Saastr Podcast #192: Michael Katz, Founder & CEO @ mParticle Shares Why Multi-Year Deals Are Not All Good
Before founding mParticle Michael was the founder of Interclick: He grew Interclick to $140 million in revenue before taking the company public.
The thesis behind mParticle: As investment into mobile ecosystems grows you will see more specialization. This specialization disaggregates technologies. So we built a way to easily unify data from various systems a company uses.
What did you learn from scaling your first company? (1) Build for sustainability. There are a lot of other companies doing more sexy things. We are just focused on mastering fundamentals. (2) Don’t get distracted by competitors, employees, or partners. Just relentlessly put the customer first. (3) Don’t obsess about any one particular thing. It is easy to get too fixated on one objective.
Invest all of your focus and energy on the market you want to sell into: Don’t diversify. If you want to sell to enterprise then focus only on the enterprise. If you want to sell to the developer community then focus on them. Whichever market you choose focus on the buyer.
Something that may sound counterintuitive: If you focus on your customer’s success that can actually make you very successful.
Small companies have limited resources. There is no perfect way to address this: You have to be creative. If you copy, you lose. Zig where everyone is zagging.
Where is the opportunity in SAAS today? API first companies.