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
Why Duda Ditched Half Their Audience to Scale with Itai Sadan, CEO of Duda
Dan Balcauski speaks with Itai Sadan, co-founder and CEO of Duda, a leading professional website builder for digital agencies and SaaS platforms. Itai shares his 15-year journey of scaling Duda to over a million active websites built by 20,000 agency partners globally. They discuss strategic pivots from mobile to responsive design and shifting focus from SMBs to digital agencies. Itai emphasizes the importance of focus, customer understanding, and internal alignment in overcoming competition and driving growth. The conversation also touches on leadership evolution, managing transitions, and the role of trust and alignment with a co-founder.
01:22 Introducing Itai Sadan and Duda
02:13 Competing in a Crowded Market
04:13 The Inflection Points in Scaling Duda
05:51 The Shift from Mobile to Responsive Design
08:13 Focusing on Web Professionals
14:06 Navigating Internal and External Challenges
30:13 Leadership Evolution and Company Growth
35:49 Closing Thoughts and Advice
Guest Links
itai@duda.co
Obviously there's, in a 15 year journey, there's multiple points in time where, it feels for a second or more than that, that, you're almost at, you're looking down at a ledge and things are not what you thought they would be. the question is. Why are we unique? Why are customers going to come to us? when you're a leader, you really don't care. The first, getting to the first million of a R is like just survival. Is it like, am I gonna be able to make paycheck at the end of the months? I still make mistakes until today, and I learned from them. do your own thing. I think it's great to have mentors and advisors and you should be talking to people all the time and get different ideas, but no two companies are alike. something that worked for one company doesn't necessarily mean that it will work for your company. there's no template company. You need to do your own thing.
Dan Balcauski:Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stores and 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 welcome Itai Sadan, co-founder and CEO of Duda, the leading professional website builder for digital agencies and SaaS platforms. Itai has scale Duda to over a million active websites built by 20,000 plus agency partners globally. He's been CEO for over 15 years. Usual founder of longevity and has navigated multiple major platform transitions while building a figure business with more than 400 employees. Hey Itai, welcome to the show.
Itai Sadan:Thank you Dan. Thank you for having me excited to chat with you today.
Dan Balcauski:Likewise. Before we dive into your scaling journey, give us the elevator pitch. What does it do to do? Who do you serve?
Itai Sadan:I think you, you said it pretty clearly, I'll echo some of it. We're a white label website builder. We
Dan Balcauski:I.
Itai Sadan:Digital marketing agencies, web designers and sas platforms that want to integrate a website offering into their technology stack.
Dan Balcauski:Well, the, the website builder is notoriously crowded. You got like the Wix and Squarespace, WordPress, dozens of others. How do you think about competing in that market where on the surface a lot of folks are building? What if you're not an expert look like very similar solutions?
Itai Sadan:Yeah I think I've heard of those companies that you mentioned and yeah, the reality there are competitors or other players in the general market. But I think in the area that we are focused, our niche is really being focused on digital marketing agencies. We typically don't service SMBs or consumers directly. For us, it's very clear that our customer is a digital marketing agency. Due to that there, there's a very deep and profound understanding. of this customer, of a digital marketing agency and its needs. And our website builder has taken very specific product evolution to serve or solve the pains that digital marketing agencies have. So I think when you come to Duda as a digital marketing agency versus if you come to a Wix or a Squarespace, you would see a, you would see a quite an apparent difference. In the platform. This is a, the tool was built for more of a professional user that is that needs flexibility, needs powerful tools. Someone who's typically not just building, one or two sites a year, but many of our customers are building. Tens, hundreds, thousands of sites a year, and thus the requirements are very different. This is requirements for building websites at scale and not just building, also maintaining them which is a lot of work.
Dan Balcauski:I, yeah, I appreciate the the focus there, and I think that will give us a, a good jumping off point for sort of the first area I wanted to explore with you. So, this is called Sask Galy Secrets. So I'm curious, you've, you've been at the helm of Duda for 15 years. I mentioned the intro and it scaled the business pretty significantly over that time. Looking back over that period, has there been a, a moment, a inflection point that has really stood out to you as a, a crucible decision or area where, you really struggled in your scaling journey?
Itai Sadan:Obviously there's, in a 15 year journey, there's multiple points in time where, it feels for a second, like, or more than that, that, you're almost at, you're looking down at a ledge and things are not what you thought they would be. And there's transitions and there's pivots. Yeah, there's a couple of clear points like that, that I can mention. I think, first of all, I started the company together with a co-founder. His name is Amir. I actually known him since high school. And we we were college roommates afterwards and we worked for the same company back in the day, but we started the company really around mobile at the kind of, it was a mobile website builder in its first incarnation. That was our first product. And about, I would say. Four or five years in. So we started in 2010 and then around 20 14, 20 15, we had a lot of success in these first, three, four years. We got to, hundreds of thousands of mobile websites on the platform, suddenly there was this proliferation of devices and there was. Desktop and tablet and people started having browsers on in their cars a new paradigm arose. So market change. There was a change in market dynamic where. This was responsive. Web design was introduced and there was suddenly a solution where you can build a website once and it runs everywhere. And we were this mobile player and it was very clear to us that we needed to jump on this responsive web design bandwagon and add kind of these other screens.'cause people wanted to build it once. It runs everywhere. Some of the competitors were coming from the other side. They were desktop first and they were. Trying to add mobile we all companies got to more or less the same point where they have really similar offerings to the same market. And from being a very clear leader in mobile, we were suddenly not a leader. We were in a very crowded space maybe four or five years in kind of the first time the word differentiation came into our our lingo. Or the question is. Why are we unique? Why are customers going to come to us? Because when you're a leader, you really don't care. You would ask me you would ask me back then in the early days, who's my customer? The answer would probably be anybody who wants to use the product. That was probably as clear of a definition of who our customer was, at that point it, it was not sufficient. We had to. Compete in this market against much bigger players, bigger budgets. And we looked at our user base and we saw about 50% were small businesses, but the other 50% were these web professionals, these digital marketing agencies, web designers. that user base was growing faster'cause each one of them was building multiple sites. And, to be honest, like these two different
Dan Balcauski:Okay.
Itai Sadan:right? Ideal customer profiles, the SMB and this web professional, were a little bit tearing the company apart.'cause SMBs just wanted simplicity. Give me the ability to publish a site in two minutes and,
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Itai Sadan:about it. While web designers wanted, give me sophistication, give me the flexibility to build what my clients want. So r and d was very torn between these. And so was like our marketing team, at what level do we message and the sales team, and it really helped us at that point. To make a decision that we are going to become a web professional company. So we basically made that decision we didn't fire 50% of our user base, but we said, going forward, we are not gonna spend$1 more to acquire S and SMB. We are gonna be a web professional company and we are focusing, we're narrowing our lens to focus on. Really that 50% of our customer base that was more advanced, more of these web professionals, that focus brought, I think first of all it was a really important decision. It helped differentiate us compared to the other companies in the market, and it also gave us the sense of focus and. Clear understanding of who we are, what we're building, and the product took a much more a much different kind of dimension. And it propelled us to, probably where we are today with over a million sites on the platform in 22,000 customers, that the majority of them are web professionals.
Dan Balcauski:There's a, a lot you mentioned in that arc there, so obviously you're. You're, everything in, in retrospect seems clean, but I'm sure it wasn't exactly clean at the time. You mentioned things like the roadmap, the marketing, the sales were getting pulled in multiple directions. I'm, I'm curious, like, if you take me back to that time when that was happening, how did you realize people are always, potentially selling to folks outside their ICP what was going on when you realized that, okay, we really have sort of a, a choice to make like was it, was it clear at the outset that this was, it was going to be such like, Hey we're gonna have to choose one or the other of these?
Itai Sadan:right. So there were, in that story that I just told, there were actually two. Really critical decisions. first one was moving from a mobile product into a responsive web design product. The second was narrowing of our customer base to address really one core ICP, which was the web professionals. So I'll start with the first one. That, that by itself was not an easy move. We were a mobile only company. Like the initial name of the company was actually due to mobile. So the first dec decision to actually move from mobile to be a fully responsive, I think we saw different signs that told us that we had to, that there was a dynamic in the market that was changing
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Itai Sadan:we needed. We needed a change in order to survive. It started maybe from customers asking us about responsive web design partners asking us about it, maybe even some deals not coming to fruition.'cause like bigger partners were thinking about, Hey, is this the right way or should we be. Going this other way. So we started sensing that the market there was a dynamic shift in the market and we wanted to move the company with that, with the market change. And I think that's a very key role that the founders have, right? This is it's the essence of, product market fit. Initially when I launched the company, we had a very clear product, market fit. The market. There was, the introduction when I launched the company, it was phones were coming into the market. iPhone launched in 20 2007, Android in 2008. SMBs were inundated with traffic coming from mobile and they had. Terrible desktop sites that look, look really bad even on the newest phones. So initially we had a really good product market fit, and I think that started to change as the dynamic in the market changed where people did not to build dedicated mobile sites but wanted to. Move into kind of this responsive design, but the thing was to identify that shift really early on and start building a product.'cause it takes about, a year or two years to build like your second product, our, which was this responsive web design,
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Itai Sadan:product and. The difficulty of coming into the company and persuading the management, persuading the board, persuading the employees that we needed to do this shift into a second product. So I think that was a big decision by itself.
Dan Balcauski:So within, within that, no, I, well, yeah, I just wanna stay on the sort of the responsive switch. So looking at the. How that market evolved. Was that when you were looking at having to go into responsive? Obviously you're due to mobile before, so, but besides sort of the, the naming maybe have set it down one path did you view that as a sort of a contrarian view at that point? Or was it just like, Hey, this is where the market's going, we've gotta, we've gotta move over there in order to survive.
Itai Sadan:Yeah I think, there were multiple options. We
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Itai Sadan:in the mobile space and maybe developed other products that were not. Web presence, right? We could have gone into other areas there. So there's definitely was a discussion of what is the right route to take, right? You're you feel like we're being disrupted and there's multiple avenues and you need to pick one of them. We pick. The avenue of expanding, of building the second, the second product that was a responsive web design. We were excited about it. We thought back then that maybe there's a chance that we will be the first platform out there that is truly. Responsive design for, small businesses. Evidently we were not, like, it took us about two years to build it. And as I said, some of the existing incumbents were all, were also they were desktop first and they were adding mobile. So we all got to the market at the same time with a responsive web design builder.
Dan Balcauski:So you mentioned before, like, you having to manage, obviously the, the team internally, but then also you mentioned the the investors, the board. Help me understand that,'cause I, it's like, it's, it sounds like maybe the, this was a, a larger undertaking than maybe you first assumed. So I'm curious how you. Were how you managed the board and their expectations as you guys were navigating this transition.
Itai Sadan:Yeah. I think early on it was really difficult to explain'cause you're doing really well.
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Itai Sadan:see it in the revenue. You don't see any drive. It's like if you're identifying the trend and the dynamics in the market changing early enough there's not a lot of signs. Out there that that the end is nearing if you don't do anything. So it's hard to persuade people at that time. But I think this, again, this is the role of the founders ensuring product market fit and ensuring persuading the rest of the folks on the ship that we need to shift course a bit in order to, in order to continue and drive the growth and success of the company. And there was enough, like you start, you say, Hey, I'm gonna build this second product. Initially we're gonna take maybe a Tiger team to work on it. Eventually it launches. Nobody wants to give that new product any. Time of day, right? Sales is so focused on product A that's actually generating revenue. Marketing doesn't want to give it any real estate on the website. So you have to fight the fight for this new product to give it a chance to succeed. And I think if it really has, if it's really solving a pain point and if it really doing what's supposed to do, it will start to gain traction. And I think as there starts to be real traction and some revenue behind it and good customer feedback, marketing is open to giving it more real estate and sellers are start to get interested in selling it. So it takes time and maybe by the time that it's. 50 50 between the revenue coming from the old legacy product and the new product at that point, or maybe quite a bit before that people internally really know where the future of the company lies. Uh, but
Dan Balcauski:Mm. What.
Itai Sadan:transition, probably took two years. To be truthful.
Dan Balcauski:Was there anything that you recall from that time period? Again, even focusing on the, on the board in order to convince them to maintain or to build confidence in the, in the strategy?'cause I imagine, two, two years, it depends how long you've been a product development. Sometimes that that might be like, oh yeah, of course it's gonna take two years for a new product. So people might, if you have optimistic estimates, maybe you thought it was gonna be much less than that. Sounds about right. Maybe in retrospect was there anything that you did to help shore up confidence from the board level that, that, that this approach was gonna pay off?
Itai Sadan:Yeah, I think those two years were not easy in terms of top line revenue for the company. You think of there's product A that's already generating millions of revenue and is starting to see decline. Product B is gaining some traction, but you know this, they're both, it's sub subscription product. It takes time for that revenue to become somewhat material meaningful. So in some ways you're like taking money out of pocket A and moving it into pocket B. But the top line of the company was pretty flat in those years, and it was pretty clear we were not. Going to be able to raise money from external investors in that time. And we already had, this was post series B, so we did have some funds, but it was, we needed additional financing.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Itai Sadan:I think over, during those two years, the existing investors came and supported the company. But it was easier for someone who's internal to really see the traction, even though it was early traction, and to believe that this product is going to overtake the legacy product and become so the, the, the future revenue driver of the company. but it did. Require them. It did require us to persuade them. It did require us to present data to prove this.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah.
Itai Sadan:I'm still very thankful for them, for supporting those company, the company, in those two years.'cause it was not, if it was not for them, the company could have been at.
Dan Balcauski:You mentioned as well, it, so shifting internally in that transaction transition, you mentioned, marketing and sales. I wanna focus just on sales'cause this is a common problem when you have a, a second product or new product or, or transition of, a business model where, you know, the existing sales folks, they have their pitch, they have their demo that they're, used to talking about. And now you have this new thing and maybe customers aren't, asking for it yet. There's how do you. Manage that transition on the sales side to seed the success of this newer product that maybe was a bit of a change from how the, the sales team was, was used to talking about it.
Itai Sadan:Yeah. I think if you're building something, hopefully you're building it because there's people out there that, that want that product, and you've done. done some of that homework in advance. So we did have some customers that were early adopters of that, and I think that helped give confidence to sales in some ways that they were they were adopt. Some of those were adopting and using. And over time as we opened it up more and more that that confidence grew.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Itai Sadan:Yeah, you do. It's not, it's, let's say it's, it wouldn't be enough that just me and my co-founder would say, Hey go ahead. Go out and sell it. Go out and sell it. You need there needs to be like customers out there that are actually buying it proving that there's really arms and ls to this.
Dan Balcauski:Was, was this the type of thing where you had the, like the entire sales organization rolled out at once, or did you guys grab some subset of the team in order to have them focus on nurturing and selling the, the new product given the overlap with your existing mobile? I, I could see either way, but I'm not sure if there was a way that worked for you guys.
Itai Sadan:Yeah. Yeah, the company wasn't that big back then and, we had a a sales assisted motions through sellers and we had also, we also sell on the web until today, we probably launched it first to some. Close customers before we put it as a self-service tool. So hand handheld, the first customers who were using the platform got them to adopt it. These were bigger customers that maybe made some commitments to this. And then over time we also opened it up to self-service to all our customers.
Dan Balcauski:Got it. And so, earlier in the conversation, you were mentioned, two different strategic pivots. So the one was the mobile to responsive pivot, and the other was the the switch in sort of customer segment focus. So pivoting back to the customer segment focus option. So, there, you were, you had SMB and you had these digital agencies. You were talking about how it was, separating the, or. Or spreading very thinly both the go-to market motion as well as the, the product investments. So walk me through the evolution of, of that as a problem. Sometimes, obviously there could be folks who are buying it, who are outside of your target and it's totally fine. Like, and they might want different things, but it sounds like it got to a breaking point. So I'm curious, like what was happening inside the business at that time that sort of realized like, okay, that we, we've, this is really forcing our hand and making to make a choice.
Itai Sadan:So I think the struggle was between kind of the two ICPs of small businesses and kind of these web professionals was always there, but we didn't for initially, in the early days, we didn't feel like we had to make a choice. We just built one product and whoever wanted to use it. when we got into kind of fierce competition when around the responsive website builder, and. And it really started hurting our growth. You see that there's much bigger companies out there, bigger r and d teams that have more focus than you have. And then that's concerning, right? Like you're scratching your head, how am I gonna beat those? With a much smaller team, smaller budget, I clearly have. To make a decision here. So it's
Dan Balcauski:mm.
Itai Sadan:like your hand is a little bit forced in some way.'Cause there's just no way to win. If you're not focused and you know you have too many customers that are, that you're serving and you need to build a for that customer, B for that for the other customer and C with a small r and d team.
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Itai Sadan:so I, I think that's you know that pain of service serving multiple customers was there for a while, for a long while. but at the end we, in order to really make sure that we continue. To grow and make the right decision. We had, we felt like we had to make, I think on one side it was maybe a little bit defensive. We felt like we needed to make a choice. On the other hand, we were excited about making a choice.'Cause we felt like there's an opportunity there. Everybody's fighting on the same customer. But hey, we have this. Other type of customer that is growing and we feel like this other customer is underserved, so let's head the ship in that direction. And there's a big tam out there of web designers, digital marketers. We can grow leaps and bounds just in that market. And,
Dan Balcauski:Well, I, yeah, I'm curious.
Itai Sadan:last thing, I would also say, I think the DNA of the company kind of being very engineering, a lot of like all our engineers on is, are in. kind of, most of our engineers are in Israel. so there's a very strong engineering culture in the company. I think we, we understood better the, what the sophisticated users wanted. And were probably better at building the products that solve their pain points versus going and trying to dumb down and do simple things for a small business. So we were, we were pretty excited about making this choice.
Dan Balcauski:So you realize you have to make a decision. I'm curious, like,'cause you, you mentioned, a word like tam in there engineering background. Like, did you, like, how did you actually approach making the decision? Was it like a very sort of analytical exercise? Like, did you and Amir get together and say, be like, this is what the company looks like if we go this direction, this what it looks like. This is the tam for both. Like how did you actually approach, like making that. That choice, like when it came to you and your leadership team.
Itai Sadan:Yeah. So I think it starts with kind of me and Amir agreeing that this is like, noodling on it for a while and thinking about it and agreeing that this is the direction that we need to go. And then from there we typically, do an offside or something and persuade the rest of the management team to be on board. And from there it cascades downward to the rest of the company. Yeah, I think that's probably the way that it went.
Dan Balcauski:And so you guys make this decision to go after the more sophisticated buyer, okay? So you come out of your management offsite or whatever it ended up being.
Itai Sadan:yeah, and we usually come pretty much pretty prepared there to these offsites. Like we come with data and there was a lot of data.'cause these were two user bases that we have. So it's
Dan Balcauski:hmm.
Itai Sadan:easy, like to look at data like growth rates, retention rates, things like that. So I, we are, pretty analytical in our decision making.
Dan Balcauski:Not, not surprising given the engineering background of the company as well. And, and if you have a volume market, right? That's an advantage of having a, a, a, a volume market of being able to some, sometimes more enterprise type companies. It's just like. Yeah, if you don't have enough deals to, or customer logos to be able to tell that. But so using that data to help you support that decision, so you guys make the decision from a leadership level, okay, we're, we're gonna go after this more sophisticated buyer. I'm curious then on the execution of that decision, what what was the sequence of changes that you made? Like, okay, you say like, or we have all these existing customers. I like, what was the strategy or the plan from there to like say, okay, given that we've realized or we've made the decision that we're not gonna after s and b, like what do we change for second, third, like that? Once we have that in place.
Itai Sadan:Yeah. I remember, pretty clearly in, in the early days, think of kind of our website right. It was all geared and messaged towards small businesses a while, when we started understanding that there's this other ICP of web professionals, we probably put somewhere in the navigation, like a link to partners or resellers. So it was a small part of our go to market. You would click on that partners resellers, and there was probably a page where the offering for those who are more professionals was articulated there. time that part of kind of partners, resellers, agencies started to become the majority of the website. And to the point that today, if you come to the website, the whole language, everything on the homepage, and this has been around like that for for us for a couple of years. It talks to agencies, it talks to web professionals. So it was it overtook the company over time as we, as it pro, as we proved out the success and we saw the traction happening.
Dan Balcauski:And so, in this transition, what proved harder to execute than you expected?
Itai Sadan:Ooh great question. I think I don't, I think the decision was absolutely right. If I go back, what would I do maybe differently is just move faster. Because I think we were early to understand that there's an underserved market there early to come into the market with a product for digital marketing agencies and web professionals. And since then, others has, have seen our success and have followed. And now this area as well is we're seeing more competition both from existing platforms that we're, we're initially only SMBs focused and have created solutions for web designers, so more competitors creeping into space. Initially we were there alone and if maybe if we would've moved faster and grown faster we would've had a bigger part of that market. Today we're competing there in that, in this market as well.
Dan Balcauski:So I'm curious with that because the previous response you were talking about, like the. The marketing landing page and how the, you grew to eventually, the agency business was more dominant and so that, took place over the header. And so I see a lot of companies that get I, I go to a lot of SaaS websites because I have personality problems, but it's often it surprising how. Confusing like their hero is of like, who is this for? Right.'Cause I think they are trying to straddle multiple companies. So is it, is it within, when you say like moving faster, is it within that sort of the switch of like, Hey, like we've made this decision to pivot over, like, let's just rip the bandaid off. Or just saying like, we're for agencies, like versus waiting for that to be the majority of the business.
Itai Sadan:I think it's both that and probably mo and not just that. I think it's also, the of budget that you put into your, your marketing budget, into your branding, into your paid advertising, just to go faster. Become a bigger player. Just accelerate that before, before other people come into to the space.
Dan Balcauski:both of those strategic pivots are fascinating. Both the mobile to responsive web as well as the the founder or, or the, the persona transitions. Those are very difficult. I think for a lot of folks. I'm sure there's a lot of listeners out there who have tried to navigate similar transitions in their business. So, so super helpful there. I'm sure both of those. Reinvention experiences have required leadership and, and maybe different leadership. And you've, as I mentioned in the intro you've, you've been leading Guda for 15 years now, which is unusual founder longevity. I'm curious like how you view how you've changed as a leader from those early garage days to now. I guess has there, has there been any sort of skills. That have been most surprising to you of like, we all lack self-awareness to a certain, certain regard. I'm curious, like if there's, if there's skills that you've picked up, you know now later in your leader career that you know you didn't realize were gonna be as important as they were.
Itai Sadan:Yeah. Yeah. I think at every stage of a company you need to evolve and, and have embrace different skills. The first, getting to the first million of a R is like just survival. Is it like, am I gonna be able to make paycheck at the end of the months? It's these type of con concerns as a founder and CEO you wear a ton of hats at that point. You're doing the sales, you're doing the marketing maybe you're hiring, we've started to hire like some of the initial folks on the business side, but it's still, you're still doing a lot of different things then thinking about getting to the first 10 million. at that point you're definitely growing that team around you. There's a little bit of scale that's starting to happen. You try out different you start bringing some experts in that are much better than you are. You make a lot of mistakes in hiring. Hopefully you learn from that and make fewer mistakes. I still make mistakes until today, and I learned from them. And then like thinking about, 50 million kind of in a RR which we crossed a while ago, it's, that's a different type of scale. Like you really need, you're definitely not. both sales and marketing and and a lot of other things you have. Hopefully by this time, senior executives that have been there have done that a couple of times in other companies. They're doing it much better than you are. You give them a lot of autonomy. And I find myself, when things are going well in, finance, sales, product, I don't need to get into those areas as much. I can be much more on the strategic side, be much more managing, getting involved where they're asking me to get involved. I feel like where. And so I delegate a lot. And I enjoy delegating. I think where I find myself spending more time is usually when there's an exec that is not kind of uh, holding his own or her own. And I need to get involved there more than I would've wanted to. but
Dan Balcauski:I.
Itai Sadan:yeah.
Dan Balcauski:So I love how you painted sort of those different eras zero to 1 million, a r to 10 million, a r to 50 million 50 million plus. I'm curious, like, was there any of those, maybe it was, maybe it was in the transitions of those eras. Or maybe it was some other sort of period or moment in time. I'm curious where there was a change in how the business needed to operate that maybe wasn't aligned to your sort of regular way of being that was most jarring for you when you realize you, you had to adapt your the way you were leading the company. Was there any moment like that sticks out to you?
Itai Sadan:So many moments like that, Dan, that I can think of. One of, for me, like one of the, probably funnier moments was. I came from a big company before starting Duda. I was at SAP. And then, one of the things that I, I wanted to do something like move to do my own startup. And, like I, I saw an SAP kind of, which is common for a lot of enterprises, a lot of things that I've learned. When I operate my company, a lot of examples of things of how I don't want don't wanna run a company.
Dan Balcauski:Mm mm.
Itai Sadan:And, there's a lot of this wasting of times in meetings and alignment calls and that was fun in the early days starting Duda, that we didn't need to do those things'cause we were like 10 people in the room in the early days and everybody knew everything. So you didn't have to. Have those type of meetings. And it's probably when we grew to, I don't know, but we were probably maybe 20 or 30 people and we had already like more than, one location because engineering was in Israel and I was here with the business team. I was in California back then with the business team. and I think someone came and said to me, this, I remember the word very succinctly, itai. There's no visibility. And I felt, wow, that's such like a, an enterprise that kind of, it, but it, I, he was, whoever that, that was, they were totally right. Like, it's now like we are having meetings and people are in a little bit feeling siloed and out and, probably I need to do like, some kind of. Company all hands meeting or kind of think about the communication and how does everybody know?'cause we're no longer 10 people in the same room and everybody knows what's happening. Like it's starting to be like a more dispersed company. So you know, you have, as you grow, there's some of these things like communication and visibility that you need to think about.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Itai Sadan:and obviously the, today the team's almost 200 people, so I put a lot of attention. And we have all hands and town halls and there's a CEO newsletters that I send out with kind of my thoughts. So yeah these things develop and and and need to develop as the company becomes bigger.
Dan Balcauski:Well, that's, that's fascinating. Yeah, it's, it, you, it's like we, no, we are being transparent. But yeah, the big, big company process stuff. You when you do have 10 people in a room, you don't really, you really need, and then you're like, oh yeah, there's, there's a reason this stuff exists. This has been great. I do wanna start wrapping us up with a couple of closeout questions. Just I wanna go back for the first question on that. You, you mentioned you started udo with your co-founder Amir, who's CTO. You've known each other since high school. We've been business 15 plus years. What's the secret to establishing good business partnerships? Like why has that worked so well for you? Any advice that you could pull out of like understanding what's gonna make a successful business partner
Itai Sadan:Yeah, I think for us it's it's just those years, it's
Dan Balcauski:I.
Itai Sadan:history. We've gone through so much over these years, failures been there for one another. I think we have, are very aligned on our, our values and the way we see things. I don't remember, in 15 years, I don't remember us having really any significant kind of fallout or anything like that. We typically agree on a lot of things and there's a lot of trust where, today I don't need to talk to Amir every week. I can talk to him every second week or so. We meet in a lot of meetings with the management and other cases, but we're just, there's just this strong alignment between us that is very natural and is based on shared history. We just trust each other to do each does their best work and we know that we trust the decision making. And I think that's the foundation underlying the company.
Dan Balcauski:Build trust and a lot of years is shared experience. Italia, if I could give you a billboard, he put any advice on there for other B2B sass CEOs trying to scale the companies who would go on it.
Itai Sadan:do your own thing. I think, and think it's great to have mentors and advisors and peop and you should be talking to people all the time and get different ideas, but no two companies are alike. something that worked for one company doesn't necessarily mean that it will work for your company. at the end, there's no template company. You need to do your own thing. Listen to all that advice, but it's at the end. Whatever you think is right for your company.
Dan Balcauski:Do your own thing Itai. If our listeners wanna connect with you, learn more about Duda, how can they do that?
Itai Sadan:LinkedIn is a good way to connect with me. You can send me an email, itai itai@Duda.co. one of those things.
Dan Balcauski:Awesome. I will put links to those in the show notes for our listeners. Thank you Ty. That wraps up this episode of SAS Scale Secrets. Thank you for sharing your journey insights. For our listeners who find it,Itaisites valuable, please leave a review and share this episode with your network. Really helps the podcast grow.
