Terry Hedden (00:00)
I’m excited to welcome today’s podcast guest, Mr. Matt Solomon. Matt is a great dude and a recognizable dude. All of us know him. He’s a man about town, a man about the community, and he’s been a part of some amazing technology vendors. He’s figured out how to build a community, how to scale, knowing when to outsource versus insource and achieve the level of success that so many vendors don’t.
If you’re a vendor or even just a technology business owner and you want to learn how to leverage third-party resources to scale your growth, this is the podcast for you.
I am excited to welcome Matt Salomon to the Grow Limitless podcast. One of those guys that is a face you can’t forget. He’s always out and about in the community. Always someone who’s, to me, exudes positivity and just fun to be around. He’s also a smart dude that can share a lot of lessons that he’s learned in his journey through three different vendors in the MSP community. Matt, welcome to the podcast.
Matt Solomon (01:05)
Thank you. I’m excited to be here. You’ve been a big part of the journey over the last, I think, eight years that I’ve been in the channel. We’ve now known each other. And I don’t know if a face that’s recognizable is a good thing or a bad thing. But I’m excited to be here and talk through some of the journey.
Terry Hedden (01:23)
Yeah, absolutely, Matt. You know, before we get started on those three, the three vendors in the community you’ve been working on, what’s your story back before that, man? Tell me about your educational background. What did you do before you entered into the MSP channel?
Matt Solomon (01:38)
Yeah. So yeah, going back to college, I went to a Towson University up near Baltimore, Maryland. And my focus was, you know, marketing was, it was really my degree. So always been the back of my head, marketing, business development, started my career at an accounting firm, which wasn’t super exciting, but you you kind of early lessons and, you know, I was able to make my mark at that accounting firm and then actually made a pretty wild decision at the time. It felt wild at the time, which was to move up to New York City. I went and lived with my sister and I moved up there with no job. And I walked into Times Square in the first 24 hours and got a job waiting tables at Bubba Gump Shrimp House in Times Square. And yeah, it was a six month little journey there, like where I was at, you know, in the middle of Times Square.
But it was like, you you learned like selling lessons, you know, just the power of just suggestion, you know, just suggesting, would you like an appetizer, particularly if somebody was on a date, it like prompted the two of them to like go back and forth. And generally speaking, they would end up ordering an appetizer, which obviously increased the bill, which increases your tip. And then, you know, learning what not to suggest, which was I didn’t want to suggest dessert or coffee at the end of a meal because I didn’t want them, you know, turn and burn. So I learned some early lessons there and then ended up for about 10 years at a copyright and licensing publishing company, which now seems weird to talk about because there’s hardly any magazines and newspapers, hard, hard, hard magazines and newspapers these days. But that was focused on the legal industry and then fell into this company called Windvale, which is where I met my current co-founder, Kevin Lancaster out. It was his business and it was selling ⁓ with businesses doing doing business with the government essentially so GSA schedules. Yeah. So that’s like started the what introduced me to Kevin who is ultimately the serial entrepreneur and I joke that I’m the guy that’s smart enough to just keep tagging along.
Terry Hedden (03:54)
I don’t think, I think he would say that he would not have as successful without you. So you’re more of like a Batman and Robin tag team. That’s awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Kevin’s a great guy. I love being around him as well. So talk about that journey. What was the first step in that journey with you and Kevin?
Matt Solomon (04:13)
Yeah, so after about eight months of focusing on the government stuff, he came to me with this idea around dark web monitoring. And at the time, you have to really go back, it was about 2015. So like it wasn’t as common of a thing that people are talking about. And he told me about it, I was like, I don’t know what this is, but it sounds infinitely more exciting than GSA schedules. So I like took a chance.
And I knew at the time, like it was going to take a while. so like, I, when I say I sold my car, I lived in downtown Washington, DC. It wasn’t like a massive thing I did, but you know, I like cut all my costs down to kind of, you know, know that we were getting into the startup thing. And, um, we were actually interestingly enough, too early to market, uh, because at the time when we were talking about credentials being exposed on the dark web and we were selling to enterprise, the LinkedIn breach hadn’t happened. Um, you know, the my, I know it’s crazy to talk about MySpace, MySpace breach didn’t have, hadn’t happened yet. And so it wasn’t like a common thing that people were aware of. And so we were kind of beating our heads against the wall for about eight months in the enterprise, even though we did find some really interesting customers and some of the largest law firms in the world, some of the largest sports organizations. ⁓ It wasn’t until those breaches occurred and particularly the GSA breach, like the government breach or OPM, excuse me, OPM breach and then it started becoming part of the forefront. But we still, we were basically not priced correctly for the enterprise based on how long the sales cycle was taking. And then, I mean, can distinctly remember having a conversation with Kevin about this MSP concept. And we didn’t, I didn’t know much. He knew more about the MSPs than I did, but we floated the idea of like, let’s just try this last thing. And if it doesn’t work, then we’re honestly probably having to shut it down. And so we went from like, having to potentially shut it down to almost overnight, one article changed everything. Then we just started hitting the circuit all of a sudden and getting introduced to folks like you. And we had a Blue Ocean product. It Dark Web Monitoring. We were the first to introduce it in 2017. Literally, Terry, I went from those eight months of the enterprise where we were struggling, I could barely get out of bed. was like, it was so…miserable during that time of like we just weren’t having the success that we thought we were gonna have so like To have that and then switch over to like literally running to work almost like with excitement because I was at the time I was closing like 70 % of my demos I mean it was like on her I knew I was smart enough and had enough Years behind me to realize I was like this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I’m gonna take full advantage of it and I mean, there’s a million stories that we can jump into, but that was kind of the, mean, we were the right people, the right time with the right product. MSPs were struggling to talk about security and our tool allowed them to talk about it. know, Marketopia was a part of that journey and I’m happy to talk about that as well.
Terry Hedden (07:18)
Interesting. I guess, how did that article come about? seems like that’s like a pivot point right there, right? So how did that article come about? Is that something he arranged through his relationships? Did you just get lucky to pay for it?
Matt Solomon (07:33)
No, so Well, that’s interesting. We didn’t pay for it But I definitely thought the reason they ran the article was a way to get us to sponsor potentially ⁓ So I had just done started doing research, know just with like MSP stuff and I don’t even know if the came to think of the publication now because I don’t even think it exists but this guy is author this guy Alden Brown was his name and I know he’s been in the space for a while and We basically just got on a call with him and we showed him what we were doing
And he was like, this is fascinating. And he’s like, I want to write an article about it. And so that’s when I thought like, okay, he’s doing this because he wants us to sponsor or maybe he found an engine. I don’t know. I still to this day don’t know the answer, but regardless, he thought it was interesting, ran an article and we went from zero inbound leads to 20 MSPs calling us within a couple of weeks from that article. And we got introduced ⁓ to some various peer groups but it was a couple of individual MSPs who basically helped us in those early days where they were like, your pricing does not work for us. Like, and really outlined and shaped what our packages would look like. And honestly, they kind of remained our packages through acquisition. know, like we kept to those core, I guess, principles that we were told in the very beginning. ⁓ yeah, that article ran and then we got introduced to the MSP event circuit, which is a huge animal obviously and when we were at events we were very fortunate you know it’s a very expensive industry in terms of events and spending you know money ought to be on on on stage but we were fortunate enough that we were closing enough deals at events to pay for the speaking like it was unbelievable it’s hard for me to explain it to people like but i could literally have gotten off stage and this isn’t just me it’s just just the right you know the product. It was the messaging, it’s everything, where I could have thrown physical copies of our contract and people were signing it. That’s what it felt like when we got back off of stage, because it was so new to everybody. I mean, we were signing 20, 30, and then we had a record of 87 deals we closed at one event. So it was just like nothing like it. It was wild.
Terry Hedden (09:50)
What a cool experience like lightning in a bottle.
Matt Solomon (09:52)
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Terry Hedden (09:54)
Well, Matt, know, you know, to be honest with you, knowing you and working with you through that journey, you were certainly a big part of that. And so you should be proud of that. I know that it helps to be in the right place at the right time with the right product. And Kevin’s a good dude and knows what he’s doing. I’m diminishing all of those things, but you played a big role in that. You’re a personality. People kind of trust you and they like you and they want to be around you. When you speak, they listen just naturally. So, you know, you get a big chunk of that credit too, man. Don’t sell yourself short.
Very cool, man. What was the 87 in one event?
Matt Solomon (10:29)
Yeah, 87 in one event and like, you know, cause I know there’s some, some vendors have some big numbers out there, but it’s usually when it like a free trial and involved ours was straight up. I mean, we booked over $330,000 and we’re talking about, you know, an average of, you know, we were like 4,100 average, you know, ARR. So that was, it was, it was nuts. But yeah, I mean, yeah, as you mentioned, yeah, I mean, I played a big part of it. Obviously we build an awesome like BD team with Amelia, Jamie and Natasha.
But we did get to a point where we were like, it’s great we were closing deals at events, but we had to match it with inbound leads that weren’t just at events. To put all the money on just events is really tough and it’s almost impossible these days, especially with the cost. And that’s where our relationship professionally ended up. We had met many times on the road, but we were like, we need somebody actually dialing.
We cannot just depend on events. that’s where market Toby had played a big part ⁓ of getting us to that next level, you know, and it was really fun being able to close deals at events while your team, that one individual particularly was calling and booking demos for the sales team back home. And so we’re just closing business everywhere all of sudden, you know, and, you know, and I, that, that particular individual was really an extension of our team. And it was like, she was great, she’s fantastic, and I’m pretty sure, at least the last time I talked, she’s moved up quite a bit in your company. ⁓
Terry Hedden (12:03)
Yeah, she’s, she’s awesome. Um, and I’m really glad that you treated her that way. Cause I think part of, this going back to you, you treated her like she was an extension of your team. showed appreciation. You, you, you, uh, I guess if she had a down day or a down week or even a down month, would, you didn’t like chastise her. Like she’s some sort of robot that doesn’t have emotions. You, you treat her like a real human being, man. And that, that led to a lot of dedication, a lot of loyalty, a lot of hard work going above and beyond. And I think that ties into just, you know, what it takes to be successful.
You said something there that I really want to key back on because I think it’s a lesson that a lot of vendors don’t learn quick enough and that is you know, events are wonderful when they’re there, but they’re not evenly distributed throughout the year. And the cost of them is getting absolutely out of control. In my mind, it’s like the only way you can really afford to go is if you’re a SaaS private equity VC funded company, because you’re going to have to, you might have a good ROI in the long term, but the upfront is astoundingly high and seemingly getting higher and higher as all the events sort of try to one up each other on the, on the⁓ So talk to me about that. So you said, listen, we got this event thing going. It’s part of our plan. It’s necessary. We got to get out in the community, shake hands, kiss babies. I get that part. But now you said, OK, let’s get a more of a systematic outbound effort. How did that tie in to consistency of revenue, consistency of leads, less seasonality with growth, and then just stability for the organization? Can I walk me through that?
Matt Solomon (13:43)
Yeah, I mean, it was just evident to us. Again, any agent so unique in the sense of like the velocity we had, but we just couldn’t consistently, you know, week to week hit the numbers we were looking to hit because of an event. Like, yeah, you get this massive spike. Again, we were fortunate that we are one of those vendors who could close deals at an event, but we were looking for real scale and we just could not do that with just events. You know, even though was a lot of events.
There’s always so many people that you can send to them. There’s only so much money you can spend. And so really for the consistency, that’s why we needed somebody making the calls is so that our sales team wasn’t just depending on the team, the BDT coming back with all these demos. needed, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think, I feel like it was 25, 30 demos we were getting booked a week at that time. And so we did, yeah, we just absolutely needed that for consistency and being able to report out like the future.
earnings because it was just, you didn’t want to have these massive up and down valleys, know, hills and valleys. And, um, yeah, I mean, it played a huge part. mean, and the other piece of it is most, you know, unless you’re a conglomerate vendor, like if you’re not calling on all these leads that you’re spending all this money for at, to be at an event, you know, sometimes you get lead lists and sometimes you don’t, but they’re just sitting in your CRM. mean, the amount of vendors I’ve worked with, you know, in our channel program journey where we’ve done.
you know, joint marketing things where we give them a list of 2000 MSPs and it just sits. And it’s, know, and it’s just like, you’ve to, you’ve got to be in front of me. don’t, you probably know better than me than how many marketing touches these, you know, they need in order to close the business. It’s probably in the twenties at this point. So yeah, it’s just, that’s what we needed. We needed people ready and, firing in that moment. It’s like we’re on the road to hear the leads fire away and not time kills everything. Time kills all deals.
Terry Hedden (15:44)
Yep. No, I totally agree with that. And it is a problem. You know, I think one of the things that I’ve seen in the, guess two things I’ve seen with vendors in terms of mistakes in this category. One is that they try to turn salespeople into BDRs and it’s like, they’re not going to do it. You know, 29 touch points to get a deal is a metric that our team tosses around. And the average salesperson is not going to make 29 outbound calls to get a deal. might make two, but they’re definitely not going to make 29. So a lot of leads don’t get one. The other thing that I’ve noticed, and I’m curious on your thoughts on this in hindsight, ⁓ internal versus external. ⁓ know, ⁓ is it easy to create an outbound BDR function that maintains the KPIs and performance metrics that you would expect? Or is that something that really benefits from third-party ⁓ expertise and sort of like a specialty environment dedicated to that?
Matt Solomon (16:44)
Yeah, so I think, well, let’s talk about the first point. It’s funny because I just was reading a gentleman’s post on LinkedIn where it was talking about like he was trying to turn his A-Team salespeople into like mentees or mentors, no mentors, to some of the juniors and it killed everybody’s productivity, right? So like trying to put people in positions that isn’t their main function or their strength, I think is a detriment to them. And that’s why, yeah, you don’t see a lot of successful like salespeople who are then being asked to make SDR type of calls. You’re just really hurting your overall productivity. You want your salespeople doing demos, period. know, every second they’re spending making a cold call, I mean, it’s a complete waste of time personally. And the second part, actually, what is the second part? You want the second part of the question?
Terry Hedden (17:41)
So, yeah, so basically the second part was, it, do you find that the, it’s easy to create an internal function or is outsourcing to a specialty company’s environment better?
Matt Solomon (17:48)
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
I mean, for us, it was better to outsource it towards market overview. I think the biggest challenge we had, and I mean, I know I’m not alone, is just even the interview process of SDRs. It’s a tough job, and you get a wide range of people who are willing to do that job. ⁓ And the time sucked on us from an executive level on just finding people and doing the interviews and then hiring people and then having them flame out a week later and things like that. was just, it ended up being for us, it’s just a complete waste. And it was not productive for us. we just, mean, over my 10 years now in this space, I think we’ve found that the SDR hiring to be the most challenging hiring period. And I’m sure you have reasons that you can probably explain of why that is, but for us, yeah, it’s always been like that.
Terry Hedden (18:50)
Yeah. You know, and this is something that I find interesting. I, there’s some people in the channel that, that really, really, really are respected. And it’s because they came from like a, a big vendor, like a massively successful vendor where they created these massive sales teams and they really push every little tiny vendor, every medium vendor, every vendor to have everything be internal. And, and they struggle and they struggle mightily, especially when they’re small. And, and I’ve thought a lot about this because I’ve been on different chats with this person and those other people, just listening to the dynamic of the struggle combined with the unwavering, like dictation that this is the way to get it done. And, and I just, you know, sometimes when we get really big and you’re really successful, if you forget about how things are when you’re at one and two and five people, you know, and you start thinking, well, I had this factory where I could develop people quickly and have them successful as BDRs and they don’t sit back sometimes to think, okay, well I had a really senior level executive leading it. I had mid managers that were managing people and then I had team leads that had been there for years teaching the new people that came aboard. So I spent a decade making a factory and the reality is lot of the vendors out there don’t have time. They don’t have a decade to spend to make the factory. They’re expected to become the next ID agent and snap their fingers and see it’s productive. And one of reasons that I see that is that they’re not in an environment conducive to it. If you have a BDR sitting next to a salesperson, that salesperson is not a fan of the BDR. They annoy them, they distract them, whatever. And what ends up happening is the BDR’s productivity drops because they’re trying to be quiet or they’re trying to not offend. And you want to, you know, if you’re in a hard job, like Wolf of Wall Street kind of thing, they weren’t sitting next to the accounting department.
You know in a room that was conducive to the high energy thump thump thump music sort of an upbeat environment To keep you motivated because it’s not easy to make the hundredth call of the day, you know or whatever the 50th call of the day so yeah, I just I was curious on your thought on that because it just feels like ⁓ I guess people tend to forget just because you can doesn’t mean you should and just because it’s cheaper in the short term doesn’t mean it’s a better ROI in the long term because it’s ultimately in your in in sass and in the channel success comes from revenue, not cost reduction. It’s about generating the more, the more, the more, more leads, more sales, you know, eventually yields better results.
Matt Solomon (21:31)
Well, and there’s some calculators out there that we started using, ⁓ where you basically put the salaries of the people that are in a meeting. And you start realizing, if we just cut 15 minutes out of this meeting, how much money we save as an organization from just like, that’s just a baseline of like, my time is worth this. And that’s what I think the smaller vendors need to think about at an executive level is like, all right, if I have to interview 25 know, SDR applications, how much of that time, you how much is that time actually worth? And to your point, you start doing the numbers and it’s not cheaper. It’s not cheaper even, you know. And then the other piece, you know, I think, you know, with so many people obviously in, you know, doing remote, you know, businesses now, I do think there’s like, you know, you all are in an office down there in Florida. Like you have your team, yeah, you know, they might be, the SDRs might be separate from some of the others, but they’re around that energy. Whereas like now you’re hiring an SDR and it’s a remote SDR and they don’t have anybody there. And that like you might find a gem sometimes. But just historically speaking, yes, it’s a incredibly vile tile position. And ⁓ I think without being around other people, I think it I think most SDRs would really struggle.
Terry Hedden (22:51)
Yeah, it’s not easy.
You know, frankly, it wasn’t even in our business model when we launched. We were a digital agency and we wanted to outsource to the Philippines for calling and more of a pass through than any kind of revenue generator, profit generator, but they failed miserably. It was terrible. So we honored all the offshore contracts and brought it onshore. And that gave birth to what now is the most robust part of the company by far with probably, you know, 60, 70 % of revenue there and then a majority of people. ⁓It works and that’s one of the things that keeps people coming back and keeps, you know, people doing it. Even when they say, my God, I can save a thousand bucks by bringing internal. End up coming back six months later going, shoot, was the turnover was hard. And it’s like, yeah, you know, it’s, a, takes a village. takes recruiters and trainers and HR people and you know, managers and a physical environment and all these very people ask what your secret sauce is. I’m like, it’s just built. Like, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s all the little things that add up to some big.
One of my favorite contests is when we say, okay, well, you’re skeptical, I get it. Why don’t we do a competition? Your team versus mine, know, two on two, let’s see what happens, you know, and we end up, you know, 50 % more production. So you’re like, yeah, you might be spending whatever 10 % more than you would, but you’re getting 50 % more results. Obviously, ROI is in that favor.
Matt Solomon (24:21)
Nah, I love a bake-off competition, that’s cool. I didn’t know you guys have ever done that.
Terry Hedden (24:25)
Yeah, I love it.
We’ve never lost. that’s good. You know, if you can get someone to do that, normally when you say that, like, okay, you’re probably right. It’s harder than it looks. Everything about sales is harder than it looks. You know, it’s not easy to, to, to find a Matt Solomon to get on your team and to be the face of the organization because Kevin’s a great dude, but he’s not the front guy as much as you are. Right. And you’re that personality that people gravitate to and they’re, they’re, they’re on this video right now. What is better tracker? And I can’t wait to get to, what you’re doing these days. Okay, so ID agents killing it. You’ve got events going that are producing pops. You’re taking all those leads, giving it to your BDR team and they’re turning it into ⁓ a 20 to 30 leads a month or a week, I’m sorry, for your sales team, which obviously is going to have a fairly consistent close percentage. So you can literally start planning your revenue growth week after week, month after month, quarter after quarter.
Matt Solomon (25:23)
Exactly right. So it definitely put us in a position ⁓ which ultimately we did get acquired. So we scaled up to 2000 MSPs in just about two years. ⁓ But yeah, mean having that consistency was huge.
Terry Hedden (25:38)
2000 MSPs in two years. That’s pretty amazing.
Matt Solomon (25:41)
Yeah, I mean, at the peak, it’s always hard. Some of these numbers are out of my head at this point. at the peak, we were signing over 100 MSPs per month. I mean, we had to, obviously. it was yeah, it was insane. Awesome. Yeah, I guess that’s why I was running to work every day. Fun.
Terry Hedden (25:59)
Yeah, I don’t blame you.
We’ve grown really quickly, but I certainly have never sold 100 MSPs in a month. That’s awesome. Now, you know, I got to ask, man, if your revenue is like this, you’re killing it. Why sell? You know, did Kevin need a new boat? Did you need a fresh new haircut? I mean, what’s the reason you sold out when you’re driving a rocket ship?
Matt Solomon (26:22)
⁓ so, so I think it’s important to note Kevin was the owner. I was not an owner of ID agents. I was the first employee. I definitely had juice in the game, but I did not have any decision making power as far as that. ⁓ I mean, I would remember him having a discussion with me about like whether we should or shouldn’t. And it was tough because you’re right. We were scaling so fast, but we’d hit that kind of that, that mark of like 5 million in revenue, ⁓ reoccurring revenue, which is a pretty big number.
You know, that gets obviously a lot of attraction from people. And I think what we saw was how quickly it was about to get commoditized. So despite being the first and only dark web monitoring company for about a year and a half, and look, we took full advantage of it. You you had other companies coming into the space like Breach Secure Now, and then other ones that were starting to come in. you know, just it felt like the writing was on the wall that eventually this was going to become a commoditized product and was going to be incredibly hard to differentiate our tool versus other tools. ⁓ You know, we did it through the people and the sales enablement materials. Like we set ourselves apart for a long time with that. But I think the writing was on the wall and it proved out. You know, if you look at right now, the top product on a cybersecurity stack, dark web monitoring is number seven. It’s like from no MSPs in 2017 using it to number seven on the stack essentially. So that’s where I think we can go back and look at it be like, yeah, we made the right decision. Or he made, I should say he made the right decision.
Terry Hedden (28:03)
Well, you know, I’m going to push back on that. One thing that I always wondered is to me, it was obvious. I could feel that energy. could see that success. It wasn’t hard to know that you guys were firing on all cylinders and it was not hard to ride that ride with you. But I always wondered why Kevin didn’t double bound, triple down, quadruple down. Why not, you know, your Legion, 5X your sales team? Like, why not?
Turn that hockey stick into this because it felt like an insatiable demand and it was a once in a lifetime thing. And I’m just kind of wondering why in hindsight, I’m even curious what you think he would do if he could do it all over again. ⁓ but why, you know, I felt like you guys grew quickly, but you could have grown five times as fast. Is that, is it never that like that? Or do you think you were, you know, I mean, was the constraint people and lead that you can change whenever you want or.
Matt Solomon (29:01)
I mean, I, it’s a good question. I’ve never thought about like, we just, yeah, we hired a bunch of like, if we actually, like you said, even put more money into our partnership with you all and then had five more SDRs. Yeah, it’s hard to say. I mean, I still go back to the competitive element where we had just, you know, all of a sudden everybody was offering it even, know, like, like LionGuard offers a million things, but then they had dark web monitoring as part of it. And it started getting almost just thrown in as a part of a package.
So to me it was a race to the bottom from a price point perspective. So I’m positive that played a major part. But yeah, mean, you probably have to have a podcast part two where Kevin answers that question.
Terry Hedden (29:44)
I might.
Matt Solomon (29:46)
think it’s one of those things, I think everybody did well when it was sold. So I don’t think there’s that much regret in the terms of the timing of it. And it took us, you know, I think, which is life onto this journey. And so if we didn’t do that, I don’t know where we would be today. you know, we perhaps wouldn’t have had built channel program and better tracker. it’s something I guess I don’t really harp or spend too much time on. ⁓At the time it felt like the right timing and it’s yet taken us on this path. And I love what I do still and I’m happy to be on the path and happy to do it with him again.
Terry Hedden (30:25)
Yeah, well, this time you probably have a little more skin in the game, so you’re probably a little more upside potential. To me, that would be the one catch for you. Like, well, actually, I worked as hard as I wanted to work. Yeah. I see some vendors take two different approaches here. You’re like, wow, this is working great. Thank you. And then other people go, this is working great. Can you double, triple, quadruple, contuple? And we’ll get clients like ID Agent who go from one to five to 10 to 20. And they turn their 20 leads a week into 200 leads a week and it felt like you could have done that. And I was just always wondered and I didn’t know there was obviously a reason I’m sure, but I was just kind of curious about it. ⁓ Very cool, very cool. All right, so you get to the point, you’re driving this rocket ship, you sell ID agent, windfall, everyone’s cheering, you’ve sold, tell me about that transaction. Who’d you sell to? Did you go with them? Walk me through kind of that next phase.
Matt Solomon (31:24)
Yeah, so we got acquired by Kaseya, which, you know, most, if it’s an MSP listening, we’ll certainly know who that is. I mean, they’re one of the largest conglomerates in this space. So we were kind of on that ride of when they were doing a lot of major acquisitions, particularly around like, I guess the best of Reed, right? Like they looked at like ITGlu and the followings that those tools had. I know, I don’t, again, I wasn’t in on every conversation, but I…believe strongly, we were acquired one, because of our velocity, but then two, we had a product that allowed it, it was an easy stepping stone into selling multiple products. Like get your foot in the door with ID agent and sell the rest of the 29 products that Kisei had. So I think we fit perfectly with that and we had raving fans. And so I think that was obviously part of their strategy and they did the same with IT Glue and Rapid Fire Tools and obviously a series of other ones. ⁓ So we spent…both spent, I mean, not the exact amount of time, but we were both there about two and a half years, I can say, but it was during obviously an incredibly interesting time in the world, when the pandemic time. And so, you know, for myself, I had to like really reinvent what I was doing, because my entire life was on the road ⁓ with IDAgent. So I just tried to find ways to pivot and, and stand out in the crowd. And, know, one, one of those actually was working with your wife on an event where we call it funny enough called pivot to grow. And we were just throwing things at the wall at that time. And you we did it. I mean, you would never do this now because no one would ever pay attention for a week. But we think we did like four straight days of a virtual in a virtual conference. And you know, we had somewhere between 700 and 1000 people attend, you know, various days over the over that four days. And then I started interviewing like, pretty big celebrities, I got to interview magic Johnson, Wayne Gretzky, and I just brought the vendors together and I was like, look, we got it. There’s too many webinars. It’s all going to be the same. Let’s like, I’m not trying to make money off you. Let’s just cover the costs and we do shared marketing activities. So we’re just really trying to find creative ways and think we did as well as we could during those COVID times. then, you know, Kevin and I both went our separate ways from Kaseya and sort of we’re doing the same thing in a different capacity, which was consulting with vendors, you know.
I was literally doing my own thing and Kevin was doing it from more of the approach of like the CEO stuff. And I was doing it more from like the boots on the ground, like strategies of what works at events. And then we were like talking and we were like, well, we’re sort of talking to the same vendors in different ways. Like, wouldn’t, couldn’t we come together and how it all like burst into channel program, I guess is a good question. Again, at the time is as a reminder for the audience, like, you know, events were not in full swing yet. And so.
What we, we were using big terms like we were going to democratize the channel. So we were, we were looking at it as like anti-establishment kind of messaging of like, we’re tired of this event cost. It’s too much for a merging vendor. And we’re hearing from the same vendors over and over again, which means the MSP experience sucks also because they just, they’re just hearing the same stuff at every event. And so when we’d launched channel program and we’re a long way from where we were, It was basically a virtual platform that would give equal like main stage time to any vendor. know, everybody got, we called it channel pitch back then. Everybody got seven minutes on main stage and we’d have about six to eight vendors and the MSPs could attend anonymously and give direct feedback. And it’s always like a safe place for them to hear about the next vendor. And we always thought that was important. you know, who’s the next ID agent, you might not know because you might not hear from them on stage. And that first one we did, we had over 400 people attend and we were like, honestly, Terry, we thought we figured it out. Like we were like, this is it. We did it. It works. And it worked for a long time. But you know, over the years, that particular element dwindled in terms of, people just weren’t attending in 400, you weren’t getting 400 people to a webinar and things like that. But we just, the, platform slowly evolves. And so what it is today is basically a free resource platform for MSPs to visualize, manage and evaluate their technology stack. ⁓ We’ve now got over 6,300 product reviews from MSPs where they have to put their name on it. So it’s really a vendor agnostic platform, you know, and there’s not that many of those that exist for MSPs. So it’s basically allowing them to do all the research they’d want to do in an agnostic community and take them along the buyer’s journey without actually having to purchase there. We’re not a distributor. ⁓ And now we’ve built up a platform that’s got over 8,000 unique MSP users, over 6,000 unique MSP companies. But it’s evolved so much from that early point. And really, I would say the turning point was this free tool called Navistack that we came out with. And Navistack is just a visualization tool because every MSP tells me that they manage their vendors through Excel spreadsheets. And so we came out with Navistack, which again allows you to visualize the technology stack, see your gaps in the stack, identify overlap. And now we’ve got over 55,000 products that have been added to the various stack. And that Navistack, which again was never part of the original plan, that started getting us thinking, wow, if they’re managing all their vendors here, you know, putting it out visually. And everything I keep seeing in forums is all these complaints about contracts with vendors, right? My thing got renewed. I don’t like the terms of my contract. You actually are one of the most vocal people about holding people accountable to the contract they signed. And that ended up morphing into what became BetterTracker, which is our first tool that we launched, which allowed MSPs to manage all their vendor contracts and all their SaaS subscriptions. So if you’re familiar with like rocket money, it’s basically rocket money for your business. And in its simplest form, the idea was never miss a contract renewal ever again, take back the power, don’t depend on vendors telling you when their contracts are up for renewal.
You know, as well as I do, Terry, most vendors don’t want you to know when the contract’s coming up for renewal, right? They prefer it just keeps getting renewed. As probably does an MSP with their customers. Like it’s a natural thing, but it allows you to be empowered of like, okay, I know I have a notification date coming up in 60 days. I’ve got a custom email that’s coming in, is gonna tell me regardless of whether the vendor does. And we’ve tied that into 365 logins with this thing called 365 Scout, where it’s basically solving two truths. It’s the usage truth for the MSP and their customers and the subscription truth. And it’s uncovering all these revenue opportunities for MSPs. And now I’ll shut up for a second.
Terry Hedden (38:49)
I love it. I love the iterative innovation and the net new and here’s a need let’s go chase it. I love that. Really interesting. And I’m not surprised that you’re still seeing success. Honestly, it goes back to you. I’ll tell you one of the reasons IDAgent was so successful was the smoke backdrop. That was awesome. There’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of things to succeed. ⁓ A lot of different small things that add up to success at the end of the day. It’s not
Matt Solomon (39:06)
That thing was awesome.
Terry Hedden (39:18)
None of us are robots, none of our clients are robots, and even though sometimes we try to treat each other like we’re robots, the ones that succeed are the that don’t. You know, mentioned contracts. I think that’s a really interesting point. ⁓I can tell you that we would not have survived COVID without contracts. Our customers would not have thrived with COVID if it weren’t for contracts. ⁓ And it’s really fascinating to me because there is like a super negative connotation with contracts in the channel. And when you push back, they’ll literally brag to you that they don’t have a contract and that they’re month to month to all their customers. I’m just thinking myself, Have you, are you a business person? know, have you thought through this? COVID? don’t, my guess is a lot of customers that were so proud of their no contracts lost all their customers at the start of COVID like the first week. And then the ones that didn’t are the ones that are still in existence today. When they go to sell a month a month contract isn’t worth a whole lot versus an annual or whatever. That auto renewal clause really adds up. You know, So it’s I think everyone you know I have an f-150 right now And it’s got two dings on the tailgate And I would love to go to Ford and just drop my keys on the table walk out with a new one But I can’t do that you know there’s a contract that I’ve signed that to to and I have to fulfill that contract You know with better tracker I get you’re trying to take the power back, and I love that. I think it makes a lot of sense. Are you a fan of no contracts? If you were starting a SaaS company right now for the channel, would you have contracts or would you have everything be month to month?
Matt Solomon (41:01)
Contracts. mean, I did start a SaaS company with better trackers. So yeah, I you need contracts. ⁓ Well, I look, I know there’s some very vocal, even vendors, like that’s their selling point is that their month to month and they don’t, and they’re going to earn your business every month. And like, get it. ⁓ But yeah, I mean, I think from a, you do have to look at the future of the company and the value of it as well. So I think to your point,
Terry Hedden (41:17)
Yep.
Matt Solomon (41:30)
the evaluation is definitely going to hurt if it’s month to month contract. Certainly if it’s no contract, you know, if you’re an MSP that’s trying to get acquired and you don’t have any contracts, your business is significantly less valued. ⁓ So, you know, it’s a debate I’m willing to have probably with any vendor and it’d be really interesting conversation to talk about the pros and cons. You know, I don’t think, you know, ID agent, we would have, you know, sold for what we sold without those contracts in place. And, you know, I get like the idea of like, yes, you want to earn somebody’s business every month, but things happen and it’s nice to have a year to earn that business as well. you know, and not just chunk it down to a two, two bad weeks. Um, you know, and I’ll give you an example of where this killed one of our competitors is, that that event when we closed 87 deals, we had a very aggressive offer and they, those people were at the same event and basically their people went and canceled, like they signed with us and then we’re just going to cancel their contract because they didn’t have a It was month to month, so it was really not a contract. And so we signed probably 30 MSPs from a competitor just because of that flexibility. The other piece that’s just interesting, know, the reason, one of the reasons BetterTracker evolved in this is because we kept seeing all the vitriol around contracts and we were like, all right, let’s give power to the MSP to at least be aware of when their contracts are up.
Terry Hedden (42:55)
I created a meeting request and outlook that recurs every year, know, notification. A lot of people just don’t do that. think BetterTracker is a brilliant idea. Yeah.
Matt Solomon (43:05)
One of the things that we have noticed from our data set is that despite the pain point of they don’t want to sign one-year contracts, 70 % of the contracts they sign are one-year contracts in the MSP space. Now, obviously that’s being driven by the MSP, the vendors, but I’d remind an MSP who’s looking at that is, it’s the same reason, there’s no like hidden reason why the people do this. It’s the same reason an MSP wants to sign a one or a three-year contract for their customer.
It’s no different. It’s the same reason vendors want it. ⁓ But you know, and it’s easy to say this and and not every vendor will do it like this, but it also does help support the vendor in being to be able to reinvest in the product. You know, and maybe there’s broken promises at higher levels of bigger vendors and stuff, but smaller vendors like that dependency on the recurring revenue is super important.
Terry Hedden (43:58)
Yeah, to get don’t even know how to get private. mean, you’re done.
Matt Solomon (44:02)
Yeah, exactly. mean, you definitely are way more risk with the month to month.
Terry Hedden (44:07)
And frankly, every employee that works there, they’re one dirty bomb away from losing their job. know, something has nothing to do with them or their business or their product that scares people could result in everyone losing their job. remember when the first thing of COVID happened, was like, everybody called you at the exact same time. And I’m like, chill, just hold on. And I was right. At the end of the day, it was a boom time for MSPs. Profits went up, revenue went up, and everyone naturally freaked out.
And it was kind of similar to your big event where a lot of people canceled. It was like a spark of light all of a sudden resulted in a consequence that it’s unfair for the employees and the investors and at the end of the day it’s rewarded in valuation.
I’m not surprised you’ve been successful. You’re a great dude. I love talking to you. I love working with you. You know, you’re a wise guy. You’ve been around. You’ve probably made some mistakes. I’m not going to get into those too much because, you know, they’re yours to know. if you could tell Matt Solomon from a decade ago 10 things, let me give me five, five things that you believe are the reason that you’ve been successful that you wish you did more of them, they’re the brilliance that you happened to either look into or you were smart enough to realize up front, what are those lessons learned that you would give the next Matt Solomon to ensure that they’re even more successful than you are?
Matt Solomon (45:40)
Man, that’s a tough question. You did not give me this in advance. This is on the spot. I’m going to, some of this is going to come to my head. ⁓ I mean, one thing I would say is surrounding yourself and being part of an organization that you believe in the people is massively important. mean, you you’re spending more time with these people. I, know, over the, especially like that ID agent journey, I was on the road all the time and surrounding myself with people that you know, I care about and that were smart. I think that was, you know, That’s something I would really look at, like who you’re gonna be working for the next few years. ⁓ know, listening, I mean, some of it’s basic stuff, but it’s like really listening to your customers. ⁓ You know, it’s always tough in the MSP space because every MSP has like very individual needs a lot of times. And so you have to really be smart on like what noise from one individual person versus like, here’s like really good advice on how to get your product to the next level.
Because I mean, I really can say like over the course of these three companies, honestly, some of the very best ideas have come from our customers, you know, and, and I think that’s helped us build trust and I’m able to get on stage and say, look, we listened to exactly what you guys did wanted for ID agent. We listened and we put it into the product and we’re doing the exact same thing with better tracker. So come along this journey with us.
Yeah, you it takes time to build a product over the course of a couple of years, but you trusted us before, trust us again. We’re going to do exactly, you know, we’re going to take the path and we’re going to listen to our customers. I’m probably a big, you know, probably advise myself. I don’t think I did it too much, you know, not using the phrase too often of like, that’s not my role, especially in a startup. Everybody does everything in a startup. So, you know, being willing to do things that maybe are outside of your role just for the betterment of the company, I think it’s good. And also you can learn other things. you it’s, think about these journeys that these CEOs take on, and I think Chick-fil-A might be an example of that, where they like require you to do every job at some point. So I think that’s a really good lesson. ⁓ You know, I’m a big proponent of also like not asking people to do things you’re not willing to do yourself.
And there’s different levels of it, but like for me, like at events, like, yeah, I mean, I guess I’m at the point where I don’t have to set up the booth, but I also like to show the team that I’m willing to be in the grind with them, you know, and maybe not everybody has to do that type of stuff, but I think that stuff goes a long way. And I do think people appreciate it. Like, Oh my gosh, like he’s here doing this. Like he’s a co-founder of the company and he’s, he’s getting here at 6 45 AM, you know, and doing this stuff. And then it makes it easier when I can’t make it that one time and their understanding, they’re hey, I’ve got meetings, can you do it today? ⁓ So those are a few of the things that come to my mind off the top of my head.
Terry Hedden (48:40)
What about, what about lead gen? What about marketing? What about sales? Anything there?
Matt Solomon (48:45)
⁓ lead gen and sales. mean, I guess going back and it takes us back into the SDR piece a bit. It’s just how they plan on actually following up. Cause again, it pains me. Like when I’ve talked to vendors and they’re like, my gosh, we did nothing with those 2000 leads or whatever it is. So I think really having a plan of after show, I think it’s so easy. Everybody focuses on it. And we have to talk about shows because it’s a major part of the industry, but It’s what are you doing after the show? And that’s probably probably the biggest conversation that I think if I was advising myself or any other vendor would would be around that, you know, I would say, yeah, looking back, we definitely could have strategized better on the post event stuff. And then, you know, we, you know, we, we got involved with you all later, you know, somewhere in the middle of the journey, but it would have been nice earlier in the journey to have that relationship. So I would definitely look at that because there’s so much there’s just missed missed opportunities, sitting in a CRM. And then, you know, I guess now I’m just giving advice, general advice, maybe not for myself, but you know, I’m in this space. I do think you have to be consultative. You know, it’s always this like a little, little line of like being a little bit aggressive, but, finding the right ways to talk to people, like figure out, ask more questions. I guess that would be the lesson I would say ask more questions and shut up when they’re answering them.
That is like the number one thing that I, you know, and I have to learn this too, cause you get excited. Like you, you’re like leading yourself into the sale. You actually have a sale or you have a demo that’s about to be booked. And I tell this to my team. said, if they’re booking the demo, like in front of you on an iPad, shut up. Because like the second you start talking to them while they’re typing, you distract them. You might give them a reason to back out of the demo and same thing with a closed deal. Like you start getting excited. You’re like, we’re to do this, this and this. And then they’re like, you triggered something and then they start questioning it and then they back out. So, I think you just ask more questions and shut up after you ask them and listen.
Terry Hedden (50:50)
Awesome. There’s a lot of wise words coming out of that mouth, man. I’m not surprised. You’ve been around for a long time. You’ve seen some success. You’ve probably stubbed your toes a couple of times. But, you know, I applaud you, man. It’s not easy to do what you do. It’s not easy to be on the road. It’s not easy to build and maintain relationships with people like Kevin. And then obviously, you know, the opportunity to be a part of something like IDA, it was super special for you. And I hope that Better Tracker does even more and achieves more so that you can, ⁓ you know, benefit from the fruits of your labor for generations to come.
Matt Solomon (51:24)
Appreciate it, Terry, and thank you for all your support over the years. Definitely tell Andrew I said hello as well.
Terry Hedden (51:29)
We’ll do it. Thanks so much, Matt. I appreciate you coming aboard. Take care. Bye-bye. ⁓
Matt Solomon (51:32)
All right, thank you.
