[00:00:00] Lucas: Matt, welcome to the “Building and Growing Podcast”. Delighted to have you here today.
[00:00:04] Matt: Thanks, Lucas. I'm delighted to be here.
[00:00:07] Lucas: Excellent! Matt, is now working with Vertice and I'll hand over the mic to you to introduce yourself, your career and Vertice.
[00:00:17] Matt: Absolutely! Thanks Lucas. So, I'm Matt, I'm 36 years old. I'm a go-to-market leader. I've got expertise within the Software as a Service (SaaS) space, and I'm a bit of a FinTech nerd. My career up to this point, I've been working in frontline sales roles at companies like Market Invoice and CrowdCube; and then five and a half years ago, I joined a company called Codat,
[00:00:45] Matt: as the second employee. Codat provides API infrastructure, for B2B financial services. I had a very successful five years at that business. Recently
[00:01:00] Matt: I left following a hundred-million-dollar series C led by JP Morgan.
[00:01:00] Lucas: Huge growth journey.
[00:01:00] Matt: It was a great time and I had many close friends at Codat but it was following the series C that I was itching for a new challenge and felt that going early stage again, having just seen that movie of going from a one-person sales team to several hundred people was something that I wanted to replicate.
[00:01:32] Matt: So, that brings me to today, joined Vertice in June. Vertice is a SaaS purchasing platform. We help companies to deploy capital more efficiently on their technology, specifically their Software as a Service (SaaS) tools. We've had a very strong start to the business' life cycle.
[00:01:54] Lucas: Fantastic! Well, look thank you very much. It's been an illustrious career and
[00:02:00] Lucas: journey and the start of something very exciting. So perhaps if we start diving into some of the problems that Vertice is solving. Is there a top three list of problems or challenges that you find businesses face?
[00:02:20] Matt: Yeah absolutely. Maybe I'll set the scene with a bit of context. So, Software as a Service (SaaS) is the prevailing business model or delivery mechanism for software companies. So previous to the cloud, I guess people would sell you software on a CD and or on premise, set up where it be stored on a local server in the corner of your office.
[00:02:43] Matt: Obviously that is becoming a thing of the past and the majority of new software that is shipped to customers these days is deployed via the cloud. So, it's Software as a Service (SaaS) and it's typically licensed on a subscription basis. There's obviously tremendous
[00:03:00] Matt: benefits of doing it that way around,
[00:03:02] Matt: but it can also lead to inefficiencies on the client side. We believe that there's significant wastage and leakage and overlap and things like orphaned licenses which lead to companies wasting a lot of money on software. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a good thing.
[00:03:24] Matt: Largely companies are buying it because they want to drive greater automation across all departments within their organization. You'll know that better than anyone, Lucas based on your background in the technology sector. SaaS is a good thing, it's been growing double digits year over year.
[00:03:44] Matt: It will continue to grow even in the current climate and what I think companies are finding much like in the consumer world, that we're all getting a bit of subscription fatigue with Netflix and all of these other services that we're asked to subscribe to. I think
[00:04:00] Matt: businesses are going to suffer a similar thing where a company with 200 people might be licensing 200 different software
[00:04:08] Matt: tools. It very quickly becomes difficult to manage, understand what value you're getting for all of those tools. Not only is it inefficient from a cost perspective, but also from a time perspective. I lead a team today and people are constantly saying: hey, what about this tool and what about this tool?
[00:04:30] Matt: This can help us do emails better and this can help us do this better. It's like, guys, that's like that's great. Obviously, we're going to review different tools and we're going to try and arm you with the best technology stack to be efficient at your job but what it is doing is causing a huge, like a lot of time is wasted.
[00:04:50] Matt: A lot of I guess share of mind space is lost on which tools should we be using rather than
[00:05:00] Matt: going out and speaking to customers in my case. So, Vertice has come to markets. The founders’ third SaaS business, they exited the previous two ScanSafe to Cisco and Wandera to Jamf.
[00:05:14] Matt: They've got a reasonable track record. This is a problem which they've identified as one which needs to be addressed. So how do we achieve these savings for customers? Well, we are basically try to give them a single source of truth
[00:05:36] Matt: for all of their SaaS tools. They let us know what they're using, they send the contracts across to us, and we basically build out a dashboard with an accurate renewal schedule of all of the different tools they're using. That way they can, make sure that if they're not getting good utilization on one tool, let's say they have a hundred seats, but they're only using
[00:06:00] Matt: 50 of those seats.
[00:06:01] Matt: They can make sure that there are the relevant credits or refunds for that. Because there's some like weird cognitive bias with software that if you're not using it, then that's your problem and you shouldn't be getting a refund. If that was any other service, you may say that was a, I don't know, cleaning service and your cleaner didn't turn up, then you would be looking to get a credit
[00:06:23] Matt: or a refund. What we just want to help companies and our clients in that really nuanced and relatively new segment of SaaS to make sure that they're, like I said, at the top of the call, deploying their capital efficiently in that area. For many technology companies, software is their second largest cost outside of
[00:06:47] Matt: headcounts. Obviously in the current economic climate, people are looking to headcount to reduce cost, but that's always a difficult one because if you cut headcount,
[00:07:00] Matt: then in sales and marketing you're not going to sell as much. If you cut headcount in development, then you're not going to build as much.
[00:07:06] Matt: Our promise to customers is we'll help you to reduce costs and optimize without any loss of productivity, which is hopefully a pretty compelling pitch.
[00:07:18] Lucas: Yeah, absolutely! I think there are many companies out there with excess licenses. What would the journey look like as to how you're really helping them to reduce that cost?
[00:07:32] Matt: See like many things which provide value, really what we're doing is using data to enable our clients to ensure they're getting best deals. Because what we've seen in B2B SaaS is there's significant price discrepancy.
[00:07:51] Matt: So company A, which looks exactly like company B, and when I say looks exactly like less, so they're using the same number of seats. Company A can be
[00:08:00] Matt: paying 35% or 40% less than company B, and it might be something completely outside of those companies’ control, for example, it was the end of the quarter for the rep
[00:08:11] Matt: or they wanted this particular case study, so they did a deal. Now, without Vertice, the buyer of that tool has to rely on the rep that the rep is telling them that this is the price and this is the discount. I can't do anything else. Whereas we have the collective wisdom of all of our clients, and all of the pricing benchmarks that we have acquired and we hold on file.
[00:08:37] Matt: We're building a very significant data set on pricing benchmarks so that when our clients are negotiating with those vendors or when we're negotiating with those vendors on their behalf, we can just cut through a lot of the noise and say, hey guys, we've got
[00:08:53] Matt: benchmarks for this number of SKUs and this is the price we want. And we also know who all of the
[00:09:00] Matt: competitors in the market are who can solve the same problem. So, we're helping our customers to make that sourcing of a tool easier, more transparent, making sure they get the right price when they buy the tool.
[00:09:15] Matt: That all starts with the problem. So, what's the problem you're trying to solve? So, I don’t know if that answered your question.
[00:09:24] Lucas: Well, I suppose it leads me to the next one which is could you say it's almost procurement as a service?
[00:09:32] Matt: Yeah. As I've learned more about the world of procurement, there's a lot to procurement.
[00:09:40] Matt: There's a lot to unpack within that space. There's sourcing, there's compliance, there's of course negotiation but there's RFPs and RFIs. We don't address all of the workflows and all of the problems that a procurement team might have. Actually, our initial ICP is companies that don't have
[00:10:00] Matt: procurement.
[00:10:00] Matt: Because those are the guys where the need is greatest. Although we found that larger companies who have procurement teams are reaching out to us because they want that pricing intelligence. Because they don't have that either. Because there's no one in the market that's providing that as a service currently.
[00:10:18] Matt: But the area that we really help out with is the commercial negotiation of the license. Because these SaaS companies are often operating at very significant like 90% gross margin in some cases. They lock you in, they often have a lend and expand approach and their pricing models are designed to increase the price year over year, irrespective of usage.
[00:10:46] Matt: We're there to help our clients to demystify the SaaS sales tactics that have led to many multi-billion dollar
[00:11:00] Matt: companies being built largely in Silicon Valley. But we're there to help our clients to ensure that they're not falling into some of the traps that we understand because we've come from a SaaS sales background.
[00:11:11] Matt: It's kind of, we feel good about it because it's like we're levelling the playing field to some extent. We're helping the little guys and the businesses and the start-ups who rely upon these tools heavily to ensure that they're getting the right deal on these tools.
[00:11:28] Matt: SaaS is an unregulated market unlike FinTech and Financial Services where there's a regulator. He'll stand in to make sure that unfair pricing doesn't proliferate in a market. SaaS isn't regulated in the same way. So, I think Vertice and other companies in this space are, it's almost a self-regulating mechanism.
[00:11:54] Matt: That means that unscrupulous
[00:12:00] Matt: kind of discretionary pricing within the market, it is not left to run out of control. If the client is using Vertice or another service similar to Vertice then there's accountability because we've got
[00:12:15] Matt: the price points to say, we've got people paying 50% or even more, less than what you're quoting our customer. So hopefully it brings more transparency and more fairness to the market.
[00:12:29] Lucas: I mean we've dived into pricing in terms of vendors. The magic question will be, how does Vertice then price?
[00:12:38] Lucas: How you value that service?
[00:12:39] Matt: Yeah. We thought about this long and hard and obviously, B2B sales org as well. We've got to be conscious of like how B2B sales functions currently. So we want to be the antithesis of the worst offending SaaS vendors in the market, which is we want to have transparent very easy to understand
[00:13:00] Matt: pricing, so we publish it.
[00:13:01] Matt: It's completely transparent, we publish it on the website. We have tier which are based upon your software spend. The higher your software spends, the higher your fee with Vertice and hopefully the greater the savings that Vertice can achieve for our customers. The ROI that we target for our customers is between 20 and 30%
[00:13:24] Matt: in annually recurring savings. So significant, is it for some companies. The way that we protect our clients and give them reassurances that we can achieve those savings, is we have a performance warranty associated with the contract which would basically stipulate that if we aren't able to achieve a minimum level of savings
[00:13:50] Matt: then there's a reimbursement mechanism. So that is always at least as much as our fee. Say our standard pricing
[00:14:00] Matt: tier would be; you pay us $40,000 up front. The performance warranty, the minimum savings would be $40,000.
[00:14:04] Lucas: There is a 100% alignment
[00:14:08] Matt: Yeah, so it's a budget neutral service.
[00:14:10] Matt: If you're pitching it to a CFO, you can say: hey, you don't need to make a business case or an ROI case here because if we can't achieve the savings, and maybe they did do a really good job and they negotiated the best terms across all 100 of their tools. I haven't found one of those companies yet,
[00:14:27] Matt: but if they did, we would say: hey guys, we can't help you. We're going to reimburse your fee or part of your fee. So that's how we're doing it. It means that we've been able to get pretty good, velocity through the pipeline, because we can make that kind of compelling offer to people.
[00:14:45] Matt: If we don't do what we say we're going to do then the downside risk is limited for you guys.
[00:14:54] Lucas: Yeah, absolutely! So, I'm just going to go back a couple of steps,
[00:15:00] Lucas: to what you referred to at the beginning of the podcast: the current economic headwinds that we're encountering.
[00:15:08] Lucas: When it comes to negotiating with SaaS vendors, they love to say, we can only give you a discount if it's a 12 month or multi-year deal because of revenue recognition laws. I think it's their number one rabbit that they love to pull out of the hat! There's a couple of use cases in mind that I have, where actually
[00:15:34] Lucas: from a business continuity perspective, you're in an emerging market and the currency is devaluing against a hard currency like the US dollar. A multi-year approach could mean that the client is paying three times what the deal was worth in local currency at the end of the deal compared to at the beginning of the deal.
[00:16:00] Lucas: What is Vertice doing in order to help clients get flexible deals with discount pricing without being locked in?
[00:16:14] Matt: Yeah, it's a really great point, which I’m glad you've raised Lucas because like, of course we talk about savings, which is cash. In the current climate net savings make all the difference.
[00:16:29] Matt: What we endeavour to achieve for our clients is getting better contracts. Sometimes that may might mean more flexible and more flexible might mean actually the unit cost is higher. But if you are in the scenario that you described and you're an emerging market technology company and you need to hedge currency risk, then actually flexibility
[00:16:51] Matt: is a better hedge than locking in a rate. We don't operate in emerging markets yet, but I can see exactly
[00:17:00] Matt: the value that we would provide to a client of that nature. You could produce hedging strategies and all sorts of things to address that particular problem. But
[00:17:10] Matt: when it comes to vendors like we're not there to beat the vendors up, effective negotiating is about getting a win-win. There has to be a win for the vendor and there has to be a win for our client. But what we've seen over the last 10 years is its very rep led,
[00:17:28] Matt: everything is stacked in favour of the vendor, there's very little price transparency and we want to level the playing field a little bit, but not to the detriment of the relationship because some of these vendors, they're strategically important suppliers for many of our clients.
[00:17:47] Matt: They provide critical infrastructure. We're not there to beat them up, but we want to make sure that our clients are treated fairly. Alongside the pricing benchmarks, we also have
[00:18:00] Matt: playbooks for each vendor. We think we understand what each vendor's year end is, and we understand what is top of mind for each of those vendors because we've read their annual report and we understand what they need to achieve to deliver value to their shareholders.
[00:18:17] Matt: So, if you understand negotiating counterparty intimately then you'll be able to drive better outcomes. Obviously, that comes with experience because just like the vendors rep is selling every day, we're buying every day. Whereas when I was a sales leader on my previous company many times it was the first time I was buying a CRM from Salesforce,
[00:18:41] Matt: it was the first time I was buying a phone system from somewhere. You're not best placed to do that negotiation. Procurement teams are not something that companies introduce typically until they're much later
[00:19:00] Matt: stage.
[00:19:00] Matt: We see companies with thousands of people who don't have procurement professionals working for them. I haven't heard Vertice described procurement as a service, but it does sum up nicely what we achieve. But specifically for the nuanced area of SaaS basically.
[00:19:16] Lucas: Yeah. Which is fantastic!
[00:19:19] Lucas: I think that the point you made about Vertice coming across the same vendors often, to name a couple of names Google Cloud, AWS these are supporting many tech companies. it’s important for the tech companies to know as well that you've got a good relationship with them.
[00:19:42] Lucas: You might even be able to recommend particular products based upon what you see.
[00:19:47] Matt: Totally! I think that the direction of travel for this industry and for Vertice is exactly that. It's to be the trusted partner for how
[00:20:00] Matt: you use technology and how you use SaaS to address your businesses changing requirements. Because businesses go through phase shifts where one day a cloud accounting package of which there are many might be perfectly suitable for running your ledger.
[00:20:20] Matt: But, when you are 400 or 500 people, actually you need to start thinking about do I need an ERP at this point? So making smart recommendations based on all of the data points and the collective wisdom we have from all of our clients in the market is an area that we think is the future of the business.
[00:20:40] Matt: Making those recommendations and ensuring our clients have the right tools at the right time at the right price of course. Because the market moves so quickly and there's new players coming in all the time. There are acquisitions that take place. We obviously saw Adobe's acquisition of Figma, which will have,
[00:21:00] Matt: a big impact on that kind of design and marketing
[00:21:05] Matt: SaaS space. So keeping on top of all of that is not something that every company has the resources or appetite to do. But we specialize in it to ensure that our clients are getting good value and are not wasting time basically.
[00:21:24] Lucas: When you look to deliver that advice and those recommendations, is almost a sort of consultative and implementation partner approach something that Vertice is looking at doing? I've seen companies that might buy a new piece of software, but then the implementation falls down and so before the software's even implemented it has lost it’s reputation.
[00:21:51] Matt: Yeah. No, absolutely. I think I heard a stat the other day that 10% of SaaS tools that are bought are still unused within 90 days of purchase. There's even a term for this, it's called shelfware, which is people buy, it sits on the shelf and I've heard stats that it's up to 10%, of the entire SaaS market is shelfware. It's completely unused software which is obviously grossly inefficient. It maybe okay for the, for the SaaS companies, but in terms
[00:22:30] Matt: for the efficiency of the market that's not good. Because the value is not being exchanged. The value is completely weighted towards the vendor but we're a technology enabled service, there is human beings in the loop here,
[00:22:50] Matt: so we have the Dashboard, which acts as the single source of truth for all SaaS tools that has tremendous value to our clients. But we also have expert
[00:23:00] Matt: software buyers who need to get involved. Because there's too much complexity, there's too much nuance from vendor-to-vendor. We could automate it if every vendor used the same SKUs and the same rate card and they have the same operating model
[00:23:13] Matt: but they don't. They're all very different. We have specialist software buyers. Some of them will specialize in ERP, some of them will specialize in cloud and we have to make sure that our clients have the relevant expertise. Obviously, that is a shared resource across all of our clients.
[00:23:31] Matt: But it means that, they can go in with the best leverage going into those negotiations because we've seen these scenarios many times before.
[00:23:42] Lucas: Fantastic! Again, I'm going to take a couple of steps back to a point you made about unused seats and getting refunds from them to a company that I saw do a fundraise late last year, I believe or perhaps
[00:24:00] Lucas: the beginning of this year called M3ter, which was helping, SaaS companies to deliver consumption-based plans.
[00:24:10] Lucas: Wherein you might need a refund two questions will come off this, first one; how easy is it to get refunds for seats that aren't being used? And secondly, are you seeing more and more SaaS companies move towards consumption-based models?
[00:24:30] Matt: Yeah, So both great questions.
[00:24:32] Matt: I'll go for the first one. Most people don't ask, is the reality. Unused seats are just left unused and it's, that's it. Like I mentioned before, it's in inefficient value exchange because people are buying stuff that they don't need and then they're not being reimbursed for that.
[00:24:58] Matt: I think the reality is that
[00:25:00] Matt: most vendors aren't going to offer you a cash refund in the same way that other markets you might not get a cash refund, but you might get a voucher to shop in store; whether it's clothing or supermarkets or whatever. A similar thing can be achieved within software.
[00:25:17] Matt: If it's a vendor that you are going to continue using and there's good sentiment within your team towards the vendor and you want to sign up for another year or two years, three years. Typically, the way we would approach that with our customers say, hey guys, we signed up for a 100 seats at the start of the year, but we have
[00:25:36] Matt: 15 that are completely inactive, not used, we got it wrong, you didn’t tell us! Because some vendors, very few will tell you if you have unused space but it's not common practice. So, we would come in and say, hey guys, we had 15 completely unused licenses and, or maybe we
[00:26:00] Matt: added a module, and we never deployed it.
[00:26:02] Matt: We want credits for those unused seats and we want those credits to be deducted from our next two years of licensing. Well, it's fair and it's proportional and for a company that wants to sign up for another two years it's normally completely accepted by the vendor
[00:26:26] Matt: is something that they should do. But the number of companies that are doing that is very low, obviously.
[00:26:33] Lucas: That's a great insight for founders and procurement teams to take away from today.
[00:26:41] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. If you're looking to cut costs and you have renewals coming out, whether you want to use a service like Vertice or not, and you're a CFO, Finance Manager, Head of Department, look at your usage and if you don't know where to find it, speak to your AM or your CSM at the vendor and say, hey, I want to understand
[00:27:00] Matt: utilization
[00:27:00] Matt: for the trailing 12 months. It's a good way to set yourself up for success in a negotiation.
[00:27:07] Lucas: Fantastic! Jumping down to the second question in terms of pure consumption-based models?
[00:27:16] Matt: I think if the market was completely usage-based pricing,
[00:27:22] Matt: Vertice’s business model would be slightly different. We're addressing a need in the market. We have had tremendous demand since we came out of stealth mode in June, we’ve been onboarding clients faster than we expected to. Because this is clearly a problem that is impacting companies at the economic headwinds as you described earlier, where people need to cut costs,
[00:27:49] Matt: venture capital has dried up. The kindest way of cutting costs without going to head count is optimizing your operational expenditure.
[00:28:00] Matt: If you're a technology company, one of the ways of doing that is looking at your SaaS tools and how you can tweak those and optimize those.
[00:28:08] Matt: If the market moves completely to usage-based pricing then, which I don't think it will by the way, I think, lots of vendors have a combination of annual subscription plus usage based. Of course, for start-up plans and early-stage customers there is pure usage-based pricing because those customers can self-serve.
[00:28:33] Matt: So they can self-serve. There's no cost to serve. There's lower cost of acquisition for the vendor and therefore they can go completely usage base. But if you are serving enterprise or you are serving midmarket, there's a cost to acquire the customer. You have got to service them and they've got support issues and there's a huge amount of cost, largely human capital.
[00:28:56] Matt: You need people to deal with those issues and
[00:29:00] Matt: as a result, there's going to continue to be licensing models. They're licensing models with very healthy margins.
[00:29:06] Lucas: They're ones that the investors love because they see the forward cash flows,
[00:29:11] Matt: They're recurring, they're locked in, and all of this good stuff.
[00:29:15] Matt: We've seen SaaS valuations go through the roof and I have seen today that they're coming back down to earth as we speak. But like I said before, it's an unregulated market. So you can basically come up with whatever pricing plan you want and obviously you're going to come up with the one which is most favourable for you.
[00:29:40] Matt: We're just trying to level the playing field and demystify some of these things. Our customers are paying the right price and suffering huge wasted and orphaned licenses and all of this stuff because I think some of the larger companies we deal with, you wouldn't believe how much wastage
[00:30:00] Matt: there is.
[00:30:00] Matt: It's phenomenal. It's a third of their total spend is completely wasted on licenses, which have never been used. Nobody's ever logged in. It's a big problem.
[00:30:15] Lucas: Earlier you touched upon pushing companies to ask their CSM for their utilization rates
[00:30:23] Lucas: and such. If you could give three big tips to clients of SaaS vendors out there who is essentially everybody. What would those three tips be?
[00:30:36] Matt: That's a great question. I would not be doing my job if I said, well, you should look into a SaaS purchasing or SaaS Management Platform so that you don't have to deal with these things on a case-by-case basis.
[00:30:50] Matt: You've got standardized way of doing it. But yeah there's a couple of things. You need to know how you compare to the
[00:31:00] Matt: market. Currently it's not transparent. If I have 200 seats, I don't know what everyone else is paying for 200 seats. For fast growth tech companies, one of the common practices that I've observed is that people price benchmark, sorry, people's salary benchmark.
[00:31:17] Matt: So human headcount and people are their largest cost. They want to make sure one they're getting best people, so they've going to pay market. But two they're not overpaying for people so they’re deploying capital efficiently. The same thing doesn't exist within software or it's starting to exist now. Companies like Vertice help businesses to do that.
[00:31:41] Matt: Whether you are using Vertice or not look for benchmarks, join communities. There's a growing number of communities for specific types of executives. So if you're a sales executive or market executive there’s RevGenius or Pavilion. There are your communities of executives where you can
[00:32:00] Matt: join a Slack group and you can say, hey guys, I'm thinking about buying this tool,
[00:32:03] Matt: can anyone give me insight on price points for 100 seats. You'll be inundated with people telling you what they're paying. There'll be lots of variation. So, find benchmarks. A good way of finding benchmarks is joining a professional community. There's one for CFOs in London called the Start-up CFO Community,
[00:32:22] Matt: there's one for marketing, there's one for procurement. Google it and you'll find it. The second is utilization. So, speak to your CSM. Go and find out. How much you're using. Sometimes there'll be APIs, but then they're often poorly maintained. The best thing to do is ask your CSM to show you on video like what's being used, who's logging in.
[00:32:44] Matt: Sometimes it can be an interesting insight into your team as well. So that's always a good thing. Then the other one is like what are your time horizons like? I think you called it out earlier Lucas, the main trade off that you'll
[00:33:00] Matt: see with vendors is like if you commit to them longer term, you'll get the better deal.
[00:33:04] Matt: So, think about your time horizon. Are you likely to change from this tool? Can you commit to a longer contract? See if you can get your contract to align with their year. Because that's where you are likely to get that extra discount if you push hard enough.
[00:33:21] Lucas: So January?
[00:33:23] Matt: Yeah,
[00:33:25] Matt: it depends on what the fiscal year end of the vendor is. Because obviously, if they're chasing a number, you’ll find that all sorts of additional discounts become available if you are a deal that's coming in at the end of that financial period. So those would be my three tips.
[00:33:43] Matt: Yeah.
[00:33:43] Lucas: Fantastic! I'll just add a fourth that if you're a big company, a case study can go a long way in terms of reducing price.
[00:33:50] Matt: For sure Obviously that's a really good one. We will say to our clients, if you
[00:34:00] Matt: can commit to marketing or a case study or a press release that often carries quite a bit of weight with vendors as well.
[00:34:08] Lucas: Yes, indeed. Look, Matt, is there anything else that you'd like to add or touch upon before we close?
[00:34:14] Matt: Nope. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, so thanks for having me on Lucas.
[00:34:17] Lucas: Fantastic! Thank you so much for joining and your insights. Hopefully businesses really can start paying what's right when it comes to SaaS vendors.
[00:34:30] Matt: Yeah, I hope so too.
[00:34:31] Lucas: Excellent. Thank you.
[00:00:04] Matt: Thanks, Lucas. I'm delighted to be here.
[00:00:07] Lucas: Excellent! Matt, is now working with Vertice and I'll hand over the mic to you to introduce yourself, your career and Vertice.
[00:00:17] Matt: Absolutely! Thanks Lucas. So, I'm Matt, I'm 36 years old. I'm a go-to-market leader. I've got expertise within the Software as a Service (SaaS) space, and I'm a bit of a FinTech nerd. My career up to this point, I've been working in frontline sales roles at companies like Market Invoice and CrowdCube; and then five and a half years ago, I joined a company called Codat,
[00:00:45] Matt: as the second employee. Codat provides API infrastructure, for B2B financial services. I had a very successful five years at that business. Recently
[00:01:00] Matt: I left following a hundred-million-dollar series C led by JP Morgan.
[00:01:00] Lucas: Huge growth journey.
[00:01:00] Matt: It was a great time and I had many close friends at Codat but it was following the series C that I was itching for a new challenge and felt that going early stage again, having just seen that movie of going from a one-person sales team to several hundred people was something that I wanted to replicate.
[00:01:32] Matt: So, that brings me to today, joined Vertice in June. Vertice is a SaaS purchasing platform. We help companies to deploy capital more efficiently on their technology, specifically their Software as a Service (SaaS) tools. We've had a very strong start to the business' life cycle.
[00:01:54] Lucas: Fantastic! Well, look thank you very much. It's been an illustrious career and
[00:02:00] Lucas: journey and the start of something very exciting. So perhaps if we start diving into some of the problems that Vertice is solving. Is there a top three list of problems or challenges that you find businesses face?
[00:02:20] Matt: Yeah absolutely. Maybe I'll set the scene with a bit of context. So, Software as a Service (SaaS) is the prevailing business model or delivery mechanism for software companies. So previous to the cloud, I guess people would sell you software on a CD and or on premise, set up where it be stored on a local server in the corner of your office.
[00:02:43] Matt: Obviously that is becoming a thing of the past and the majority of new software that is shipped to customers these days is deployed via the cloud. So, it's Software as a Service (SaaS) and it's typically licensed on a subscription basis. There's obviously tremendous
[00:03:00] Matt: benefits of doing it that way around,
[00:03:02] Matt: but it can also lead to inefficiencies on the client side. We believe that there's significant wastage and leakage and overlap and things like orphaned licenses which lead to companies wasting a lot of money on software. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a good thing.
[00:03:24] Matt: Largely companies are buying it because they want to drive greater automation across all departments within their organization. You'll know that better than anyone, Lucas based on your background in the technology sector. SaaS is a good thing, it's been growing double digits year over year.
[00:03:44] Matt: It will continue to grow even in the current climate and what I think companies are finding much like in the consumer world, that we're all getting a bit of subscription fatigue with Netflix and all of these other services that we're asked to subscribe to. I think
[00:04:00] Matt: businesses are going to suffer a similar thing where a company with 200 people might be licensing 200 different software
[00:04:08] Matt: tools. It very quickly becomes difficult to manage, understand what value you're getting for all of those tools. Not only is it inefficient from a cost perspective, but also from a time perspective. I lead a team today and people are constantly saying: hey, what about this tool and what about this tool?
[00:04:30] Matt: This can help us do emails better and this can help us do this better. It's like, guys, that's like that's great. Obviously, we're going to review different tools and we're going to try and arm you with the best technology stack to be efficient at your job but what it is doing is causing a huge, like a lot of time is wasted.
[00:04:50] Matt: A lot of I guess share of mind space is lost on which tools should we be using rather than
[00:05:00] Matt: going out and speaking to customers in my case. So, Vertice has come to markets. The founders’ third SaaS business, they exited the previous two ScanSafe to Cisco and Wandera to Jamf.
[00:05:14] Matt: They've got a reasonable track record. This is a problem which they've identified as one which needs to be addressed. So how do we achieve these savings for customers? Well, we are basically try to give them a single source of truth
[00:05:36] Matt: for all of their SaaS tools. They let us know what they're using, they send the contracts across to us, and we basically build out a dashboard with an accurate renewal schedule of all of the different tools they're using. That way they can, make sure that if they're not getting good utilization on one tool, let's say they have a hundred seats, but they're only using
[00:06:00] Matt: 50 of those seats.
[00:06:01] Matt: They can make sure that there are the relevant credits or refunds for that. Because there's some like weird cognitive bias with software that if you're not using it, then that's your problem and you shouldn't be getting a refund. If that was any other service, you may say that was a, I don't know, cleaning service and your cleaner didn't turn up, then you would be looking to get a credit
[00:06:23] Matt: or a refund. What we just want to help companies and our clients in that really nuanced and relatively new segment of SaaS to make sure that they're, like I said, at the top of the call, deploying their capital efficiently in that area. For many technology companies, software is their second largest cost outside of
[00:06:47] Matt: headcounts. Obviously in the current economic climate, people are looking to headcount to reduce cost, but that's always a difficult one because if you cut headcount,
[00:07:00] Matt: then in sales and marketing you're not going to sell as much. If you cut headcount in development, then you're not going to build as much.
[00:07:06] Matt: Our promise to customers is we'll help you to reduce costs and optimize without any loss of productivity, which is hopefully a pretty compelling pitch.
[00:07:18] Lucas: Yeah, absolutely! I think there are many companies out there with excess licenses. What would the journey look like as to how you're really helping them to reduce that cost?
[00:07:32] Matt: See like many things which provide value, really what we're doing is using data to enable our clients to ensure they're getting best deals. Because what we've seen in B2B SaaS is there's significant price discrepancy.
[00:07:51] Matt: So company A, which looks exactly like company B, and when I say looks exactly like less, so they're using the same number of seats. Company A can be
[00:08:00] Matt: paying 35% or 40% less than company B, and it might be something completely outside of those companies’ control, for example, it was the end of the quarter for the rep
[00:08:11] Matt: or they wanted this particular case study, so they did a deal. Now, without Vertice, the buyer of that tool has to rely on the rep that the rep is telling them that this is the price and this is the discount. I can't do anything else. Whereas we have the collective wisdom of all of our clients, and all of the pricing benchmarks that we have acquired and we hold on file.
[00:08:37] Matt: We're building a very significant data set on pricing benchmarks so that when our clients are negotiating with those vendors or when we're negotiating with those vendors on their behalf, we can just cut through a lot of the noise and say, hey guys, we've got
[00:08:53] Matt: benchmarks for this number of SKUs and this is the price we want. And we also know who all of the
[00:09:00] Matt: competitors in the market are who can solve the same problem. So, we're helping our customers to make that sourcing of a tool easier, more transparent, making sure they get the right price when they buy the tool.
[00:09:15] Matt: That all starts with the problem. So, what's the problem you're trying to solve? So, I don’t know if that answered your question.
[00:09:24] Lucas: Well, I suppose it leads me to the next one which is could you say it's almost procurement as a service?
[00:09:32] Matt: Yeah. As I've learned more about the world of procurement, there's a lot to procurement.
[00:09:40] Matt: There's a lot to unpack within that space. There's sourcing, there's compliance, there's of course negotiation but there's RFPs and RFIs. We don't address all of the workflows and all of the problems that a procurement team might have. Actually, our initial ICP is companies that don't have
[00:10:00] Matt: procurement.
[00:10:00] Matt: Because those are the guys where the need is greatest. Although we found that larger companies who have procurement teams are reaching out to us because they want that pricing intelligence. Because they don't have that either. Because there's no one in the market that's providing that as a service currently.
[00:10:18] Matt: But the area that we really help out with is the commercial negotiation of the license. Because these SaaS companies are often operating at very significant like 90% gross margin in some cases. They lock you in, they often have a lend and expand approach and their pricing models are designed to increase the price year over year, irrespective of usage.
[00:10:46] Matt: We're there to help our clients to demystify the SaaS sales tactics that have led to many multi-billion dollar
[00:11:00] Matt: companies being built largely in Silicon Valley. But we're there to help our clients to ensure that they're not falling into some of the traps that we understand because we've come from a SaaS sales background.
[00:11:11] Matt: It's kind of, we feel good about it because it's like we're levelling the playing field to some extent. We're helping the little guys and the businesses and the start-ups who rely upon these tools heavily to ensure that they're getting the right deal on these tools.
[00:11:28] Matt: SaaS is an unregulated market unlike FinTech and Financial Services where there's a regulator. He'll stand in to make sure that unfair pricing doesn't proliferate in a market. SaaS isn't regulated in the same way. So, I think Vertice and other companies in this space are, it's almost a self-regulating mechanism.
[00:11:54] Matt: That means that unscrupulous
[00:12:00] Matt: kind of discretionary pricing within the market, it is not left to run out of control. If the client is using Vertice or another service similar to Vertice then there's accountability because we've got
[00:12:15] Matt: the price points to say, we've got people paying 50% or even more, less than what you're quoting our customer. So hopefully it brings more transparency and more fairness to the market.
[00:12:29] Lucas: I mean we've dived into pricing in terms of vendors. The magic question will be, how does Vertice then price?
[00:12:38] Lucas: How you value that service?
[00:12:39] Matt: Yeah. We thought about this long and hard and obviously, B2B sales org as well. We've got to be conscious of like how B2B sales functions currently. So we want to be the antithesis of the worst offending SaaS vendors in the market, which is we want to have transparent very easy to understand
[00:13:00] Matt: pricing, so we publish it.
[00:13:01] Matt: It's completely transparent, we publish it on the website. We have tier which are based upon your software spend. The higher your software spends, the higher your fee with Vertice and hopefully the greater the savings that Vertice can achieve for our customers. The ROI that we target for our customers is between 20 and 30%
[00:13:24] Matt: in annually recurring savings. So significant, is it for some companies. The way that we protect our clients and give them reassurances that we can achieve those savings, is we have a performance warranty associated with the contract which would basically stipulate that if we aren't able to achieve a minimum level of savings
[00:13:50] Matt: then there's a reimbursement mechanism. So that is always at least as much as our fee. Say our standard pricing
[00:14:00] Matt: tier would be; you pay us $40,000 up front. The performance warranty, the minimum savings would be $40,000.
[00:14:04] Lucas: There is a 100% alignment
[00:14:08] Matt: Yeah, so it's a budget neutral service.
[00:14:10] Matt: If you're pitching it to a CFO, you can say: hey, you don't need to make a business case or an ROI case here because if we can't achieve the savings, and maybe they did do a really good job and they negotiated the best terms across all 100 of their tools. I haven't found one of those companies yet,
[00:14:27] Matt: but if they did, we would say: hey guys, we can't help you. We're going to reimburse your fee or part of your fee. So that's how we're doing it. It means that we've been able to get pretty good, velocity through the pipeline, because we can make that kind of compelling offer to people.
[00:14:45] Matt: If we don't do what we say we're going to do then the downside risk is limited for you guys.
[00:14:54] Lucas: Yeah, absolutely! So, I'm just going to go back a couple of steps,
[00:15:00] Lucas: to what you referred to at the beginning of the podcast: the current economic headwinds that we're encountering.
[00:15:08] Lucas: When it comes to negotiating with SaaS vendors, they love to say, we can only give you a discount if it's a 12 month or multi-year deal because of revenue recognition laws. I think it's their number one rabbit that they love to pull out of the hat! There's a couple of use cases in mind that I have, where actually
[00:15:34] Lucas: from a business continuity perspective, you're in an emerging market and the currency is devaluing against a hard currency like the US dollar. A multi-year approach could mean that the client is paying three times what the deal was worth in local currency at the end of the deal compared to at the beginning of the deal.
[00:16:00] Lucas: What is Vertice doing in order to help clients get flexible deals with discount pricing without being locked in?
[00:16:14] Matt: Yeah, it's a really great point, which I’m glad you've raised Lucas because like, of course we talk about savings, which is cash. In the current climate net savings make all the difference.
[00:16:29] Matt: What we endeavour to achieve for our clients is getting better contracts. Sometimes that may might mean more flexible and more flexible might mean actually the unit cost is higher. But if you are in the scenario that you described and you're an emerging market technology company and you need to hedge currency risk, then actually flexibility
[00:16:51] Matt: is a better hedge than locking in a rate. We don't operate in emerging markets yet, but I can see exactly
[00:17:00] Matt: the value that we would provide to a client of that nature. You could produce hedging strategies and all sorts of things to address that particular problem. But
[00:17:10] Matt: when it comes to vendors like we're not there to beat the vendors up, effective negotiating is about getting a win-win. There has to be a win for the vendor and there has to be a win for our client. But what we've seen over the last 10 years is its very rep led,
[00:17:28] Matt: everything is stacked in favour of the vendor, there's very little price transparency and we want to level the playing field a little bit, but not to the detriment of the relationship because some of these vendors, they're strategically important suppliers for many of our clients.
[00:17:47] Matt: They provide critical infrastructure. We're not there to beat them up, but we want to make sure that our clients are treated fairly. Alongside the pricing benchmarks, we also have
[00:18:00] Matt: playbooks for each vendor. We think we understand what each vendor's year end is, and we understand what is top of mind for each of those vendors because we've read their annual report and we understand what they need to achieve to deliver value to their shareholders.
[00:18:17] Matt: So, if you understand negotiating counterparty intimately then you'll be able to drive better outcomes. Obviously, that comes with experience because just like the vendors rep is selling every day, we're buying every day. Whereas when I was a sales leader on my previous company many times it was the first time I was buying a CRM from Salesforce,
[00:18:41] Matt: it was the first time I was buying a phone system from somewhere. You're not best placed to do that negotiation. Procurement teams are not something that companies introduce typically until they're much later
[00:19:00] Matt: stage.
[00:19:00] Matt: We see companies with thousands of people who don't have procurement professionals working for them. I haven't heard Vertice described procurement as a service, but it does sum up nicely what we achieve. But specifically for the nuanced area of SaaS basically.
[00:19:16] Lucas: Yeah. Which is fantastic!
[00:19:19] Lucas: I think that the point you made about Vertice coming across the same vendors often, to name a couple of names Google Cloud, AWS these are supporting many tech companies. it’s important for the tech companies to know as well that you've got a good relationship with them.
[00:19:42] Lucas: You might even be able to recommend particular products based upon what you see.
[00:19:47] Matt: Totally! I think that the direction of travel for this industry and for Vertice is exactly that. It's to be the trusted partner for how
[00:20:00] Matt: you use technology and how you use SaaS to address your businesses changing requirements. Because businesses go through phase shifts where one day a cloud accounting package of which there are many might be perfectly suitable for running your ledger.
[00:20:20] Matt: But, when you are 400 or 500 people, actually you need to start thinking about do I need an ERP at this point? So making smart recommendations based on all of the data points and the collective wisdom we have from all of our clients in the market is an area that we think is the future of the business.
[00:20:40] Matt: Making those recommendations and ensuring our clients have the right tools at the right time at the right price of course. Because the market moves so quickly and there's new players coming in all the time. There are acquisitions that take place. We obviously saw Adobe's acquisition of Figma, which will have,
[00:21:00] Matt: a big impact on that kind of design and marketing
[00:21:05] Matt: SaaS space. So keeping on top of all of that is not something that every company has the resources or appetite to do. But we specialize in it to ensure that our clients are getting good value and are not wasting time basically.
[00:21:24] Lucas: When you look to deliver that advice and those recommendations, is almost a sort of consultative and implementation partner approach something that Vertice is looking at doing? I've seen companies that might buy a new piece of software, but then the implementation falls down and so before the software's even implemented it has lost it’s reputation.
[00:21:51] Matt: Yeah. No, absolutely. I think I heard a stat the other day that 10% of SaaS tools that are bought are still unused within 90 days of purchase. There's even a term for this, it's called shelfware, which is people buy, it sits on the shelf and I've heard stats that it's up to 10%, of the entire SaaS market is shelfware. It's completely unused software which is obviously grossly inefficient. It maybe okay for the, for the SaaS companies, but in terms
[00:22:30] Matt: for the efficiency of the market that's not good. Because the value is not being exchanged. The value is completely weighted towards the vendor but we're a technology enabled service, there is human beings in the loop here,
[00:22:50] Matt: so we have the Dashboard, which acts as the single source of truth for all SaaS tools that has tremendous value to our clients. But we also have expert
[00:23:00] Matt: software buyers who need to get involved. Because there's too much complexity, there's too much nuance from vendor-to-vendor. We could automate it if every vendor used the same SKUs and the same rate card and they have the same operating model
[00:23:13] Matt: but they don't. They're all very different. We have specialist software buyers. Some of them will specialize in ERP, some of them will specialize in cloud and we have to make sure that our clients have the relevant expertise. Obviously, that is a shared resource across all of our clients.
[00:23:31] Matt: But it means that, they can go in with the best leverage going into those negotiations because we've seen these scenarios many times before.
[00:23:42] Lucas: Fantastic! Again, I'm going to take a couple of steps back to a point you made about unused seats and getting refunds from them to a company that I saw do a fundraise late last year, I believe or perhaps
[00:24:00] Lucas: the beginning of this year called M3ter, which was helping, SaaS companies to deliver consumption-based plans.
[00:24:10] Lucas: Wherein you might need a refund two questions will come off this, first one; how easy is it to get refunds for seats that aren't being used? And secondly, are you seeing more and more SaaS companies move towards consumption-based models?
[00:24:30] Matt: Yeah, So both great questions.
[00:24:32] Matt: I'll go for the first one. Most people don't ask, is the reality. Unused seats are just left unused and it's, that's it. Like I mentioned before, it's in inefficient value exchange because people are buying stuff that they don't need and then they're not being reimbursed for that.
[00:24:58] Matt: I think the reality is that
[00:25:00] Matt: most vendors aren't going to offer you a cash refund in the same way that other markets you might not get a cash refund, but you might get a voucher to shop in store; whether it's clothing or supermarkets or whatever. A similar thing can be achieved within software.
[00:25:17] Matt: If it's a vendor that you are going to continue using and there's good sentiment within your team towards the vendor and you want to sign up for another year or two years, three years. Typically, the way we would approach that with our customers say, hey guys, we signed up for a 100 seats at the start of the year, but we have
[00:25:36] Matt: 15 that are completely inactive, not used, we got it wrong, you didn’t tell us! Because some vendors, very few will tell you if you have unused space but it's not common practice. So, we would come in and say, hey guys, we had 15 completely unused licenses and, or maybe we
[00:26:00] Matt: added a module, and we never deployed it.
[00:26:02] Matt: We want credits for those unused seats and we want those credits to be deducted from our next two years of licensing. Well, it's fair and it's proportional and for a company that wants to sign up for another two years it's normally completely accepted by the vendor
[00:26:26] Matt: is something that they should do. But the number of companies that are doing that is very low, obviously.
[00:26:33] Lucas: That's a great insight for founders and procurement teams to take away from today.
[00:26:41] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. If you're looking to cut costs and you have renewals coming out, whether you want to use a service like Vertice or not, and you're a CFO, Finance Manager, Head of Department, look at your usage and if you don't know where to find it, speak to your AM or your CSM at the vendor and say, hey, I want to understand
[00:27:00] Matt: utilization
[00:27:00] Matt: for the trailing 12 months. It's a good way to set yourself up for success in a negotiation.
[00:27:07] Lucas: Fantastic! Jumping down to the second question in terms of pure consumption-based models?
[00:27:16] Matt: I think if the market was completely usage-based pricing,
[00:27:22] Matt: Vertice’s business model would be slightly different. We're addressing a need in the market. We have had tremendous demand since we came out of stealth mode in June, we’ve been onboarding clients faster than we expected to. Because this is clearly a problem that is impacting companies at the economic headwinds as you described earlier, where people need to cut costs,
[00:27:49] Matt: venture capital has dried up. The kindest way of cutting costs without going to head count is optimizing your operational expenditure.
[00:28:00] Matt: If you're a technology company, one of the ways of doing that is looking at your SaaS tools and how you can tweak those and optimize those.
[00:28:08] Matt: If the market moves completely to usage-based pricing then, which I don't think it will by the way, I think, lots of vendors have a combination of annual subscription plus usage based. Of course, for start-up plans and early-stage customers there is pure usage-based pricing because those customers can self-serve.
[00:28:33] Matt: So they can self-serve. There's no cost to serve. There's lower cost of acquisition for the vendor and therefore they can go completely usage base. But if you are serving enterprise or you are serving midmarket, there's a cost to acquire the customer. You have got to service them and they've got support issues and there's a huge amount of cost, largely human capital.
[00:28:56] Matt: You need people to deal with those issues and
[00:29:00] Matt: as a result, there's going to continue to be licensing models. They're licensing models with very healthy margins.
[00:29:06] Lucas: They're ones that the investors love because they see the forward cash flows,
[00:29:11] Matt: They're recurring, they're locked in, and all of this good stuff.
[00:29:15] Matt: We've seen SaaS valuations go through the roof and I have seen today that they're coming back down to earth as we speak. But like I said before, it's an unregulated market. So you can basically come up with whatever pricing plan you want and obviously you're going to come up with the one which is most favourable for you.
[00:29:40] Matt: We're just trying to level the playing field and demystify some of these things. Our customers are paying the right price and suffering huge wasted and orphaned licenses and all of this stuff because I think some of the larger companies we deal with, you wouldn't believe how much wastage
[00:30:00] Matt: there is.
[00:30:00] Matt: It's phenomenal. It's a third of their total spend is completely wasted on licenses, which have never been used. Nobody's ever logged in. It's a big problem.
[00:30:15] Lucas: Earlier you touched upon pushing companies to ask their CSM for their utilization rates
[00:30:23] Lucas: and such. If you could give three big tips to clients of SaaS vendors out there who is essentially everybody. What would those three tips be?
[00:30:36] Matt: That's a great question. I would not be doing my job if I said, well, you should look into a SaaS purchasing or SaaS Management Platform so that you don't have to deal with these things on a case-by-case basis.
[00:30:50] Matt: You've got standardized way of doing it. But yeah there's a couple of things. You need to know how you compare to the
[00:31:00] Matt: market. Currently it's not transparent. If I have 200 seats, I don't know what everyone else is paying for 200 seats. For fast growth tech companies, one of the common practices that I've observed is that people price benchmark, sorry, people's salary benchmark.
[00:31:17] Matt: So human headcount and people are their largest cost. They want to make sure one they're getting best people, so they've going to pay market. But two they're not overpaying for people so they’re deploying capital efficiently. The same thing doesn't exist within software or it's starting to exist now. Companies like Vertice help businesses to do that.
[00:31:41] Matt: Whether you are using Vertice or not look for benchmarks, join communities. There's a growing number of communities for specific types of executives. So if you're a sales executive or market executive there’s RevGenius or Pavilion. There are your communities of executives where you can
[00:32:00] Matt: join a Slack group and you can say, hey guys, I'm thinking about buying this tool,
[00:32:03] Matt: can anyone give me insight on price points for 100 seats. You'll be inundated with people telling you what they're paying. There'll be lots of variation. So, find benchmarks. A good way of finding benchmarks is joining a professional community. There's one for CFOs in London called the Start-up CFO Community,
[00:32:22] Matt: there's one for marketing, there's one for procurement. Google it and you'll find it. The second is utilization. So, speak to your CSM. Go and find out. How much you're using. Sometimes there'll be APIs, but then they're often poorly maintained. The best thing to do is ask your CSM to show you on video like what's being used, who's logging in.
[00:32:44] Matt: Sometimes it can be an interesting insight into your team as well. So that's always a good thing. Then the other one is like what are your time horizons like? I think you called it out earlier Lucas, the main trade off that you'll
[00:33:00] Matt: see with vendors is like if you commit to them longer term, you'll get the better deal.
[00:33:04] Matt: So, think about your time horizon. Are you likely to change from this tool? Can you commit to a longer contract? See if you can get your contract to align with their year. Because that's where you are likely to get that extra discount if you push hard enough.
[00:33:21] Lucas: So January?
[00:33:23] Matt: Yeah,
[00:33:25] Matt: it depends on what the fiscal year end of the vendor is. Because obviously, if they're chasing a number, you’ll find that all sorts of additional discounts become available if you are a deal that's coming in at the end of that financial period. So those would be my three tips.
[00:33:43] Matt: Yeah.
[00:33:43] Lucas: Fantastic! I'll just add a fourth that if you're a big company, a case study can go a long way in terms of reducing price.
[00:33:50] Matt: For sure Obviously that's a really good one. We will say to our clients, if you
[00:34:00] Matt: can commit to marketing or a case study or a press release that often carries quite a bit of weight with vendors as well.
[00:34:08] Lucas: Yes, indeed. Look, Matt, is there anything else that you'd like to add or touch upon before we close?
[00:34:14] Matt: Nope. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, so thanks for having me on Lucas.
[00:34:17] Lucas: Fantastic! Thank you so much for joining and your insights. Hopefully businesses really can start paying what's right when it comes to SaaS vendors.
[00:34:30] Matt: Yeah, I hope so too.
[00:34:31] Lucas: Excellent. Thank you.