Growth Unlocked: Insider Secrets from SaaS Visionary

Hello, everyone. Today we have with us Steve Oriola, CEO at Unbounce. Steve comes with over 20 years of experience in leading B2B SaaS companies, particularly in marketing, CRM, and automation. Steve, welcome to the show. Excited to have you.

excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Steve, before we kick things off and dive into your experience and the world of leading SaaS companies and how that works, it would be great if you could give us a little bit of introduction about yourself, your background, and what initially drove you to the tech and SaaS industries.

sure. I think what led me to the SaaS industry was, well, SaaS itself just sort of made sense. It was a model that was new for sure, but I’d been in software already, so I’d seen sort of the beginnings of it, certainly the internet happening and all of that. And my first full entry into SaaS was Constant Contact.

which was very early at that company. I think I was the 25th employee or something. And it just went from there. mean, that was a big success. So I there for a long time. And that was my entry. it was, I would say, after a few years in it, was clear that it was becoming everything very quickly. And that was how SaaS was being, or software was being developed.

You know, within just a few years of me being in…

You have been in unbounce from January. How have these eight months been so far?

Busy, certainly lots of changes. Unbounce is a of a venerated brand in marketing and marketing technology. The company’s been around since 2009, was founded. I discovered it in 2011 and thought it was sliced bread, brilliant. And so brilliant that Unbounce sort of became the category.

for a long time. If you wanted to do landing pages, it was unbounced. So great, great market leadership for a lot of years. And we still benefit from that. We still have tons and tons of brand equity. Other parts of the business were in need of changes, which is why I joined. And we made a lot of those changes. So it’s been a fun ride.

Right. Did you get a chance to ski in Canada since you joined?

No, I almost did. But there was no snow. The snow conditions were just really poor. But Vancouver, where the company is still headquartered, certainly since COVID, we’ve gone pretty virtual. I’m in New York. But we do congregate there because we have 100 people there -ish in that range. And the skiing’s fantastic, world class. So no, I haven’t done it yet, but this winter for sure.

How many trips did you do to Vancouver so far?

In eight months, probably six.

Nice, perfect. How is it working for a company owned by a private equity firm? Is it any different?

It’s a little bit different, but not in sort of major ways. They’re investors, and we have a board, and all of the mechanics are pretty similar. I would say I found less

I wouldn’t say less support in an equity environment. mean, equity, I’m sorry, venture capital situation. It’s not less support. It’s just they sort of share it, right? You get through certain stages in the venture game and all of a sudden you have three or four venture firms on your board and they’re sort of sharing the management of the business. Whereas in private equity, it’s just them. And they’ve got a couple of partners on the board from the firm.

Generally, there’ll be an outside board member and it’s someone out in the industry with lots of expertise. We have one of those. He’s very helpful. So, you know, in a lot of ways it’s not different, but in some fundamental ways, certainly ownership, it’s very different. And I would say that private equity helps more and provides sort of more resources, not that venture doesn’t.

venture does. They, you know, especially the big firms have resources, but private equity, they’re the only owner, you know, so they are, it’s just a, it’s a level of intention that’s different, but super helpful.

Right. How do you approach stepping into a new company, you know, with fresh eyes and setting a new tone?

you have to learn a lot really, really quickly. there’s a whole bunch of things going on at once. you know, the role that I stepped into, you’ve got to sort of win over, everyone, a, you know, a large group of people, you know, whatever the head count is in the company. and that usually is, you know, competence and trust, competence you can display pretty quickly, trust.

takes a lot longer. Trust takes making a commitment and following through, those sorts of things. the cycles on that are longer. I hope I’ve achieved some confidence in my competence, and the trust will come. And overriding all of that is performance of the business and what the investors need. So you have to keep your eye on that sort of day one.

Yeah. Right.

What other components might there be? Yeah, it’s really the performance of the business and the culture. And the culture is something that I pay a lot of attention to. I think the culture is how people will make decisions when you’re not there. That’s really what culture is for me, right? Is how are people going to make decisions when I’m not around? And can I…

You know, can I impact those decisions in positive ways, right, without being in the room, but by defining the culture? So those are really the things that you have to address really quickly, know, stepping into this role into a new situation.

Yeah, One of my very close friends, know, again, a very good leader. know, one thing he always tells me is that, you know, like, it’s so important at these leadership positions, you know, when you’re going into an environment or a company, which has already been there, and then you’re just going there to lead either as a CEO or a particular department, you know, one of the most important qualities is to be a good listener. You know, because…

you know, that kind of helps you understand the problems, situations, you know, basically get that trust.

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s usually about 90 days where things start to click. You know, I think in any job, honestly, but this one in particular, and, and yeah, you’ve got to spend the first 90 days listening quite a bit. think I probably asked, you know, 10 ,000 questions in 90 days. But I also made a couple of really impactful changes within the first 30 days.

So sometimes you walk in and there are things that are just obvious, right? And you’re sort of compelled, almost duty -bound to make some changes if you see them and they’re quick and you know their wins. Usually there’s reluctance, you know, so you have to pick your battles because you do want to win the or go over and not be dictatorial. But sometimes there are a couple of things that you just see when you walk

door. And that is the benefit of a fresh set of eyes. Right. It’s also the benefit of, you know, I made one change very quickly. And, and, you know, I was getting, you know, I was getting sort of kudos from people, right? Hey, that’s great. We wanted to make this change. You know, it was obvious for tall of us for such a long time. And you just came in and saw it and did it. And what I said to them was I said, well,

Right.

It’ll give me too much credit. It wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t my initiative. If I kill something a year from now that I started, then you should be impressed. So that was a way to say, hey, it was kind of easy for me to make that call. There were a couple of easy calls when I first came in. And I think it’s important to let yourself do that.

Right, and I’m sure there must have been some difficult decisions as well.

Very difficult. No, the one I’m talking about was difficult. But it was difficult because I knew the impact. It stings. And it was basically I was killing something that was not working. And when you spend a lot of time on a project and it gets ended, it stings. So there were a lot of people sort of not feeling good about that.

You know, it’s, yeah, it’s a combination of that and really listening because, you know, you can’t come in and just tear everything down and change everything. There’s a lot of things that are in place for a reason. And you have to understand the context of what you’re changing. Right. And that takes time for sure.

No, absolutely. I think one of the most good qualities of a successful leader is to be able to take those decisions of killing something that’s not working. One of our very close friends, he was a lead SEO in a popular company in the US. He was working closely with the CEO and they were working on a project which was

very close to the CEO. They had spent thousands of dollars on the project. And then suddenly, you know, like the CEO decides to basically kill it. And when, you know, like when he was asked the reason behind it, because everybody thought that it was a good project and, know, it was doing well, you know, he said, well, you know, I don’t think or I don’t know how this is going to benefit my clients.

So better kill it right now. you know, and I think, you know, that’s very important for, you know, a leader of that position.

Yeah, yeah, those are difficult decisions. More to come. you know, we’re talking about this in the context of sort of stepping into something. I think if I’d been the CEO here for 10 years, I’d still have difficult decisions.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, absolutely. Well, I mean, I wish you all the best.

Thanks.

Talking about acquisition of Insightly, how do you see that helping Unbounce? Could you walk us through the strategy behind it?

Sure. If you think about the sort of the value arc of Unbound, It was, of course, you don’t want to run Google ads and have people click through to your homepage, right? You want to run Google ads and have people click through to a page that is contextual to that ad, right? And then guide you into the website so that the likelihood of you becoming a customer goes way, way up.

Right? Boom, 2009, that just jumped off the page. By the time I discovered it, I was like, wow, yes. And, you know, it was at a time when, you know, the market was raging, right? Everything was going digital. And, you know, it was a lot of attention and focus and budget were shifting. It just they just nailed it. We really did. And that

That tailwind carried the business for a long time. I would say still is still benefiting us. The brand that was built around that. About 2016, they realised that, we have something bigger here than just build your landing page independent of the website team. Hey, Mark, you don’t have to go to the website team to get a page built for this campaign. You can do it yourself. And they’re like, yeah, we have more than that.

Yeah.

So they started to invest in AI and machine learning capabilities, built a team and built an A -B testing solution so that the landing page platform became an experimentation platform for marketers. They also built something we call smart traffic to start to, you know, we went from, build a landing page to build a landing page in multiple variants and do an A -B testing.

campaign so that you start to narrow down and you pick the landing page that leads to the best conversion, leads to the best creation of a lead, right? This landing page is it. We want that conversion. And then now create multiple variants and I’m going to use them as different pages for different types of people and I’m going to start to make that assessment upfront. We call it smart traffic.

And it’s a form of personalization. So suddenly you have a platform that is conversion rate optimization, right? So they built the company into a conversion rate optimization business. All of the optimization was focused on the conversion from the linkage. And it just wasn’t enough, right? Because you don’t want to optimise just for conversion. You’re going to optimise for the customer you want.

Right. Right.

And that customer that you want might be the one that doesn’t just convert, but spends a lot more money. You need to be optimising for conversion. You might also want to optimise for the customer that stays the longest, has the highest lifetime value because you’re well capitalised. can spend on that. How do I optimise for that? Unbounce could get some access to first party data in some places to build that level of optimization.

Right.

But when idea of Insightly first came up to me, that’s where my head went. was like, we could build an optimization solution all the way through the funnel. We’re not the only people in the world thinking that. But there aren’t a lot of companies in the world at the scale that we’re currently at that is doing that. And that’s what I saw. That was the strategic opportunity.

Right.

Yeah, I’ll stop there. Yeah, you got it.

I understand. Yeah. You talk about brand equity a lot, know, in a lot of your podcasts, you you have always spoken about brand equity. How do you view brand equity as a foundational element in building a successful SaaS business?

I mean, you know, I don’t just think dollars and cents, but mostly in my job I do. you know, brand equity brings down cost of acquisition. I mean, that’s, that’s sort of the first thing that pops into my head is, okay, I now have an asset in my, you know, in my search for more customers, so that I can grow my business. brand value has a tremendous, impact on acquisition and acquisition costs.

it also has a big impact on, know, employment, your ability to draw employees, your ability to keep employees, you know, brand equity has a big impact there. so that, that’s how I think about it. and I’ve also seen brand equity last for a very long time, right? It’s hard to kill very hard to create. And it’s also hard to kill. So I think when you have it, you need to take full advantage of

Right. What are the key factors to consider when scaling a B2B company? How do you balance growth with profitability and customer satisfaction?

Yeah, it depends on the funding environment, to be honest. It depends on the cost of capital. So you know that story. And that’s why when the cost of capital goes up, the brakes get hit, people lose their jobs, all of that. So I think it depends on where you are in those cycles. And I would say for, I don’t know, 12 years?

the conditions were, well, what the conditions were. That’s why we got what we got. Cost of capital was low. Venture and private equity was a very good option for the limited partners, the large endowments, rich families, things like that. And the money was flowing. And I think at a time like that, you worry less about…

profitability, you worry a little bit. Well, you’ve always got to worry about cash, but you know, there was always another round coming. Right. And we haven’t been on that train for a couple of years now. So you just have to think about it, you know, very differently in how you scale. That’s sort of the, you know, the money side of it and the financing side of it. You know, I think as

As important as anything is access to talent, right? It’s hard to scale without the right people and without the right talent. And I think a lot of people stalled out during the hey day because they couldn’t get the best talent or they couldn’t get enough of the talent. You know, it changed a bit. There’s more talent available. I still think the best talent is still hard to get, you know.

But there’s certainly, your ability to hire talent has gotten easier as the job market has gotten more difficult for people.

Right.

I suspect that to change again. I think these are all sort of cycles that you go through. And I think you have to be very aware of what cycle you’re in and what you have access to. And if it’s cheap capital, you better be growing because everybody else is going to take advantage of it and take market share.

And at a time like this, you want to be growing, but you also want to be a little bit more careful about the bottom line, and especially in a private equity environment.

Right. Given your experience in building and leading high performing teams, what are your strategies for attracting and retaining top talent?

Mm

Again, I think there’s a lot of variables here. If you have a great brand, that helps a lot. I think that you also need to be a bit opportunistic, to be honest. And if you have a lot of experience and a long track record, you want to go find some people you know, because less risk that way.

But you can’t depend totally on that. I think first and foremost, if you really, really, really want to be good at finding really great talent, you need a good people and culture team. And you need a clearly defined culture with values. And that needs to be, as much as technical skills, that needs to be your lens.

Yes.

So before you go hire your friends that you know are super talented and had success at this or that, I think that needs to be worked out. Right. You need to really know who you are as a company and an organisation. And you need a, yeah, you need that thought through and you need that lens of, Hey, you know, we want someone who’s a little bit more autocratic, but not so much, or she’s, that’s not going to work at all in this culture or.

We want to change the culture. So yeah, we never would have hired someone like that a year ago. Now we want them. I think you got to work that out first. All right. And then, go ahead.

Yeah. I think… No, no, please.

No, I’m rambling now, so you can edit that out.

Basically, I was saying that, you know, like we as a company, you know, follow traction. know, like traction, like, you know, starts with telling you, okay, fine, divide, you know, like define your core values. And we were, and we were actually like, you know, defining our core values. actually realised, you know, like you, actually first need to define our culture. And, you know, we kind of, you know, start, started reading books about culture and like one of like, you know, very

popular companies in India, Zomato, it’s like a restaurant, directory website and like food delivery website. When any employee joins the organisation, with the kit, they actually give their culture book as well. And it’s mandatory for every employee to read it. I found that like a very

cool idea because you it’s so important I mean you might find a very talented person but if he doesn’t fit your culture you know it’s not gonna last long.

Yeah. And, and, know, I’m generally aware of the leaders that we’re researching for and hiring and especially leaders that are brought in who are going to inherit teams who teams that who are already in the culture. Yeah, they need to fit. They very much need to fit where you can lose months of productivity on a bad decision there. And you’ve got to also have a culture that

actually is sort of part of how you operate. You need to hire, manage, and evaluate and make decisions about people based on that. We have our values in the review process. You rate it on that sort of thing. So that makes it real.

Right. What do you think are the common mistakes, you know, leaders make these days, you know, while implementing AI in the organisation?

I think you have to be clear about, AI a tool? Is it going to be employed as automation? Or is it going to be employed to surface insights to people who are going to use that information to make a decision, as opposed to automation? It’s just making a faster decision than a human would make. Or is it generative AI?

used to generate, you know, content quickly. I think it’s different for all three use cases. I would say on the generative side, you need to be very careful. I think it should be used a lot by marketing, really across the company by salespeople. but you’ve got to monitor it cause it can get really stale, right? And, you know, I receive a lot of emails and I get to tell it’s generated.

Yeah, absolutely.

You so, so it’s a tool, you got to make sure it’s a tool and not a crutch, on the generative side. I think in terms of, AI gleaning insights and surfacing, that’s a tool, right? And, you know, you’ve got to keep an eye on that. Say, it, is it surfacing good ideas? Is it, is it giving me good insights? So you’ve got to look at it with a critical eye, but I think that’s a, that’s a, tremendous.

know, advancement for everyone when, when you have AI surfacing those kinds of insights and automation, I’m all for it. You know, we’re in the automation business. So, you know, for me, that’s more machine learning and the more you can do the better.

No, absolutely. mean, automation, you we also love automation, but you know, like some parts of AI are so fascinating. You know, like six months back, you know, I was working with our content team and you know, like I was trying to see like, you know, what kind of like for any particular client, like what kind of, you know, common things that it does fine and stuff like that. And, you know, we started playing around with custom GPTs and I was so amazed.

to see what we could develop. We could actually use AI and create a custom GPT for a particular client, which basically acted as an editor, where it would give out those common mistakes and make our editor’s life easier. So I think as long as it’s used as a tool, think it’s amazing.

Yeah. it’s, but it’s, you know, it’s not human and you can tell. So you got to say to your team, let’s stay human. but if, but if I have a marketing person who could do something in 15 minutes, as opposed to two and a half hours, I’m all for that.

Yeah. Right. Right.

Absolutely. Steve, you have been leading companies through various stages of growth and change. What is one lesson you have learned that you wish you knew earlier in your career?

But I wish I knew earlier in my career. I would say earlier in my career as a general manager, because if I’d known it way too early in my career, couldn’t have done anything about it. I wasn’t in the right position. So I would say as a general manager that the stage and the dynamics of every stage really should be impacting your decision making. I think people kind of lose sight of that. I sometimes will lose sight of it.

You know, I’ll be in a situation, I’ll say, wow, we should do it just like I did it before. It’ll work the same way. and playbooks generally don’t work in this business. there’s too much fluidity and quicksand. and. You know, I would say that it, even in my arc as a general manager, I have at times, assumed that how I had done it five years prior or assume that how I had seen it work would apply and.

And was usually a different stage and there were different dynamics and it just didn’t work. And I think a lot of people fall victim to that, right? They try to do it as, hey, it worked, let’s go do it again the same way. And stage is really can be pretty confounding if you’re not paying attention to it.

Steve, what’s next for unbounce?

well, that, that vision that I described is, is, you know, not fully fleshed out. So I would say what’s next is, is making that as real as possible as quickly as possible. but, but I think we have a value arc that we’re literally at the beginning of with this combination. Right. I think there’s a ton of value to build into this business.

over the coming three to five years. And I would say it’s that arc that is next for us. We’re not gonna do a hard left or a hard right turn. I think you have a sense for the direction we’re headed in. We’re gonna keep going in that direction.

Right. Well, Steve, you know, before, you know, we end the episode, I like playing a quick rapid fire round of three to five questions.

Looking forward to it. All right. Football.

Perfect. Favourite sport?

Football.

texting or talking.

Talking

Early morning or late nights.

Early morning.

Last Google search if you remember.

I was searching about customer data platforms.

If a movie was made on you, what genre would it be?

drama.

Perfect. Well, Steve, thank you so much for your time. It was fun having you. Thank you for some amazing insights and looking forward to speaking to you soon.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Enjoyed it. Take care.