How to Grow Your SaaS Using Other People's Audiences - StartupSauce SaaS Podcast #6 - Stewart Townsend

This is a transcript from my recent SaaS podcast interview Episode #6 with Stewart Townsend

Stewart runs PodcastHawk - a platform that helps you get booked as a podcast guest on autopilot. 

Previously he spent 20 years working in channel partnerships and indirect sales and built the channel partnerships team at Zendesk.

Watch the full interview here: How to Grow Your SaaS Using Other People's Audiences - with Stewart Townsend from PodcastHawk.com

In this episode you can expect to learn about:

• How to use AppSumo and other lifetime deal websites to launch your business
• How you can get customers from a mastermind group
• Tips to reach the CEO of a company through your podcast
• How to get on a podcast and what to say
• How to prepare for a podcast in terms of education and promotion
• The unexpected backlink benefits of podcasts

Here's a short 3-minute clip from our conversation.

Also you might be interested in these:

• 3 Quick and Dirty SaaS Revenue Sources You're Probably Overlooking
• 11 Important SaaS Metrics You Need To Be Tracking
• SaaS Content Marketing Hacks - Ep #4 With Uwe Dreissigacker

 

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[00:00:00] Stewart Townsend: Always treat your channel, whether it's a reseller or distributor, you know, whatever model it is, treat them as if they work for the company. You're not selling to the customer, you're selling to that vendor and to that reseller and it's building that relationship with them. It's a relationship. What advice would you have for anyone thinking about being a guest on a podcast?

[00:00:22] Stewart Townsend: Just be who you are, be credible, because if you try and put a persona up, people will just see through it. Try your best not to write a script or preempt what you're talking about. The key thing any host is looking for is Stewart Townsend, welcome to the show. Hey Ryan, thanks for having me on, on this beautiful, glorious, uh, sunny day in England.

[00:00:44] Stewart Townsend: Of course not, it's due. Why would it be Sunday in England? 

[00:00:48] Ryan Wardell: Listen, let's, let's start off with something pretty spicy. Let's get straight into it. Um, you've got some pretty interesting thoughts on using AppSumo and other lifetime deal websites, uh, in order to launch your business. What are your, what's, what, what are your thoughts on those?

[00:01:02] Stewart Townsend: It's funny actually, cause, um, Last week I had a conversation with some, well, I'm going to be a long winded response to this, but actually last week I met a chap I got introduced to that was actually the founder of a lifetime deal that I bought three years ago, ironically enough. And we were having this conversation, um, and I candidly asked him, so apologies, Noah.

[00:01:26] Stewart Townsend: AppSumo is awesome. I know it's awesome. It's launched a lot of startups and there's no issue there. Um, but again, I think it comes back to sort of, sort of his viewpoint is those lifetime deals are great for initial cashflow, um, around that. And it gets you kickstarted off and it gets you moving. And they always add a percentage of, they knew that, I don't know, say 20 percent that keep using the app and 80 percent wouldn't and that sort of thing.

[00:01:52] Stewart Townsend: The challenge is contractually now, They've tried the upsell, the cross sell, the downsell, left sell, and that sort of thing. And then that's not happened. Um, but contractually they still have to deliver. Um, now in their case, because they've now added some new terms to their contracts. And I suppose a lot of people could do this as well.

[00:02:11] Stewart Townsend: If you've not logged in for three months, your account isn't deleted. It's just turned off some of the processing capabilities, um, around that. So, so there's that side, I think, you know, it's, it's a great sort of marketing platform to get you out there. It's just that obligation you have and what, What we've seen lately over, and not just AppSumo, there's all, there's lots of different sites that do lifetime deals now, is copy clone companies that sell production plans in some offshore country somewhere.

[00:02:42] Stewart Townsend: And when AI came along, if I see another AI writer, I'm literally probably just going to shoot myself because I just, it is like, AI writer, Stu, you know, and literally they're just taking some template code, writing it, stick it on there. Um, and it, you know, it doesn't necessarily make the main sort of AppSumo or lifetime deal pages, but it starts to congest those software apps out there, uh, really good.

[00:03:08] Stewart Townsend: So, so I bought Phrase, um, on. Absolutely years ago. And that's been great. And then I bought an add on, which I don't actually need. And that's, uh, that's been awesome. Um, but then people came and copied it and then it was like, Oh, we've got every version of phrase under the sun. We've got every version of, uh, what was it?

[00:03:25] Stewart Townsend: Just Jasper AI. And it starts to, I suppose, devalue those products that are really good. And you get that sort of aspect from it, uh, as well. So, you know, it's one of those, it's there's pros and cons to, to lifetime deals on both sides of the fence. There's definitely a need for, uh, for getting cashflow quickly for young companies, but I think because we have the whole sort of trend and emergence of AI so quickly sort of rising and being rapid, it's caused, uh, you know, a pain point of just software that's been pushed out there that is not, not really that good.

[00:04:06] Stewart Townsend: Or if is, you know, it's okay. Uh, but then it disappears after a year or so, or, you know, you don't have access to it anymore. So it's, it's, it's a tough one because there's definitely, there's a place for it, but also it does, people have to recognize that there is an impact. You're not getting a hundred revenue for one thing.

[00:04:23] Stewart Townsend: You have an obligation to serve those customers. And it may kickstart you a little bit, but if you're like, I was talking to a chap last week, uh, about his service and it's very demanding on AI credits, um, go Google, go Microsoft, but you're going to burn through those sort of Azure type and cloud credits really quickly.

[00:04:45] Stewart Townsend: So you still have to have a pricing model, a unit model that makes sense. And I think what happens is people get excited, go and put a lifetime deal on and don't actually do their unit model finances and go. This wasn't a good idea, was it? We're giving away X amount of credits for like, you know, 99 for a lifetime deal per month, and It costs us more than that.

[00:05:09] Stewart Townsend: So there's some basic math. So it's a bit of a rant and a rave. I'm sort of, you know, pros and cons on either side, but it's just great to launch. But you know, you need to think a lot more behind it. And AppSumo, I've got a great team there now that do help manage and all that. And they've matured into a product that sort of is a pipeline for it.

[00:05:30] Stewart Townsend: Um, but then this sort of negative side as well. 

[00:05:32] Ryan Wardell: I think so. So I had, um, Andy from Hike SEO on a little while back. And he was talking about, so they launched on, uh, on AppSumo. So basically it's a, it's a, it's an SEO tool for. 

[00:05:44] Stewart Townsend: It may have been the company I was speaking to. 

[00:05:46] Ryan Wardell: May it 

[00:05:46] Stewart Townsend: may 

[00:05:47] Ryan Wardell: have been. Andy's great.

[00:05:50] Ryan Wardell: And, um, We had a really good chat about this stuff too. But basically the way they used AppSumo was as a stepping stone into an angel round. So that enabled them to get a lot of traction, a lot of feedback really quickly. They got an inflow of cash, which enabled them to go full time, which meant that they were able to accelerate a lot of things.

[00:06:07] Ryan Wardell: So their plan was, you know, not just to rely on the AppSumo launch itself, but to use it to propel into something else. Um, I don't know if you've spoken to Rob Gelb from, uh, well, he does a lot of things now. Uh, he launched Hey Summit. really well out of it. Um, and, and he, he said a similar thing. He said, um, the, the audience on AppSumo may or may not be your actual ICP.

[00:06:31] Ryan Wardell: So just bear that in mind. If it is great, if it's not, um, then you get an influx of customers. Um, you'll get some feedback quickly. Just bear in mind that it may not be the perfect feedback that you want because they're not. You know, the perfect ICP that you want to target. Um, but, uh, but it does give you a bunch of cashflow quickly, and then you can use that cashflow to build out your team a little bit more, accelerate the product a little bit more, maybe raise some more money if you, if you're going to go down that path.

[00:06:58] Ryan Wardell: Um, but, but also if you've got a plan to convert those lifetime deals into. Recurring revenue. You've got some upsell, you've got some, some path that you've thought about in place. Um, then it can work out really well. The, the, the biggest pitfall he was talking about was just that a lot of founders are unprepared for the support requirements as well, because suddenly you've got to support people all around the world, 24 hours a day.

[00:07:21] Ryan Wardell: Um, and if it's just you and your co founder sitting there on live chattel day, you're not gonna get anything else done. So I think a lot of people don't anticipate how much work is going to be involved in that either. Um, but, 

[00:07:31] Stewart Townsend: but. Conversation we're having the, the soon, soon learned very quickly about customer support and tickets.

[00:07:37] Stewart Townsend: Uh, sort of Zendeskian style, not like, Oh, we've got 500 emails. How do we respond to this? It's like, Oh my God. And, but funny enough, again, timing wise, literally this morning I bought, it's AppSumo day. So I bought a product on there cause you got a million quid discount or whatever. And their support and their onboarding has been flipping amazing.

[00:07:58] Stewart Townsend: Literally like a professional company. Um, maybe a bit too much because of other WhatsApp messages and email. Um, but straight away they're going help support, you know, if you can help us do a review and you like the product, whether it's positive or negative, we'll upscale you, um, customer support, here's how to reach us and here's, I was like, right.

[00:08:16] Stewart Townsend: So, you know, that preparation definitely pays off. Hmm. Which, which, which product was that out of curiosity? Um, it was a growth email, Gozen, Gozen growth. Yeah. So it's like email campaign, marketing tool, warm up emails, et cetera, all that sort of thing. Cause he used to have MailerLite and MailerLite suddenly just turned us off and deleted our thousands of subscribers.

[00:08:42] Stewart Townsend: Thanks MailerLite.

[00:08:47] Stewart Townsend: But literally, I'd signed up for it and then I got my onboarding email. Uh, I got a WhatsApp message. I've gone back to their support, asked a couple of questions already, got some responses, um, booked an onboarding session. Um, and then they reached out as well and said, you know, about the review site. We'll look into it.

[00:09:05] Stewart Townsend: Or credits or, you know, we'll give you some incentive. Perfect. So they got a plan, executed it brilliantly because they knew, well, obviously prepared knowing that this day everybody's going to be smashing it going 20 percent discount if you're a plus member. Yeah. 

[00:09:21] Ryan Wardell: I think to the, um, we, we get so conditioned to expecting crappy onboarding and crappy support when you actually find a company that does it well, it's like, Oh, it's a pleasant surprise.

[00:09:31] Ryan Wardell: So that's why I was saying, you know, if you want, it's not naming and shaming, it's naming and, uh, Praising I suppose is, 

[00:09:37] Stewart Townsend: yeah, well, it's done really well. You're like, wow, that was brilliant. What an experience. And straight away, positive. Yeah. I'm happy with this product. It's out of the gate. Um, but yeah, I think it is that prep, but also I think it's down to, you know, the platforms also filtering out.

[00:09:53] Stewart Townsend: And so we don't have. AIwriter. co. com. org. whatever, because yeah, there's only so much of 

[00:10:00] Ryan Wardell: that you can take. Number 37 in that category. Listen, let's, let's, let's zoom out a little bit. Let's, let's talk about you and your business specifically. So tell me what is Podcast Hawk and who is it for? 

[00:10:14] Stewart Townsend: Yeah. So podcast talk is essentially an automation platform to get you booked like me on podcasts, uh, from that side as a guest.

[00:10:23] Stewart Townsend: So it's not aimed at hosts or, um, sort of your side of the fence. It's aimed at people that could be, uh, book authors, masterminds, consultants, marketing agencies, that sort of thing that have got clients. And it's a platform that lets you search podcasts and then, uh, automates the campaign, the outreach emails to the podcast hosts.

[00:10:45] Stewart Townsend: So the idea is save a load of research time, only find podcasts that actually got episodes that are live, not from four years ago that haven't broadcast. Uh, and then send the emails out based on did we get a response? No, let's keep on messaging it. I'm not spamming emails, like four emails would control that aspect.

[00:11:03] Stewart Townsend: Um, but it's through a client's email address as well. It's not through ours. It's through them. So it's really simple. Uh, it just saves hours upon hours of time to, to do that. How, how did you come up with the idea? It's a joint idea, um, but we came up from different ways. So my, uh, business partner, Ray, this could only happen in our world, Ryan.

[00:11:25] Stewart Townsend: So, um, I've never met Ray. In person, we've been in the same room, apparently in 2019, in 2019, we've been in the same room, uh, but we've never physically met. So he's in another mastermind group. Um, and we were essentially, he had a product and I was talking to him about helping him understand how to take that market through channel partners and resellers and that sort of aspect.

[00:11:53] Stewart Townsend: He'd never sort of come across that world before. And we were just talking about data and podcast and nerdy stuff sort of thing. And I was like, Oh, I've been looking at this idea, but I'm gonna try to work out how to do it. And he's like, Oh, it's all similar to what I've been doing, but I've done it. Cause I can do, he can code a little bit.

[00:12:10] Stewart Townsend: Um, so we, we sort of came out and smashed together, um, that way. And his pain point was a classic pain point was he had a, He's still got a business, which is, um, teaching languages and he wanted to promote that business. So the standard thing is let's do some blog posts and LinkedIn and social. Let's do all this stuff and let's do webinars and all that.

[00:12:31] Stewart Townsend: Um, and he's quite introvert. He doesn't like to go and stand up on stage. But he's got some good stories about travel and language and things like that. So he started to get some podcasts, but he found it a real pain because of that whole aspect of I'll find some podcasts. Okay. I'll go and search this a couple of years ago.

[00:12:48] Stewart Townsend: So there's listen notes at a time, which was really expensive. Or I'll look through Apple podcasts. Then I'll find someone, I'll make a list and then, Oh, actually, no, they haven't had a show for two years. So I'll start again. And I came at it from a way of, I want to look at the data or the On podcast guests and the impact it was having on their business or their reach and social network, uh, from that side with the aspect of then getting some more metadata and use it as a marketing platform.

[00:13:16] Stewart Townsend: So we sort of came together and smashed it together. And that's how it came about. Two different, two different viewpoints, but the same sort of. Goal in a sense. 

[00:13:24] Ryan Wardell: How, how did you get initial traction for it? Like, where did you get your first, first few customers from? 

[00:13:29] Stewart Townsend: So the first few were through the mastermind through, through the other group that were part of, um, and it was, it was basically Ray and me just reaching out and going, Hey, We want some people to come and test it.

[00:13:42] Stewart Townsend: You're all sort of nerdy people and you like to promote yourselves and you've been on podcasts because the whole group's based around the podcast. So we did it that way and then it very quickly became word of mouth of them going into their networks and going, Hey, I'm on podcasts. Check me out. How do you do that?

[00:13:59] Stewart Townsend: Um, type of thing. So it became reciprocal then of like, Oh yeah, you've been on a podcast. Oh, I'd like to be on a podcast. Um, type of thing. So that's how it initially started. So, uh, and also, um, traction came through doing personal onboarding as well. A little bit like the company I was talking about today is literally, are you signed up or Ray would get an introduction or I would, um, and then we'd do a, an onboarding session.

[00:14:25] Stewart Townsend: And then say to the end, right, okay, put your credit card in. You get a bit of a trial, it's ready to go sort of thing. So it was very much, it was limited in the functionality. Obviously it was an MVP at the time, so it wasn't what it is now. Um, but it was still the same aspect of, do you get what I've just shown you?

[00:14:41] Stewart Townsend: You can filter all these podcasts and you can reach out some. 

[00:14:44] Ryan Wardell: Is there a secret? So if you're a guest on a podcast, I think a lot of people watching this or listening to this have thought about being a guest on podcasts, but don't necessarily know about how to a, how to. How to get, how to, how to go about getting on there in the first place, but be what to say or how to present themselves on that podcast to get the most kind of value out of it.

[00:15:04] Ryan Wardell: What advice would you have for anyone thinking about being a guest on a podcast? 

[00:15:10] Stewart Townsend: The key thing any host is looking for is you respect their, their audience. So you've got something that, cause, cause it's not, you know, it's not, it's not, No disrespect to you. It's not your podcast. It is your podcast, but it's your audience's podcast.

[00:15:24] Stewart Townsend: And that's the key thing. It's like, right. Okay. You're bringing guests on to share insights. So the key thing is you respect that and understand who that audience is. And do you have a really good story to tell because. The best will in the world. You could be, I always say Vodafone. I don't know why I'm not even a customer of theirs, but you know, you could be the CEO of Vodafone, but you you've got no, that's great.

[00:15:47] Stewart Townsend: You're the CEO of Vodafone. You're cool, Bob, Brill, whatever. Have you got a story to tell? No, I've been the CEO for 30 years of just an enterprise B2B and B2C. I don't really know what's happening in the real world. Your audience are not interested in that. What they want to hear about is, like, my friend Nick, um, so, I used to sell to him when I was at Sun Microsystems.

[00:16:10] Stewart Townsend: I then went to work for him when I left Sun, and he'd done TweetMe, which he'd then sold the licenses. Uh, the platform to Twitter to get access to build data safety, then exit data, data safe, set up another company. Now he's a touring car driver and he's set up another software company. So he's been through that battlefield.

[00:16:30] Stewart Townsend: It's those sorts of stories, isn't it? That that's the sort of thing you, you know, your audience want to hear about. It's how did you do that? How did you get there? So the key areas have a really good story and interesting thing to tell that's a value to that audience. If it isn't just don't bother applying.

[00:16:48] Stewart Townsend: Or think of a different aspect that you could bring as a perspective to it, that that's the key for . 

[00:16:54] Ryan Wardell: I, I think that's really good advice. Like I, I've been on both sides of this. I've done, I've done a fair bit of public speaking and I've also had, you know, we, we bring people onto, into the startup source community to run workshops and, you know, expert talks and stuff like that.

[00:17:05] Ryan Wardell: And, and it's amazing how many, like, I, I had a guy once say, oh yeah, just, just Google that. And I felt, I felt like kicking him. I was like, look, if they could just Google it, people have given up an hour of their time to come and listen to you to give some insights. If they could just Google it, they wouldn't be here.

[00:17:20] Ryan Wardell: They're looking for something that can't just Google. Don't tell people to just Google. So I, I, I don't know what the research is, but I do remember reading some research that says, um, storytelling is a really powerful way to communicate. An idea or a concept because it sticks in people's brains. You can, you can spit out some facts and they'll, it'll go in one year.

[00:17:38] Ryan Wardell: Sounds great. It'll go out the other year really, really quickly. But if you weave it into a story, especially something that happened to you or, you know, a personal story or a true story, um, for some reason that seems to stick in people's minds a bit more and they're able to recall, call it later. So, um, absolutely.

[00:17:52] Ryan Wardell: I think storytelling is a really, really powerful medium. I think podcasts probably. Probably the best medium for telling stories or getting, getting people to share their stories that convey some insights that they can then go out and apply in their, in their life or in their business later on. Um, fantastic advice.

[00:18:07] Stewart Townsend: The key thing as well is, is that, that story, but also audio builds trust, your voice builds trust. Um, so if you're again, trying to promote something and you write a blog post saying, Hey, I'm Stewart from podcast Hawk and we're the best platform ever. And it's great. People are great. Whatever. If I go on a platform and people can see I'm passionate about it and I'm behind it, that the audio builds that trust with it.

[00:18:31] Stewart Townsend: It's just, it's those key things. Tell the story, but I always say people just be who you are. Be credible because if you try and put persona up, people will just see through it, even if it's even through the audio, they can just, you can just tell, can't you, it's just, it's a human instinct that we have. 

[00:18:48] Ryan Wardell: I think for a lot of SaaS founders too, that so many categories of SaaS now are just.

[00:18:53] Ryan Wardell: It's completely crowded. So they're saturated. So there's a whole bunch of, you know, like you were talking about the AI writers before, there are lots of different products selling effectively the same thing that does with the same feature set, more or less at the same price. So how do you stand out? And a really good way to do that is the whole personal branding thing.

[00:19:11] Ryan Wardell: Um, so, so you want to show some personality. You want to show who you are. Cause at the end of the day, people are 17 different options, but I like that guy. That guy seems like he knows what he's talking about. That seems like the kind of guy who's really passionate about it, really excited about it. I think that's the guy I want to buy from.

[00:19:26] Ryan Wardell: Um, have you, have you noticed something like that when, when people have been on podcasts? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's sort of, 

[00:19:33] Stewart Townsend: um, and going back to like Jasper AI, I can't remember the chap's name because I'm over 50 and I can't remember my own name. Um, but he's six foot seven inches or something ridiculous.

[00:19:44] Stewart Townsend: Again, he did webinars at the start of Jasper pre investment and everybody just remembered him because he was just like bouncy, typical American, lots of energy and everything, but just memorable. It was like, Oh, I'll buy in Jasper. And they weren't buying Jasper, they were buying into what he was saying, what the product could do and everything.

[00:20:02] Stewart Townsend: And you see, you see that, you hear that a lot on podcasts when you're listening to interviews, it's either people are really into it or they're just turned up and just monotone and like, yeah, whatever. And I do HR software. It's like, God, no, delete that episode. Don't do that. Please don't try and use that anywhere sort of thing.

[00:20:20] Stewart Townsend: Um, but he definitely, definitely. Yeah, definitely works. 

[00:20:24] Ryan Wardell: How, how should you, if you're going on your very first podcast, like how should you structure it? Say you've got an hour, you got an hour booked in for the podcast, like do you, in preparing for that, do you say, I can, I'm going to tell this story about this, um, I'm going to, you know, how, how should you prepare for it and how much should you be talking about, um, you know, how much education should you be doing versus how much promotion should you be doing?

[00:20:48] Ryan Wardell: How do you get that balance right? 

[00:20:50] Stewart Townsend: Yeah. So, so part of the business, we have an agency as well, which is mainly about getting people booked on podcasts from a sales perspective. So a call to action. Um, and as part of that, what we tend to, we, we send them the pre show sort of cheat sheet booklet sort of thing.

[00:21:05] Stewart Townsend: So it's more about not about them, but who the host is, typical customers, questions that have been asked, that sort of thing, but what we say, cause we do sort of, I call it press training because again, I'm over 50 hours, you know, it's, it's that audio public speaking training, et cetera. Cause it doesn't matter whether this video goes out or not.

[00:21:24] Stewart Townsend: You're still there. It's audio. Um, and we talked to him just about be aware of what. At least what the podcast is about and who the audience is and some of the questions that have been asked, but try, try your best not to write a script or preempt what you're going to talk about. Cause the most interesting engaging podcasts are ones that just free flow and just go down natural sort of curves type of things where it's not scripted answers.

[00:21:52] Stewart Townsend: It's just connotations that I think, all right, okay, great. I just remember the story from last week or from two years ago. So I always say that to anybody. Is be prepared, but in a respectful way of who's the person you're talking to, who their audience is, and at least what's the title of the podcast and what the, what their objective is so that you can then naturally sort of respond to it and have a conversation about it.

[00:22:19] Stewart Townsend: Because many times, yeah, it's funny, sort of, it does get asked in my onboarding of like, shall I write a bit of a script and some response answers and stuff? It's like, You're not going to telly, you know, it's not, it's not something that you're going to get a shot for. And if it's something most hosts will say, if there's something that you don't like, we can edit it out.

[00:22:41] Stewart Townsend: If you said something and said, Oh, I shouldn't have said that. I've just written, you know, they'll edit it out. It's that, otherwise, yeah, it just becomes, yeah, 

[00:22:52] Ryan Wardell: dull. And at the end of a podcast, so this is something that, I think a few people have thought about, um, I did a lot of, I did a lot of, uh, press releases for a previous business.

[00:23:05] Ryan Wardell: And I was expecting that to translate directly into sales. And I had a mentor say, no, no, no, no, no. The reason you do this is just to get eyeballs on your website. And what you want to do is you want to capture as many email addresses as possible. So rather than promoting your product or service, what you want to do.

[00:23:20] Ryan Wardell: Is go down the path of promoting like a lead magnet or something I can download or something, you know, get on my email list or capture their contact information. Um, as a, as a call to action, like, what are your thoughts on that? Should there be. A call to action at the end of the podcast. If you're, if you're the guest, should you be trying to promote a lead magnet?

[00:23:38] Ryan Wardell: Should you be trying to promote your business, you know, your product or service, should you have some kind of discount or special offer that you're promoting? Like, what do you, what do you do at the end of a podcast to take some of the people who are listening or watching? And get them kind of into your universe.

[00:23:54] Stewart Townsend: So, so there's multiple answers to that. Um, and the simple sort of political answer, which gets you out of jail is, it depends on what you do. Um, so again, so we podcast Wolf for the agency business. When we're talking to clients, it's literally, we'll say, set up a templated landing page that says, X, Y, Z.

[00:24:13] Stewart Townsend: It's got a standard message, but then tailor that for each podcast. So when you're doing a call to action, so at the end of it, it's like, right, okay, thanks for being on the podcast today. It's been audience. Um, it's been amazing. Thanks to the audience. The audience get directed to a landing page that is promoting a lead magnet or whatever it is that you've said in a way that's relevant to them.

[00:24:35] Stewart Townsend: I think that's, that's, Wonky element. Cause then it's bespoke. Um, it feels like, oh, there's a transition and there's a host. It's promoting their podcasts again. Cause you know, it gets, gets surface and people go, oh yeah. Stop. So, so there's a podcast. Great. Oh, brilliant. Yeah. It's that sort of thing. So that's one key areas.

[00:24:54] Stewart Townsend: Do something a little bit. Um, I'd always say keep it customized based on that and be respectful of the host in terms of. Again, the audience, so it may just be, it's, it's a marketing push message. So I go on podcasts and I just say, I'm from podcast hawk. I'm not pushing the product, but here I am. You know, it's like when it used to be at Sun, when I ran and built a startup program, I didn't talk, I used to get the startups to talk because the audience already knew I'm trying to sell them some servers and hardware and software.

[00:25:25] Stewart Townsend: I'm there, I've sponsored it. So it's the same in a podcast, you know, people know why you're there. I think the key element we talk about anyway is getting that backlink. So whether it's to a landing page or to your main page or whatever it may be, and it's a call to action, it's getting a backlink, not just in the podcast description, but if that podcast has a high domain authority website, it's getting lots of traffic and lots of traffic pointing at it, getting a backlink on there back to.

[00:25:55] Stewart Townsend: page back to, back to your website so you can get that sort of link to you from it. That's the key aspect. Most definitely. 

[00:26:01] Ryan Wardell: Oh, that's, that's something really interesting. Cause I know I had a conversation the other day. Um, so, so someone was new to SEO and they were saying, it's really hard to get, to get backlinks.

[00:26:10] Ryan Wardell: Um, everything that I've read said you'd just do guest posting. But when I've tried doing guest posting, people are now asking me to their website Pay money to submit an article that I had to spend money to create in the first place. And it feels like this is a really uphill battle is, is getting on podcast.

[00:26:24] Ryan Wardell: Is that a bit of a shortcut to getting some quality backlinks as well? Or is that one of the benefits that you might also that maybe people don't think about? 

[00:26:31] Stewart Townsend: It's a benefit that people don't think about. So how that's the rationale we set the company up for was to help people understand, and we do a really bad messaging job about this because when I have that conversation with the AppSumo, um, chap, the AppSumo SaaS company called Hike, um, He said, yeah, I didn't get it.

[00:26:49] Stewart Townsend: We've just had a conversation. I said, I know, cause we haven't messaged on there because it's hard enough educating people about being a guest. And then you've got to try and explain domain authority and backlinks. It suddenly blows our mind. Um, so what we do in our data is we augment it against a couple of other sources that bring in, you know, domain authority and page ranking.

[00:27:10] Stewart Townsend: So basically in simpleton terms, cause I'm not an SEO SEO guy, the only means it's like how many high quality links are pointing to that website. So I always put it as the aspect of, you may just start, start being a guest on podcasts and you start on those podcasts that may have had 10 or 15 episodes and we've got some traction, but the trend could be like, you know, you haven't done a podcast before, right?

[00:27:33] Stewart Townsend: And, but suddenly, You start to do a podcast, but your website is getting a million hits a month. I want my website linked on there somewhere. I want my, my bat link to come from there. Cause Google is going to go, Oh, this is a high quality link. It's a similar content. It's on entrepreneurship and startups.

[00:27:50] Stewart Townsend: Oh yeah, we love that. Um, and it's that aspect. So I, I. tend to not think or push or ask a host for sort of, can I do a call to action? It's normally, it's like, do you want me to give an offer away? Is it something like that? Or what I prefer is actually what, do you have a pay, uh, uh, an area on your site that has the podcast on there with the description that has a link component in there?

[00:28:15] Stewart Townsend: That's what I want. Great. Okay. Yeah, I can do that for you. Perfect. That's what I'm looking for. I'm sort of going through that aspect and even getting a backlink on sort of lower ranking sites. It's, it's not necessarily on anchor, Spotify and all that. It's on that, that Stewarttownsend. com slash podcast type of, that doesn't exist by the way, but it's on that page.

[00:28:36] Stewart Townsend: Um, Because that will naturally get organic traffic over time as well. And it's a whole lot easier than going, Oh, let's go and help a reporter out and let's try and get on whatever. And then suddenly it's like, Oh yeah, that's great. I've got a little article there on the link, but it's a no follow link or it's whatever it is.

[00:28:54] Stewart Townsend: Suddenly I can get some links on this site, but I've got to pay 2, 000 a month to get these. And it's like, yeah, it's not, and it's 

[00:29:01] Ryan Wardell: not relevant sites either. So there you go. Good, good little hack there. If you're looking for backlinks and you've got a bit of a bit of charisma, you're good in front of a camera or good, good at talking.

[00:29:09] Ryan Wardell: Maybe that's an alternative pathway to building some backlinks as opposed to, yeah, doing that uphill grind of guest posting plus, uh, you know, having to pay for, Backlink placement and everything else. Um, let's, let's go backtrack a little bit. So, so you mentioned that you, you met your co, well, you met your co founder.

[00:29:28] Ryan Wardell: You still haven't physically met, met your co founder, but, um, but you got, cannot got connected, got talking about stuff. You also mentioned Sun Microsystems. Um, what, what is the path in life that led you to starting podcast hawk in the first place? 

[00:29:43] Stewart Townsend: Uh, yeah, it's a bit of an interesting path. So, um, I spent.

[00:29:48] Stewart Townsend: 10 years selling steel, which was very excited. I can tell you. Very exciting. 

[00:29:53] Ryan Wardell: This is how most startup entre, you know, stories begin. I spent a decade selling steel. 

[00:29:59] Stewart Townsend: Yeah, you look at 20 year olds now and they've got their own business and do millions. They didn't sell steel. Um, but yeah, and, and whilst it was there, it was like, I'd sort of, I was 20, I think I was about 25, uh, just had my son and it was like, I can't do this forever.

[00:30:14] Stewart Townsend: This is just like, no disrespect to it. It just wasn't me sort of thing. Um, so I put myself through university, got a degree, um, got my HNC and stuff, got my masters, blah, blah, blah. And son at the time were taking on. It was their last graduate program. So I was 30 when I joined that graduate program with a bunch of 21 year olds at a university.

[00:30:40] Stewart Townsend: He wanted to go and party all the time. Um, I spent 12 to 14 years. I can never remember it. So it's the best company ever. It really was. It's just a shame where it went financially. It was, I can honestly say hand and heart, I would have, I would be there now because it gave you the autonomy. So I created the first startup accelerator program.

[00:31:01] Stewart Townsend: Um, I hasten to add, I'm not big headed about it, but it was like the first one out there, Microsoft came and followed us, but it was just, we'd seen that, that I was out in the space in London. It's like, well, I'm Why are we not selling to Google? Why are we not selling to this thing called Facebook? Twitter was just about, and I went to Austin and I was like, God, what's going on?

[00:31:21] Stewart Townsend: Um, and they gave it, it's like, Oh, okay. Why are we not selling Unix into there? Why are we not selling Solaris? Why aren't we selling our servers? Just come back with a plan then and create this job. So we did create a whole team, had a global team. Um, and then I was just building out our cloud program and we deployed a Two and a half to 3 million worth of kit in Vegas, ready to go.

[00:31:46] Stewart Townsend: But yeah, we weren't financially great and Oracle bought us. I lasted a year at Oracle. Not from a bad sense. It just wasn't, they weren't into the sort of, by then I was like, startup mode. I'd met Mark Zuckerberg. I'd met the Prime Minister. I met the Fonz. Fonz. You know, all these sort of people that you wouldn't normally get in corporate life and Oracle was definitely not going down that route.

[00:32:09] Stewart Townsend: Uh, and then I mentioned Nick Halstead before. I'd sold to Nick, um, some hardware and supported him. And like I did a load of startups. And he'd always said, if, you know, if you're looking for a job and you want to leave, We'll get an extra on investment when I get it and come here and do whatever you do.

[00:32:28] Stewart Townsend: Cause I've got 25 developers and no adults apart from me and I can't be honest being the adult

[00:32:38] Stewart Townsend: with the idea of building out channel, uh, and resellers and marketing agencies to sort of take data to market. Lended up hiring salespeople, doing marketing, organizing hackathons, getting pizza for developers at 11 o'clock at night. Cause they had no ability of trying to ring a phone number because of deep in C code and playing for pin games and stuff.

[00:33:01] Stewart Townsend: And it was awesome. But what it did teach me really quickly was working at a startup is much harder than working at a corporate. I thought a corporate was hard, you know, it wasn't mamzy pamzy corporate. I was running a startup accelerator sort of type thing and nobody got what I did. And there wasn't really that much support.

[00:33:21] Stewart Townsend: Working for a company with 25 people. Yeah, that's tough. I was doing demos with Japan at 11 o'clock at night in bed, waking up in the morning and getting in and not knowing what day it is and working out what we're doing and just. But it was just that he could make decisions really quickly. It was awesome.

[00:33:41] Stewart Townsend: And that sort of led me finally to my last sort of proper job, which is, um, I built out the Zendesk channel team across Europe and the US, uh, pre IPO. So we were, we were 10, no, we have 15 people in Europe and, uh, about 250 people globally. Stayed there for about four or five years. And then again, it just got to a size.

[00:34:06] Stewart Townsend: It was starting to get to 1500, 1600 people post IPO. And I got fed up. I live in Lancashire, so live in middle earth of England. And I literally, I was either on a plane or a train. I was away from home a lot. And it got to a point where it was just, I was getting divorced for the second time because I was never at home and stuff.

[00:34:29] Stewart Townsend: And it was like, right, okay, what do I do now? Then I sort of fell into this world of, I set up my own little consultancy, helping B2B SaaS companies grow and scale through resellers and channel partners, explaining that to most founders who'd never come across it before, but saw it as a way of going indirect and growing that team.

[00:34:51] Stewart Townsend: And then literally, like I say, part of this other mastermind group always wanted to do something on my own or separate or with somebody and me and Ray just have this random conversation and set up this software company. Been, been an interesting journey. 

[00:35:09] Ryan Wardell: There's, there's a few things I want to dig into there.

[00:35:11] Ryan Wardell: Um, especially the resellers and the channel partnerships, because I think a lot of startups that I talk to, they think, right, we need customers. Let's set up some Facebook ads. Uh, we'll do some SEO. Uh, maybe we'll do some social media. Those are like the go to things. And there's all these other ways of acquiring customers.

[00:35:29] Ryan Wardell: They just don't even really, really think about. So I want to ask you some questions about that in just a moment. Um, but first, how did you meet Mark Zuckerberg and the prime minister? How did that come about? 

[00:35:39] Stewart Townsend: Uh, Mark Zuckerberg was a lot easier. So in my. Uh, more youthful days, not that well still now. So basically I used to, I used to, and I still wear, um, flowery shirts, um, basically.

[00:35:53] Stewart Townsend: So you've got to imagine I'm working at a large corporate with half a million trillion people working there. I've been selling to finance. I've got a standard pinstripe bankers suit and such. Suddenly I'm now in a world of where I'm going to. Speak to people like last FM and selling to Spotify and going to events and talking to people.

[00:36:17] Stewart Townsend: Uh, so I'd said to my boss, I need to wear a different attire. I can't go to work in this shirt and tie thing. It's just not going to work. Um, last FM thought when I went into a meeting there, I thought I'd come and shut them down because I turned up in the suit and what was like the investor come and shut them down.

[00:36:32] Stewart Townsend: No more money. They were just in panic stations. So I said, I'm just going to go to work in my jeans and my shirt. And this is in London, the city. And it was like, it was very frowned upon. Literally. I can, I can, I can picture it now as I walked in, it was still the, um, but ironically enough, um, after about 18 months, people got it when we brought in a 5 million plus deal with Spotify for the first thumper storage.

[00:36:59] Stewart Townsend: It was like, ah, Yeah, what are you doing now? Great. Um, but I used to organize events with a couple of friends of mine. So Sam, Sam Sethi is big in the podcasting world and we used to do these crazy things and we set up, um, the first screen. We basically hired a cinema in London for this first screening of the Facebook film, Social.

[00:37:25] Stewart Townsend: God, I can't remember the name of it now. Social network, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in between that, we used to do what was called flowery tweet ups. So you have to wear a flowery shirt, flowery dress. flowery knickers, whatever it was to turn up events. I made a strict door policy. Um, and in between that, I used to host a lot of events at our office in London.

[00:37:52] Stewart Townsend: Um, and Mark Zuckerberg had come across, or it was when Facebook had first started about a hundred people in London, whatever. And he'd heard about this flowery, um, tweet up events. And he'd heard about that we were doing this, um, Like Facebook meetup, but in a flowery sort of sense. And he, he, he came along and Sam.

[00:38:15] Stewart Townsend: I was like, Sam fucking Berg there. And he is like, yeah, no, we're gonna go and say hello and get a picture. I was like, yeah, come on then. So and he was dead, dead chap. He's wearing his like black T-shirt or whatever, and we're like, we we're the organizers and we do this sort of thing. I know it's a bit random.

[00:38:29] Stewart Townsend: You know, we're now doing the flowery Facebook sort of thing. We had the flowery tweet up and it's like, Oh, that's great. Yeah. And yes, we got a picture and met him, chatted for about half an hour. Yeah. It was awesome. 

[00:38:39] Ryan Wardell: Just, I was going to, I was going to say his, his, um, his, his entire wardrobe consists of the one.

[00:38:45] Ryan Wardell: Kind of t shirt. Right. So, so he wasn't wearing a flowery shirt. You couldn't get him to do that. 

[00:38:50] Stewart Townsend: He definitely, yeah, we, we did say to him, we could find him something alone, but it was, there was, it wasn't going there. 

[00:39:00] Ryan Wardell: I was going to say, how, how seriously do you take this flowery shirt policy? Mark Zuckerberg walks in the door and you're like, sorry, I'm going to have to go, you're not dressed for this.

[00:39:10] Ryan Wardell: Oh, geez. That's, that's awesome. And, and, and the prime minister, like how did that come about? I was. Was it, was that the, the flowery shirt as well? 

[00:39:17] Stewart Townsend: That was a little bit more professional. That's quite a lot. That was when sort of the whole tech city was taking off and they were trying to, um, get an understanding of what was happening across, not just London, but across the sort of growing and emerging startup sector in the UK.

[00:39:32] Stewart Townsend: Uh, so there's a group of us that went there. I'd gone representing the sun, but also representing the Northwest because I live in the North of England. Um, so I was the only sort of non Londoner there that was going, there is life outside of London. And that was cool as well. We had nice drinks and stuff and that sort of thing.

[00:39:52] Stewart Townsend: I was wearing a flowery shirt, um, but it give us access to. I think obviously the Sun named it as well. Um, but it just being in that sort of whole startup ecosystem at the time, there was a lot of generated interest from government departments, but also, I know it's sort of a bit left curve, I'm pushing to the right, is I used to bring some of the startup founders and companies into the enterprise sales team and so on and go, right, okay, I'll get 50 of them in a room, come and tell them actually what's happening out there because they sell into large.

[00:40:33] Stewart Townsend: You know, Citibank, Vodafone, and TS Deloitte, whatever, nobody's got any idea what is actually happening and how fast development's happening. So as salespeople, if you can go out and educate Citibank on what's happening across here, so access pay, start up based in Manchester, it's doing this that and the other, and it's solving this problem.

[00:40:55] Stewart Townsend: And we could run it on Solaris and we can do this and we can do it really quickly. Or you could buy your standard enterprise solution. Let's deploy it in two years time. The project's going to fail and it's going to cost you a billion quid. Um, so I bring these young nimble companies in to come and educate them and actually what the accelerated pace was happening in financial services and the healthcare in, you know, sector specific, and that went down really well.

[00:41:18] Stewart Townsend: We used to literally, suddenly went from zero to hero. Cause it was like, I don't know, Stu knows what's going on. I had no idea what was going on. I think 5 percent more than anybody else. It was just bringing people together. That was all. It's literally bring them together, share that knowledge. And it just, you know, it was a win win situation.

[00:41:37] Stewart Townsend: Um, and again, that opened a lot of doors for me to go and sort of meet some industry type people and. Well, basically, let's put it as it is, go, go for drinks, eat some food, go for more drinks and just have a bit of motivation. 

[00:41:53] Ryan Wardell: It's amazing how, um, it does change the relationship a lot. Once you go out for drinks with people, I, I know that, you know, we live in the era of the, of, you know, zoom calls and, and, and everything else.

[00:42:04] Ryan Wardell: But, um, there is no substitute for going out and having a few beers with someone in, in my experience in terms of, you know, if you actually want to establish a relationship with that person, um, but yeah, that, that sounds like it opened a lot of doors for you. Let's go back and I want to get into something a little bit more tactical now.

[00:42:20] Ryan Wardell: So you touched on, uh, channel partnerships and resellers, and I feel like that's a bit of a mystery to a lot of, um, people. A lot of startup founders in general, but SAS founders in particular. Um, if we, can you talk us through step by step, like what is the difference between like how to channel partnerships work and if you don't have one in place and you'll, you'll thinking about setting, setting up a program to do that, how do you go about doing it step by step?

[00:42:49] Stewart Townsend: Um, so channel partnerships are really simple. People just put a complexity around it. So if you look at Microsoft. 95 to 98 percent of their revenue for software goes through channel partners. And the language is a little bit different in the U S but predominantly it's not a big direct sales team. It's a lot of channel managers managing big distribution partners.

[00:43:12] Stewart Townsend: I think, you know, if we look at what channel actually means in direct sales, it's just what it's, what the word says is rather than as a SAS founder, I've got my Me and my family looks like, Oh, well, how are our first sales person? Great. Okay. He can own, he or she can only do so much. Like they can only make so many phone calls or you get an SDR.

[00:43:34] Stewart Townsend: They can only do so much. So it's that pod model into it. Like you've got your pod of people. They can do so much. An indirect sales team is where you as a SAS organization, take your product out as a vendor and go, Hey, Mr. Partner, would you like to sell my customer service solution? I'm Stewart from Zendesk.

[00:43:53] Stewart Townsend: Hmm. Maybe. Yeah. Let's see if there's some, uh, thing we can do here. It's like, right. Okay. Um, I'm a Google workspace partner. I'll say I've got thousands of customers, I sell thousands of seats. It's not, it's not, um, competitive, but it's complimentary. Because like we were saying before, I suddenly launched an AppSumo.

[00:44:14] Stewart Townsend: I've got 500 emails. I've got no idea what's going on. My emails are all coming into Google workspace. It's all just a mess and I'm using labels or I could use a customer service platform. So in a nutshell, from a reseller model, a SaaS founder, a SaaS vendor can go out to a partner that sells into a complimentary type of space and then get access to how many salespeople they've got.

[00:44:37] Stewart Townsend: So they may have three people or five people or 10 people and they have a portfolio of products. But now suddenly you've gone from one direct sales person to, Oh, I've got five or 10 direct salespeople selling my product out to market. And the key key aspect is more than likely they're going out to their existing customer base first.

[00:44:59] Stewart Townsend: So it's warm leads. It's like, Oh, we're going to have a conversation. We've already got customers and we know where they're going to fit, uh, from that side. So it opens that up. There's the aspect of, uh, people don't think of it this way. And it will sort of make a key point of it is if you're looking to expand territory wise, or you may have an existing customer base, you've got a reasonable level of MRR suddenly you get some customers in Australia.

[00:45:24] Stewart Townsend: Awesome. I'm in London. How am I going to service those customers in Australia apart from staying up all day and all night? So it may be you. Implement a service and sales partner in Australia and go, I'm looking for a partner that can help manage my customers. So I'm going to, any leads that come in for APAC, I'm going to pass them back to you.

[00:45:41] Stewart Townsend: You just manage them and you sell to them. So it gives you geographical footprint expansion for, there is a cost cause you're giving margin away, but limited cost from that side. And then the third component is sort of a, a technical integration type, type of partnership where it's like, Actually, I'm going to build some partners that sit in the marketplace.

[00:46:03] Stewart Townsend: So yeah, I'd like to build an integration with Zapier, with Shopify or whoever it is. And it'll sit in that marketplace and then technically it will get pushed and promoted and somebody may buy it. It may sit in Salesforce and such. From that side. And that's, that's a sort of simple, there's, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's a simple kick, kick in the box sort of type of thing.

[00:46:29] Ryan Wardell: So, so there are, there are specific businesses that are reseller businesses. That's their entire business model. They find software and other solutions and then they sell it to their customers and they sort of, they are professional middlemen. They sit in the middle. Is that, is that what you're saying?

[00:46:42] Stewart Townsend: That's 

[00:46:42] Ryan Wardell: what we 

[00:46:43] Stewart Townsend: do all day long. 

[00:46:45] Ryan Wardell: How do you go 

[00:46:45] Stewart Townsend: about finding them? So the easiest way to answer that is let's give you an example. So I'm working with a vendor in, um, a SaaS vendor in the HR sector. The first place I would start is go, let's look at a competitive vendor. So I'm in HR. Let's go and look at what Workday do.

[00:47:06] Stewart Townsend: Okay. Workday do similar sort of stuff. Lots of functionality, but X, Y, Z. Let's see who Workday's partners are. So we could start there. That's one thing is like, okay, let's go and have a look workday. I've got 200 partners X amount are in the UK. I know this on that product, but it gives me like a lookalike audience.

[00:47:23] Stewart Townsend: So I can understand a partnership opportunity in this, in this sector. 

[00:47:27] Ryan Wardell: Sorry. And, and just, just to clarify that. So how do you, how would you find workdays 200 partners? Are they listed on LinkedIn? They listed on the website somewhere. Like, where would you go to find that? 

[00:47:38] Stewart Townsend: website, big enterprises normally like to do logo shine.

[00:47:41] Stewart Townsend: So it's like, here's all our partners are all great. Or like in Microsoft, don't talk to us, go and talk to a partner and we'll list the partner in look for him by geography and about the services they can deliver and stuff. Um, the other component is, and this is always a low hanging fruit and it's like the gold is going to ask your customers.

[00:48:03] Stewart Townsend: You've already got customers, more than likely they've got a service partner, professional services partner, an integration partner, a team that have done stuff or your customers have bought software and it's been through a reseller that may be aligned to the sector you're in. That is always the gold.

[00:48:21] Stewart Townsend: Nobody, but not nobody. Cause I always tell everybody, but it's just, it's the low hanging fruit. It's like, have you asked your customers if they've got any partners that work with them? No. Right. Okay. But why don't you just going to sack cause that's. You know, you've, you've just sold the product to them.

[00:48:39] Stewart Townsend: It may be, they've not took our services for a reason. Cause they've got a service partner. Great. So why don't we go and talk to their service partner? Cause he's got other customers as well. He's got a big sales team. He's got mousetop. There's that. And then there is aspect. So. Again, it sort of comes from just, I suppose, common sense in my side, but just because I've done the role so long, it's like, right, okay, if we're going to sell a product like customer service, it doesn't really fit Magento too much because it's an e commerce platform.

[00:49:12] Stewart Townsend: It's great. But at the end of it, they may only have two customer service agents. So nobody's really interested in that. Google. Yeah, I'm selling thousands of email seats with Google drive, all that sort of aspect. Then I've already got customers that are using the platform as a reseller. I'm looking for value added services as a VAR to attach to that, to my customer.

[00:49:35] Stewart Townsend: So I can keep on making revenue and service revenue. So a customer service platform is like, Oh, That makes sense then because a lot of customer service starts inside an email and then people move out of that into spreadsheets and then they move out of that to actually a customer service platform. So it's about, I suppose, understanding who you're selling to, um, directly, and then looking around that and defining what your partner profile persona is from that, and that's.

[00:50:04] Stewart Townsend: You know, some, some jiggery pokery magic in the background, but it's just, it's that aspect. And then once you define that, then go and test the market and understand what's your objective. I want to sell or want to do services or want to do both. Um, and then go and talk to some of those partners that are not necessarily partnered with your competitors or they could be, but they're looking, your, your product may offer a small bit of functionality that the main features don't.

[00:50:32] Stewart Townsend: It's like, right, okay, we can sell that. 

[00:50:34] Ryan Wardell: So you're almost approaching it the same way that you, you know, in the same way that you would come up with an ideal customer persona for the end customer that you want to send to. You take the same approach, but what you're trying to find is like, okay, what is our ideal partner persona looks like?

[00:50:47] Ryan Wardell: Yeah. Okay. I know there's like, you know, you go to any startup advice and they'll say, talk to your customer, talk to your customer, talk to your customer. But I don't know anyone who's ever talked to a customer and asked them the question, what are the, what other software tools do you use? And do you buy any of them through a reseller?

[00:51:04] Ryan Wardell: That's a question that I don't think ever gets asked. I've never asked that question 

[00:51:08] Stewart Townsend: before. And I can always remember Zendesk when I raised this and sort of got these, I mean, the SDRs and the sales team were quite young. They didn't even know what channel was. So I was educating them on that and it was.

[00:51:21] Stewart Townsend: Just do this one thing for me. That's all you got to do. We're across multiple territories. Just please go and ask who are the other partners? Who are the other resellers? Who else are they working with? And, but what it did for them, it just opened up a different line of conversation. Oh, okay. So you've got DocuSign in there.

[00:51:37] Stewart Townsend: Oh, so you're signing documents. All right. Okay. Oh, we integrated with DocuSign. Did you know that? Or, you know, whatever it may be, it's like, Oh, Right. So let's talk about an integration. So suddenly professional services are involved and it's not secret. Yes. I model as well. Then PS always knows what's going on in the business.

[00:51:53] Stewart Townsend: And once they're in there, like they come back to the sales guy and go, I've got a deal for you. Yeah. They're doing this. So 

[00:52:00] Ryan Wardell: it's been right. And it feeds on itself. Yeah. 

[00:52:03] Stewart Townsend: But I did get that same sort of look of, I don't get why we're asking customers. This, I still don't get it. It's like, yeah. It just ask it naturally and you'll get some responses back and let's see where we get to.

[00:52:13] Stewart Townsend: And that's how predominantly it came up with, um, Google has been a really good choice for resellers because there was a high level of Google reseller relationships in there already. Um, cause they're already selling the email and the drive and all that sort of things. Oh yeah. Even something as simple as like, who do you use for your email services?

[00:52:36] Stewart Townsend: Google. All right. Okay. Do you have a partner that delivers that for you? Oh yeah. It's, it's Bob. Bob does that. Perfect. Let's have a chat with Bob then. 

[00:52:46] Ryan Wardell: And it goes from there. Yeah, that's cool. How, how do you structure an agreement with a reseller or a channel partner? 

[00:52:54] Stewart Townsend: Um, so there's, there's two models.

[00:52:57] Stewart Townsend: We'll, we'll concentrate on reseller cause you can have a referral agreement or a distributor agreement. A reseller is really simple in terms of the sort of legalities. So when you've got a reseller partner selling on behalf of you as a vendor, the structure is a couple of things. One, they buy a discounted price and people always get caught up on this.

[00:53:18] Stewart Townsend: It's like, we're giving margin away. Not even going to go there. Just shut up now. Um, it's like, right. Okay. So we'll, we'll say you're a small SaaS company. So you're going to give 30 percent away. So a hundred dollars C, you're going to sell at 70 to the reseller. Great. So they buy at 70. Um, And the other obligation they have is to pass through your service level agreement, your SLA, your standard terms, pass that through to the, to the client as part of their contract.

[00:53:48] Stewart Townsend: And then that reseller is contractually obliged to you to pay your invoice, pay your invoice for the 70. You are not contractually, if that customer goes bust, disappears and doesn't pay them, Nothing to do with you, the reseller's got to pay you, your payment terms, uh, from that side. Normally the reseller would do a level one support ticket, so it'd come and say, Oh, I can't log in or my password, you know, whatever it may be.

[00:54:14] Stewart Townsend: Um, and then you triage it and the vendor would do level two, level three, et cetera. So you'd have that agreement from that side. And then, Through that partnership, you would, as a vendor, provide them with training, marketing materials, webinars, et cetera. The clarity is, and where people get really sort of in the twist, is that customer is the customer of the re seller.

[00:54:41] Stewart Townsend: Salespeople go mental about this. Cause it's like, Oh, Bob, your reseller has just signed up. Um, Spotify. Oh, well done. That's been great. I'm getting paid. Awesome. Yeah, but I want to speak to Spotify. Tell them I'm going to speak to, no, no contractually. It's not our customer. Our customer is Bob, the reseller.

[00:55:01] Stewart Townsend: We've sold him a license at 70 anything. Yeah. Uh, the only time that customer passes back is if there was a contractual breach, you bring the customer back, but it has to be really clear that. You know, that, that SAS sales organization suddenly thinks the, the CVS input, you know, the, the, the license is going out Spotify that they can talk to them.

[00:55:24] Stewart Townsend: No, they can in a constructive way if they work with the partner, but the customer belongs to the partner from a contractual obligation and from a communication obligation obligation. 

[00:55:36] Ryan Wardell: In that example, let's say Spotify, you got talking to Spotify came through with a support request. You got talking to them, you uncovered that they actually need some professional services that you might also be able to provide as well.

[00:55:49] Ryan Wardell: But the reseller doesn't like if the reseller provide those services, would you have to? Would you be contractually obliged to say, actually, you need to go and go back and talk to Bob about this? Um, or No problem. Would you say actually, yeah, we can provide that service like then, cause that's getting pretty murky.

[00:56:06] Ryan Wardell: How, how do you navigate that? 

[00:56:07] Stewart Townsend: All it always goes 

[00:56:09] Ryan Wardell: Bob, the reseller 

[00:56:11] Stewart Townsend: is his customer. So even though you may have better PS services or Bob may not have the full capabilities in the middle, you'd have something like me. It was a partner manager and go, you know, Bob's my customer. He's my reseller. And it's like, Bob, can you deliver this?

[00:56:28] Stewart Townsend: No, I can do about 50 percent of it. All right. Okay. Well, let's do a co sell. You do that 50, we'll do that 50. We'll, you be the invoice, the contractor and own legalities back, you know, back to back legalities. Um, and we'll, we'll come in and provide the resource to do that. So I've done that on a couple of occasions.

[00:56:47] Stewart Townsend: And also what I used to do a lot and still do is. As companies grow, you get a partner council to get all partners together, but also get them cross selling and working together. So you may have a partner front end UI, UX type stuff, which was a biggie at Zendesk. I want it red, not green. I want this button there and get them.

[00:57:09] Stewart Townsend: So resellers were buying services off each other, uh, from that side as well. Again, helped us. We could focus our service delivery to our top tier clients where we were getting revenue against it. But also, you know, as a, as a SAS founder, you're looking at, okay, I'm looking at my forward projection. My operational costs are the most expensive piece, which is people.

[00:57:33] Stewart Townsend: How many, do you want to be a service company? No, because any investor doesn't want to say that you're a 40 percent service business. You want to see the MRR. Just like chunking, it's waging the nice hockey stick and any salesperson will always give away. So if they're a smart salesperson, we'll always discount or give away services rather than MRR.

[00:57:53] Stewart Townsend: It's the crumbs, uh, from that side. So it's always a nice thing because it's like, Oh, actually let's, let's work with our partners because they can be our service lead. We can reduce our operational costs, not be a service like company, a software, be a software like company. 

[00:58:10] Ryan Wardell: Right. Okay. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:58:13] Ryan Wardell: And, um, how do you motivate the resellers to drive the sales for, you know, I mean, if you're not the only thing that they're reselling, if there's 20 different products that they're reselling, how do you get kind of the mind share and the focus among their, their sales reps to be actually, I want you to push our product or our service.

[00:58:32] Stewart Townsend: Um, so, um, again, as you get a sort of a more mature program. You'd have this thing called market development funds. So anytime a sale was made by a reseller, a margin of that sale would go into a pot and you'd pass that pot back for them to do market development. So outbound calling, et cetera. When you're a scrappy startup and you're inside Zendesk or wherever, and there's like no other people apart from Nick, the marketing guy, you make things up basically, um, but you support them in terms of.

[00:59:07] Stewart Townsend: Again, it could be doing lead pass back. So if you've got some leads that are good for them to get the incentive out, you can pass those back. You do joint webinar activities with them, make sure the sales guys are trained. And again, like we talked about earlier, go and, so if they're in, you know, if you're in the UK and they're in the UK, Go and socialize with them.

[00:59:28] Stewart Townsend: I just had a conversation this morning about this and we'd set up, um, you know, set up this, this sort of partner type activity and thing going on. Um, where there was a vendor that was bringing all their sales people, their customer success people, marketing people into their one event and partners who could, uh, go along to it.

[00:59:50] Stewart Townsend: And it's not my client, so I didn't go, but it's the best opportunity to go and have a drink with somebody and get absolutely slaughtered. Cause that's, that's how it is. It's just, I know it's a very UK thing. We don't go out drinking at lunchtime anymore, but it's just suddenly that. Vendor that, um, has got a relationship with that partner and knows the five sales guys, knows the customer success team.

[01:00:17] Stewart Townsend: And they're like, Oh yeah, we had a great time. Didn't we? It's like, yeah, great. Yeah. Remember you said you can introduce me to that customer at Votion. Oh yeah, no problem. Yeah. I'm seeing them next week. Why don't you, in fact, why don't you just come for a drink with us? Don't bother. It breaks those barriers.

[01:00:32] Stewart Townsend: So it's. Essentially indirect is the same as direct. It's just, you've got a third party. So you're not selling to the customer, you're selling to that vendor and to that seller, and it's building that relationship with them. It's a relationship all the way through. So it's a standard sort of stuff that you do.

[01:00:50] Stewart Townsend: Um, But with a reseller rather than with a customer. 

[01:00:55] Ryan Wardell: So it's not just this one and done. Great, cool. Here's the reseller agreement. Signed. Fantastic. We don't have to touch this ever again. No, no, no. You're constantly feeding it. I wouldn't be at a consult or have a job or do 

[01:01:05] Stewart Townsend: anything if it was that. I mean, there is that.

[01:01:08] Stewart Townsend: People do do that. And that's, that's, that's vanity contracts. So basically it's like, it's a little bit like Microsoft. Microsoft say, We've got a hundred thousand resellers globally. Now, what they have is a hundred thousand contracts with probably like the standard principle, you know, 20, 000 of them doing a transaction over time, and that may be, then you narrow it down to 500 of them are doing.

[01:01:32] Stewart Townsend: Ongoing transactions on a monthly basis. And the rest are doing sporadic ones every quarter. And then some are just doing one a year. 

[01:01:39] Ryan Wardell: Are there, are there any other common mistakes or pitfalls that people make when it comes to channel partnerships and resellers? Here's 

[01:01:46] Stewart Townsend: my 

[01:01:47] Ryan Wardell: big bug 

[01:01:47] Stewart Townsend: bear. And I have this on when I'm trying to educate people about channel.

[01:01:54] Stewart Townsend: So always treat your channel, whether it's a, not a reseller or distributor, you know, what, whatever model is treat them as if they work for the company. What, what tends to happen is, Oh, we've got this reseller now. It's great. Let's sign them up. Fantastic. Great. Um, but don't tell them anything. We're doing a feature release.

[01:02:16] Stewart Townsend: We can't tell them about that. Oh, we're doing a price increase. Oh, you can't tell them. No, it'll get out. Look, you know, it's under NDA. Yeah, that's why we've got a relationship. We've got an NDA contract with them. What happens is, and it really annoys me is that it's dead simple is I'm a SaaS founder, I've built my company up, I'm doing well, I've done my revenue.

[01:02:37] Stewart Townsend: Right. Okay. The investor has said I need to hire salespeople. Great. So I'm going to hire 10 salespeople. Boom. I've got 10 salespeople on board. What am I going to do? I'm going to onboard them. I'm going to train them. Going to give them all the resources they need to being successful and really invest in them.

[01:02:54] Stewart Townsend: Why would you not do that with a channel partner? A lot of people think, Oh, I've got my channel partnership. I've got a contract now just, yeah, can't tell them that we can't invite them to sales meetings. We can't invite them to onboarding. It's like, no, the, the part of the company, there's a contractual aspect there that says we're a reseller, but it may be, they're only selling our product and to others.

[01:03:17] Stewart Townsend: All complimentary. And that's the worst mistake any SAS company makes is treating their channel partnerships as if the third level citizens shouldn't somewhat. It's just, it just really annoys me. It really does. Um, because you wouldn't. invest that much money in a salesperson and then not give them the tools or the information for success.

[01:03:39] Stewart Townsend: You know, just leave them in the corner and hope it's all going to be okay. Um, so what I used to do is as I brought a new on board, uh, channel partner on board it, um, we stopped doing this after a while. It's all going to sound glamorous, isn't it? But anybody that joins Zendesk would go to Dublin and do Four days of training.

[01:03:58] Stewart Townsend: So in dockeration of like who sent us gears and what the product is and messaging. And of course a reseller wouldn't send all that team, but I'd say the option is every month in Dublin, you get a chance to send somebody across, not all the time, because there's going to be some stuff that's just not relevant and it's sensitive as such, but maybe do two days of it.

[01:04:20] Stewart Townsend: And then you get to meet people that sit in customer success, marketing sales. And then, you know, who people are as well. A hundred percent of my partners invested people who come from Israel, from Malta, uh, from Northern Europe, Southern Spain, everywhere, just to just have those couple of days and see the value in it.

[01:04:41] Stewart Townsend: And it, and it made a massive difference. It took me about six months to persuade the company to let me do it. And once they got it, it was like, Oh, great. Yeah. Cause now they've just indoctrinated. It was like they were part of the company. It's like, Oh yeah, I know, I know it's a ring. I don't even have to ring Stu anymore.

[01:04:56] Stewart Townsend: I just go straight through to, um, the chap that I met though. I went for a Guinness with in Dublin. 

[01:05:02] Ryan Wardell: Right, right. Okay. Okay. I'm with you. I'm with you is, uh, if, if you're gonna make that kind of an investment though, because obviously it takes time and money to train channel like resellers as well as it your own, your own sales team.

[01:05:16] Ryan Wardell: Um, how long do you typically make one of those reseller agreements go for? Is it, is it, is it 12 months? Is it three years? Is it five years? Like, what does, what does that kind of duration look like? 

[01:05:28] Stewart Townsend: Uh, again, so they normally just start out as 12 month recurring contracts because it's, it's a bad directional relationship.

[01:05:34] Stewart Townsend: It's not just you investing. Like I say that, you know, partners, some people across the Dublin or they've invested time. And then also they're doing outbound marketing as well. So. that when they sign that contract, there's probably been anywhere from six to eight months of conversations and persuading negotiation to get them to that point.

[01:05:58] Stewart Townsend: The minute they sign, literally they're like, right, okay, let's get started. Give me all the resources. Let's go now. And they're not looking at an end game in terms of it's a three year, five year agreement. I see now. So I left Zendesk, I think it was like seven years ago or six years ago. And, um, we had a reunion about a couple of months ago, very tiring evening.

[01:06:22] Stewart Townsend: It was, um, I was just chatting about the sort of number of partners and such that are still, that I signed up in my first six months are now still with Zendesk. I still have conversations with them. Um, so, you know, they, they've been a Zendesk partner over 10 years. If a 12 month recurring contract, if that makes sense, because they've invested as much as Zendesk had invested into that relationship.

[01:06:48] Ryan Wardell: I've got a couple more questions for you. Um, first one is relating this back to podcasts. So I was talking to a guy the other day who said that he's using podcasts in a really interesting way. So, so he's a guest on podcasts. Uh, but he also has his own podcast that he launched after a while. He built up a bit of a name for himself being, being a guest on others for a while.

[01:07:10] Ryan Wardell: Um, and, and when he hosts his own podcast, the kind of guests that he's looking for, uh, business owners that he wants to partner with or people that he eventually wants to sell to. And he uses his podcast as a, basically a way of sort of flying under the radar a little bit and getting straight through to the decision maker.

[01:07:26] Ryan Wardell: At, at a company. Is that something that you've seen? Is that a way that you've seen people use podcasts before? Or, um, is that. I love this. 

[01:07:35] Stewart Townsend: Yeah. So, um, I was working with a company under my consulting. So basically, basically to anybody that's listening, I've got about 3 million hats. One, I have to consult to pay some money.

[01:07:45] Stewart Townsend: I put it into my software company to grow it. So I don't have to consult. It's the standard dilemma of a founder, isn't it? Um, and one of the companies I was consulting with, I was trying to get Uh, the founder there, cause he's got really good stories. He's been around a bit and stuff to do, to, to be a guest on podcasts and obviously using podcast Hawken, et cetera.

[01:08:06] Stewart Townsend: And we were talking and talking, it's like, Oh, I just don't really fancy that sort of thing. And then it was like, well, the other option is. We built this channel partnerships and it wasn't really sort of moving forward because it's a bit of a tight space. He didn't have the resources to put into it. And the SDRs were doing outreach and cold emails and standard thing.

[01:08:26] Stewart Townsend: And it was, why don't we just do a beat, not we really do a B2B podcast, which is. When your SDRs are reaching out, not the standard thing of, Oh, I've got this feature and it's really great. And it's lovely is like, we'd like you to be on our podcast, come and tell us your story about what you do in the HR sector and blah, blah, you know, whatever it was, the conversion on that a hundred percent, like literally people are like, Oh, I'll sign up for that.

[01:08:53] Stewart Townsend: Um, so it's exactly that model that, that, that's again, it's a secret source, right? It's a secret source. So I, what I, what I tend to say to people is be a guest first, get warmed up to it, get used to public speaking and all that, get your infrastructure set up because being a host, you've got the hardest job.

[01:09:11] Stewart Townsend: I'm simple. I'm, I'm going for my tea after this. I don't have to worry. You've got to do the editing and all that. So I say to anybody, it's not simple. Um, you can get larger agencies to do it for you, but, but that model of reach out to your target customer base to invite them on your B2B podcast about the sector that you're involved in, asking them questions that are relevant, but also.

[01:09:35] Stewart Townsend: Insightful to you. And at the end of it, it's sponsored by you as the, the SAS company and it's little, little push. And I've seen it. I've seen that gain a lot more traction over the last six months. People start to twig onto that a lot more because it's just a warm way and the convert, I can't tell you his conversion rate, but the conversion rate is.

[01:09:59] Stewart Townsend: Is good.

[01:10:05] Stewart Townsend: It's literally, it's like an outbound message to a podcast, to a converted sale. Yeah. Because again, it's like you build that relationship with a customer before the customer. Um, you've, you've. Sharing their story, but also that customer sharing outside network. You've got free reach into their network and they're in the same sector that you want to sell into.

[01:10:28] Stewart Townsend: So, so again, we use the word Bob, the name Bob, Bob from XYZ company is well respected in that sector. And he's sharing his podcast about him being on this podcast. Yeah. So it's like, ah, okay. So that's XYZ SaaS company. Oh, right. Okay. I'm going to have a look at that because Bob's been on it. Oh, great. Yeah.

[01:10:46] Stewart Townsend: Yeah, it's just secret source, total secret source. 

[01:10:51] Ryan Wardell: But starting point is get on other people's podcasts first, get used to it, build a bit of an audience, use that as some, some credibility that you can leverage and then maybe think about, um, using it as a B2B channel inbound. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

[01:11:05] Ryan Wardell: Um, Stewart, the second last question. Um, do you have any other advice that you would give to a sass founder? Just starting out? Especially, you know, maybe they're interested in channel partnerships. Maybe they're interested in in podcasts. Maybe they're kind of juggling that whole, you know, I'm still doing a bit of consulting, but also building the software business at the same time, like that kind of stage.

[01:11:25] Ryan Wardell: What would you, what would you say to them? 

[01:11:27] Stewart Townsend: Um, I'm just going to be. Pretty boring and say, I have a really good calendar. This, I can't remember, I can never remember the word when I try and sort of describe it, but, um, contextual switching, that's the thing. So as a founder, if you're doing, Um, you know, you've got a great idea and it's like, right, okay.

[01:11:48] Stewart Townsend: I'm either doing a side hustle because I've got a proper job or I'm a consultant doing something and I've said it either, either way, it's contextual switching into the best advice. I would say is have a really organized calendar blocks out time because my human brain. And most people's can't cope with contextual switch.

[01:12:10] Stewart Townsend: And it's literally, it's like, right, okay. Um, you know, this morning I'm doing channel stuff. I'm talking to companies about channel and resellers. And then five minutes later I'm switching to, Oh, I've got to build a marketing campaign for podcast talk. My brain's like, Oh, that's a bit dull. Let's go eat some biscuits instead.

[01:12:28] Stewart Townsend: That's more fun. Um, it's hard, isn't it? So I think being very organized. Helps you plan and as a founder of right. Okay. What's the direction of this company? Because if I'm going to put time and effort into it, I'm going to invest that time to focus on that, whether it's a day or half a day or whatever it may be just on that.

[01:12:48] Stewart Townsend: It can't be, which is what I used to try and do was, Oh, I'm doing my channel consulting. I've got a couple of clients. It's great. And I try and sort of manage two or three clients. And they'd be in different sectors and my brain was like, Oh, no, brain cells. Now just switch off. It's too hard. Um, so no, it's pretty dull.

[01:13:06] Stewart Townsend: It's pretty common sense. But I think that time management is when I spoke to a lot of sort of founders in startup land, Sun and Oracle and that sort of thing, their idea of time management was, I've got, I've got a meeting booked for coffee with Bob and I'm going to see Bill for another coffee. And it's like, right.

[01:13:27] Stewart Townsend: Okay. That time is valuable. Quantify it. Yeah. What's the outcome? What is the objective of meeting Bob? What's the outcome and how much time are you going to put into it before that meeting? Great. Was it a value? And your calendar helps you structure that because you just put it in there and then you look at it and go, I mean, now we've got zoom and all that.

[01:13:45] Stewart Townsend: It's just a bit rubbishy into it. It's not the same sort of thing, but I'm still the same as like, do I need to meet Bob? It's 15 minutes of my life. What am I getting? And it sounds a bit sort of selfish, but what am I going to get from it? Is it a value? No, actually I'm not doing it at that time because that's my podcast talk time.

[01:14:03] Stewart Townsend: So I'm not interrupting that to have a call about channel stuff. Um, that, that's the way I sort of look at things. If I was a founder starting off is, is really sort of be aggressive about your time management, produce your contextual switching and just be accepted of don't do lots of meetings for me and say, if you're going to meet somebody, What's the objective and be honest with yourself.

[01:14:27] Stewart Townsend: Like I'm meeting this PR lady on Thursday and it's around podcast talk, I've put the time in, but I've been honest going, this is probably going to be a bit more of a marketing type message than a sales type message. It's probably, it's going to reach out to her. It's a connotation sort of thing. So I'm not.

[01:14:43] Stewart Townsend: Thinking of it from that side. So yeah, half an hour, that's fine. And it means I get out of the house and go meet a human being. Great. Um, so, you know, it's setting those objectives around it. 

[01:14:54] Ryan Wardell: I, uh, I have a really good friend. So I, the only danger with that is I think as a startup founders, we can get so sucked into that.

[01:15:01] Ryan Wardell: We try and optimize our time probably a little bit too much. I had, I had a friend recently and I said, Oh yeah, I absolutely want to meet up with you. Yeah. Just, just send me a calendar invite. And she was mortified. She was Ryan. You're, I'm a friend of yours. Like, if you want to meet up for dinner, I'm not going to send you a bloody calendar invite.

[01:15:16] Ryan Wardell: You do that. You put it in there yourself, but let's just be a bit human about it. It's probably fair enough. 

[01:15:20] Stewart Townsend: Oh yeah. Cause one final note on that as well, just to go back to human beings again, is that I've pushed back a lot on that lately in terms of let's sort of put a zoom link or a calendar invite and stuff.

[01:15:30] Stewart Townsend: And with some things it's like, literally I've got this thing called a phone and it's got a number and you can just ring me. Because you're my mate. Why am I setting up a calendar invite to have a chat about? The football or whatever. 

[01:15:46] Ryan Wardell: I, I, it's so easy to slip into that too, but yeah, I, I need to, you know, catch myself sometimes when I, when I, 

[01:15:53] Stewart Townsend: yeah.

[01:15:53] Stewart Townsend: I think over the last couple of years, we've been not programmed, but it's just become natural to do that. Ain't it? And I found it really hard to switch out of it, but it's just a couple of people have just been like, nope. Just WhatsApp me, ring me, whatever sort of thing, because it's that same thing.

[01:16:07] Stewart Townsend: Cause it is, you just start to treat your friends as business partners in a sense of business people and going, put an invite in so we can have a chat. Yeah. What's wrong? You used to ring me. It's like, what's wrong with that? So yeah, we need to get all that. It's 

[01:16:21] Ryan Wardell: hard, but yeah. Absolutely. Um, for, for anyone who's listening or watching, who's interested in podcast hawk or in getting in contact with you, what's, what's the best way to get in touch?

[01:16:33] Stewart Townsend: Um, yeah, so I'll send the link through, um, to put in the description, but yeah, podcasthawk. com. Perfect website there. You'll go and any messages that come through there, come through to me, um, Stewart at podcasthawk. com. Spam the hell out of me if you want to, it's fine from that side. And then also I think sort of a good place just to try and get a connection is just on LinkedIn as well.

[01:16:56] Stewart Townsend: So we can share that link. Um, I'm totally open to people if they want to have a conversation, I did say about time management, but you know, if they want a little bit more, I suppose, information on channel and podcasting the benefits. I'm happy to talk about that because the more I can educate people, the better.

[01:17:14] Ryan Wardell: Fantastic. I'll put all those links in the description. Uh, so people can find you more easily if they want to. Stewart, it's been a pleasure, buddy. Thank you so much for coming on board and we'll speak again soon. 

[01:17:23] Stewart Townsend: No, it's cool. Great. Great chatting to you around. Awesome time.