Do you really think you need to hire a strategist?

Yash From Momentum (00:00)

Hello, and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting, often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for this show, where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Judah from OneTab .ai. OneTab .ai is a unified platform.

designed to improve developer productivity. It brings together chat, Kanban, CI, CD, documentation, APIs, and a lot more in One single place. We're excited to hear the story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive into the world of SaaS. Hey, Judah. Thank you for joining us. How are you doing today?

Judah Guber (00:51)

Hi Yash, I'm great, great. Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.

Yash From Momentum (00:55)

And thank you. Thank you for doing this as well. I want to start right off the bat by just trying to understand the problem that One tab .ai solves. Like what's the big challenge that One tab is solving today.

Judah Guber (01:06)

Sure, so it's kind of interesting that there's so many aspects of industries where streamlining is very important and you figure that One of the industries that that would be a focus on would be the development of technology, but software development itself is still a very disjointed process. are, you have to subscribe to, know, whether you have 5 platforms, 8 platforms, 10 platforms, there's not a unified solution for any of this. know, minimum need, chat,

project management, continuous integration and deployment. So it goes on and on. Now that's One issue. One issue is having to jump from platform to platform. The second issue is in the world of AI, you can't use an AI approach. You have no holistic data to have AI analyze if you're using 8 or 10 different platforms. So One tab,

the importance of One tab is unifying that process, is streamlining that all into One platform. So you can have AI optimize the process, ask questions to the platform, answer questions, and basically have it all in One place and not have to jump from subscription to subscription to platform to platform. You have it all in One place. You can analyze and get insights that you would never be able to get in the formerly used disjointed approach.

Yash From Momentum (02:26)

That's interesting because, and I relate to both of these problem statements because we use GitLab for CI, CD and we use Asana for our Kanban project task management and then Slack for communication and so on and so forth. it's always a challenge because I have to go out and tell someone, hey, I just sent out a message. Can you check that out if it's urgent? But then they update on Asana and then I get a notification on my

scale, and stuff like that. So that's interesting. And we've started using AI to improve developer productivity as well. And I sort of relate to the second challenge as well, which is fairly interesting. And so as on -date, how would you describe the, like, if we were to give the audience who are watching or listening to this episode an idea of size and scale of operations at One time?

Could you share some metrics, some indicator that will help us understand, like, is it team members? Is it the amount of users who are using the platform? What metric can you share with us that will help us understand the size and scale at One time?

Judah Guber (03:28)

Sure, like every company at this stage, like revenue is nice, but users is really nice. Like that's what you want at a stage like this, because it makes you understand. First, you reach a point of product validation, and then you're searching for a point of product fit. So that's kind of the path that we're on right now. We've kind of reached product validation. Now we're on the way to product fit. So users is a metric, especially active users who are on the platform every day.

We have hit 500 organizations on the platform. have about 4 to 5 ,000 developers, about 1 to 2 ,000 that are active on a daily basis. But this is something that we've ramped up to this point in a very short amount of time.

The entire entity of One tab is less than a year old. we've gotten to this point. And this is not a white labeled solution. This is a solution that we built completely in -house.

We have experience in the IT world through myself and some of my co -founders. through that understanding of the pain points and knowing what we need, we're able to build a solution and a platform pretty quickly, but we're continuously optimizing it. And that's why I like to think of OneTab as for developers by developers so that when they have feedback, we knock it out, we figure out, this is exactly what they're looking for. This will help them a lot. They need this

and we're not too big to move the ship a little bit if we need to tweak something to give it to our customers.

Yash From Momentum (04:56)

Yeah, 2000 daily active users out of 5000 registered users, like 40 % daily active users. And that's, I would say a monumental achievement within a year. And that I think speaks volumes about the fact that I think the founding team has a lot of experience. You had a lot of stints in leadership positions. And I think the co -founders that you have also have had

You know experience building products like these before and I think a complete journey from founding to to an exit so they've done that journey as well and so that's That's that's that's great. And so the point that I would like to dive in a little deeper in this journey is is from a go -to -market standpoint and so tell us a little bit about So so I understand that the product is great for developers Perfect, but from the developers standpoint, how do you

the ideal customers because the customers are still businesses I'm assuming. And so from the business standpoint like how do you know that okay agencies or small business or mid -market or enterprise what was your journey of figuring out who the ideal customers are here.

Judah Guber (05:59)

OK, so yeah, think to the best explain that, I'll touch on the founding team refer to the last question a little bit because I think it's important to understand how we got to our ICPs. So I, myself, have been in marketing and sales for a little over 15 years, most recently at a data SaaS company. So I kind of understand a lot about go to market, understand what we need.

the other founders, our CEO, Saket Dandodia, our CTO, Alec Potil, they had already created a major gen AI company that ended up becoming a video verse, which is huge, huge tagging key sports moments, valuation near billion dollars. So they have had an understanding of this and prior to

They have been in the IT world for a number of years. So their experience in the IT world running an IT company is what kind of brought OneTab out. They understood the pain points of not only having so many different platforms, but having to jump around, manage subscriptions. You have 7 developers with 6 seats on Trello and then...

8 developers with 10 seats available on Slack. it's hard to figure that out and to execute with that much disorganization. So that's why IT companies were our number One target. It's something that made sense because it was One of the main reasons, One of the main drivers behind building OneTab was as

solution that we had during the process of operating an IT company. There are also companies, this is early stage before we had a lot of the migrations and the integrations we have, but companies that don't necessarily have a fully developed tech stack yet. They were still working on it. These are our two early ICPs because they were going to be the easiest people to kind of transition onto the platform.

that didn't have a loyalty and say that we've really been using Jira or something for a very long time and we don't really want to move over. Even if we create an easy way to move over, some people

are kind of get stuck in a way of thinking. And once they move over One or two things into One tab, they get, this is really easy. We create very easy migrations, very easy integration. But the companies that are kind of mid -size that don't have a fully established foundational way of doing things yet, tended to be our easiest to get onto the platform.

So those were our two main ones. And then we've had a lot of interest from, you know, kind of through some of our go -to -market efforts, we've found companies that we wouldn't necessarily be on our ICP list initially, but, you know, they seem to want something like One tab, which kind of.

changed how we think about it. So if I had One point of learning here or advice is don't get married to create an ICP, but don't get married to an ICP too early because you really don't know what your ICP fully is until you actually see who is signing up on the platform. It goes from theoretical to real life after a little bit.

Don't say, no, that doesn't make any sense. That's not our ICP. Say, I think I have to change a little bit about what I thought our ICP was.

Yash From Momentum (09:20)

Yeah, and so this is something that I've seen a lot of founders miss out on because in early stages what happens is that your MVP sort of is great for a particular ICP, but then there is a use case for another ICP that your MVP sort of fulfills, and then they start to use it. And so both the product.

Like the journey from MVP to PMF is basically discovery of both the ICP as well as the product itself as well. So both of them sort of work in tandem. And it's at PMF that you are really able to say that, OK, now I know that this is the product and this is the market. And then this is where we want to grow for the next few years or next few quarters or whatever the case may be. And that sort of.

One of the things that stands out in this conversation is is that in a very short amount of time you've been able to reach out to a large number of people, right? For 5 ,000 people to sign up to One tab, it essentially would mean that you have close to probably 50 ,000 people having visited One tab at some point of time at a generous 10 % conversion rate, right? From website to sign up. What is the, if you're comfortable sharing, what's the software stack?

Judah Guber (10:24)

Mm -hmm.

Yash From Momentum (10:33)

that you use for go to market at One time. What's the CRM that you use and what's the data measurement platforms that you use, reports that you use, the key metrics that you measure.

Judah Guber (10:44)

Sure. So some of it is repeatable and some of it is something that you can say, this is what I suggest. Some of it is the help of having a previously successful team of founders who, you know, people might want to know what you're doing next. So obviously if you can attach people to that, that's a big help. We use a lot of the standard stuff of, you know, for in terms of sourcing databases, Zoom info, HubSpot is what we use for our CRM just because I've had a lot of

with it over the years. I'm not going to say it's the, I think there are different CRMs that are good for different use cases. I think HubSpot works really well for kind of what we're doing in terms of adaptability, ease of use, number of people who you bring on to be on your go -to -market team. Very easy to learn if they don't have a deep understanding of it yet. So that's kind of our current stack right now. We

Like a lot of our stuff is based off of user engagement. It's internal tools that we've built. like our user engagement tools, our admin dashboard, like I said, we come from an IT world. We built this platform from scratch. So a lot of our tools are also bespoke in terms of like what we're doing. if we want something to exist and it doesn't exist, then we can build it. So it's an advantage that I would say that it's something. But I will say this.

that in terms of looking for what you want in your go -to -market tech stack is, is don't get hung up on what is out there. People and companies will customize certain things that you require. And it's like ordering off, it's like, we want to order off the menu because this is something that maybe doesn't work exactly for our type of company. So you request something and say, I'm willing to sign on. I've been involved in a number of

negotiations to get onto these platforms, both at this company and other companies. And you'd be surprised how customizable they're willing to be as long as you go to them in the right way. But yeah, those are kind of our main tech stack right now.

Yash From Momentum (12:47)

And then this sort of brings me to my next question, which is where One of the things that I was advised as well, and I had a SaaS company which we founded, built, grew, exited before Momentum. so One of the things that SaaS founders typically say is don't offer a free plan, a free forever plan. You always want to charge something, you want to give them a trial.

However, you do see that some of the really largest SaaS companies, like HubSpot and ClickUp, have a very generous free plan. And you do have a generous free plan as well. What's the thought process? Is it a time bound thing? Because earlier you mentioned that users and engagement and feedback and learning from that is important at this point of time. But what's the thought process behind having super generous free plan at One time?

Judah Guber (13:34)

So I've seen that like it's not exactly a transition of a model, but this the model of getting users on the platform, having them get very accustomed to it and being One of the early adopters into it. And we feel as much more important than making an extra, you know, a couple thousand dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, whatever it is, we feel like this is more advantageous. If you look at the model of a lot of very successful companies, Uber, Airbnb,

This is their, you know, they actually are tech companies, they're, they're, you know, modeled as different companies, but they are, they were lost leaders. They were not companies that were trying to scratch out every dollar in the beginning. They wanted to get users on site. Every social media company that's successful right

wanted to get users on the site and cared about monetizing it later. So once you have brand loyalty and customer loyalty and they really appreciate they were part of the building of the product that they see today, they're a lot more likely to stick with you than, you know, somebody being more impressed because your MRR is, you know, 10 ,000 more dollars a month. doesn't move the needle as much as lot of founders think.

Yash From Momentum (14:41)

Interesting. I got my short video. Because this sort of goes against what most SaaS founders advise. And this really needs some amount of exploration, because not enough has been said about the benefits of having a free forever plan out there for SaaS companies specifically. Because in SaaS,

Judah Guber (14:44)

Hehehehehe

Yash From Momentum (15:04)

More often than not, user engagement is measured by a, like it's One of the things that you measure. But typically, like if you ask any SaaS founder, what are the key metrics that you track? They'd say, you know, net revenue retention. They talk about net MRR growth or churn or engagement, retention rates and whatever. But this is something that very few people sort of talk about. So that's interesting.

Judah Guber (15:28)

I'll also tell you why our platform is a little different in that sense is that you're getting full value once you're using it with more people. you know, there's a user feedback loop there much like any other chat platform. The more people toward team members that you invite to the platform, the more use you get out of it. So our freemium plan is to kind of get people to first see the platform. But if they want real value, they're going to have to be a part of the platform,

an actual plan. So our plan is to kind of get people to see the power of the platform. And then once there, they become a part of it, they grow, they invite team members. I think that is the kind of a more of a long term success plan as opposed to the other One where

you know, might make your seed round a little easier because you have an extra. But if you're not as dependent on trying to quickly impress an investor because you have an upcoming seed round and you're able to really try to build a long -term, put a long -term strategy in place, you can do different things. That's also the benefit of having, you know, founders and a team that have been through building other platforms before. They know

Short -term success doesn't denote long -term success.

Yash From Momentum (16:39)

Yeah, no,

That's a great insight and that's going to be helpful in terms of thinking from a perspective that nothing is true forever. It's true for a particular context and there is a different context or a different set of circumstances that exist where there is another way of thinking about it which sounds counter -intuitive in the current context that you are in. So that's a great way to go about it. The other question that...

That I also have is One of the other things that folks say a lot of times is that if your central pitch is that we have 5 tools in One, 7 tools in One, 3 tools in One, you're not great at doing One thing really well, but you're sort of average or above average at doing everything. And so,

So how do you at One tab ensure that they are able to get value of each One of those tools? Unified experience is the value proposition. But how do you ensure that they're able to get value equivalent or a little more than each One of those tools?

Judah Guber (17:41)

So the unified experience is a value proposition. Our AI capabilities is also a value proposition. So something that they wouldn't be able to access by having a bunch of different platforms. But we're also continuously building integrations. we're going to make it easier and easier that if there are specific platform that you're like, this is something that works really well for me, we're going to work out a way to get that included involved

One tab in terms of integration. We think that our features will stand up against any other platform and you won't have any issue. I'm sure there'll be features that, and that's also part of the process that we're gonna see certain features that we're gonna build out so much more because the user said, wow, this is so much of a better user experience than anything I had at this company or that company. So we're gonna,

And then they're going to want to use more of One tab because they want everything in One place. So I actually fully agree with you that having a value proposition of just doing everything isn't necessarily a strategy, but as the process goes and they say, this is something that we really like.

And these are the tools that are being used the most. That would be part of our core suite. And then the upsell is the other aspects of OneTab plus the AI and being able to ease of managing subscriptions. can't overstate how important it is to certain companies. Whether they're in the US or emerging markets, by the way, it's not. Because the main difference is US, they care less about budget than they do about

Yash From Momentum (19:03)

It is.

Judah Guber (19:14)

and optimization. Emerging markets, they kind of care a little bit more about both. So this is an approach that actually works well either way.

Yash From Momentum (19:19)

But it's, yeah.

Judah Guber (19:22)

But may have, you know, right now has an additional selling point for emerging markets, but the USA, they want efficiency. They want, they want AI, they want the latest thing. So they want to be the ability to be able to find out what tickets were worked on by which developer that day. Are there any redundancies? What are deep developer insights that they can, you know, you can ask the platform about. So there, there are a lot of aspects there that are not included in just saying it's just purely a unified platform.

Yash From Momentum (19:50)

How do you, like this brings me to, so this is like everything about One tab, your thought process, how you discovered your ICP, what are the go -to -market software stack that you have, pricing and a couple of those things. How do you do your goal setting? So what should we do in the next 3 months? What should we, where should we be in the next 12 months? What are some frameworks that you use to figure out? I think you're a good 40 people team

across all the initiatives that you have. How do you do goal setting for a team that may get at the skill that you are at? So what's the thought process?

Judah Guber (20:20)

Mm -hmm.

So right now, like I said, we're kind of past the product validation part. We're trying to get that product fit part so that there are some internal metrics that we use for customer engagement and user engagement and seeing how happy they are. I know I spoke a lot about the MRR and ARR thing. Main goal, 1 million ARR. It's something that is just something that is kind of a milestone of any SaaS company that you want to hit that. it's not just so you know that they're both kind of

using the platform, you have both kind of small teams and larger established teams that are on the platform. So that's something that we would like to hit this year, hopefully. that, and we have a number of users that we're also kind of looking for. like you said, daily active users are something that we monitor very closely because we can have sign ups and we could say they're users. But if they're not using the platform,

So I think a lot of it has to do with internal user engagement. But obviously, we're a SaaS company, and we're also judged by some of the metrics that other SaaS companies are judged by. So we just have a little more flexibility in terms of how we're doing things due to our founding team. We're not necessarily tied into, we have to do it this way to show this traction by this point. We can kind of do it so we know we're building long term.

we still want to achieve all the same success metrics that other SaaS companies are hitting.

Yash From Momentum (21:55)

Interesting. One of the things about signups and calling them as users is a thing that a lot of other SaaS companies do, which we also used to do. And there was an interesting insight that was told to me by One of the investors that we had on the cap table, is that if we say that, let's say we have 10 ,000 users, which is actually not 10 ,000 users, only 10 ,000 signups.

But you only have, let us 1000 daily active users. What that means is that it is not just misrepresentation of information. What that means is that 9000 people came into your product and said that you are not fit. Which means either the product is wrong or the marketing is wrong. Either you making a wrong promise to the wrong market or you build something that people do not want. And so, as a SaaS founder, feel free to say whatever it is that you want to say to the world.

But internally, VAUs and WAUs, like weekly activizers, daily activizers, something that you should very, very actively track. It's extremely important. so this, brings us to the last part of the conversation, which is where I ask you the question that I was asked by a previous founder. so I was having, you know, I was recording the episode with Lucas from, he runs an application called Kardz.

Kardz .app and it primarily is a social collaboration platform that brings in every piece where information is shared. So it brings in your Slack, WhatsApp, your emails and then has capabilities of task and project management, collaboration capabilities built on top of it. One of the challenges that he has, One of the questions that he has is, especially when you're recruiting people,

Judah Guber (23:15)

Mm

Yash From Momentum (23:36)

and in leadership positions who are going to make strategic decisions that have disproportionate impact on your company, what is the framework or what are the things that you look for, what are the key qualities that you look for. So what do you do at One time? What are the things that you look for?

Judah Guber (23:52)

So yeah, so I actually heard a few things about this recently from other people as well. And One thing that I've heard that actually I feel like makes a lot of sense is that until you hit a point of, you so I've heard between 10 or 50 million ARR, don't hire anybody with the title strategist, only strategists, because you need people that are both smart strategically and doers and executors.

I think One of the biggest qualities that I look for is being proactive. So when you're in a startup or you're especially maybe in a new category or in an entrepreneurial in general, you can't look for what people have done before and business as usual because it's not going to work. It's just you're competing exactly by what other companies are doing that have already been established and have a lot more resources than you.

So if you're not willing to try things and say, I did this, even though I wasn't asked to, I was just something that I wanted to try, or I've never saw this anywhere, but I want to try that. I think that's the point is you want to, you're trying to break a model of, you know, how things are being done, matter what the industry is. So if you're trying to say that you're also trying to do things exactly how people did them before, there's going to be kind of a clash there of your, of, you know, methods and.

methodology and it's not going to work. if somebody is kind of just wants to do whatever they're assigned, I would say that's not something that I'm looking for. Somebody wants to be proactive and say, didn't, this is not something you mentioned to me, but I looked this up and I found where there are ways to build communities in this. And, you know, as an example, like that, I think is something that's a, a copy quality that you can't copy.

you need that in people. I also think it's a little bit inbuilt. It's not even something that I'd rather have somebody with, let's say, maybe less experience using HubSpot before, but with a quality that's much more like they want to try things. They want to throw things against the wall and seeing what sticks. That's much more important to me.

Yash From Momentum (25:54)

Thank you for sharing that and what's the question that you are battling with at One Tap today that you want me to ask our next guest.

Judah Guber (26:02)

And I'd say, what is the strongest way to get people to kind of break their way of thinking about doing something? So if somebody is very much married to a specific way of doing something, and this can apply in a number of industries, let's say you're doing a sales point. Especially in SaaS, are a lot of sales techniques of emotional selling

you know, rational selling or fear based selling. So what, what, what works the best in terms of trying to convince people to change the way they're doing things, take a chance on something. So I'm, really, it's something that I'm continuously researching and I'm going over because every industry is different and sales is a, you know, something that applies in every aspect of a company. So, you know, SaaS itself has its own sales methodology and I'm looking for what, what people

have been the most successful with.

Yash From Momentum (26:54)

This is good, and I'll tell you why. Because I like to see my guests suffer trying to come up with answers. And really difficult questions like these make my job more enjoyable. It's fun. So this is a great question, which I'll ask our next guest. And with that, we come to the end of the episode. Thank you, Judah for joining in. And thank you, everyone.

who's been watching or listening wherever you are, whether it is YouTube or Amazon Music or Spotify, you'll be able to find One tab .ai linked in the description. If you are a company that works on engineering projects or if you're a developer or a team of developers, do check out, it's a unified platform that will help improve your productivity as well. Thanks, Judah, once again for taking out the time.

Judah Guber (27:41)

Yash, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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