Commitment is Everything in Tech Company Growth | Arman Eshraghi on BeyondSaaS Ep 007

Jason Niedle Today we’re talking with serial entrepreneur Arman Eshraghi, currently founder and CEO of Qrvey, about his experiences in growing tech companies, and maybe we’ll touch on his collection of 200 board games as well.

Arman Eshraghi Thank you very much for having me, Jason.

Jason Niedle Welcome to Beyond SaaS Arman Before we jump in, have you got a golden nugget for today?

Arman Eshraghi Yeah, as you mentioned, you know, I love games. So I would say, the game boards and in general, the not type of video games, but the old fashioned games that you sit down and you play, they can play a big role actually in business, can play a big role in the way that you understand the people that you work with And they can also better understand the way, you behave and you work.

It used to be, believe it not, just some years ago that everyone was working at the same office and we had more actually opportunities to get together and we had this game night maybe once a month with people. And we do it less than what we want now because everyone is working remotely.

But that’s something that can be very educational We can get into a situation that we trust each other more because we know each other better.

Jason Niedle Absolutely, that’s a really good idea. My golden nugget today is this, let’s see if I can reach it, this little square timer here. And for those of you who are just listening, it’s called a Pomodoro timer and it has four sides and whatever side I put up on top, will give me 25 minutes if I hold this side. So I focus on a 25 minute task. And then when I turn it to the other side, it will give me a five minute task. And It’s such a transformational tool for me. And it’s a stupid little $15 Amazon.

timer, but it really helps me focus on tasks. So I do 25 minutes on, a five minute break, or get organized, or answer emails, or whatever, and then 25. So that’s been really life changing. a little bit about Arman. He’s a very special guest because he is also a podcast host, hosting the amazing SaaS Scaled Podcast, which, by the way, that was a name that I looked at when I was looking at my podcasting. And you got it first, so you’re smarter than I am.

He has founded four B2B software companies as well as been the advisor to numerous startups and entrepreneurs. As I mentioned, he’s currently the CEO of QRVEY, which is modern embedded analytics platform for SaaS applications. And that enables richer analytic experiences to their customers faster and more cost effectively.

And as you guys may know, I am Jason Niedle founder of Tethos. And for the last 22 years, we’ve been experts at accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen and conversion. So Arman, thank you for being here. Tell me a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. It sounds amazing.

Arman Eshraghi Sure, so, you know, I started at the age of 18 without knowing what I’m doing. About four of us, actually classmates, we decided to literally start out of the garage of one of that we had and we said, okay, let’s start there and a software business. Very quickly, we signed up a customer, we got into this automation, we moved to, you know, an office space.

that again somebody gave it to us and said whenever you had money just rent, pay the rent. Very casual. So we started very casually, but By the time I graduated from university, we had 55 or close to maybe 60 employees depending on when you counted. Shortly after that, I sold my shares

we got out of that company and I started my second company with my my classmate and also working at my first company together. So we knew each other. We started the second company and that was when Windows came to market. That shows my age. And one of the first application products on Windows and then got to the point that we had

good number of customers and revenue and we got into the third company and the third company when internet came to market and I was in the US at that point and I started LogiXML that we renamed it to Logi Analytics and that was the first web-based reporting dashboarding product in the market and then we grow to about 200 something people and we sold the company to Marlin Equity

And again, the third company also, Kathy and I started together. And then I started QRVEY, that is my fourth company, and that was when AWS introduced the microservices and we thought that cloud has become the new kind of operating system, and that’s the time to start building an analytic tool for the cloud age.

Jason Niedle Wow, so what do you see your role now and how do you differentiate Qrvey?

Arman Eshraghi Yeah, so QRVEY is probably very hyper-focused, more focused than any other software company I had so far. And it is really narrowly enriching SaaS products. So essentially when you are building a SaaS product, part of the product is the analytic side of it, right? So unless you are an analytic…

product yourself, it’s a SaaS product built for analytic purposes, most likely analytic is a kind of secondary function. You are serving another function. Maybe it’s a CRM, maybe it’s a HR management system. Maybe what you are building is just accounting software, financial software, whatever it is, it has normally an analytic piece that people go there to gain insight about the data they have collected.

Besides, when you are a SaaS company, you’re normally serving a lot of customers. So you’re…

not building the software for your employees. You are building software for other users and other companies outside your organization. And since you have different customers and different tenants and each of them may have a slightly different need, it is very important to make it in a way that they configure, they can customize it, they can change it. But also you can define the

sandbox. You can define what you want them to be able to change and what you are supposed to be in charge of. And that kind of creates a different kind of analytics that is designed for SaaS and designed for multi-tenancy and designed for external users versus other type of software analytics that most people are familiar with, like Tableau and Looker style kind of products that are designed mostly for internal use cases.

So that’s really what QRVEY does. It’s an analytic layer designed for SaaS products to add to their product, embed it into their product, and in OEM fashion. And then they can enrich their product in a white label, the style, and make it exactly like it fits into the application, look and feel, and user interface and user experience.

Jason Niedle That’s amazing. So you’ve sold several companies. What motivates you to continue to grow now? Like, what are you trying to accomplish?

Arman Eshraghi Yeah, so in any company I think you will learn a lot. And you will learn a lot because as soon as you start doing something, you will make mistake. There is no way around it. And then you will learn from the mistakes. And then you get to the point that it’s hard to change what you have built. Right? So at that point, architecturally, you have committed to something day one.

that then at some point you realize that I wish I had more flexibility now to change it, but you don’t have the time machine. So you have to really live with it. But then you say, you know what, now I learned, I want to do it again. And then architecturally, I can do it differently this way. And then of course it’s expected for the next one to do better than the previous one. If you apply those lessons, most likely it will work better. But then

you will learn some other lessons. So it’s never ending game. And to me, it’s just a matter of, you know, also I enjoy it. So I was talking to, you know, my partner, my wife, Kathy, and said, okay, when we sold the previous company, what do we like to do now? And both of us agreed that we wanted to come back and work with our laptop and just work again. We don’t want to sit down and do nothing. And if that’s what you like,

That’s the definition of retirement. So when you retire, you do something you like. And we feel like we have been retired for the whole life. At least I have been retired since, you know, age of 18, since I did everything I liked. so I don’t feel like, I like to do anything else. I just like to, you know, build these companies, build the teams, work with the team. There will be challenges, no doubt about it. Not every day is a…

fantastic day, but that’s what it makes it very interesting, exciting. And then you get to the point that you achieved something and you created something from nothing. And that’s to me the big reward that when you look back and say 10 years ago, there was nothing. And now look at this awesome result that if I didn’t start it, it was not there.

Everybody is kind of there and happy. And that’s really when you feel like all of the efforts and work that I did and others did and all of us worked so hard for the last 10 years. It is worth it. And that makes it again that you want to do it again and you want to do it again.

Jason Niedle Absolutely. So I see the connection there with your gaming, right? A game is a small version of that strategy play and you and your wife are on the same team right now, making these things happen. So that’s really cool. I feel the same way as you do, right? We do a lot of websites, we do a lot of products, but ultimately we’re helping companies grow and it’s fun to see the small products That website was great or that video was great or that lead magnet was great. But then it’s also

fun to see when they work and to see when companies grow and to see how that transformation happens. So I’m like you, I really love that essence of building something and then launching it into the world and seeing how it works is to me the best feeling and what business is all about. Where would you say Qrvey is in terms of size right now? Are you guys start up or mid stage? And what’s your big growth goal for this year?

Arman Eshraghi companies go through different stages. Of course, for us, the first stage was building the product and that took a while because it was supposed solve a challenging engineering problem. And because of that, we expected for that to happen, not as quickly as, you know, in six months or one year I’m done.

So we worked for several years in order to get to the place that we could finally bring the product to market. We started selling the product in a very repeatable style, not in a kind of, you know, random style as we did in the past, but in the repeatable style with very scientifically being done and repeatable with the sales and marketing team starting

January 1st, 2020, just two months before the COVID.

And that was when we started the revenue team and started selling. so we have been in the market for some years and the revenue has grown pretty healthy for us and we have seen a very fast growth year over year. We very quickly passed the stage of product market fit. So very quickly after a year or two, we knew we have a perfect product market fit because

we could see customers coming, signing up, we are delivering the product, we are getting feedback, and very soon the type of feedback changed from major enhancement requests to minor enhancement requests that you know you are in the fine tuning kind of mode time. So definitely you pass that stage and then you get to other challenges. So every quarter if you ask me where you are, I would tell you a different story. So one quarter I’m still into the product and…

making sure that this release is going to be out end of the quarter and it’s going to be very solid. And the next quarter I’m there with revenue team discussing everything on the revenue side that how we can really just make it better. And maybe the day after you are in the CX kind of side of the business and customer experience and you know how to really add more value to the post sales and how to improve the customer experience when they come to Qrvey. So there is no

kind of stop there and you just go like a circle from one part to the other part to improve it. But we are definitely at the fast growth pace at the moment, growing the business, getting very close to profitability that is important for the company. But at the same time, we are actually growing fast and that’s the best situation to have to be profitable and still you grow fast.

Jason Niedle Do you have a specific big goal for this year in terms of growth?

Arman Eshraghi honestly, my main goal is always, how to make customers happier, how to really get sooner to that point, right? So when they purchase from us, how many months it takes for them to really see the value and get return on their investment. And always our goal is toward making those customers happier and

bring the value to them sooner and faster. And we set those goals for ourselves every year and we challenge ourselves and we say, okay, last year, these are the metrics. This year, we want it to be 25 % better, 50 % better, depending on the metrics. But that’s always the goal. And if that is addressed correctly, everything else is secondary, right? So I have no doubt that we are going to, from revenue perspective, we are reaching our goal and exceeding those.

Jason Niedle Mm.

Arman Eshraghi if we have happy customers and we can bring value to them. So that’s really the way we see it. something like QRVEY, being analytic and being analytic for SaaS, there’s so much versatility there that we can’t really be a very versatile kind of business. That we can do so many things with this technology that it’s not a problem about really how big QRVEY can be.

It’s more about how to stay focused on certain goals and accomplish those and execute well in order to make sure that we are not dropping a ball and we are really getting there and delivering.

Jason Niedle Our first guest on Beyond SaaS said, “It’s not the best product that wins. It’s marketing that wins.” And I’m hearing you say, “No, we’re going to have the best product. And then that creates the sales.” So I guess there are two parts of that. A, you have to have the best product. But B, you have to get your name out there. And people have to know that you exist. How are you letting people know that you exist?

Arman Eshraghi Both arguments can be correct actually. but in our case, bear in mind that we are in a particular situation that We are very, specialized kind of product, right? When you are so specialized, then marketing in a way that you need to generate leads and be known to people is different.

than when you are in a very kind of different market with a lot of competitors and doing something that is not extremely specialized. Just imagine if you need a very, very specialized, let’s say, bicycle. Then only there are a few vendors in the world and everyone will be gravitated toward them and it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to find them.

Jason Niedle Mm.

Arman Eshraghi versus if you need a generic bike. Well, in that case, who has the best marketing? Because that company needs to get in front of everyone. And if they don’t, I’m not going to find them. I may go and buy from somebody else. So in our case, our marketing that is extremely important is about education. It’s not about really advertisement. We are not focusing to advertise more. We are focusing to educate more. Because when you are specialized,

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

Arman Eshraghi Other people need to understand why this analytic is different than other analytics. And we tell them upfront that if you are not a multi-tenant environment, you don’t need it for external use cases, you are not a software product, we are overkill. Don’t use us for internal use cases. There are plenty of other options there that are less expensive, easier, whatever, just use them, right? So it’s important to know

exactly where you fit and then clarify that on both sides it saves a lot of time. But Again, for us marketing is important, but it’s more about educating. than about advertising. And then of course we need to deliver. So if the product doesn’t work, especially a specialized product, there are way more expectations because

The reason our customers coming to us because they expect that very specialized capabilities and if you cannot deliver upon those doesn’t matter how great the marketing and sales work, we are going to fail.

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm. Yeah, if you go back to the bike analogy, I could get a kid’s bike anywhere, go to Target, Big 5, whatever. But if I need a racing bike of titanium, there’s going to be three suppliers. I’m going to go find them, particularly if I’ve been following their education along the way… right? But if I get that bike and it doesn’t perform, your reputation’s gone in a week and you’re not one of those top people anymore. So all that makes perfect sense.

What challenges are you facing in the educational side of marketing?

Arman Eshraghi marketing being very specialized, it makes it more challenging to explain what you do in the way that it is intuitive and it’s easy to understand, even though what you explain is highly technical and might be very difficult, right? So you need people to understand what you do in the first two minutes in order to invest their time.

and then you have 60 minutes with them and then you can expand upon those. Now, if you have 60 minutes from the get-go, there is no challenge. You can do a good job. But if you have only a few minutes, sometimes even less, a few seconds, to really express yourself and get their attention and bring them in to listen to you and see the demo, well, that can be challenging for everyone, but

the companies and products that are highly specialized in one domain, right? Bear in mind that some people already know about that specialty and they already are looking for that product. It’s much easier to work with them because they already come to you and they know it. They are educated about it. They already have wasted money and time for the last five years on something that was not that perfect.

and then they had to build a lot around it and now they learned that lesson. So you are in a good shape, but that’s not everyone. There are many, many other prospects in the market. They still have not been educated about it and they expect you to educate them what are the best approach and methods that can help them in order to get to the success that they need.

Jason Niedle So if we get specific here, what are some of these tools, educational tools that have worked really well to actually get somebody on one of those calls for you?

Arman Eshraghi But really there is no tool, it’s more about content, right? So the magic is not about the tool we use, the magic is about the content we use. So a good content that is hard to create is not, a five minute content, you can go to chat GPT and type something and get the content out of it. It’s really something that, we have to think about it, we have to plan about the content, we need to make sure the content is really useful.

subject matter, expertise matter when you are creating this content and all of that and then you go and just create the right content and the right content for whom? Because again, if the person in front of me is an engineer versus the person is a CTO versus the person is a CEO and on the business side, there are different ways to really convey the message and they may have different questions from different perspectives.

And when we are talking about embedding analytics into your product as a SaaS company and go to market with it, it’s a very strategic move. It’s not something that you will take it lightly. So you want it to really understand this partnership is very long-term and it’s going to either make you very successful or it may annoy you for some years. Okay. I need to get education on that to understand all aspects of it. Look at it from different perspectives and then

take the action to do it. And such a thing normally has a longer education time. There are different people involved, but it’s all about content. That what kind of content can help them. A webinar is the best approach for some, yes. Is it really something like a blog post? That’s a good idea as well. Is it something like an interview? Maybe that’s helpful.

Whitepaper? There are tons of other things that you can think about and it can be as creative as you like, but it has to be different type of kind of avenues. And then of course the distribution part of content matters. Now you have the content, how do you want to distribute it? Right? So that’s the other question.

Jason Niedle Are you guys doing all those interviews, blog posts, white papers, podcasts, obviously?

Arman Eshraghi we do it, but sometimes with the help of others, you know, we are a small company, we are less than 100 people, relatively small, it’s not like big and marketing is even smaller because majority of the business is, you know, probably on the product side. So we are very heavy on the R &D side from number of people perspective in the company. So the marketing has to really use and utilize a lot of other

companies and agencies and other teams outside the company for different functions. And that’s by the way, the way marketing by nature is. It’s hard to find one person with 10 expertise, but not every single expertise is a full-time job. So automatically marketing lend itself well to that kind of nature of the work and we utilize that way as well. So we have a lot of parties that help us.

to get the marketing done, but definitely content is the heart of what we do on the marketing.

Jason Niedle Sounds good. Do you have any specific lead gen or marketing tools that are especially successful these days?

Arman Eshraghi I would say we are doing a lot. For example, we have some dinners with different people with CTOs or VCPUs or head of product in some cities that we just host those kind of dinners. We have some of these events we are there and either speaking in that event or having a booth or something. Also we are on…

Google AdWords and all of the usual suspects that you know. Organic is the best for us and we do a lot over there of course. Organically people find us and come to us because when you have the right content, if they search they should be able to find you. It’s a very diverse and distributed kind of things. I would not expect our marketing, maybe in one particular week or one particular month, they may come and say, this is the channel that

drives 80 % of our leads. But I would promise you that if you look at it throughout the year, you would see how distributed it is because maybe for that month, one of them outperformed everything else, but it’s omnichannel marketing. It’s not just one single thing. In my previous company, it was different. When I started Logi, it was when Google started and our audience was techies and where

do techies go to search Google? Perfect. So we were one of the very first customers of Google when Google was extremely a small company. And we were there. It was extremely inexpensive to really go and put AdWords. And we were getting all of these people, thousands of them every month coming downloading our product. And then we ended up rapidly selling. But bear in mind, in that case, the product was

very inexpensive, selling to a lot of organizations, large and small, less specialized. The key point was this is a web-based reporting, dashboarding product done. So different type of companies, depending on their business, need to consider different avenues, the way they kind of go to market. But for us, being very specialized,

We have a very well defined kind of market and we know exactly where SaaS companies are and then we reach out to those SaaS companies and we need to educate them on why QRVEY.

Jason Niedle Absolutely. So you’ve done the CEO role many times. You’ve transitioned from startup to mid-stage to exits. What do you wish you could tell other CEOs who might be at an earlier or younger place than you these days?

Arman Eshraghi So some of the things that I have experienced again and again and again, I just forget about the importance of it. I even don’t see it. But then when people talk about it, I just realize how important it is and it was so challenging to me and unknown to me.

And one of those, I would say that, you know, how much I should commit to this idea, how far I should go. And always my answer to them is you have to be crazy if you want it to be successful. If you are thinking very logically and you want it to be very, very ordinary,

Don’t take this route. I would go to every limit you can imagine to really make sure I’m successful. I have no limit. I have ultimate commitment behind every company I start. No limitation. Now you can imagine, even if it makes zero sense, right? So,

Jason Niedle Even if it makes no sense at that moment, right? You’re gonna do it.

Arman Eshraghi When I go to the limit that again, at one point I may go and just sell every single thing I have and get every single loan I can and somebody may look at me and say, you are crazy. Yeah, definitely. That’s, I am that level of craziness, but there is no limit, no question. Every single thing that I can do in order to show my commitment to the business I start, I will do. There is no

So my philosophy is that if you are a founder, you are more than a CEO. You are not there to take salary and do it. You are supposed to give whatever you have.

in order to make that happen and you should be always the last to eat. And if you are not prepared for that, don’t do it. Now wait for another company to start and then they hire you as CEO and then go ahead and get salary and run it. But if you want to name yourself as a founder and you wanted to really start something and you wanted to make sure you are successful, the chance of success is not that high.

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

Arman Eshraghi I mean, look at the statistics. If you don’t know it, just go to chat GPT and say, I wanted to start the software company. How many of them are successful? How many of them get to $1 million ARR? How many of them get to $10 million? How many of them get to $100 million ARR? The numbers are very, very discouraging if you are that kind of person that you don’t want to commit.

Jason Niedle One person’s crazy is another person’s commitment, right? You’re just committed. You’re just committed.

Arman Eshraghi Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. So that’s, to me, commitment is everything. And if you are committed and unlimited, unconditionally committed, and by the way, especially for people like me who have, you know, their spouse there, it’s not just, am committed. My wife needs to be committed too. Right? So you cannot just make a decision at that point you have committed to a kind of common life.

So everything you do, you cannot just say it’s me. Everything I do is impacting somebody else too. And that’s the difficulty that many of the founders, they might be committed, but if the spouse is not committed, still you are not committed.

Jason Niedle Wow. Okay, I have two more quick questions for you and then I’ll let you go. The world is changing really rapidly. Do you see any upcoming trends for growth in tech?

Arman Eshraghi I think tech is always going to be kind of changing and accelerating the changes based on everything I have seen. The acceleration is there, nobody can deny it, meaning that we are going to see faster, faster, faster changes. But the fundamentals are not going to change. I don’t foresee the changing in my lifetime. So it’s still the fundamentals are that when you start something, it’s challenging, it’s not going to be easy. Everything that is easy also is not going to be rewarding.

So if it’s challenging and very much challenging, that means that probably is more rewarding and not necessarily just because it’s challenging, but has to be challenging to be rewarding. Otherwise it’s so easy. Everyone can do it. Everyone would do it. There is no value in what you are creating. So be ready for that. And doesn’t matter if technologies are gen AI or, you know, way more advanced technologies doesn’t matter. It’s still, if you are starting your company, expect that kind of challenge. Expect.

signing up for something that you have to really stand behind it and support it for the next at least 10 years of your life to get it into a place that you can be proud of.

Jason Niedle I love that. Okay, maybe your last question here. What’s one of your favorite board games and why?

Arman Eshraghi depending on whom I’m playing with and who wants to play. For example, I played a lot of Monopoly game during my teenage years, loved it. And that helped me a lot with a lot of skills that you need later in your life. But I would say, for example, even some simple games that are so simple, but so majestic, so smart is like Set. If people have not played that Set, S-E-T, please search for it, play it.

It’s so easy and so fun and you will be amazed and read the history of it, how this game was created and it was created by scientists, American scientists in Germany. And it was so amazing how this game became so popular and New York Times was running puzzles of Set for many years. So I would suggest if people haven’t heard of it, try it. they will love it.

Jason Niedle Perfect. this has been super informative and interesting. Where can our audience find you?

Arman Eshraghi So LinkedIn is the best place I’m normally active on. Of course, they can reach out to me by email as well. That is Arman, A-R-M-A-N, at qrvey.com, Q-R-V-E-Y.com, both five letters, not more. So, and yeah, so happy to connect with people on LinkedIn and email and be of help.

Jason Niedle Perfect, and that website again is qrvey.com. Arman, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS and for our audience out there. If you are a leader in mid-stage tech looking to grow, please feel free to drop any questions, comments, or below. And look me up at tethos.com, t-e-t-h-o-s.com. And of course, we love your likes and subscribes. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.