BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I am Jason Niedle. And today we’re talking with Dallin Palmer, co-founder of Halda, about transforming student engagement through innovative AI-driven enrollment solutions. Credits roll.
and proper intros. Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Nidale, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency. And for well over 22 years, we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy branding, lead gen, and conversion. If you’re looking to grow, check out podcast. Oh, blah, blah, See, this is why we have to edit. If you’re looking to grow, check out tethos.com slash podcast for a free report or a growth consultation with me. Or easier yet, just drop the word growth in the comments. Today, I’m excited to explore tech company growth with Dalen.
He is the co-founder of Halda, which is revolutionizing student enrollment by leveraging AI and advanced analytics to enhance student engagement. I hear that you have a rich background in ed tech and strategic innovation and that you’re reshaping educational institutions and how they connect with prospective students. I also hear some fun facts that you’re an avid outdoor enthusiast and that you lived in China and are proficient in Mandarin. So welcome, Dallin.
Dallin Palmer
Thanks, that proficiency in Mandarin may be slipping slowly every day. Well, so my kids are in a Chinese immersion program, so I get to practice with them. We take our kids when they finish elementary school out to Taiwan. I spent a couple years living in Taiwan, which is awesome. I love Taiwan so much. But yeah, when we were living in Beijing and working, yeah, I got really.
Jason Niedle
Not practicing so much?
Dallin Palmer
That’s been like over 10 years ago now. So, anyway, I’m grateful for the kids in elementary school because then I get to like read their very simple books with them and like, okay, I can still do this. I can still do it.
Jason Niedle
Well, and reading’s
much harder than being conversational, isn’t it?
Dallin Palmer
It is a little bit different language, but writing is the worst. I never learned to write very well. So I can read it. I have a decent memory. so like it’s picking up reading wasn’t bad. And then typing is easy because you still use Romanized characters. And so it’s not hard to type it, but if you memorizing all the strokes to write it, that’s where it gets just really hard.
Jason Niedle
Awesome. Well, I’m super interested to hear about Halda, but do you have a golden nugget for us today first?
Dallin Palmer
Yeah, the golden nugget for me came through a lot of trial and error. So like most entrepreneurs, this is not the first thing that we tried to build and grow, you know? And I think that this is probably a golden nugget you’ve heard from others. But essentially, for the first several things we tried, we chased after shiny technology and we went hunting for a problem. And we thought we were doing it according to all of the greatest, you know,
advice, but it wasn’t until later in hindsight, we’re like, we’re taking shiny technology and trying to find a good problem to solve with it instead of really understanding deeply a problem and then applying the best technology available to solve the problem. Like a deep understanding of the problem and pain that you’re setting out to solve is just so crucial. And if you, you flip that at all, you’re just, it’s going to be so much harder to succeed. So
There’s probably a whole bunch of other things, but like for anyone that’s just getting started, I think that’s the number one. Like you have to deeply understand the problem first.
Jason Niedle
We talk about this all the time and I don’t think it can be said in enough different ways, so I’m glad you’re saying it and I think that’s perfect. I had somebody on last week who said that they were obsessive and I was like, how obsessive can you be? And then he said, yeah, when we were starting our company, we went and interviewed 300 people in our space to understand their needs. And he’s like, we probably understood them better than Gartner did. And I’m like, yeah, you probably did.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you just, have to. It’s so, I didn’t make it to 300. We did about 75 universities before it really dawned on us what to do. And you know, we dabbled in things before. when Lance and I first started building together, it was before we brought on Spencer, like we were just, we had a marketing agency that we were running to help pay the bills.
Jason Niedle
That’s huge still.
Dallin Palmer
Neither of us were like terribly great at digital marketing. It’s just like we were good enough at it. But so we knew we wanted to build a software business and we went hunting around. And so it was around the time, I don’t know if you remember this, when like Magic Leap raised like a billion dollars and like, my gosh, augmented reality. And so like shining technology, right? Okay, let’s run after that. And then like we got distracted by this other. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the whole thing. In fact, I don’t know if this like the video thing.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Dallin Palmer
works on this but I’ve got a little like piece of art here on my wall you can’t really see it too well but right there on my wall is is this you know I don’t know if you technically count as a sculpture not but it’s called the wanderer’s way and when I when I saw it I’m like oh my gosh I need that up in our in my office because it’s just like nope nope nope nope nope nope nope there it is we finally figured it out it is not a straight path it can be straighter if
Jason Niedle
It’s not a straight path to get from A to B.
Dallin Palmer
you’ve learned the lessons, but I think irregardless, all of the fun is in the discovery, you know?
Jason Niedle
I always like that analogy of a map, right? If you know where you’re going, you’re B, you still won’t get there if you don’t know you’re A. Like the only way to get somewhere is you have to know your starting point, like where am I right now and be really clear and then you have to know where am I going and be really clear. And even then you’re still gonna go where the path takes you.
Dallin Palmer
Yep, 100%.
Jason Niedle
So tell me about your company.
Dallin Palmer
man, so, Halda, we’re here to really change the way that student recruitment happens and to update it. I think a few things that make us super unique is for a lot, the historical business in this space has been very institution-centric and has been…
and just hasn’t been updated in forever, right? Using very old technologies, as you might imagine. Higher Ed has just moved slow, right, in terms of adopting new technology. the way that, the idea came to me and Lance where we did, we partnered up with a, with an industry association, NAGAP, the National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals. And at first we thought it was just a way to drive up more business for our agency, right? In the back of our heads, we’re always trying to find, what’s the product, what’s the product, what’s the product?
But we did this thing where like, free assessment, right? We’ll review your digital ads, we’ll review your landing page, da da. And so we had about 75 universities say, yeah, I’ll sign up for that. So we did this survey and.
The shorter version of the story is we’re writing the reports afterward and 80%, 85 % of the institution said, hey, what I need from my digital marketing efforts is more leads. I’ve got to convert better, right? And so we’re reviewing it and we’ve reviewed all the landing pages and about the 35th time that I wrote out,
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Dallin Palmer
your calls to action are clear, apply now, learn more, contact us. They’re just not compelling. Nobody cares. Like if you want more leads today, you’ve got to offer more value that’s relevant and immediate to their problem. Today, we’re relying too much on the eventual value of a degree and education, which is by and large, I believe, an education to my bones, but you’re not offering them value today. And that was the spark.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Dallin Palmer
So from there, over the years as technology has advanced and our product has evolved, the one thing that we stay really true to is keeping a sharp eye on the student. Is to say, have one of the values up on our wall is when the student wins, everyone wins. Right?
And I think that’s really important, especially anyone building marketing technology, because there’s manipulative marketing, there’s got you marketing, there’s tricky stuff you can do to improve conversions or whatever. But if you’re really focused on value-based marketing, how do I, the best marketing in my mind, irregardless of industry, is just being more helpful. And so…
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Dallin Palmer
In our minds, that was, I gotta learn something about you. And then the best way to be helpful is to personalize the content. So we went down that strategy. AI comes out, right? And it’s like, oh my gosh, personalization just got massively easier. Before it was like, you have to build out so much stuff and so much custom logic and calculators and all these things. But now with AI, we’re to the point now where HALT is an AI enrollment platform where we can individualize the content across any channel.
Jason Niedle
Hmm.
Dallin Palmer
website based on my behavior and what I’m searching for, et cetera, I give you custom content.
I request a phone call from an AI student recruiter. That’s us too. And as I talk to it, hey, I don’t remember. It’s on the website. I did one of those scholarship assessments. How much did you say I qualify for? Well, that recruiter knows because it’s tied into the same data layer. So it’s got context there. That gets transcribed. Any channel that student wants to interact with, email, SMS, phone calls, WhatsApp, if you’re international, back to the website, it all syncs to a unified data layer where
Jason Niedle
That’s pretty mind blowing.
Dallin Palmer
I can help individualize their content, their journey, their marketing based on of course the knowledge base that I have about the school. So it’s been so fun to build and the good news is
It saves institutions tons of time and we can deliver better results at a lower price because the alternative is a more historical agency where it’s like hire a bunch of people, write a bunch of content, review that content, deploy it. You can’t change it on the fly because it took way too much work to get it in place. anyway, that’s hauled it in. Probably not quite as small of a nutshell as it should have been, but anyway.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Well,
I can imagine coming from an agency that you have a different perspective on how things have to work.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah, yeah, think it was helpful to have a little bit of that. Like, I don’t have deep agency background, right? So I’ve been in SaaS for the most part. So I took a little bit of time. My first job out of college was student recruitment. That’s what took us to China. We did like high school tours for US universities through China. And we had a lead aggregator site that we got prospective students to register for. We connected with the schools, et cetera. That was at a company called Zinch, which was later purchased by Chegg.
And then I went and did some software sales actually with a group here in Utah called Podium. Learned a ton there. And then I knew Lance back at the Chegg days during Zinch and Chegg. And so we got back together. And again, like at first it was just like, we want to build a business. We want to do our own thing. And the easiest place to start was with some marketing, just because Podium was in marketing technology. Like I knew the basics of it.
Yeah, anyway, it helps to have a little bit of that background.
Jason Niedle
So have partners, your title looks like it’s co-founder, but what’s really the heart of your role these days?
Dallin Palmer
Oh, these days I’m focused a lot on just, I’ll tell you what I’m most passionate about. So like day-to-day stuff, I handle like partnerships for us, reseller agreements, how do we improve distribution systemically? And then one of the things that we found to really be a strategic advantage for our business is working hard to maintain our culture.
Jason Niedle
Hmm.
Dallin Palmer
It’s something that I didn’t really appreciate. Like I’d heard other founders talk about culture and how important it is and how to safeguard it and how do you go about that.
And so because of that, and I and Spencer, we did put out values in the business from the earliest of times, right? Like how we wanted to operate internally. And fortunately, that’s been something that we use consistently. Every team meeting, we review one of the values. It’s very much not something that we just put up on the wall and no one ever thinks about it or…
Allows it to impact their behavior. It’s something we talk about all the time and so so I think another part of what I like to do is just making sure that Everyone in the company understands the foundational tenets of like how we go about our work And I think that makes a huge difference in terms of making this a great place to be to work but also
empowering every individual to be innovative, take risks, seek truth about what actually adds value, what’s really gonna work. We had our VP of product, John Grover, love him to death, he’s just the best. Spent a lot of time developing a new part of our app. obviously if he’s spending time, engineers are spending time, this is an expensive project.
digs into the data, it did not improve results. And what did he do the next meeting? He gets up in front of everyone and said, this didn’t improve the results. But that was celebrated. That wasn’t a bad thing. was like, OK, awesome. We’ve checked something off that didn’t work. But now we have data to go and improve it and actually get good results. I think if you’re hiding from, if you’re trying to hide from that, in the medium or longer term, the business fails. I think that happens to a lot of organizations. They find something that works.
and then they stop seeking truth around it. And then it becomes this effort of protecting that original thing. And over time, every product will have decay because the ecosystem changes. So you have to perpetually just keep that motion going. So I spend a lot of my time trying to make sure that we don’t lose that as the company grows, that every seat knows, hey, there’s no off-limit topics. There’s no, you know, can’t touch that product or this project.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
you
Dallin Palmer
We want to seek truth and just try to figure out what actually works and what actually adds value. And we’re going to talk very directly with one another about that, of course, in respectful and professional way. But we want that type of culture here at Halda where we can really just continue to innovate because of it.
Jason Niedle
I really like two things you said in there about culture. I like that you’re actually bringing up the values in the meetings and you’re using them. And I hear about culture somewhat regularly, but I haven’t had actually great tips on like, do you implement and push culture through the organization? Do you have any other ways that you guys actually push the culture?
Dallin Palmer
Absolutely. So they are up on the wall. We, in our offer letters that we send out, A, well first off, we’ll interview for CultureFit. We have a whole interview just about the culture here at Halda and team members that join to judge really about CultureFit.
And it’s about paradigm, it’s about worldview, it’s about how do you operate as well as we can. And we always check references too, because that culture fit part is crucial. And then in the offer letter, we have our values there and it’s something they sign. Like we have it out there, like these are the values that we do our work by. And during the hours that you’re with us, we expect you to live according to these. And we have them sign it as part of their offer letters. Day one.
with every employee so far and hopefully we can continue this always, the founders, me, Lance and Spencer, will sit down with each new employee and talk through each and every part of that document. There’s eight points. And we’ll talk through each one. We’ll describe what they mean. We’ll tell stories and give examples of how people at Halda have been living it. so like from day one, it’s like sort of leveling the expectations. It’s letting you know this is how we play the game here at Halda.
So that you and we tell them just so you know every single employee has had this exact same conversation. Right. So when I’m telling you we give and receive feedback we give and receive feedback directly with each other just know that that’s the expectation everyone has. Right. And so like when if something goes wrong or someone hurts your feelings even it’s like talk directly we’re telling everybody let’s talk directly with one another. So that’s something that I think really helps.
And then we have what we call town halda, it’s really cute, every Friday. And a portion of that is we’ll pick one of the values. And it’s not like a speech about it or whatever, it’s essentially saying, hey, here’s one of our values. Who have you seen on our team who has done something to live up to this value this week? And again, it’s something where we can celebrate our team members. And so…
So yeah, and then there’s a few of them that really guide our decision making. Because I think because we review it enough when we’re sitting in product meetings and we’re talking about, should we do it this way or that way, et cetera, like all the time we ask, well, is this putting the student first?
Is this adding value to the student? Because we believe that if the student wins, everyone wins. And that has guided a lot of our decisions. It’s become part of our vernacular. The number one thing that we, the number one value is we seek truth in everything we do. We just want to figure out what actually works. And so that comes up a lot. Hey, can we seek truth around this for a minute?
Sometimes I’m so used to talking that way now. I realize that it’s probably weird for someone who doesn’t like work. You’re like, hey, let’s seek truth around what this means. But again, we review it enough and it’s become part of just, again, it’s ingrained in how we do
Jason Niedle
So let me recap that because a lot of people are listening here. It sounds like you said you interview for culture right off the bat. You include it in the offer letter, which they sign. Day one, you have like a founder review where you talk through it all. You have town hall does, town halls, where you discuss like the values in use. And then you actually use them for decision making. When you’re making a decision, you reference them and you know, is this the right decision based on values? I love that. That’s all amazing. And those are great tips.
Dallin Palmer
Yep. Yep. That’s right.
Jason Niedle
What stage would you say HAL does in? You call yourself a startup or mid-stage? Like how big are you?
Dallin Palmer
What?
man, so we’ve got about 30 people who work for us now. That’s fluctuated. Like some startup journeys, I think we all celebrate the startup journeys of like, wow, they’re ship, J-Curve, here we go. Like, Lansing, my and Spencer’s opinion about this is a little nuanced. So we bootstrapped the business to our first million in ARR. And then there were just some competitive…
pressures and things going on where like, okay, it’d probably be worth having a little bit of money raised. So we haven’t taken like a traditional VC path. Like we’ve raised some money, but we’re not doing it in the way where you’re on the treadmill, where it’s like, raise the money, burn it all within a year and a half or two years, raise the next tranche. Like we’re not building the business for the next fundraise. I think that’s another thing that really takes startups down a bad path. So, you know,
We, last year we got ourselves to the point where we were break even. And then we were building this new set of tools. We’re like, okay, if we staff up and we push some more into marketing, we could really, you we have a chance to double the business this next year. Awesome, okay, let’s go to town and we raised a little bit of money for that too. So it’s always been strategic in terms of like how…
we deploy it, but we’re way more bootstrappers at heart than we are, hey, let’s raise a grendle of money, let’s burn it and see what we can do. So, HALT has been healthy. We’ve been growing about 70 % year over year, 70, 75, so it’s not like your story of bonkers, we grew 800 % this last year, but it’s been healthy and strong.
And that’s a lot of what we’re trying to build for. One thing that we’d seen in previous businesses is just how churn can murder your growth. And that was a problem in businesses that we saw where they were able to cover it up with really strong new sales growth. But…
We’re just not into that type of treadmill. we’ve invested really heavily in making sure that our NRR is strong, our renewals are really strong so we don’t have to re-win those dollars. And the way to do that is like great account management, but also having a product that adds real value. Right? Like it’s easy to sell a flashy thing year one, it’s a lot harder to sell it year two if it didn’t do its job, right? And again, I think there’s way too many software companies that are like, they’re just hoping and praying that people don’t look at their credit card, credit card bill and like, just forget that I’m here.
Jason Niedle
so important.
feel like
that’s half my subscriptions.
Dallin Palmer
Right,
just forget that I’m here and keep that coming. So yeah, I think we’ve put a big emphasis on like growing really strong and ironically, it’s helped us out a ton because we were able to avoid like the craziness of 2021 where people got absolutely upside down on their cap tables, raising it in insane valuations that they’ll never be able to grow out of and
And then now because of 2021 now like we have VCs pounding down our door and private equity firms pounding down our door all the time because what’s sexy right now is efficiency. It’s saying I know how to grow a business, grow it healthily and well without a ton of burn. And so like we get a lot of attention at this point, whereas like in 2021, like, oh, what are you doing? You’re not burning a million dollars a month. You’re crazy. It’s like anyway.
We call a lot of our business accidentally on purpose. You know, we’re just, we’re trying to add real value and we follow that path. And then as we look back, we’re like, we didn’t really intend for it all to play out this way, but it played out really nicely. someday, someday when we sell the business, we’ll probably all get tattoos saying accidentally on purpose or something.
Jason Niedle
I do, I do.
Yeah,
I do a lot of design projects and I tell them the design rules. And one of my clients, have a team of like 50 people that are doing stuff. And I’m like, these are the rules and you’re gonna follow them. And when something amazing happens, you’re gonna take credit for it. it kind of was you, you follow the rules. But if you follow the rules, amazing things will happen and it will look like you’re a genius. Just say, yep, just smile and nod. But it’s totally that accidental on purpose.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah.
That’s right.
Jason Niedle
If you have the value in your company and you’re following the right values, great things will come out. And so it’s really not accidental, right? But it kind of looks like it sometimes.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah, but
yeah, that’s the principle, right? Like exactly what you said. Yep.
Jason Niedle
So 70 plus percent growth is amazing. What’s your growth goal? What’s your stretch goal?
Dallin Palmer
Oh, well, so this year the target is to get to 125 % NRR. Q1 we did 110. I mean, I guess technically there’s still a couple more days, but I think we’ve locked up all of our renewals. So we got to 110 in Q1, which we’re really happy about. And then the target is to get the business to where…
Again, this year we’re trying to double it. We’re seeing if we can double the business. it’s good. I think we’ve got the team to do it. We’ve got the product to do it. It’s just about getting out there, telling the story, winning hearts and minds.
Jason Niedle
Well, in that regard, what are you doing in marketing and sales to reach the new people?
Dallin Palmer
So we’ve learned a lot of lessons in this realm. Like there was a time when I was, let me say this, it’s so important to have the right people in seat.
We’ve learned a ton about hiring and mostly how not to do it. We’ve gotten a lot more rigorous in terms of how we vet people. We’ve gotten really serious about reference checks and back-channeling and being way more cautious about who we bring into the business, especially because we’re not a high-burn business where it’s like, hire 10 in a few months, fire seven of them and keep the three that are good. We don’t like that playbook and we don’t have the money to do it that way.
So we’re really careful about hiring, way more careful than we were a few years ago. Another thing that I’ve grown to appreciate and this is probably ironic given that I worked in some marketing but our industry is quite small. There’s 4,000 universities that we could really, well there’s about 4,000 in the United States of which there’s like 2,500 that like I really want to sell into.
You can’t spam the hell out of them every single day for years and build any sort of affinity, right? Especially if the messages are always like, hey, let’s meet, let’s meet, let’s meet, let’s meet, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. Like you’re just gonna wear everybody out. And so over the last couple years, just as I think as we got more and more to scale, we started to think a lot harder about like, how do I make people aware of and have an affinity for Halda?
And so we did a few things that I think helped. We got some partnerships in place, some biz dev partnerships that like sort of elevated our brand and like put us on par with some bigger brands that they know. And I think that helped a lot. And then we developed a new strategy for our conferences. Conferences are really bread and butter in our industry, a great way to forge relationships and also get a lot of sales. Like they really result in good business development for us. And so for a while when we go to conferences, it was really
hey let’s exhibit and try and pitch like that was really the only play. Last year we started to say
every conference needs to include an opportunity to have fun, like get to know and have fun with our team. then of course, the follow-up meetings. We need a strong sales motion. And so last year we did a few things. At one event, we hosted a pickleball tournament. And that’s sort of how we got to know a lot of people. And it was more just like, I like these guys. Which of course is gonna open up doors. At another one,
we did, we rented out a suite at a Las Vegas Knights game and the team orchestrated this one really well where it’s like, got to, day one, you got to come and pick up your t-shirt from our booth because that’s your ticket in. So that drove a lot of people to our booth where we could like have more of like, what is Hall? Then more business conversation. But then,
Jason Niedle
Hmm
and you’re giving them something.
Dallin Palmer
then you’re giving them something. They’re all wearing it so everyone else sees your brand. It was exclusive, right? There’s only so many people and we did a few things to build up the FOMO of it. So we had a bunch of people come by, hey, did anyone drop out? Can I get a ticket? Like there’s all this stuff around it. And then, but then because we had the business conversations the day before at the booth, well, when we got there to the game, it was just like eat, drink, have fun, get to know our team better. We’ll get to know you better. And it’s like no pressure. And before when we’d done events, it was like,
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Dallin Palmer
all this, like, it was the first time we were meeting people and so the sales people that we sent had this pressure to, anyway, it sort of poisons the party a little bit. So this one worked really well where it’s like, okay, did that already, this is just about having fun, we did a glass blowing event. So anyway, so now, one of our paradigms, this could be another tip for people building, I do not believe in, like, big sponsorships of conferences.
Right, like why give the conference organizers 30 grand to have like your logo? Like nobody cares. No one cares at all about like what logos are on the banner. But take that same 30 grand and throw a crazy good party. Spend it on the people, themselves that you’re trying to build relationships with, you’ll be way better off. So the playbook for conferences now for us is like, someone called it the three P’s of Halda’s conference strategy. Throw a party, have a presentation.
and
I can’t remember what the other P was. There goes my three Ps. It’s all ruined now. But of course, so party, present, and pitch? I don’t know. But have the booth and be really well trained. The other thing, sorry, I know that we’re getting close to the end of time here, but the other thing that drives me crazy, if you’re in a business that does conferences, I mean, Jason, I think this could be like a whole section of your agency to help people grow. I don’t know if you do like conference consulting. Do you guys do any training? Okay, the thing that drives me the most crazy
Jason Niedle
We do some of that, yeah.
Dallin Palmer
And I see less of it now, but there’s still so much of it where it’s like I’m gonna have the six foot table in front of me I’m gonna sit there like a puppy dog waiting for someone to talk to me or even if you don’t have the six foot table I’ve got the tall table that I’m sitting at and I’m just typing on my computer not looking at anyone. It’s like guys come on So so I think there’s a whole business to be had of like training sales teams on how to maximize a trade show floor
In my mind, tell all my guys, listen, if you’re not having fun, if you’re not having the time of your life, no one’s gonna wanna talk to you. So kick back a five hour energy, drink as many Red Bulls as you can without getting sick, and have a blast. Have fun, meet people, shake hands, I don’t care, but if you’re just sitting there.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Dallin Palmer
thinking when is this gonna end? Yeah, you might as well not go. Go and have fun. The point is to network and meet people and just have a blast. So yeah, we tell our team, you don’t sit down, ever. Sorry, but there’s no sitting. If there’s a chair in there, it’s only for a customer. And then two, just have fun. And I don’t even think the little candies people put out or the handouts they put, I don’t think that really does anything. Just be gregarious.
have too much caffeine in your system and just smile and laugh and make jokes with people and meet your neighbors in the other booths and if it’s not a fit for you with someone you’re talking to it’s like but I know somebody else you should talk to you you know so it just it turns my stomach when I see a company with a giant booth
where they paid $10,000 for the space, they probably had spent another $10,000 on all their tchotchke and handouts, and they have two people sitting down, looking at a laptop, typing emails. It makes me wanna wharf. You are wasting your time and money.
Jason Niedle
Yeah, right.
I had a guest recommend something that I’ve mentioned a couple of times. They found a professional wing woman, could be a man I guess, but in their case it was a wing woman. And she goes out and she talks to people and when she finds someone that might have a similar need, she’s like, my gosh, you have to come meet these people over here. They’re amazing. Let me bring them to the booth. And so she brings people to their booth and then they, of course, they have all these and they’re like, yeah, we like 12 X’d the amount of people that we actually talk to that matter. And then in terms of having fun, I had a client about 10 years ago and we helped them put together a massive event.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah.
Smart.
Jason Niedle
It was in Vegas. And so if you did the right things there, know, kind like you were talking about, then they invited you to a party at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and you meet at a certain place and the buses take you to the helicopters and they rented 12 helicopters. And it was like apocalypse now. We were all taking off, you know, and of course I had to go, right? And there’s all these helicopters flying across the desert and then we all landed in the bottom. There was like…
Dallin Palmer
awesome.
That’s so cool.
Jason Niedle
snacks and champagne and whatever and everyone’s know hung out and had a party for like an hour at the bottom of the Grand Canyon you get back in your helicopter you fly back you do a tour and you land.
Dallin Palmer
No,
Well, and
think about not only the friendships and deals that will come directly from it, but all the word of mouth, like you wouldn’t believe the experience that we had. Right? yeah. yeah.
Jason Niedle
no, everybody was talking about it. They were begging for it the next year. And then
the company changed ownership and didn’t want to spend any money the next year. it’s like, it was amazing. It was amazing. So your journey sounds incredible. your goal is 200%, if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing that’s kind of slowing you down or holding you back, what would that one thing be?
Dallin Palmer
That’s awesome, dude. Yeah.
man. Honestly…
It’s something that I hope that we’ve solved for. We just got a great, a really experienced marketer in seat who understands the industry. Like our biggest barrier right now is top of funnel, is like having enough people like us, be aware of us, like us and book with us for meetings because we have a good close rate.
The product works. It’s just like, how do I fill up that top of funnel? How can I free up my AEs from prospecting and just book them back to back with meetings? And I think that the marketing we’ve got in seat right now will do really well. And we’ve done a lot better this year than we did last year that way. And some of it is like, the product’s gone flashier, it’s gotten better, and the BDRs that we have are performing really well.
still got a really fix and automate the top of funnel a lot better than I’m doing right now. We’ve always relied a lot more on sales muscle and individual outreach than we have on marketing apart from like conferences right which are helpful. having that all fixed and humming would probably be the thing that I wish I had started four months ago, five months ago you know but
But we found our person and I think she’s gonna do awesome.
Jason Niedle
That’s great.
I know we’re getting close to our time. I have just a few more questions for you if that’s okay. What do wish other leaders knew about growing a tech company?
Dallin Palmer
other leaders like leaders
Jason Niedle
tech leaders,
CEOs, founders.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah, I wish they knew. I wish…
I wish that there were more of us willing to be vulnerable and tell our true stories.
I think so many of us want to pattern match against the unicorns of the world and so we whitewash our story afterward. We say, okay, technically we started this two years earlier but no one really knows that so I’m gonna say it’s two years later because then look at the growth curve, it’s amazing. I think we could all benefit from a lot more authenticity that way. And then…
And maybe this is recency bias from some interviews that I’ve done, but I’m really saddened by what a poor job a lot of tech companies do from just going back to culture, environment, and a place to work. I think there’s way too many tech founders that are insane.
Jason Niedle
You
Dallin Palmer
that are just rude people, you know? Or like don’t treat their people well. it’s like, I don’t know. I wish that there were better ways to balance the pressure of growing with like finding joy in the journey and celebrating as we go, you know? Anyway, those are some of the things that come to mind with your question.
Jason Niedle
Mm.
It’s interesting because when you talk about founders, I’ve seen obsession many times and sometimes that leads to success. And, but I’ve seen obsession on the good side where they’re like obsessed about being a servant leader and helping and providing value and they’ll work hard and they’ll do anything to get it. And they’re on one side. And then I’ve seen obsessed and you never really know, but it’s kind of like, you get that hint of like, it’s probably not going so well for the people that work there.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah, yeah, like everyone’s in your way and like why is everyone so stupid? Yeah, I think unfortunately sometimes that type of leader gets celebrated or at least has been and I think it’s too bad.
Jason Niedle
I mean, not to get too deep into current trends or current themes, but it seems like many of the big leaders of big tech right now might be in the dark side of running over anyone to get whatever they want.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So hopefully those things can…
Jason Niedle
So,
AI is the trend everywhere. You look all the time. What do need to know about AI these days? Is there something that you’re discovering that we should all know?
Dallin Palmer
It’s so much more powerful than we thought it was, well, maybe than I thought it was gonna be. Like when 3.5 or ChatGPT 3 came out or 3.5, like it was helpful initially, it like, wow, but then like it ran up against a wall, I was like, ah, and I sort of forgot about it for a few months, know? Four comes out, 4.5, and then all the other models.
I just think for the smart tech leader, you should be using this not only in your product, absolutely in your product, not only in your development, like your engineers should absolutely be using this stuff, but think of every single process in your business. There is a real opportunity to automate.
of this work right and and we’re pursuing that heavily so we’ve dedicated some of our resources to internal tool development with everything that’s coming online because I’ll give you an example I had a meeting last week about a new page for our website I really didn’t
meeting. It’s like I don’t want to go. It’s gonna be like a brainstorming session and someone will give their opinion and other person give their opinion and we’ll leave with some instructions and then we’ll do another meeting the next week. And I was like I don’t want to do this meeting so what I do? I went went and chat to PTN and said hey I’m gonna kick off some deep research. Give me research about the best practices for this type of page and also check these specific companies who are competitors mine how are they doing it? Great.
It wasn’t a huge task, so took I think three and a half minutes for it to do the deep research. Comes back, there it is. I read through it and say, okay, can you give me a recommendation based on these best practices and like an outline for Halda? And I was in a thread that had a lot of context about Halda. Great, did it. So I said, awesome, can you make me a prompt that I can put into Claude Sonnet 3.7 so I can actually build this page?
builds me the prompt. I put it in to Claude. We use a tool called Polymet. They’re super cool. Nice. It actually does better than just Claude. They use Claude in the backend, but Polymet is the tool we use. So we put it in a Polymet and boom. So in 20 minutes.
I get all this done and I go to the meeting like, here’s a research backed, pre-built, already designed, it includes the code. So now our designer, she was thrilled because she’s like, I hate the research work, I hate the prep work, I like the last mile where it’s like artistic, let’s get into our brand guidelines and just make this really pop. Well it did all the other work for us and so I calculated, it automated probably 13 to 15 hours of work for us by doing that.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
And deep research is pretty
incredible, that feature.
Dallin Palmer
Well, it’s incredible, like, but the ability to take that and like pop pop pop and go like three steps further to where like we I ended within 20 minutes I kid you not with a fully designed page and the ability to export code from it to have it just be built like it’s I think that’s it. It’s just like
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
amazing.
Dallin Palmer
It’ll go, you can make it go so much further than just information. Now, like we are, we are probably months away from this thing being able to, to do, to actually do a lot of work for us.
Jason Niedle
I love when you’re in deep research watching it think. It’s like, hmm, it will literally kind of talk to itself. I wonder if, no, that doesn’t seem right. Well, how about if I try this? It’s like talking through the problem.
Dallin Palmer
Yeah.
Well,
yeah, yeah, I had to do like a market analysis for one of our partners that I had a meeting with the next day and like reading through, I opened up that same thing where it was like showing me the steps and what it was learning. I’m like.
It would have taken me forever to find all this stuff. And I’m learning so much about my client and their market and things that are important to them right now that, again, I would never have had the time to do. But now it’s just like, okay, I feel so prepared. yeah, I think it will infiltrate, infiltrate is probably the wrong word. It will influence, it’ll accelerate, it’ll benefit every part of our businesses.
And it goes so much deeper than just chatting with something that can give you an answer.
Jason Niedle
for sure.
So times feel pretty turbulent. What trends do you see ahead or how are you preparing for growth in times that are hard to predict?
Dallin Palmer
I think that where we’ve landed as a company on that front and we’ve had a lot of conversations about this just in the last few weeks, technology has to be able to help their customers do more with less because it’s not just turbulent for us, it’s turbulent for all of our customers.
Whether you’re working with big enterprises or smaller SMBs, mid-markets, it’s like everyone’s facing budget cuts. Everyone’s worried about how this is gonna go. And so for Halda, what we’re really showcasing is how Halda doesn’t just come in and make things better. We can straight up replace the things that you’re spending money on right now and help you do it better and cheaper.
and while replacing more expensive budget line items. So think for anybody selling technology right now, I think if you are an ancillary spend, if you are an addition to the budget, it could be a tough couple years and I’m not probably telling you anything you don’t know. I would look really hard at trying to figure out how do we replace big parts of our customers’ budgets? How do we do a big job for them?
for half the cost or less. And you’ve got to be able to demonstrate that, I think, if you want to avoid big churn coming down the pike. And higher ed may be especially hit hard by this just because as NIH budgets got cut, National Institutes of Health, that impacts a bunch of graduate programs who got grants there. And then you’ve got all the turbulence with the Department of Education. And then you’ve got…
Like that, then it’s like, okay, who’s gonna do fast fun? Can I enroll my class? And then in higher ed specifically, we’ve got a demographic cliff. People didn’t have as many babies in the last 20 years as they did in the previous 20 years. And so there’s fewer students to recruit. lots of pressures in this industry specifically. I think we’ll see it systemically. So it’s like, yeah, you gotta make sure you can straight up replace something they’re currently doing.
I think the businesses that are like, keep doing what you’re doing, add this, it’ll make it better. That’s gonna be a really hard pitch, I think.
Jason Niedle
How do I
show my clients how to do more with less? Awesome. Dallin, this has been super interesting. Where can our audience find you?
Dallin Palmer
That’s right.
in Provo, Utah. This is where we’re at. Yeah, on the slopes. That season’s coming to a close, at least for the resorts we go to. But yeah, we’re at halda.ai, H-A-L-D-A dot A-I. You can find me on LinkedIn. Pretty unique name. I shouldn’t be too hard to find. yeah, would love to connect, love to chat.
Jason Niedle
On the slopes maybe.
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