Sramana Mitra: So, a fraction of their media spend is your business model. What kind of deal sizes are we talking and, and what do you need to sell? In the pandemic, I heard from a lot of people that they were able to close deals without having to meet people. Even very large deals. They were closing without having to meet people. So what was the model of actually selling these engagements?

John Wallace: Yes. The media plans that run through LiftLab are almost an order of magnitude from small to big. So, the prices just adjust to that.

Sramana Mitra: You haven’t positioned on just big accounts? You do all kinds?

John Wallace: There’s a bit of a bell curve. We have some very large accounts, some $300-$400 million media plans. So those are our very sophisticated customers. But we have some media plans that are seven or eight figures.

What happens there is, you have practitioners mark the personas that you asked about earlier who may have been in a bigger firm or may have had access to some of this technology before. When they see LiftLab, where they can buy it as a SaaS delivery, it just makes more sense to them. We’re more of a bell curve than the pyramid where we have tons of small businesses and a few a little bit more evenly distributed.

Sramana Mitra: So, from your go-to market strategy and sales strategy point of view, it is profitable to sell to these smaller accounts as well.

John Wallace: Yes, we learn a lot. Every time we do them, we learn how to kind of simplify and ask less questions and kind of keep it to their comfort level.

Sramana Mitra: Is it self-service or do you have to touch sell?

John Wallace: We are laying the groundwork for more and more self-service, but right now we have a customer success team that meets with clients every other month or every other week.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. All right. What kind of growth are you seeing? I love the fact that you have chosen to continue kind of bootstrapping with just a very small venture round. Which means you haven’t followed this blitz-scaling strategy of pumping so much money and bloating your company up and putting salespeople everywhere. Do you think you’ve made some compromise on the growth that you are achieving because of that decision?

John Wallace: We’re at near VC-backed growth rates without raising, so I’m quite satisfied.

Sramana Mitra: That means you’re doubling every year.

John Wallace: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s great.

John Wallace: It means stating the obvious that we are forced to make hard decisions. There are always eight good ideas that I could fund today, but it forces us to rank them and to take the ones that we’re really going to see the effect on. I just think that if we had put a bunch of capital in this, we might not be as far along as we are.

Sramana Mitra: Elaborate on that. Why do you say that?

John Wallace: I think when you have the luxury of maybe trying more of the eight things than you should, you end up working on maybe some of them that shouldn’t have been worked on. You end up making hires a little bit faster. I’m able to attract talent into this team who’s already done the blitz-scaling kind of thing and is burned out on it. And they are actually welcome. I’m attracting very strong profiles of people who want this shape of business.

Sramana Mitra: What is the geographical configuration of your company?

John Wallace: We are officially remote. We have about two thirds of the team in India in two centers, but they go in a couple of days a week. In the US, part of the team is meeting in the Bay Area one day a week.

Our hiring is kind of outpaced in the Bay Area and New York. New York’s going to become our headquarters, but we still have people in Vermont and Salt Lake City and all of us meet up once or twice a year. So it’s a distributed team.

Sramana Mitra: You chose that model before the pandemic kicked in?

John Wallace: Well, the offshore-onshore model was there, but no, before the pandemic, we had a headquarters in Northern California. It’s the pandemic that changed our thinking,

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Is there an Indian person in the key founding team?

John Wallace: There is. My co-founder is from Hyderabad. He came here for his master’s as many immigrants have and is here in northern California. He’s hired a CTO based in India.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So, you have a good understanding of how to manage an India operation offshore.

John Wallace: I think we did it once before and we’re doing it better the second time. Just to be clear, they are on our payroll, they’re part of our team and part of our culture. This is not an outsourcing arrangement.

Sramana Mitra: No, of course. It’s offshore, not outsourcing.

John Wallace: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any disadvantage to operating as a remote company? Where do you sit on this debate about “You need to be together to be productive” and all of that?

John Wallace: I sorely miss the days of just talking across the room casually or asking someone, “Can you overhear what we’re saying? Or let’s just go to that conference room and discuss this a little bit more.” But that’s been replaced with Hit Record on the Zoom, share the recording to someone that wasn’t there. I sorely miss the old days, but they’re gone for us, they’re gone.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting.

John Wallace: I like the talent that I can attract in Vermont or North Carolina or Utah. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t attract that talent and then ask them to work in the same room.