SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Pendo Shares Board Deck Slides, Breaks $200m Revenue, Lessons with Co-Founder Eric Boduch
05 Nov 2024
Chapter 1: How did Pendo achieve $200 million in revenue?
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Please help me welcome to the stage, Eric Boduck from Pendo. You almost missed that shot. I almost did. I was going to be embarrassed. The trash shot in the corner, he almost missed. It was the left hand. It was my off hand. Well, we're thrilled you're here because we had your partner in crime, Todd, I guess two years ago and got a great story from him.
And I said, Todd, I got to meet the other half. Let me meet Eric. Just kick us off really quick. When was the first dollar of revenue at Pendo? And then tell me how you and Todd got together.
First dollar of revenue, I think it was, what, 2014, 15? 15. Mm-hmm. Or there was a little bit at the end of 14. Mm-hmm. Very, very little. And then 15 was really when the revenue started.
You guys can see the revenue graph here on stage. Again, this goes through 2021. I got permission to share this just last night. They are now, today, over $200 million of revenue. So they've more than doubled what this green graph is at, which is really incredible. Go back to how you and Todd met. Was it research triangle related, or how did you guys get together in the beginning?
We met at college. College, okay.
So we both computer engineering, which really was computer science with chip design as opposed to math. For me, it was like all computer science classes. So we met at college, and I actually hired him. I was doing a startup right out of college. It was really web-based consulting, building websites for people.
Always starts as consulting.
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Chapter 2: What strategies helped Pendo generate 2,842 leads in Q2 2017?
I mean, I kind of would have needed to, probably to keep him. And you were the rest? It was just fair. You want to do the fair thing for your co-founders and your entrepreneurs and everyone, too? It was the fair thing to do, no matter.
And it's worked out, obviously. So were you the only other shareholder at that time, or did you have other angel investors?
At the time we normalized him, I think we had some angel investors, yeah. So maybe he had raised, I don't know, half a million dollars to kickstart the consulting business. But it was a small amount of money. And then we pivoted into product. Yeah.
Real quick, show of hands, how many of you guys are on the C-suite or CEO of a company, of a SaaS company, and you're post-revenue? Raise your hand. Post-revenue. At least a dollar. Raise your hand. Hi, hi, hi. Okay, hands down. And this is vulnerability. We all start. Obviously, you've got to go to company two, three, four.
How many of you are in here pre-revenue, co-founder pre-revenue, searching for a first customer? This is good. We love this. Okay, this is good. So, obviously, you're in a good room, right? It's a bunch of post-revenue founders. But for those folks looking for their first dollar revenue, this is so cool. We have this. This is like an artifact. This is like a SaaS museum.
Look at this.
It's the first check. First customer, a round of applause for First Check and Pendo.
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Chapter 3: How did the co-founders Eric Boduch and Todd meet?
We blacked out the customer name out of respect, but do you remember this First Check coming in?
You know, I looked at, because you added this slide. I saw it in the deck a couple days ago because I did go back and peek at any changes. And I was trying to think of who it is, and I'm not entirely sure. Can I say it? Yeah, yeah.
Site capture or site seer, site something.
Site something, okay.
But you don't remember, so it must not be a big $2 million a year client.
I was thinking it was ShowClicks, actually.
Oh, it was, sorry, it was ShowClicks. Oh, so I was right. You were right, it was ShowClicks. So what were they paying for? What did you give them for this $597? This is how you started it.
Woof. You know, our entry point pricing was $99 a month way back in the day. I mean, the product was like, you know, 1% of what we offer today. So what does that work out to? They probably paid for six months, not a year. That's my guess.
January 9th, 2015. Back when we would do deals like that. Half the room is going, what is that thing on the screen? That's not a Stripe check. That's a check. You were collecting, they were mailing checks.
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Chapter 4: What were the marketing tactics that drove Pendo's growth?
I mean, we're super competitive. 50-50 sucks. It's like a tie in baseball. You don't want a tie. You've got to win, right? And so we sat down and really put a lot of emphasis on product marketing. specifically around how do we differentiate ourselves in ways that are meaningful to our companies, our customers.
We put a bunch of time in that in a really succinct period, and it was all about, in our case, marrying analytics and guides. Because we're losing the WalkMe because they had some more advanced guide functionality like branching and blah, blah, blah that they're pushing. And so we looked at it and said, well, we can't fix some of the product areas that our customers arguably needed.
I would say probably didn't, but WalkMe is doing a good job selling that. But what we can do is play into our strengths. So we started looking at it and saying, WalkMe has got no real analytics. Combining guidance and analytics is essential because if you're going to show someone a guide in your product, right? You want to target it to people based upon their behavior.
There's no point in showing the guide to everyone, because if you don't know who I am and what my behavior is, guide's going to be misapplied. So we were like, there's no way you should provide guides, like onboarding guides, if you don't understand the analytics in the background. And we built this whole story around why that was super important.
Didn't have to call WalkMeOut, didn't have to mention any of it, but just said that if you're putting in guides for onboarding, for learning, for technical support, for triage of service calls into your app, You're going to want analytics. You're going to want to understand if you're targeting the right guy to the right person.
And just that messaging and that positioning and that sales training caused those results, right?
Takeaway for all of you guys is you should have a kill sheet for every competitor that basically lists on the left side all the different features and then how you win or how you lose. And that kill sheet should be in with all your sales reps so they can talk about positioning, edit the kill sheet every week, and keep making the kill sheet better.
Trained with it and invest in that because... People are like, you think about it, and it's like, all of a sudden, this maybe is a million dollars of extra revenue. So just making a change maybe is a million bucks. Yes, yes. And you're like, oh, a million bucks, great. But then you start thinking about it. We were VC driven.
What was a million bucks if you're raising money at 15 times revenue or whatever it was at the time? A lot of enterprise value.
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Chapter 5: How did webinars contribute to Pendo's lead generation?
Now, all of a sudden, it's 15. This is like a $15 million change for us, right?
know so invest in product marketing you know figure out how you can change your win rate make sure that sales people are trained and it's worth a lot of enterprise value we're going to wrap up with two rapid fire questions here real quick pendo has raised a lot of money you are not bootstrapped how much has pendo raised total i don't know i think i lost it was a high number it was higher than i could count a couple hundred million something like that yeah i think it's around three what was the last evaluation that was public
Last valuation that was public, 2.6, I think. And what was the last private valuation? 2.6.
I tried to ask you with a straight face, but I'm just kidding. Yeah. So it was 2.6. Okay. What options, like, do you, what do you predict Pendo's outcome will be? Are there enough buyers since you've raised such a high valuation, or do you have to really IPO? It's IPO or bust.
Oh, I mean, back then, I think that when we raised, you know, we were at 100 million. So... You know, now we're at two.
But who are the private market buyers that would have enough cash to sort of buy you guys? Or do you really just have to IPO?
No, I think there's definitely buyers for Pendo. There's definitely opportunities.
Who would be like the top one or two?
You can look at the big private equity firms. You know, you can look at the big software providers. It's a good chunk of buyers.
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