It's very beautiful. It's very nice. It drives results or otherwise, if you do not jump on the wave, it basically floods you. So, so that's kind of thing you always have to be ready to take opportunities that arise and the smaller opportunities arise more often. Big opportunities are rare, but but they come to time to time. So that's that's a main philosophy behind that. Always be
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, so, so being prepared to act is essential, I guess. What does that mean in practice or what do you sort of attribute your ability to capitalize on that? Like, were there systems or processes that you had in place that allow you to, so you talk about this wave, right? Surfing, like mentally, physically, like what was that in the context of your business?
Rytis Lauris:So I would say mainly it all starts with people. And practices and systems are important, but it all starts with great people right people in the bus, basically people that are ready to go extra mile when it's needed. At the same time that, that people that know what we do and really are professionals in their areas. So when the opportunity comes, we don't have, there is no, no way to micromanage. There is no way to, for any, the best leader, I believe, to really to understand everything what is happening. We basically safe of a team. Okay, let's. Go and grab this opportunity, and each person does the best job they can to really grab this opportunity. So, and and they go extra miles. They don't count their working hours at that time, et cetera. So it all starts with people. And the second thing, like the system should be in place because then you can just, break as a company if, like, if product is not ready. If the processes are not ready they start somewhere like. Breaking a little bit, but that's okay. So that's another thing. How fast can you be in fixing, so operational excellence and you don't seek for excellence in those periods, but at least having it good enough. So, so, yeah, so you have to cover kind of quite broad broad scope of processes, let's say if it's marketing. Yeah. You have to be ready to cover different areas. So either you have, while you're a smaller team, you have universal people or generalist that can cover broader range. Once the organization grows, then you divide a little bit. Okay. I have pro in this area. I have pro in this area. I have pro in this area, so we have it covered. And we practice. So again, I never concept by the same Jim Collins in this case just in another book. So it's about like 20 miles march. That so no matter what happens each day, you have to practice what you need to practice, you have to go 20 miles March. So basically like, just to simplify it, he says that if you want to go from east to west. Throughout the United States on foot, you have to go every day, 20 miles. On bad days, on difficult conditions through the mountains, you have to still go 20 miles. But at the same time, if it's a good day, if you feel inspired, et cetera you don't have to overstretch yourself. And you still have to be quite persistent. Just do 20 miles, don't do too much in the good days because you will get tired and then you will overstretch yourself, et cetera. So that's with persistence. Even in the difficult times, you continue doing what you have to do. There is basics. Yeah. That you have to do. You have to send those emails. You have outreach. Those, you have to run those campaigns. Maybe they're not working'cause they used to work, they're not working perfectly. But you have to do things. You just, that is just the baseline of your job. So that's how you build fundamentals for the, for the success for accommodation of success or opportunities whenever they arise,
Dan Balcauski:So having the people in place and then persistent practice sort of in the, on the good and the bad days. So that's all good and well in preparation. But I'm sure you know this product is called SaaS Scaling Secrets because we see, the, every company breaks underneath scaling challenges. I'm curious, as you were. As prepared as you might have been you cannot, a hundred percent prepare for everything. And you said like, we don't search for excellence, but you know, we shoot for good enough. And I'm sure there were probably parts of the system where it wasn't even like, you're like, oh, that was good enough before, but now it's not even good enough. What existing processes, I guess, broke under the pressure of rapid growth? I guess what were the first sort of challenges that you had to solve?
Rytis Lauris:In our case, probably that to where, yeah, maybe scaling of the product itself. Maybe not outside pro processes, but like scaling, kinda the product. So a lot of like larger customers, so mid-size we focus on SMBs all the way from the mom and pop shop to the mid-size. Pretty, like decent size, tens of millions in revenue. So that, that is our sweet spot and our ICP currently. But yeah. Prior to that we're mainly serving like m to small businesses. Now we do serve mid-size businesses, so that's to, to accommodate those larger customers with larger. Lists subscriber list with more, more like high GMV, more transactions, et cetera. So that, that was kind of probably the biggest challenge. And and the second challenge was really to provide decent handholding or support for them. So it was kind of in the past we mainly had a support team and only when we start scaling with customer success managers, so account managers, like the same role is being called sometimes account managers. So basically serving those larger customers and more, more personal attention for them. More more help for them, et cetera. So that was kind of another area that was. New for us, and we had to scale it rapidly in order to provide the best service for them. So probably there were two kind of those main, like main areas that we had to improve. And yeah. Did we do it perfect from a first attempt? For sure not, but just, continuously kind of, you. You launch and we have this values and culture deck. And it's not just the deck, made by some HR marketing team that is, nobody knows about it, but that's really like the values and principles that we live. So yeah. So then is better than Perfect is one of those principles. So.
Dan Balcauski:Done is better than perfect. I, yes I applaud that value a hundred percent. So you mentioned, so that you had some product scaling as you started to see some inbound from more from larger type customers that maybe had not been in sort of in your sweet spot before. And then support challenges. And that reminds me of some other products I've been a part of where they've had a major competitor sort of shut. Down. And then, they get this massive influx of customers and they're like, we are for X-ing our support staff right now. Please bear with us while we get to to bring that up. I and I imagine that those types of decisions aren't. They're not mutually exclusive from each other because I'm sure there are probably resources that you could put against making improving supportability concerns, right? You've got your customer support under flooding, under tickets, and they're like, they always have their top 10 list of like, ticket drivers, right? That they're asking engineering to fix. But then you're also saying, Hey, we also got these giant opportunities for these larger customers. I imagine solving a lot of these problems. During a period like this feels like sort of repairing an airplane in mid-flight, how did you think about prioritizing, which to solve first when I'm sure at the time everything sort of felt urgent.
Rytis Lauris:So that's one of the kind of principles again that we have Inval valves in Culture Deck is like we built, we created the most of the value for the most amount of customers. We never built anything. Custom for the customer. So that's the main kind of idea and principle of prioritization. So, okay. So it's to what you say, if it's a product decision, like to help serve larger customers. So like, the support in this case, in our case, it was like both related to serving larger customers. So that was kind of like already equalized because the. The most difficult decisions when you have to compare. I'm gonna improve something for 10 customers who pay us 16 bucks, or for one who pays us 4,000. So still the monetary values on that one customer, and it's very difficult in that case still say, no, we will not do anything custom. But in that case, that was kind of a bit easy decision because both of them were kind of for the similar. Profile of customers, the larger one. So it's very easier. Just basically listen to the customers, and then you prioritize by, in that case, by monetary value. Yeah. So what our customers are complaining more about, how many customers are complaining about this, et cetera. It's one thing. Second thing that is very important, and it's outside the prioritization, but just to be honest with customers, and you say, look. Yes, we have those challenges currently. That's what we do in order to improve. Please bear with us. We ask a little bit of patience from you. Yeah. We are not an ideal setup currently, but give us some time to prove that in a few months we will manage to, to scale and it really works. It's just, just a very human vulnerability in front of your customers and then not pretending that you are better than you are. It, it, it kind of put some human do you say? Human face on the product humanizes the product and relationship and and vast majority of customers were humans. I mean, all of your customers are humans and they understand you because, especially during okay. For us it was like a lot of our customers had scaling challenges by themself, so they kind of related with us more maybe, and it, that was favorable for us.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, they, your clients were also getting, hammered similarly, right? So there was some shared empathy, You're, yeah. Everyone was going through the yeah. Well, the entire world was going through a weirdness, but yeah, I think, I imagine a lot of the customers that you serve, like, like, yeah. We're also ripping at the seams, so take advantage of that shared human situation when you can.
Rytis Lauris:True, but yeah. But that's in, in an hesitation. I mean, and I mean, it's not the single occasion that we had some challenges, but in any occasion, like being vulnerable, being transparent in front of the eyes of your customers, it is what I strongly believe and that's what we practice. And, then your customers are more forgiving for, for you as a company, as individuals.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I'm interested because, the. If I look at like, the chart of like e-commerce growth, right? You see it almost looks like a step function change, right? From, you have this, 20 years, somewhat linear growth of e-commerce revenues worldwide, and then just, overnight it just steps up. I'm curious, and maybe the answer is no, but out of, the ways you had to operate were there. When you were thinking, going through the scaling challenge, was there an area where it kind of required a fundamental change in how you operate versus just doing more of the same? Like, I imagine, right? It's like, Hey, we've got a ton of customer support tickets and so we just need more people. So we're we now are bringing our four x-ing our customer support team just to answer tickets. Right. So, so it's like, okay, well that, that makes sense. Was there, were there ways that you had to sort of fundamentally rethink how you. Approach the business? Or maybe it was, not even but you just kind of came up in the moment. Was there anything like that?
Rytis Lauris:So, well of course, like one area that was like definite for everyone. So like going remote that's for sure. But it was so maybe just amplified that you have to grow and we kind of. Hired a lot of people fully, remotely without even having like fully remote processes. So. That really amplified the challenge that you don't have like full remote processes in place, et cetera, and you start hiring. And that was the highest like hiring period and headcount growth period for us in the history of our company. So that. Maybe there was the, and we had to implement all the like more hierarchy. I think we, that we still we're, had like 250 people now. So we, pretty lean up until today, and that's what we try to do. But but we definitely had to introduce some hierarchies and some processes in place because you have more people and like and they can't meet, et cetera. So it just, it, it amplified. But yeah, probably kind of the main thing in any growth, and especially for me, what is the biggest challenge, is really to restructure the organization. And in our case, like but in our case that was like, we grew from like 80 to 180 very fast. And that, that was a massive boost. And a lot, everything changes how you have to deal with people. How you have to manage already structure, mid-level management that you have to introduce, et cetera, et cetera. So, but we still operated for quite a while as being like a 50 people company and the. Like new newcomers were, and all the employees were forgiving us for some time. And it caught us like a little bit after that. So that's kind of my lesson. Yeah. Initially you just do things and you don't overthink and you will fix later.
Dan Balcauski:No, 80 to 180. I mean, that's gigantic, right? On a percentage basis of growth. And, many, I guess, CEOs, founders, right? When they go from that scale of, a 50 person company to a. 250 person company. Right. And the like, where this change is sort of all the way between a lot of folks, CEOs and founders sort of struggle because they sort of find them themselves as being a bottleneck when they're trying to scale their companies. I guess how has that impacted, like, how have you thought about that and navigated those situations to sort of. Not impede the progress of your entire organization. Right. Because I'm sure at one point, if you're the co-founder you owned most of the company and I'm sure at the point of two 50, you, you own almost nothing directly in the company. So I mean, imagine all that's pretty exacerbated in these periods of rapid scale. Like how have you dealt with that personally?
Rytis Lauris:Yeah, so I'm not an exceptional person here and to be honest, like to learn properly delegate where that was the biggest challenge for me as a manager as a Malik, I know skill skills grow as a ma, managerial skills that was the most challenging thing to learn and go through. So, just life pushes you and you should not be too resilient sometimes in some occasions. And and kind of, you all, and in the past I read those books about like management, et cetera. And and once I read that, there are three things that a CEO has to do. First is to drive a vision for the entire company where when to go. Second to hire best people to implement that vision. And third is to ensure resources, mainly financial resources. So it's either like, funding or business model or VCs or depth or. Whatever, but like those good people have to have resources to our people to, to invest into marketing, et cetera, et cetera, whatever, for whatever you hire those people to do. And once I read this, I thought, come on, come on, come on. No. It's just, it's not that simple to be a CEO. So now I think that it's really true if you have right people and we have resources and we have. Vision where we're gonna go, we're gonna do the job. I'm still quite, I would say in depth of a lot of things that are happening in Omni. But what has changed for me, so from doing and becoming a bottleneck, as you said now I still know a lot of things. I share a lot of ideas, but I don't own decisions anymore. So I share ideas with our kind of executive team with some, sometimes even like mid-level management, but just this is idea and you don't need to implement just because I came with that idea. So I'm still curious. I love learning, like knowing under understanding of what is happening, but but it's basically, yeah it's not you who owns the decision. And there is a very good article about, it's on Harvard Business Review, and I think this is the most read article in the history of Harvard Business Review. Who's got the monkey.
Dan Balcauski:Who's got the monkey?
Rytis Lauris:Who's got the monkey. Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:for our listeners.
Rytis Lauris:So I really encourage every manager to read that article. It's really great. I.
Dan Balcauski:So, you mentioned this delegation, right? You maybe were too resilient. What I, what that tends to look like for a lot of really persistent resilient founders as they give up things like sleep and that only lasts so long,
Rytis Lauris:I did that as well. I did that as well.
Dan Balcauski:So I guess, if you could go back and maybe give yourself, two, three years ago a, a bit of advice on, when you saw yourself holding on to things like, were there. Is there a signal? Like, because I imagine like by the it's, emotionally having gone through this, at a much smaller scale before, right? Like after the fact, you're like, well, obviously I shouldn't be doing that anymore. But before it's almost like it's a total blind spot to you where you're like, you don't see any way, like, it's like, it's not even emotionally registering. Like, is there a way that you would, tell yourself to like, think about like, okay, it's time to give this thing up before it got to the breaking point, and you're only sleeping two hours a week.
Rytis Lauris:So that article, who's got the monkey, is really kind of very, it's a great guideline how to identify the situation. So basically when there's a like. I will not spoil everything, but there is a situation described in this article. So basically you sit in the office on weekend and you work and you see through a window that your employees are playing golf. So, and because you're waiting for your decisions and et cetera, and you are the one to come first to the office and to leave the last, the office, so then it's something wrong. Yeah. And this is kind of, probably was a moment for me that, and it felt okay in many occasions. This is how it happens. A lot of people are waiting for. For my decisions, et cetera, and I don't know what to do. Even then I have some ideas what to do, et cetera, and this is a wrong thing. Then that's what they always say to our managers Now your job is to ensure that everyone has. What did you do? In any minute? You cannot become a bottleneck in any circumstances. You cannot, and this is who's got the monkey? So, you should never leave any question on your table. Yeah. So probably that was kind of the moment. Yeah. That, that I was still kind of I didn't break too much. I mean, I didn't break at all. That's okay. It was, like, manage manage at some point to, to identify that, okay, I have to delegate more and more. And again, it's a journey. It's not that one day you become a really good in delegating now you just improve it over the years and you do less and less, less because you have more resources. You have more people you trust, you. Start like seeing by yourself that you know that someone did it in a different way than you thought you would do it. There's nothing bad of it and nothing broke and opposite. It apparently went better than than your original idea, so,
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Well and I love that because there's, as you were talking, I had this, I, thought in my head of this idea of like a decision queue, like how many decisions are waiting for my yes or no. And that it could be a very concrete thing that you could be like, okay, here's, here are all the decisions. And it ties back. Really nicely to what you said before, you're like, as a CEO Dow, like I don't really own any of the decisions, right? So you've, and I'm sure that's not, a hundred percent true all the time, but like for the most part you've become very aware of that. Where are those decisions known and making sure that I'm not sort of in the way of them I wasn't planning on going here, but you mentioned really understanding customers and what they need, as we were talking about this period of growth. And one thing that we were talking about before the recording was your view on really like how to really understand what customers need and what most companies sort of get wrong around this area. Can you elaborate on that for me?
Rytis Lauris:So brought two things and like our experience. So in the past when we were a smaller company, there were a lot of people within the company who actually had the direct I. Relationship or context with our customers. And and just because like, in a smaller company, myself, being a co-founder, sometimes I did a support job and that's how you understand your customer's needs and feelings, et cetera. But once the company grow, we got stuck in one moment, in, in one moment. Too much data driven. We just became very like nice and comfortable position to be at. We kind of implemented a lot of data analysis, BI tools, et cetera, et cetera, that are very helpful and they help you to run business better. But at the same time, at some point we lost the the true like, honest conversations with our customers and that's what we changed again and we. Brought it back. Like sometimes even forcing people to talk to customers and having a scoreboard of some, someone says maybe it's a shame board, but you know who those people who build a product, those people who serves who leads especially like support that, and then the customer success management, et cetera. Those people who communicate with messages, they all. Always, constantly have to be talking to customers. That's what they do. Again, like it goes to to have at least one conversation per week with a existing customer because like, and then you combine data, like what your BI tool show you and and and those. Just anecdotal evidences, but those emotions that you really feel while you talk with customers. And what do I have in mind? Just a practical like example here. Sometimes we as a SaaS we launch new features. Something. Yeah. And there is kind of a small detail in it that from the pure data work, from like this, quantitative analysis, it. Doesn't show that it is a relevant feature or some detail within the feature. While you talk with your customers, you understand that, okay, they say, okay, I love your feature, but this part, it just pisses me off every time I use this feature. Technically, yeah, this is a great seller. It generates me revenue. That's why I choose your product. But at the same time, every time I log into your product, I get frustrated on this and you will never, ever see it from the quantitative data. It's only the qualitative interviews with the customers where you add this emotions on top and then you change it and they say, and in opposite, sometimes I'm like about positive examples. Then you have a one hour interview and they praise something that you never, ever thought that it is important for your customers. And they say, oh look. My ability to copy those templates. In our case, it's just amazing. It saves so much time for me and then so many hours. But while you look just on the data, it shows that very few customers among your customer base use it. But for those who use. It's just a life changer, so, so, the mix of those two, it's crucially important, like qualitative and quantitative data and interviews and directly really honest conversations. Sometimes they're not very comfortable because sometimes customers complain about how you do things.
Dan Balcauski:yes. Very rarely comfortable. I love that point of view and that perspective and obviously you've gone through a cycle where, you said you, you maybe lost touch and then you've got back, made a priority. But I see this all the time. And look, I mean, talk to your customers is not new advice. But I just see so many companies get away from that and like, I just don't I guess. And maybe it was that period where you, it is funny. It's like you said we became too datadriven in and Right. I mean, it's like a lot of people would be like, oh, we would love to be data-driven. Like, that would be ideal. But you actually saw it as a negative. Like why do you think companies sort of slip into this, like and don't like stop talking to their customers? Is it because of the discomfort?
Rytis Lauris:Yes, I think so. No, it's just way more conf like, comfortable. Okay. Two fix, maybe just being data driven is it's seen as a holy grail sometimes, especially when you are growing to that stage that you kind of had no clue about, like, understanding of your customers from a. Quantitative side of Point of view. Yeah. So then you start investing in it. You hire people, you implement BI tools, et cetera. You invest a lot in this and, okay. Oh, I see everything now. I used to have 10 interviews with customer to understand that, of customers, to understand that. And now I just see it. I analyze, I spend hours in front of my laptop, screen, et cetera. It's one thing. Yeah. It's still, especially on the growth stage and the, for maybe first time founders and those who have never been in this situation, it seems like a holy grail. And second is, yeah, it's way more comfortable. It's just easy, your BI tool will always open. Customers sometimes don't show up for your scheduled conversations. You, you wait, you don't come. And especially when you kind of have a global. Global customer base, or sometimes you have to wake up earlier. Sometimes you have to schedule in the late nighttime just because it's more convenient for a customer. So, and yes, sometimes we complain them. We are unhappy with you. And this is this is emotional load. So, and they like data analysis or BI tools, never complain about how shitty solution did you release last week?
Dan Balcauski:I, yeah, I mean, I agree, right? It can get no, I think all those points I a hundred percent agree with and it can get very comfortable. You could look at a dashboard and you could tell yourself whatever story you want about a lot of data points that you're looking at. And without that customer perspective, you may be lying to yourself. Right? And we're the, that's the whole thing of the scientific method is like, we are the easiest people to, our, we're easiest to fool ourselves, right? We're the biggest fool. We wanna tell ourselves a story we wanna believe. But a conversation with the customer. They're not gonna let you get away with that. They're gonna tell you exactly what they think, and then you, I mean, you can still sort of rationalize it away, I guess, when you walk away, when it's much more difficult. Look, I can talk to you all day, re just but I, to be respectful of your time in the audience, I want to start wrapping things up with a couple of wrapping closeout questions. Is that okay?
Rytis Lauris:Sure. Sure.
Dan Balcauski:Look, when you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to work with, is there anyone that just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect in the way that you think about building running companies?
Rytis Lauris:So in this case, I probably would say my co-founder here at Omni Sense. So I think that we are pretty like. Different people and we managed to fulfill each other and then to, To grow, to help each other grow probably in that would be, and and a lot of peers I don't have kind of idols in general, but I spend a lot of time talking with peers who run similar stage businesses, similar industry businesses, et cetera. And it's it's really helpful.
Dan Balcauski:Are there structured ways that you've been able to establish those peer relationships or have it been more organically like, I don't know given where you're at in
Rytis Lauris:Yeah, so it's kind of initially was like more organically. So it's either SaaS vertical or e-commerce enablement or. Both. So that's kind of the easiest because you share you share a lot of some companies that are similar, growth stage, et cetera, because then when you face similar challenges and you relate and then it's on top on the value PE structure. So basically I do a lot of meetings like. In once in two months. We just schedule in advance. And then, the time comes, you see in your calendar there is a scheduled meeting and you spend some time talking about, okay what challenges, what learnings did do you have in the past? Two year. Two months? So that's where you put structure on top.
Dan Balcauski:Right. Well, if I gave you a billboard and you could put any advice on there for other B2B SaaS CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would it say?
Rytis Lauris:It's not intent to advertise one company, but just do it.
Dan Balcauski:Just do it.
Rytis Lauris:Just do it. It's a great slogan, and they truly believe in it. Yeah, so I'm a big fan of this slogan. I'm not that much of a fan of a company. It's not that they don't like that company, but maybe I have some. Shorts of Nike. I'm not kind of one of those like fans of Nike, but this, slogan and this
Dan Balcauski:worry, they're not a sponsor. So,
Rytis Lauris:Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm not, not, not promoting ye them, but just the slogan is, it's just amazing and yeah.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I absolutely love this conversation. If listeners wanna connect with you, learn more about Omnisend, how can they do that?
Rytis Lauris:So I prefer using LinkedIn. So Rytis Lauris there and Omnisend is just omnisend.com. Probably that's the best way to learn our website.
Dan Balcauski:I will put those links in show notes for our listeners along with those other articles that you mentioned. Thank you so much. That wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. Thank you to Rytis for sharing his journey Insights For our listeners, you found Rytis Insights valuable. Please leave a review and share this episode with your network.
