Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:08
Yeah, it’s sort of like you dated first a little bit in that initial conversation. That makes sense because he’s at a place like, I’m I’m enjoying what I’m doing. You know, there’s more stability obviously that than the startup. And to even to attract them doing contract work, was it just a straight business arrangement from like a money or were you saying like, okay, I’d like to offer you some kind of equity or that didn’t that conversation didn’t come till.
Benjamin Ard: 15:35
Yeah, it was it was just straight hourly payments. You know, it was just contract work to be honest. I mean, and I think it’s a kind of a cool way to do it, to be honest. I mean, if you’re a non-technical founder going and finding a really talented developer, and then really just asking to to pay them for contract fees on nights and weekends, really see if they develop an interest in the product and the company, see how you like working with them. All of that good stuff. But really, it’s just a matter if you have the financial resources to kind of pay for that. And, you know, we luckily had raised an angel round and I was able to to pay my co-founder as a contractor for quite a while.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:18
What made you decide to raise an angel round?
Benjamin Ard: 16:24
It’s a good question. So I had been really in the midst. So the company that went public, I had seen firsthand the power of what raising money can do. And so as soon as I left that business, it was fascinating. All of my network immediately surrounded me and said, great, we love this idea that you’re going to start this business. Let me introduce you to each and every one of them had venture capital contacts. And it was this interesting transition as well.
This was July 3rd years ago. And we had just transitioned slowly away from the idea that you could raise money off of an idea. And we had just left that I had friends who literally two months prior, had an idea and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to the point where people were like, okay, those times have kind of gone. That’s not the case anymore. And so for us, I just went and looked at what the costs and the needs were for the business.
And honestly, I just used my personal network and found someone who was really supportive and who was willing to put in some money at the very beginning, who also joined our pre-seed round as well as is an investor. And it’s been tremendous to have them as a partner. It’s been really cool, but for us it was the right move to make. I think if people can bootstrap that, that’s great. But ultimately for us, it was what we needed to do financially.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:52
I was talking to someone the other day with software company. They went through Y Combinator and they were just saying through Y Combinator, people come in all various stages, right? They just have an idea. They have a prototype, they have customers. Where were you at when you were raising money?
Benjamin Ard: 18:09
For the angel round, we were an idea. So and that was a really small round, but it was just an idea, you know, some initial concepts. I think I had some letter of intent. So I think that was a great pathway for us. The real raise for us was pre-seed.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:27
And when you when you go to them, you have an idea, you have a pitch deck. Do you have like a one page website, like what are you showing them at.
Benjamin Ard: 18:35
That point on pitch deck? Yeah. You have you have the deck. You’re talking about it. And I think the biggest thing is the letter of intent to say, hey, I have 3 or 4 businesses or ten businesses or 20 who said if this product was built today, they would be willing to purchase.
Having those signed letters of intent is not that hard to collect, but at the same time, it’s extremely valuable for your business and for your investors to feel like there’s at least something that could take off here. But for us, when we raise pre-seed, we had revenue. That was a really big factor for us. And I do think if anyone now wants to raise money, if you don’t have revenue yet, it’s going to be really difficult.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:18
What was the first major milestone from a customer perspective, that the SaaS company I talked to? I think their first customer, and they were going after more Fortune 100 500 companies. It took them two and a half years to get their first customer. What was that like for you? Talk about the first maybe celebration milestone from a customer standpoint.
Benjamin Ard: 19:45
What was really interesting is our first customers were all paid customers. So I had heard some amazing advice. Don’t give away your product for free because it’s not a good indicator you know, of what people are going to do. And so but if you do give it away for free, you need to see what the adoption and the usability looks like. So I just decided from day one that even if it was a steep discount, I would not give the product away for free.
I needed people to have at least some money on the line. So for us, it was honestly those first few customers getting that revenue in the door. Those were some big milestones. One of the biggest milestones for me is a fun story. We work with this really cool company called Awardco and Awardco just raised an incredible amount of money. They’re officially a unicorn. Great business. We’ve been working with them for over two years, but we got introduced to someone on their sales team and it was really cool where it was the first time a business had been working with us, where they were actively going through all of the competitors.
So other times we were like, okay, here’s your problem here. We can solve it. They’re like, oh, cool, yeah, let’s buy this one was every big name on the list. They were doing their due diligence and they were doing demos with all of them. They got quotes from all of them, and we came in and these are multi-billion dollar businesses, and we came in and beat them out. And that was one of the coolest experiences for us to know. Okay, we do have our philosophy of how we compete is really, really powerful because we had won plenty of contracts before. This was the first time that they were going head to head. When it comes to the actual, like main competitors in the space.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:34
Yeah, we’re looking on the screen. This is a word code. They have a cool, cool company here. Empower your team. They’re awesome.
Benjamin Ard: 21:39
They’re such a cool platform.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:42
And then there’s the article here which talks about their raising the series B, which gives them like $1 billion valuation at that point.
Benjamin Ard: 21:50
Yeah. And this is also something cool that I love. Like this article is on our website because we love to just share the good news about our customers. A lot of what you’re doing on your podcast, we love to just like there’s nothing about us inside of this article. It’s purely about the fact that a Awardco is awesome and we love to do this.
Anytime we have any companies that have major news, we try to stay on top of it. It’s gotten to the point where there’s a lot of good news for a lot of people, so it’s hard to stay on top of it. But we even have like these daily tasks from ChatGPT to kind of keep an eye on some of our customers to make sure that we’re getting some good news and all that fun stuff.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:28
Yeah, here’s a bunch of other ones. Job Nimbus invasion. So talk about Awardco for a second. How do does a company like Awardco use Masset?
Benjamin Ard: 22:38
Yeah. So they have their content teams and their groups inside the organization. They are the ones that are the administrators inside the platform. They’re centralizing everything in the library. And then ultimately they’re the champions for the rest of the company. So as people used to come to them sending 510 slack messages a day, they’ve enabled the entire business to find the content themselves. And with the unlimited seats and all that kind of stuff, just talking to a wall right there, they were getting, again, that 5 to 10 messages a day for a single person. That was how they were spending most of their day was answering these messages and finding content for people.
They were. Then after the implementation of Masset, it went down to like one message a week, kind of an idea. And so for us, it’s the marketing or creative or content or product team, sales enablement, whoever’s in charge of their content, they’re the administrators. And the rest of the business then has access to find, use and analyze that content in any way, shape or form. Share it externally and track when it gets open. All of that kind of fun stuff. Just a really powerful way for people to use content. So that’s really the use case, honestly, as we onboard a new customer. Step one let’s get your content here. Step two let’s get your people here. And then ultimately it’s just connecting those two things, connecting people with content.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:57
And and Ben I know you’re like the the sales and marketing mind at Masset. You know the value proposition to me seems like kind of two fold. But you can correct me if I’m wrong, obviously. Say like people wasting time, which is lost revenue and dollars and productivity. And also obviously using it for to increase sales is well, is there anything else I’m missing from like is that how you explain it to, to customers?
Benjamin Ard: 24:27
The other things I mean obviously any interaction with the customer, whether it be training materials, support material, any interaction with the customer is better if you’re giving them the right content materials they need. So yes, increasing your close rate, but it’s also increasing your customer satisfaction scores. It’s helping people find the needs that they have. It’s helping them finding the materials they need. It’s really equipping your business to help the customer at any stage of their journey.
Like you said also, it saves a ton of time and money. I mean, statistics, statistics and studies show on average it’s like eight grand a year that is wasted per employee looking for content day in and day out. And it gets even worse for other departments depending on what they’re in. So yeah, absolutely decrease the wasted time and costs and then ultimately make your customer experience better, whether that’s retention, new sales, or even just their satisfaction and opinion of your business and brand.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:24
What I find interesting about the journey is kind of how you think about validation, and even in the beginning, when you’re raising money, even before you had a product, even before you charged people, you were out talking to people and getting kind of like, okay, an intent letter or whatever it is. I’m curious, how many people did you actually talk to to get because like, obviously if you. Oh, we have like 11 intent letters. Maybe you talk to like 57 people. I don’t know what was what did that look like.
Benjamin Ard: 25:57
Yeah. So I remember this vividly. So I was working at the previous company and I’m a big believer in having clean lines. And so I went and I really I had this idea, I went and my wife and I went on a vacation and I was like, okay, I would like to leave and I’d like to start this kind of a company. What do you need to see to feel comfortable with the idea and everything you asked, like, I asked my wife this and she’s like, here’s what I need to see. So I went and I had conversations with 16 different.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:33
She’s going to be way tougher than a someone’s giving you money.
Benjamin Ard: 26:36
Yeah, absolutely. 100%. So that’s where the buy in really needs to happen. And she’s been a great support system through the whole process. But I went on that trip and ultimately we decided, okay, let’s get feedback from businesses to see if this is a universal problem. So I distinctly remember we have in those first slide decks, I have this grid and it was 16 businesses. And of the 16 businesses that I talked to and it was just informal conversations.
I asked how they stored their content, where they stored their content, what they liked about it, didn’t like about it, all of that kind of stuff. 15 of the 16 use, you know, your Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, all that kind of stuff and absolutely hated it. They felt the same pains. They had the same issues that everyone else had. And I felt like, okay, 15 of 16 is a pretty universal problem.
If you’re looking at now, it may not apply to the law of large numbers, but it was enough for my wife and for me to say, there’s something here. I’m not necessarily sure about the right solution yet, but we definitely identified the problem. And to this day, probably the same statistics hold up 90% of the time. If I talk to people about how they store their content and if they like that system, 90% of the time are really dissatisfied with what they have.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:01
I get the I the understanding of how, you know, the idea, how you came to it, how you validated it, even kind of how you rolled out features for it. And I’m curious, okay. So you get to the point where you’re like, okay, I need to validate it with people, you know, taking out their pocketbook. There’s no other validation besides that, right? It’s like if someone thinks it’s valuable enough, they’ll take their wallet out and pay for it. How do you talk about the evolution of pricing? How do you decide on pricing?
Benjamin Ard: 28:34
Tell you what, we’re still going through that evolution. That’s probably something that I continue to think about all the time. I actually went on a walk with a friend, a shout out to Jeff Lyman, and we were talking about pricing, and he was like, here’s the one thing I’ve learned about pricing. No matter what you do the first few times, you’re going to do it wrong. So just accept that and be okay with it.
And honestly, that’s kind of what I look at pricing at. For us, what I really care about is what I think the value will be for that business and trying to price everything appropriately. Now, when you have unlimited users, it gets tricky. You can’t just charge per seats when you have.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:14
Like, yeah, sign me up for my 10,000 employees.
Benjamin Ard: 29:17
Right, exactly. And that’s a.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:19
Big.
Benjamin Ard: 29:19
Decision to change that. Yeah, that. But honestly for.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:24
Get in now before he changes it. No.
Benjamin Ard: 29:28
And we’ll always hopefully keep a part of that. You know. But the the idea that’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:33
My new sales pitch, Ben. Like I’m on with the company.
Benjamin Ard: 29:35
Right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:36
Now. We may be he’s not going to keep this, you know, cost per seat, unlimited seat thing forever. So you better get in.
Benjamin Ard: 29:45
Yeah, and there’s just something about that. But we’ll we’ll try to. It’s always a difficult problem. I can’t tell you how lengthy of conversations I’ve had with ChatGPT about, okay, well, how do I do this? Where do I go here?
What about other companies do the research. And so for us it is an ongoing process. But really we like to try it. We’d like to tie it to value. We’ve built ROI calculators. We’ve done all sorts of stuff. And just now, honestly, do we feel like we’re finding some of the sweet spots where the price matches the value and we’re finding the right organizations and all that kind of stuff? But it I don’t know. I mean, it will it will always be a process, to be completely honest.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:28
Yeah. I remember Ben and I had there’s a lot of parallels. I interviewed the founder of Sweet Process and they’re more dealing with SOPs and housing SOPs. And we talked about this. It’s very similar. It’s like people can’t find, you know, their their procedures are in a paper manual somewhere. It’s in Google Drive. And they kind of like create this centralized hub for your SOPs, right? Your standard operating procedures. And we talked about the pricing piece because I thought it was interesting and it’s attractive.
And we use Sweet Process. We love it actually. But you know they charge. And again I don’t know at this point when people listen if this changes. But like it’s super affordable, it’s like $100 a month for up to 20 seats. And then after that they start charging or whatever. And it’s interesting how he does it. They don’t even do it’s like active. So if you have like 40 people using it, but only 18 people are in it frequently, they like I don’t know how they figure that out somehow. And they really you’re under the $100 plan, right? So it’s pretty interesting. So everyone does.
Benjamin Ard: 31:39
Active users is something.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:40
Active users.
Benjamin Ard: 31:41
Pushing towards we love the idea for everything that I’ve read. And everything I love is when your incentives are aligned with your customers incentives. And for a business that charges for active seats. And I love the idea of if someone uses the product once or twice in a month, don’t charge them for that. Like that’s that’s not a big enough impact in their life. But if they’re like a genuine active user getting value out of it, that’s a great thing to charge off of.
And then what I also love about that is then you’re motivated as a business for revenue to make your product so helpful that more people want to use the product and use it on a regular basis. And so you’re making it better. They’re enjoying it more, and then ultimately everybody wins. So the active user. I would not be surprised if that’s in our future. And I love every business that does that because I think that’s so meaningful.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:39
Yeah, it was definitely an interesting way. And like as a user of it, I appreciate it. And I’m like happy if like more people are using it and getting value out of it, then sure we’ll we’ll pay more, but super reasonable. And you know, talk about Big Leap and how they use Masset.
Benjamin Ard: 32:58
Yeah. So Big Leap is a really cool agency. Big Leap is going to help you with your SEO and all sorts of really cool things. What was fun is when we talked to a lot of businesses and say, hey, any chance you’d be willing to provide some testimonials? Big Leap was the company that came back and their sales team was clamoring to give their testimonials as opposed to their marketing teams.
And again, everyone gets value. But it was so cool to see the business teams see how quickly and easily they could find the content they needed for the people they were working with, with their prospects, with the people. And they’re a fun agency. And it was so cool. Operations. Testimonials, sales. Testimonials. That was where people were just kind of jumping at the bit. I think they even like unprovoked, were sending us testimonials. This is so cool, I love this.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. So there’s there’s a lot of value there. But for them again, it’s that same process of I can now use all of my content. And again you think like when we look at a typical business, 50% of the assets in their instance of Masset is actual files they upload to Masset. The other 50% is the YouTube videos, or the website blog posts, or the social media posts, or the partner website pages, or the press releases, or the awards they’ve won.
That material traditionally never gets used by your team with your existing customers or prospects. And now it unlocks that ability for people to use the absolute best material for the people at the absolute best time, regardless of where it happens to be stored, because now it’s in this unified library. And so for us, even internally, LinkedIn posts from customers who have posted about us is one of my favorite things. And I don’t have to search for it. It’s just in the system with the link I can send it.
We’re good to go, and all of a sudden it’s coming from a customer’s mouth. And that was kind of that result when it came to Big Leap. Most of their contents on their website, like any good SEO company, why not like, why wouldn’t you put it on their website? And it became the system where now everyone internally can take full advantage of their website content for their prospects, for their customers, for those people. And they have the right material, and they didn’t really have to care where it was stored or published.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:26
I’m curious what your tech stack looks like. So we talked I mean, from a user behavior perspective, you’re like, okay, I don’t even want them logging into Masset per se. It’s like they’re just kind of getting it from where they usually are, whether it’s slack or their website or Google Drive. I’m curious what your company, tech stack or project management support, all those those tools that you like?
Benjamin Ard: 35:51
Yeah, 100%. And with that, the idea of taking the content to where people are working. A lot of this, we have some really cool things in the works that are coming out later this month, the next month that we haven’t announced yet. But really, the idea there is, okay, we’ve found the places that people do work, and we’re using AI in really cool ways to bring it to them. As far as our personal tech stack.
We are big fans of Slack. Even inside of a smaller organization. We use Slack all the time. Every time, you know, demo forms are filled out, payments are submitted, all sorts of notifications, everything inside that system is housed in Slack. We use Asana for task management. We’re big fans of that. That works really well for us. We’re on the Gmail stack when it comes to everything else. On that side of things, we’ll use Google Hangouts, but the one software that I have to call out is Riverside. So we do have a podcast and we publish three episodes a week, and that wouldn’t be entirely impossible without Riverside because of how cool that platform is.
It’s a crazy affordable. I get I have never seen a company release so many features so quickly, and it’s just so fun. Every time I get a Riverside email, you know you’ll get those like update emails from companies. You don’t really care when I get those. It’s like, seriously, it’s like candy. I’m like, oh yes. Like they did it again. They did another awesome thing. And it’s like on this monthly cadence, it’s so cool. I honestly should be getting affiliate fees from them at this point in time. But like they’re they’re amazing. And I’ve seen that product go from mildly okay to I couldn’t imagine ever switching off of it. And so that’s another one that I, I’m obsessed with in our tech stack. And honestly, we. Other than that, we keep pretty lean like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:46
Any other apps on your phone from like a app perspective. It could be. It could be business or personal, I don’t know. I’m curious what apps.
Benjamin Ard: 37:55
You I mean, honestly, on my phone from that perspective, we’ve got the I’ve got my Google Calendar widget, Gmail where a stripe company, that’s how we do our processing. So I have that there. We’re also on HubSpot for our CRM, Slack, Google Analytics, Asana, those are the main ones. I mean, and then obviously our markets on LinkedIn. So we spend a lot of time there. But those I have a whole tab on my phone that’s just business and those are the main ones.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:22
Cool. Ben, first of all, I have one last question before I ask it. I just want to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey and your stories. It’s been really instructive.People can check out GetMasset.com to learn more. You know you were mentioning around you’ve gotten some great advice. You mentioned Jeff. I’m curious. You know what.
Who are some of your mentors? It could be not only personal mentors and distant mentors like okay, they gave you some specific advice that was valuable. And or there’s some books and resources that you have turned to throughout your business, you know, marketing career. Who are some of your mentors in your journey?
Benjamin Ard: 39:05
So two people that come immediately to mind are John and Tyler Richards. So we raised a pre seed round of funding that was led by Startup Ignition Ventures. And these two individuals have been the best partners when it comes to investors. You could imagine they are supportive. They’re actively talking to us and what I love about them, and it sounds weird, but this is just kind of who I am. I can ask them on a regular cadence how I suck, and they will always find things like, I mean, there’s a lot to find, don’t get me wrong.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:39
Just ask your wife.
Benjamin Ard: 39:41
I know exactly to ask my kids. Ask anyone that knows me. But they find really productive ways of building us up. At the same time, they’re educating us about the things that we have to be aware of. And we do a pretty decent job when it comes to, you know, we’re never unaware of where the metrics are at, things like that. We spend a lot of time and effort, but they always have these fantastic insights.
What’s so cool about them? They’re they’re successful entrepreneurs turned venture capitalists as well. They’ve been there. They’ve done that. But they also love the Lean Startup Methodology. And they are experts like they are the teachers of that. We believe in the same philosophy. And so they have been tremendous. I mean, we get on a phone call with them every other week, but I know that if I were to call them at any point in time, they would pretty much do anything they could to help us out.
So that’s like one of the coolest relationships that we have is from that perspective. I would also say I just have this really fun network of people that I have grown through, the podcast that we run, and that has been a huge benefit. I know that you’re such a big advocate of podcasting, but I have been able through that podcast to meet some of the most amazing people throughout the country, in the world, and they have actually become these lifelong relationships and friendships and become mentors.
I can email them, ask them, tell me like, hey, this product idea, does it suck or not? Or can you look at this and they will give that meaningful feedback. They’ll bring their insights. They know about their families. They know about what they’re going through. I’m helping them find jobs. I’m connecting them. And it honestly, that has become like this network of people I genuinely care for deeply, and they have become some of the greatest mentors, friends, advocates that you could ever imagine.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:33
Who are some of those favorite episodes that people should check out?
Benjamin Ard: 41:37
You know, it’s like trying to pick your favorite child.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:40
Like that’s depending on the day. My daughter asked.
Benjamin Ard: 41:44
Who’s your favorite?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:45
Depending on the.
Benjamin Ard: 41:46
Day.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:47
Three episodes answer that question.
Benjamin Ard: 41:49
So Jeremy’s episode was by far the best.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:52
Yeah, exactly.
Benjamin Ard: 41:53
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:54
Outside of mine. Yeah. What are what are some that stick out?
Benjamin Ard: 41:58
You know, honestly, there are so many of them. And again, I would feel bad like mentioning any over any others. But I will say we have had some incredible guests on there about Artificial Intelligence. But also what I love is each one, we could talk about the same subject ten times over or 100 times over, and the different perspective from the different guests brings an entirely different story to it. We had one podcast episode where they talked entirely about how you should update everything. We also had another episode where they talked about how you should gate literally everything. Like, these are some of the funniest ones and some of the greatest ones. It’s so cool.
I mean, even looking right here, you have this, The Future of Content: From SEO to GEO. She is an amazing AI expert who works with cutting edge companies, talks about how to rank on, you know, your LMS. And then also right next to it, you’ve got Dan Ring, who talks about how the press release isn’t dead and all sorts of really cool things. Looking at it, you’ve got, you know, Beyond Product Market Fit: Why Your Growth Channels Matters Even More. I mean, every one of these episodes is amazing. We’re talking about Guerrilla Marketing. This episode right here with Donald was amazing. How to Turn LinkedIn into Your Secret Sales Weapon, Donald Kelly.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:18
Yeah. Gotcha.
Benjamin Ard: 43:18
Yeah. He talked about so many cool things, but very tactical advice about how to dominate on LinkedIn. I mean, again, we have 345 episodes that we’ve published, and every one of them is an amazing expert. And again, these are amazing people that are so awesome. Yeah, it’s a great platform for us. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:42
Love it. Anyways, I want to encourage people to check out GetMasset.com to learn more and more episodes of the podcast. And Ben I just want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your your journey with everyone.
Benjamin Ard: 43:55
Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on my podcast. Thanks for having me. This is amazing I love it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:01
Thanks everyone.
