Transforming Leadership: Innovation and Growth at IdeaScale

Thank you so much for having me here today. Really pleased to be here.

Sure. My career journey as a mid-sert to it is my background in education was mathematics and physics by all. But I ultimately knew that I wanted to help run a company. The quickest way to do that was to go through what I would call the private equity consulting journey. I spent a couple of years in places like McKinsey and Bain Capital, then went to the Miami and Harvard Business School, then went into hedge funds, and then finally, I got an opportunity to co-run a private equity-owned $100 million revenue trucking company, which, again, I knew nothing about trucking at that point, but that was the launch pad for me to finally move into an executive role in companies. Since then, I have run either run or co-run companies in trucking, men’s fashion, and now software, which I’m very excited about. I continue to love running and building companies.

Sure. I think at least for me, there’s three challenges. Number one is learning about the industry because as I walked into trucking or in fashion software, I was not an expert, even a novice in any of those industries. I had to very quickly ramp up on the content expertise. Secondly, or the content or domain expertise. The second is figuring out how the business works. Different businesses make money in different ways. Regardless of whether you’re selling burgers or software, it’s really important to understand the mechanics of the business. You can almost, my background is in physics, and you can think of it as the laws of the universe as it applies to that business. Saas is very different than trucking, the burgers, the dense fashion. It’s important to understand those unit economics. Then thirdly is the difficulty or challenge of actually implementing the changes necessary to make a business successful. Some of that is the cultural changes of getting people working together a long time to behave differently. Some of it is just being accepted as the new guy. You may show up with the CEO title, but at the end of the day, you’re only as effective as the people and organization around you allow you to be.  You have to spend a lot of time. Or it has certainly been challenging me to build trust in a short period of time and demonstrate to people that, Hey, I’m new here, but I know what I’m doing, and this will be good for everyone.

Sure. It took about nine or 10 months, so I don’t want to give myself too much rather than six. But I think there were two things, or there were really three things that we did, which was an explicit three-phase plan. First was managing our costs and bringing our margin up really effectively. We went through a thorough cost of every piece of software that we made and said, Okay, is this actually essential? Is this good for the business? Is this positive ROI? If it wasn’t, we reduced it. Some of that was just shutting stuff down. Other times was shifting to more effective things. My favorite example of this is we were paying $150,000 a year for Salesforce. We realized we could switch to HubSpot for $40,000 a year. That’s immediately saving a bunch of money. But more importantly, we also felt HubSpot was a better piece of software for our use case. That’s when it saved money and moved to a better investment. That was phase one, reducing costs and improving marketing. Phase Phase 2 is really focusing on product quality. The most important metric for any B2B SaaS company is what your retention rate is.

I think one of the things that the company hadn’t been doing as effectively in the past was focusing on building a really high-quality product that attached with really high-quality services that would encourage customer. In Phase 2, we really focused on product quality. We doubled the size of our bugs. In QA team, we implemented a cultural shift where we’re going to release fewer features, but much higher quality. The product is going to be higher quality. Our bug count reduced something by 80% during phase 2, and it’s perpetually remained lower and gotten progressively better. Then phase 3 was investing behind growth. When I joined, I think the company had in total three FTs in sales and zero in marketing. Today, we have about 13 or 14 across sales and marketing. We’ve also expanded to Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, India, Europe. Am I missing anything? Yeah. Oh, and Japan as well. That was phase three, investing behind growth, picking which battles we wanted to fight, which countries we were likely to succeed in, and going aggressively behind them, both with personnel hires as well as with marketing hires. And marketing efforts beyond even hires.

Sure. I think that there were two or three things that we focused on within marketing specifically. Number one is increasing the total number of inbound opportunities. We spent a lot of time getting really good at SEO. One of the things we’re really proud of at ideaScale is we are by far the dominant SEO force in our industry. If you search for the word innovation, software, any variant to that in any major language, be it Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Spanish, we’re number one. We beat out the local competitors, and certainly all the English language competitors will. We increased the amount of traffic coming to us, and We made it very easy for them to book time with sales or learn about the product and get into the front end of the sales pipeline. That’s number one. Number two is when I joined again, we really had no marketing efforts, and so we actually increased the amount of outbound marketing efforts. That includes things such as webinar monthly webinars, once a year, live events, outbound email, all the basic levels of things that we just didn’t have the organization established them, and we’ve been pretty successful in establishing that outbound pipeline.

Then thirdly is the geographic expansion. When I joined, We were primarily a North America-focused organization. We did some analysis and realized that there’s other countries where organizations really need software like ours that our industry has been ineffective or inattentive We actually looked at these countries and said, Look, we think that, for example, Spanish-speaking Latin America is a really exciting market that other Western companies are ignoring, and we should invest behind those markets. We went after the markets where we saw clear demand and saw a clear ability to win. That obviously makes it a lot easier to increase sales pipeline when you’re going where there’s demand and low supply, and you are the supplier.

I talk about them as an example. I’ve implemented three different organizations. I absolutely love them. They’re easy to use and they’re reasonably cost-effective for any mid-size organization.

Disclose What was my winning strategy? Isn’t that supposed to be a trade secret? I think there were two or three things we did. Number one is before we started putting money or resources in the SEO reset, we actually thought and did some analysis saying, is this an area of marketing we can win. If we haven’t thought we could win, we would just not have done SEO. We did the analysis and said, This is something we can win. It’s an underinvested field by our peer group, and we think we have the expertise to win. That was number one. We did some analysis. Should How did we do SEO before we actually did any SEO? That was number one. Number two is, rather than just begin doing SEO, once we decided we were going to do it, we went through all of the keywords and did some fairly complex analysis on the ROI by What’s our keyword? By ROI, I mean, is how expensive is it to win this keyword in terms of content that we need to write in terms of competitors who are competing for the same keyword in terms of paid competition for this keyword?

How much benefit will we get? How much volume that is relevant to us in terms of sales generating opportunities were generated. We went through tens of thousands of keywords during this mathematical ROI analysis, the word by word. Then we only focused on the ones that were extremely high ROI. So the ROI wasn’t 10X or a thousand %. We just didn’t do it. There’s a whole bunch of keywords that our competitors are focusing on, they’re waiting on, but those are the ones that are really hard to win or very low value. We just don’t compete against that. We like waiting where it’s easy, we’re a lot of it. That was number two. Number three is we had an employee solely dedicated to doing SEO. Here, he had no other focuses for about a year and a half. I personally managed this employee, I mentored him, as well as we equipped him with the tools that he needed to succeed. So if he said he needed SMRush or ChatGPT advanced or whatever other tools he needed, we got them because we realized that the benefit to doing to wing SEO would be hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue, which is a very good investment for us to invest behind.

We weren’t cheap. Once we decided we were going to go behind SEO, we made make sure he was equipped with all the tools and mentorship he needed to succeed. That’s, by the way, our mentality for any marketing effort. If we’re going to do it, we do it well and we don’t half-ass the attempt.

What do you think? We only started doing non-English language Starting in December, so we’re about six months. That journey has been extraordinary successful. About 55% of my web traffic now is non-English, up from 0% in December, which is nice. But we did, for the most part, there’s three different elements. Number one, most of it was just direct translations using traditional machine translation services. That was phase one. Phase two was specifically for certain countries, namely Japan. We did add localization where we have a local partner who has an entirely separate localized website, we run localized webinars, et cetera. That native language level marketing. Then thirdly, specific to Spanish-speaking Latin America, which is being a breakout success for us, we’ve actually hired local language speakers and marketers in that area. In Spanish-speaking countries, We have a dedicated Spanish-speaking customer support personel. We’re a dedicated sales rep. As I think yesterday, now, we also have a dedicated local language marketer that will be doing localized content for Spanish language market.

Exactly. If we don’t think of market as we have no ego about admitting that our hypotheses were wrong. We’re scientists here. We have a hypothesis. We run an experiment. If the experiment demonstrates early success, we double down our 10X on it. If it fails, it’s no one’s fault. No one gets in trouble, no one gets fired. We have a very experiment-oriented culture where we 10X the wins and we move on with our losses and no one gets in trouble for it because that’s part of our company culture.

Our industry tech, the tech industry is on average laid off about 30% of their staff over the last two and a half years. During that time, we’ve grown our head count by 30%, so I’m really proud of the fact that our employees get to sleep easy at night knowing that they’re not going to lose their jobs, that they support their families, their kids, their husbands, It’s a really good feeling for us and I’m sure for my employees as well. I think in terms of hiring, that’s really easy. But when you’re a company not doing layoffs and you’re stable and you’re showing that you have a positive last word used, things like that, that’s easy. On the retention side, it’s been much more complex because the world has changed in terms of tech hiring. I think that the types of tech companies that got all the news, the media, and the unicorn status, in some case, were not well-run companies, were not well-run organizations. On the retention side, we’ve really focused on hiring people that understand what a well-run company is and don’t just go for the glitz of the media buzz that many technology companies have really focused on for the last decade or so.

On the retention side, we’ve been very mindful of trying to focus on keeping the employees that we think get to the vision that, Hey, I guess scale is not just your media-saturated tech company, but it’s actually well-run business. That run business, we’re going to be around a year from now, we’re going to be around five years from now, we’re going to be around 10 years from now. We may not be uniform status tomorrow, but we have an eye on that ball and we’re going to be working very hard towards that, but methodically and sustainably.

Can you rephrase the question? I want to make sure I address it correctly.

Sure. Within each element of our marketing strategy, which again could be our SEO element, it could be our webinars element, or webinars/events element, I should call it, or email marketing, A few things. Number one is when we notice that we are weak in an area… Sorry. Number one is we have analytics set up across all of this to understand, Hey, how are we doing? Are we getting better? Are we getting worse? Has something changed? If our analytics dashboard suggests we’ve got It’s a lot of worse. We go refocus on it. If we’re doing fine, then we can actually pull back and let it go on the model together. That’s number one. We just have a lot of analytics set up to monitor our success, very quantitatively and very much in real-time. Second is things change in marketing. A silly example is, 15 years ago, social media marketing just didn’t matter for businesses. It was very much a B2C enterprise. Today, it’s important for even B2B businesses to have a significant social media presence, especially on LinkedIn. Over the past year and a half, or a year and a half ago, we basically had no LinkedIn presence.

Today, we are number two in LinkedIn presence amongst our peer group, and we’re really focusing on that. That’s an area that we are… I think we still have a ways to go on being best in class, but we’re focusing on that because we realized that was deficiency that we need to correct because a lot of our customers are coming through us from specifically LinkedIn social media channel. Then thirdly is making use of whatever new tools emerge, whether it be the ChatGPT, whether it be automated social media tools, whether it be a tool that I was recently experimented, first seen with just over the last few days, is our tools that automatically chop video content into social media bite-size chunks. You don’t need to have a human editor 30-second clips, then edit them to make them social media friendly. That’s something that those are new AI video tools that have ever emerged that really over the past couple of months, they become commercial quality. We started to adopt them really aggressively as of two days ago. So whatever new tech emerges, we adopt it really quickly in order to implement it for marketing.

I’ll say we have three principles at IdeaScale that apply both to marketing as well as the organization. Number one, we do things that are high quality, so we don’t see any junk content. If you see our blog entries, for example, none of them are finly available marketing for IdeaScale. Each of our blog is actually high quality content for the end user and doesn’t even mention the name Ideascale. It’s not trying to sell you anything. It’s just saying if you want to learn about best innovation culture, you want to read Ideascale’s blog, not the Wikipedia entry, not the Reddit, not the McKinsey entry. It’s a really high quality, anything on our website. If it’s not high quality, it doesn’t show up. Not just in our website and our product and the way we run our finance, HR, whatever it is. Number two, we are decentralized as an organization. Even though I’m the CEO and I de facto act as our chief marketing officer, officer. The actual actions that we take in marketing are coming from each of our individual marketers who have a lot of latitude to act independently. If a junior marketer sitting in Mexico or India or the United States says, Hey, we think we need a page on X or we need a webinar on Y topic, they can do it.

They don’t need any approvals to do, which creates a lot of organic latitude. If somebody sees a hole that is in our marketing strategy, they can go plug it and they don’t need to go through any bureaucracy to make it happen. Number three is experimentation. It’s something I alluded to earlier on this call, but we tried a lot of things with the full advanced knowledge that a lot of them are going to fail or being affected. No one gets in trouble, which means we have a culture here of, Hey, if somebody runs a marketing initiative, let’s say, a webinar, and that webinar failed because it only got 10 attendees, no one’s in trouble for that because we know that other webinars will have hundreds of attendees or other marketing efforts, maybe non-webinar-related efforts will be extraordinary successful. That creates a lot of culture where people try out a lot of cool things, and most of them will fail. 90% of stuff will fail, but the 10% that succeeds are home runs for us.

It’s actually funny. We spend zero on paid digital advertising right now, or near zero, I should say. We spend a very modest amount on LinkedIn and paid advertising, but we spend zero on Google, for example. If I compare that to my competitor My competitors are spending a pretty large amount of money on at least Google advertising, as far as I can tell. It’s actually frustrating at times when we have really high-quality content and somebody’s pay a lot of money to Google to put a sponsored ad on top, which is literally just a sponsor ad trying to sell their product, which ranks a high-quality content that the end user is searching for. We understand why our competitors do it. It’s obviously effective for them to get a paid sponsor at number one. We understand why Google does this because this is entirely Google’s business model that they charge you for rankings. But it is frustrating when somebody is paying to actually direct and use away from the content that they are searching for, which is, hey, what is the best innovation management process? How do you run a fishbone diagram? Or how do you run an innovation webinar?

How do you manage a cultural change? We put out really good content, and it’s a challenge when somebody is directing people away from that in a sometimes a disingenuous way.

That’s a new term, by the way. I need to learn that generative engine optimization. So a few things. Number one is you’re right that the trend is going to shift to more new forms of search in the generative AI world or AI assistance for it. But first, it’s important to note that shift is happening much faster on the consumer side than on the business side. Business buyers are still, for the most part, using traditional search methods, and over time, they will shift, but that shift is slower. We understand we still want to focus on winning the traditional game. Second is for generative AI, at least as far as I know, it’s not… And again, this is an area now I have to go learn a little bit about geo now because you just introduced a new term to me. But from my My understanding of generative AI, and again, I have a bit of data science and AI background, is generative AI is still relying on all the data that sits on the traditional internet in order to inform its search query. So if you ask generative AI, Hey, help me develop innovation software, it’s going to go look at Wikipedia and every other blog entry on the web and research and try and compile that information.

Actually, the fun fact is because we’ve done so well traditionally, if you go ask ChatGPT, Hey, tell us the top three innovation software, the pros and cons, IDSquare will always be lit. Chatgp will say, IDScale is the fastest implement, it’s cheapest to implement, and their customer service works because we are in which are things all cost the business users care of. That’s because it’s gone to Gartner, it’s gone to Wikipedia, it’s gone to our blogs and said, Hey, these guys are really good at what they do. We’re actually fine if someone’s asking Chatgeek, your Jim and I want to do search about us because we’re still going to do really well on it.

Our SEO strategy was we want to put out good content. If Google or Bing or ChatGPT or Gemini want to find it, they will find it because if they’re looking for the best content, which that’s what the generative AI search is They’re going to find us because we are the best content, full stop.

Sorry, what does What does PD mean?

Sure. Ideal scale, just to summarize, is like a CRM for ideas. You put your customer data on HubSpot or your financial data on a QuickBooks. The next week, you put your idea data into IdeaScale. I think that there’s three areas where we really differentiate ourselves versus our competitors or versus anybody in this space. Number one is ease of setup. As a multi-billion dollar organization with tens of thousands of employees, you can set up IdeaScale in less than five minutes. You can be good to go. You can launch right now. You can really click on the Get Started free button on our website, and you can be up and running within five minutes. That’s very rare for enterprise software. None of our competitors can boast that level of ease of set up, ease of launch. Obviously, you can do all the fancy settings in the background, but you can be commercially up and running in less than five minutes. Number two is our customer support. I provide 24/7, 365 live human tech support with an average response time around 24 seconds. If the chatbot or the Cade knowledge articles can answer your question within a few seconds.

On average, within 24 seconds, you are going to be connected to a real human being who will help you through chat. We’re very excited about that, and that’s something our customers love, that, hey, they can talk to an expert human being on this topic. They don’t have to go through hours and multiple menus of chat bots. Number three is security. We are by far the most secure enterprise solution in our market. For example, we are FedRam qualified. That’s extremely difficult to US government qualification, which allows us to work with any US government agency, but is also something increasing that a lot of corporations are asking for as well as foreign governments, because it says that we have a high level of technological security and personnel security. A silly example that is, I’m the CEO of the company. You could steal my phone and laptop and you still cannot compromise my systems, nor can you access my customers’ data. Because that’s a human level security that’s implemented, that there’s no single point of failure. I do not have all the passwords by design, and that’s also true on the technological It’s really hard to hack our systems.

If you are a large government agency, if you’re a large corporation, you care about security and compliance, you probably want to come to IdeaScale because we are by far best in class in this.

Sure. Our space is still… We’ve been around 14 years, but the space is still reasonably nascent. I would say that most of the time when I’m going to a customer or a prospect, they’re still using paper Post-it notes or Excel. The emerging trend is people are still making the switch away from paper or Excel to our technology in the same way that people are switching away from Rolodexes to Salesforce in the early 1990s. Our industry is about 30 years behind the CRM industry, so we’re still benefiting from a long tailwind of read field opportunities. The second is that I think that there’s a cultural shift within all organizations that great ideas and great innovations don’t just come from your your executives, they can come from a broader organization. Thirty or 40 years ago, it was the top three or four guys or gals in an organization that really battered. Today, increasing companies are realizing, Hey, the junior employee working a warehouse may have a great innovation to make that warehouse more efficient. There’s an increasing cultural shift that is happening to adopt these technologies and as well as make them more open. One of the things that’s really funny, a lot of our customers make their communities close where they restrict them to either just their employees or just subsets of employees.

Whereas I actually push for our customers to make them open. Let your customers participate in your communities. Let your share participate. That’s how we run our own internal community. You can go comment on idea skills product. You can say good things, bad things. We want to hear it, and we will react to those ideas. That’s a shift. The openness that is happening that people want more and more open versions of the software, which we’re excited about because we’ve always advocated for it, but that’s been a cultural shift that’s taking some time. Number three is, I think, is the desire for more integrations. Increasingly, software is not… And this is not unique to us, but once upon a time, people thought of software as this. We have Excel, we have Word, we have Gmail, whatever your software suite is, they are independent. Today, everyone wants those software suites to talk to each other. So we are receiving increasing demand as, Hey, does your software integrate with monday. Com for project management or teams for collaboration or a Jira for ticketing? Whatever it is, people are pushing for our software to integrate with other pieces of software that are part of their corporate software suite.

That’s an increasingly an effort for us

We have integrations with Motel. We have integrations Power BI, some teams, some Slack integrations where there’s a list of all the integrations we do on our website, but we are actually rebuilding some of these integrations as we speak. For example, Microsoft Teams, we have a light integration, but we think that a more fulsome integration is needed. That’s actually how we began pretty aggressively earlier this week, which is in the design stages and planning stages right now, where we realized we need a full integration where someone can interact almost natively within Microsoft’s feet with our software and same with Slack, which will be immediately after Teams.

Sure. I’d say there’s probably three things that we’re doing to retain customers. By the way, customer attention is, as I said earlier in this call, our most important metric, our net retention rate is something every employee or junior, we share it on every town hall, whether the number goes up or down, everyone knows it and they’re proud. There’s three things that we’re doing. Number one is on the product side, we’re really focusing on features that drive engagement and value for the end user. If there’s features or buttons that don’t make the end, that don’t create value for the end user, we start slashing them and removing them. We want a simple, streamlined product that is really focused on engagement-driven features because we are basically a social platform and we want to drive engagement. That’s number one. Number two is the core product and technology product quality. One of the things that a lot of tech companies do is they focus on a lot of features so they can market it and their sales people talk about it, but they don’t focus on how good is your core technology. Is it does work fast? Is it built on a scalable system?

Is it bug free? We’ve invested a lot of this. Something that you can’t really tell in market, you can’t really advertise marketing or bug free because everyone assumes that’s the case. But once customers come in the door and they realize, Wait, the software just doesn’t break. That’s something that’s very different than an experience you get with a lot of other SMB software. That’s number two, really focusing on the four product quality in a way that sometimes is invisible. Number three is the customer support out. Every customer has a dedicated CSM for focusing on broader business issues that will help them use the software more effectively. But that person is only working during normal business hours. If they can’t access that person, they need technical support at midnight on Christmas Eve, they have that live 24/7, 365 human tech support. That’s something we’re very proud of because at some point you want to talk to the human being, and we guarantee you will always be able to talk to him being really fast. Customers love that for more attention.

Yes.

Tiktok. It’s just fun. It’s entertaining. It keeps me happy.

When I was in the shoe industry, a shoe company would pay people stand in front of Nike stores during New Hot Shoe releases with billboards and just walking around with physical billboards, and this is in 2023. So not digital at all in a digital age.

I launched our social media strategy while having a beer and pizza, waiting for my wife while she was getting ready in a hotel in Amsterdam. I was sitting down in a bar, having a pizza, having a beer, and I built our entire LinkedIn profile and scheduled a year’s work marketing.

I think I probably don’t plan my day as effectively as I could in the morning. I should sit down and figure out, Here’s the three or four things I should do. I am pretty ineffective doing that, unfortunately, which means my day is less efficient than it could be.

Internally, the company uses Monday, Asana, Slop. Track as well as you track for formal workflow stuff. Personally, I use all those when I’m interacting with the relevant team, such as our technology team or marketing team. I’m probably less effective at doing that personal work management in terms of what a mix to do is for today. I’m trying to figure out something, literally this week, hey, what do I need to do to actually make my day more organized personally?

This is going to be very nerdy, but I’m a theoretical mathematician by training. I love it. I still read academic theoretical math papers. Totally useless in real life, but deeply interested to understand what are the genius mathematicians the world doing. It’s fun to read about. Really strange things in math.

My last prompt was, how do I figure out how to get a rental license for real estate in Philadelphia? It was done using Claude yesterday because getting a rental license for real estate is extremely complex in Philadelphia, and the FAQ pages would not explain it. Thank you. Claude was very successful, by the way, doing it. It made it stupid and simple enough that I could understand.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Harshik. It was a pleasure.