The GTM Strategy that Skyrocketed Eclypses’s Cloud Revenue featuring David Gomes

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By leveraging the tackle platform, we are now getting high value leads.

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And this gives us a focus on our entire sales motion.

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This gives us a deeper insight with a more effective way to get to that

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decision-making

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and that sale. Without that, we'd still be fine-wind.

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Welcome to Unlock Cloud GoToMarket, the series where hosts Aaron Figer and

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Patrick Riley share

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the essential stages of the Cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize, and

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grow your company's

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revenue through the cloud. They've helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and

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outs of their Cloud GTM

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motion. And in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the

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people who have

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put them into place. Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future.

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And the future is now.

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Hey everybody, in this week's Unlock Cloud GoToMarket, I'm joined by my friend

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David Gomes, CEO of

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Eclipse's, where he talks to us about how his investments in Cloud GoToMarket

1:01

are prompting

1:02

investing from the investment community, lots of investments there. So stay

1:06

tuned to hear how

1:07

he unlocks Cloud GoToMarket. David, how are you? I'm doing great today, Patrick

1:12

. Doing great.

1:13

Thank you for having me here today. Awesome to have you and thank you very much

1:17

for making the

1:17

time to do this. I know you've got a cool story to tell, and so we're going to

1:20

unpack a little bit

1:21

about that. But before we do, can you give us just an introduction of who you

1:25

are and where you came

1:26

from for the audience? Thank you for having me here. I'm really excited to be

1:30

with both you and

1:30

Aaron today to talk about our journey to the Cloud here. And really, the impact

1:35

that tackle has made

1:36

and helping us get to where we are today. But listen, my background last 25

1:40

years is I've been

1:41

an entrepreneur. I've had the experience of starting a number of organizations

1:46

prior to coming to

1:47

Eclifsis, and I brought a couple of organizations to an exit, mostly in the

1:51

technology marketing

1:53

edtech arena prior to that. But in 2019, I actually discovered Eclifsis. I was

1:58

going on it in an

2:00

investor presentation back in downtown Boston. And I always recall when I was

2:05

there and they were

2:06

going through their solution, I was, I kind of said, "Geez, I know they have

2:09

something, but I really

2:10

didn't understand what they have." And I don't necessarily position myself as a

2:13

very technical

2:14

person. But after talking with the inventor of the technology and the CEO of

2:19

the company at the time,

2:20

I was so intrigued with what they had that I decided to ask a favor. And the

2:24

favor was,

2:25

could I take that inventor of the secure MTE technology, a gentleman by name of

2:30

David Schoenberger,

2:31

and bring him into Boston with me so that I could actually introduce him to

2:35

people within my network,

2:37

people who I know like and trust that have a lot, I'm going to say far more

2:41

technical,

2:42

deeper technical understanding of technology than I did. And this was back in

2:46

early 2019,

2:48

and the hell came back with the same feedback, which was, "Holy cow, we've

2:52

never seen anything

2:52

like this. This is very different." But it was a bit immature at that time. And

2:57

there really was no

2:59

pure go-to-market. So after doing some due diligence for a number of months, I

3:03

actually decided to

3:04

join the team, not only as an investor, but also as an executive. And so at

3:09

that time, I joined as

3:10

the chief operating officer in 2019, where we are today, I actually was

3:14

appointed as the CEO

3:16

in November of this past year. And really, my job right now is to guide us to

3:20

this

3:20

cloud-go-to-market strategy, which is why we're here today.

3:23

That's such a great story. Can you tell us a little bit about eclipses? Like,

3:28

what is this

3:29

technology? When you talk about cyber technology, there's so many organizations

3:35

out there, so many

3:35

technologies and solutions. So I guess the question is, how do we cut through

3:39

the noise, right? With

3:40

eclipses, the way we cut through the noise is we say, we're primarily focused

3:45

on one thing and one

3:46

thing only, and that is protecting data. And so for any business leader, any

3:52

CISO, anybody that

3:54

who needs to manage risk within their organization, in a sense, optimize reward

3:58

and stay ahead of

3:59

the competition, eclipses has a technology that is FIPS 140-3 validated that

4:06

will mitigate any

4:08

material impact in the event of a breach. So now, what do I mean by that? What

4:13

I mean is that we

4:14

don't keep the bad guys out. We actually take the stance that bad guys are

4:18

probably going to get

4:20

into the network. They're going to find a way where there's a will, there's a

4:22

way. That's right.

4:24

But we have a technology that when they get in, they will get absolutely

4:29

nothing of value. And

4:30

that's really our position. Somebody gave me an analogy the other day is, the

4:34

bank robber's going

4:36

to a bank and they still have bag full of money, but there's a bomb die in that

4:39

bag. The bomb

4:40

die goes off. That money is useless. That's who we are. We're the die bomb in

4:44

that bag.

4:45

All right. So like, you first heard of them in 2019, it's five years later. How

4:52

big's the company?

4:54

Where are you in your startup journey? Great question. So the company was

4:59

founded in 2016.

5:00

So I came in pretty early on. There was a history with the technology that

5:04

evolved. Actually,

5:06

the birth of the technology came out of the payment processing industry, you

5:09

might say.

5:10

And the envengers of the technology basically said, hey, if we can, if we can

5:14

obscure or protect

5:15

any type of credit card data, why can't we protect any form of data? So when we

5:19

talk about data today,

5:21

we mean any form of data that we're projecting. That could be anything from a

5:25

document to a

5:27

sensor value to live streaming video. And actually, what about usernames and

5:32

passwords?

5:33

Anything credentials, because we know that data is going to be breached. We

5:36

know that

5:37

credentials will be stolen. And that's what we come in. Any data created on any

5:42

device in any way.

5:44

In any application, 90% of the applications that are up there today, and we'll

5:49

explain how

5:49

we're able to do that. We started, as I said, 2016. We were primarily an on-

5:55

prem solution

5:56

prior to where we are today. But there was some configuration. When I joined

6:01

the team,

6:02

there was quite a bit of work that we had to do on the product roadmap. Because

6:05

at that time,

6:06

literally took months to deploy up technology. But really, what we've evolved

6:10

to, even on an

6:11

on-prem play, we were still deploying weeks to a matter of days. We now have a

6:18

phenomenal

6:18

engineering team. I tell you what, the world class engineering team that has

6:21

done just a

6:22

spectacular job to bring us to a point where we are in essence self-service,

6:26

where we can

6:27

get deployed in a number of hours with no intervention from our team whatsoever

6:31

, which is very special.

6:32

So the team consists of roughly about 15 engineers located in the Colorado

6:36

Springs area.

6:37

We've got executives, our sales and marketing team is basically focused here in

6:42

the New England

6:42

Boston area. We're under 25 people, but we are growing right now. So we're

6:48

early in our journey

6:49

still. We've got a solid product. How did we get here onto this call today?

6:55

Where did you all begin

6:56

your cloud go-to-market journey? And I think I'm asking a leading question

7:00

because I know a little

7:01

bit of this already. But for everybody who doesn't, can you tell us how you got

7:05

here?

7:06

Sure. I think the story goes back to January of 23, where our team was calling

7:12

on a potential

7:13

prospect, which was a multi-billion dollar leading athletic organization. And

7:21

the team had multiple

7:22

discussions with the chief data security officer at that time. And the way the

7:27

story goes is that

7:29

gentlemen had seen the technology, had asked for a number of meetings quickly

7:33

right after he had

7:34

seen the initial meeting. After about six weeks, I, as the chief operating

7:39

officer, I had gotten

7:40

involved in actually introducing myself to this particular individual. His name

7:45

is Jefferson Dance.

7:46

And Jeff said to me, he said, "David, me and my industry colleagues, we've been

7:50

looking at certain

7:51

problems. And I've never seen a technology that solves the problems that we've

7:55

been looking at

7:56

till I saw your technology." He said, "Our problem is though, is that here at

8:00

this organization,

8:02

and at this particular organization, they said, let's, we operate within the

8:06

cloud, within AWS.

8:08

That makes it easy for us to buy. Right now, for us to manage a one-off

8:13

contract, it's a little

8:13

difficult. Well, anyways, this particular individual, Jeff Dance, that I'm

8:17

talking about,

8:18

ended up consulting with our organization because he was so enamored with our

8:21

technology.

8:22

And Jeff actually left that organization. He is now our chief innovation

8:26

officer. He joined

8:28

our team in June of 23. And at that point in time, we started looking at, okay,

8:33

how can we deploy

8:35

through the cloud marketplace? And Jeff actually worked with our engineering

8:39

team

8:40

to really understand the technology and the applicability in the cloud

8:45

marketplace. And so,

8:46

he drove, I'm going to say the technology roadmap side of things. We then

8:51

brought in our operations

8:52

folks, Jim and Beny with Dan Lemoine, who really got to tell you something. We

8:56

have a lot of MVPs

8:58

on this team. Jeff leading the vision from a technology side, Dan leading the

9:03

operational side,

9:05

really, we put together a plan to say, okay, this is where we need to go. And

9:09

the first thing we did,

9:10

Patrick, is we got executive alignment. We got everybody on the team to

9:14

understand what is the

9:16

value of deploying through the cloud marketplace versus on-prem one by one by

9:20

one. And we actually

9:22

got everybody to lean in and to buy in. And that started at the board level

9:27

from the

9:27

executive level to the entire team. But in a weird way, I say this, we didn't

9:33

know, we didn't know.

9:34

And that's where tackle comes in. What you folks did tackle is that you gave us

9:38

really an understanding to validate what our plan was first or foremost. But

9:44

secondly,

9:45

in joining and working with you on our coaching program that you provided, you

9:50

were able to

9:50

actually provide us with a refined outlook on exactly where we're going. You

9:55

gave us the insights on

9:57

how to get there. Patrick, you worked directly with Dan Lemoine. If I'm not

10:02

mistaken, you guys

10:03

had probably 70 action items after our initial go-to-market strategy for

10:08

executives, for our sales,

10:09

for our operations. So in a way, we didn't know what we didn't know. And

10:13

without your guidance,

10:15

without your expertise, without literally the insights that the tackle team was

10:20

able to give

10:21

us, we wouldn't be here where we are today. You had a product market fit, but

10:26

you needed to adapt

10:27

that fit for the marketplace. And it sounds like you all were able to change

10:30

that around really

10:31

quickly. Obviously, we were able to help you then prioritize the internal

10:35

action items to go after

10:37

next. That's awesome. And working with us at tackle, that helped you validate

10:45

your strategy and your

10:46

assumptions. So what in there were you looking for to really help you

10:53

prioritize cloud go-to-market

10:56

with the cloud providers? Again, I'll go back to the insights that you and your

11:02

team provided us.

11:04

And we were flying blind. We didn't have that expertise in house. Although Jeff

11:11

had actually

11:12

had it on, you know, from an enterprise side of purchasing technologies, Dan

11:17

Lemoine was on a

11:18

team that had leveraged the marketplace as well. We really didn't have it from

11:23

an ISV perspective.

11:24

There were things that we didn't understand. We didn't understand the

11:27

accelerator programs

11:28

that AWS puts on. We didn't understand the requirements that we thought we knew

11:35

, but we didn't know. So

11:36

the value that I'm going to say that tackle has brought us is the expertise,

11:41

the insight,

11:42

but also the technology. I mean, now that we're leveraging the tackle platform

11:46

for the propensity

11:47

to buy, it's giving us the insights and the actual data-driven metrics on

11:52

customers that actually

11:54

have a propensity to buy, which is in essence streamlining our sales process.

11:59

So you got us

12:00

to a certain point where we can actually go live, and now we're leveraging the

12:04

technologies to

12:05

actually accelerate the sales process. We got you to the point to go live. So

12:10

you can actually

12:11

like transact in the marketplace. You can understand which customers that you

12:15

should start to have

12:16

that conversation with, but you also did something else inside of the company,

12:21

which you knew you

12:23

needed to transact in the marketplace, but you really took a deeper look at the

12:29

product

12:30

and how to really make it a product-led marketplace experience. Can you share

12:35

with us

12:35

a little bit about that continuing to build out your product so that it was a

12:42

marketplace first

12:43

experience? You're absolutely correct. And if you recall, one of the things I

12:48

said is that we had a

12:49

toolkit methodology, developers to work with our toolkits deployed to mobile

12:54

applications at that

12:55

time. And as I said, it took days to weeks to sometimes months to deploy,

13:00

depending on the

13:01

organization and this on-prem. We realized that in order for us to be

13:06

successful, we had to have a

13:08

licensing platform that would allow us to scale. That's one of the things that

13:13

the marketplace gave

13:14

us. But we also realized that we had to have a solution that we had to make it

13:18

easy, not only easy to

13:19

buy, but easy to deploy. And our engineers, in a matter of months, were able to

13:26

create a containerized

13:29

solution that can be deployed through the marketplace in a matter of hours. And

13:34

now,

13:34

prior to this, I will say this, we were early on in our journey here in talking

13:40

with the engineers.

13:41

We felt as though we could do this. We could deploy the client, the server side

13:45

, without issue, whatsoever,

13:46

no intervention whatsoever from our team. But our team at that time, the

13:51

methodology would be,

13:52

well, we would then send out a compiled library to our customer and then we

13:56

would actually help

13:57

them deploy it on the client side. And we said, you know something, that's not

14:01

going to work.

14:02

That's not a great customer experience. Like, how can we make this customer

14:05

experience even better?

14:06

Absolutely. And this is where I give our engineers the fullest credit. You know

14:11

, again, led by

14:12

Jeff and a gentleman by name of Joe John Jukay and another gentleman by name of

14:15

Trevor Blackman,

14:17

these guys did an absolutely amazing thing in just a matter of months. We were

14:22

able to create a

14:23

solution that is fully deployable through the marketplace with absolutely no

14:28

intervention from

14:29

us, both on the client side and the server side or APIs server to server that

14:35

is supported by

14:37

all of our documentation, supported by our videos that we provided, we've made

14:42

it easy to deploy.

14:43

And as I said, there's truly no intervention required from our engineers

14:47

whatsoever. We're

14:48

now live in 140 different countries on a global basis. It started with a

14:54

customer saying,

14:56

I really love your solution. My budget is aligned to the cloud. Can we buy this

15:01

through the cloud?

15:02

And you're like, oh, I've got to try and figure out how to make sure I can be

15:07

purchased through

15:07

the cloud because that's where our customer's budget is. Then you go down this

15:11

route of looking

15:12

at this cloud marketplace and you realize, wait a minute, this could actually

15:18

help us also fix this

15:21

other experience that we have that it takes weeks and days to deploy our

15:26

product. Like,

15:27

if we did this, we not only can our customers now use their cloud budgets to

15:33

buy this way,

15:34

but we actually fix our product experience as well. And we decrease the time it

15:39

takes to deploy

15:40

our product. Our customers now have a better experience deploying. They can

15:44

actually start

15:45

using the product sooner. It can start getting their ROI on what the product

15:50

value is sooner.

15:51

And we start actually also driving consumption sooner because the sooner your

15:56

product gets out

15:56

there and used the sooner you start to drive the consumption and you start to

16:02

get those meters going

16:04

in the cloud's environment. You hit on some great points, you know, in addition

16:08

to that too,

16:09

by going to the marketplace, what we realized is we went through an entire

16:14

foundational

16:15

technical review with AWS. So right then and there, along with our fifths 140-3

16:22

validation,

16:23

along with now the industry analysts following us in writing about us, we now

16:28

have market validation

16:30

by being in the AWS marketplace. We are a trusted vendor of those enterprises

16:35

that are already

16:35

committed to spend in the marketplace. They see that we've gone through the

16:40

process that AWS has

16:41

gone to vet our technology, to vet our processes, our documentation that was

16:45

aligned with it.

16:46

So we're validated now in the marketplace. We've simplified the procurement

16:50

process now.

16:51

We don't have any contracts that are going back and forth and redlining and

16:54

whatnot.

16:55

We're leveraging the marketplace itself, leveraging their end user license

16:59

agreement.

17:00

We're certainly offering what we call a private offers as well, but that is

17:03

again,

17:04

a simplified process through the marketplace itself. We've made billing

17:08

extremely easy now.

17:10

We talked about the global reach, but really what it comes down to is we are

17:14

making it easy to deploy,

17:16

easy to buy. Our revenue model, it's a simplified revenue model, it's repeat

17:20

able, it's predictable,

17:21

it's a consumption model, it's actually, it's a pay-as-you-grow in essence. We

17:26

could never have done

17:27

any of this. We could never have achieved any of those key points without being

17:32

in the cloud marketplace.

17:34

Recapping, we've just kind of set the table with product, and that there's no

17:38

shortage of work

17:39

involved in everything you've just talked through. Getting us ready from a

17:42

product market fit,

17:43

getting us involved in the marketplace, getting the right resources aligned,

17:46

shifting how we look

17:48

at providing better customer experiences for our customers. And in the spirit

17:52

of kind of

17:52

unlocking cloud go to market, this whole podcast, we're really looking at

17:56

through the lens of

17:57

tackle's maturity model. And so, quick overview for those listing that might

18:02

not have heard,

18:02

we've got a maturity model where we look at customers through various phases of

18:07

growth

18:07

in their cloud go-to-market journey. And this journey is kind of like rungs on

18:11

a ladder where

18:12

the very base, you've got to have a sure footing where we establish our

18:16

foundation,

18:16

and we climb the ladder and go all the way to scaling adoption. And if I look

18:20

at

18:21

eclipses in this journey, right now, I think you're really definitely in the

18:25

establishing

18:26

foundation phase. You've built out that product alignment fit, but I'll caveat

18:30

that with, you look

18:31

a lot further than you are, because you've got some great strategies that you

18:36

've implemented

18:37

internally with an alignment specifically. And I'd like to dive in now a little

18:42

bit more on the

18:42

people side of things with you and talk about when you looked at this problem,

18:48

and you all

18:49

looked at the opportunity in front of you for marketplace, how did you think

18:52

about aligning

18:54

the rest of ELT, right? You get it, you came in CEO, you had great people

18:58

around you, gave you

18:59

great advice. But how did you get everybody else behind us? And within that

19:03

experience,

19:04

like who were some of those people and key players on the team that helped

19:07

build that out?

19:08

As I said, we have a phenomenal team. I'm going to call it MVPs here that

19:14

should go to

19:15

quite a few people here. But as I said, I had mentioned Jeff dance before with

19:20

an initial vision

19:21

and then driving the product roadmap. It did make mention of Dan Lamoy, and I

19:25

tell you what,

19:26

Dan's a superstar. You know, you've worked with him directly Patrick on the

19:29

coaching and strategy

19:30

on a weekly basis. And really, he's a KPI metric driven guy. He's also kept

19:37

everybody aligned.

19:39

The amount of research he did before we even met the you guys and the folks at

19:44

Tackle,

19:44

you know, was was astronomical here. And he put us in a great position. But

19:49

what Dan has done,

19:50

he drove us to really understand what the vision could be with Dan's input on

19:56

all of his research,

19:58

Jeff, myself, Larry Murray, our other chief revenue officer, we put together a

20:03

business plan,

20:04

we presented it to the board and the board understood it. They understood the

20:09

value. What we did is we

20:10

talked about again, some of the things that we talked about earlier, we if we

20:14

looked in the rear

20:15

of your mirror and said, here we had this great technology, we're not

20:19

abandoning the technology.

20:20

We're just looking at what's the best way to deploy it. What's the best way to

20:24

consume it.

20:25

Let's create a licensing platform that allows for infinite scalability. Let's

20:30

be able to deploy

20:31

in a way that takes hours that is self-sufficient, self-service. And we

20:36

actually put that in the plan.

20:38

And our board of directors had full buy-in on that. One of the things that we

20:43

did afterwards,

20:43

once we got buy-in, we actually went to all the team members. I needed the team

20:47

members,

20:48

the engineering team, our marketing team, everybody to understand where we're

20:52

going.

20:52

And I couldn't be more proud of how we got to where we are today. And it's been

20:58

a journey.

20:59

It's been a learning journey. And part of the value that tackle has brought us

21:03

is identify the

21:04

areas that really the gaps that we needed. One of the true gaps that we

21:08

understood that we needed

21:10

from a people perspective is that we needed a cloud alliance director. We need

21:14

somebody to come in

21:15

and actually not only lead the sales motion within the marketplace, but

21:20

actually create the

21:21

sales motion within the marketplace. One of the most strategic hires that we

21:25

made was the first

21:26

week of April of this year, Taylor Brooks. Taylor is a certified cloud alliance

21:31

director. She comes

21:33

from the Caddy Shack group. She's worked with awesome partners. She's opened

21:38

our eyes to what

21:39

is required to really get into the ISBA, the accelerator programs. She opened

21:45

our eyes to

21:46

understanding how we get to the worldwide service organizations within AWS to

21:51

open the doors to

21:53

the open doors to other partners. She really is defining that sales motion. And

21:58

Patrick,

21:59

you may recall you were part of that recruitment process with us. You and your

22:02

team provided us

22:04

with, I'm going to say certain leads and certain through your network, that's

22:08

how we were able to

22:09

find Taylor and you assisted us on the, I'm going to say on the interview

22:13

process to ensure that we

22:15

had the right candidate. And I'll tell you right now, we've learned more from

22:19

Taylor in the last

22:19

two months than we did in the last eight months combined on this particular

22:23

journey when it comes

22:24

to the sales motion. So when I look at the people, you know, we, as I said, we

22:29

've got a lot of MVPs

22:30

here. Jeff was driving the engineering, the tech roadmap, Dan was driving the

22:35

operational side

22:36

of things. Taylor, along with Larry and the sales team are driving the sales

22:40

motion, the cost cell

22:42

sales motion in the coal bill, the coal brand within the partner network.

22:46

I always tell people like, yes, you can do this. Like you can figure all this

22:54

out and you can

22:55

build your cloud, go to market and you can operationalize it and all these

22:59

things. You can do this

23:00

or we can do it faster together. So I love that you guys are taking that

23:07

philosophy of

23:08

there are experts out there in the industry who can help us do this faster and

23:15

you hiring Taylor,

23:16

hiring tackle to help you learn faster so that you can get to market faster. It

23:24

's such a great

23:25

like bus practice. When you hire Taylor and she's kind of opening your eyes to

23:30

here's all the things

23:31

that we have to go do. And now that you have tackles platform, what are the

23:37

next steps you're

23:38

taking to really start to operationalize your strategy inside of Salesforce?

23:44

If we talk about Salesforce remote, that was another strategic move for us to

23:49

adopt Salesforce

23:50

as our CRM. But we also realized again, going back to working with you folks

23:56

and with Taylor

23:57

understanding things that we didn't understand. I'm going to say AWS had

24:02

certain requirements for

24:03

their ISVA programs. And that's the independent service vendor accelerator

24:07

programs. And in order

24:09

for us to be assigned a PDM, we needed Salesforce. But we had a different CRM.

24:14

I don't have to

24:14

name who they were, but that wasn't part of what the lines properly, not only

24:19

with the ACE portal,

24:20

but also with the tackle dashboard as well. So bringing Salesforce and adopting

24:25

Salesforce

24:26

integrating with the tackle dashboard with the propensity by platform combined

24:33

with the insights

24:34

that we get from the ACE and call it the ACE portal truly gives us the benefit

24:39

of accelerating

24:40

our sales process now and understanding the insights of the customers buying

24:45

the buying habits and

24:46

their propensity to buy, which again, I'll go back is accelerating our yield to

24:51

productivity.

24:52

You talked about a lot of cool things so far. I wanted to unpack a little bit

24:57

more on

24:58

this foundation that you've built with. Yes, we did product fit. Then we had

25:03

executive alignment.

25:04

Something cool, I think that you skimmed over which everybody should listen to,

25:08

is that you went and spent time one on one with all the employees. I know that

25:12

's not scalable

25:13

at huge companies, but like getting everybody on board with the pillars of this

25:17

venture and

25:18

this go to market strategy was nothing to skim over. So like, who does to you

25:22

for doing that?

25:23

But that was an important phase of getting that alignment, not only from the

25:28

executive team,

25:29

but from individuals. And then you just talked about Salesforce. We've got

25:34

people in place.

25:36

We've got alignment across product, but now we need to look at how do we

25:39

implement the right tools to

25:40

do so bringing in a different tool. Obviously, that's not an easy thing to do.

25:45

It's a transformational

25:47

change. So I think you're really looking at this as a business transformation,

25:52

which is something

25:53

that a lot of companies aren't looking at it that way. So how did you come to

25:56

the realization that

25:58

the company is going to need to change what we're doing from a tooling

26:01

perspective. And we're going

26:03

to need to leverage some new things in order to grow scale. Like, what was the

26:07

realization for

26:07

you? Was it just simply that, hey, tackle and AWS have come in and said, hey,

26:12

this is kind of

26:12

the way forward? Was there anything particular in any of these tool sets, like

26:17

maybe prospect or

26:18

something else that we're motivational to say, ah, this is something we should

26:22

probably get into

26:23

future proof or whatever customer feedback. Once we got that initial feedback

26:28

from Jefferson,

26:30

we then started talking to other clients. And when they said the same thing, we

26:35

have another,

26:36

what I'm going to call on prem client that has said, yes, this would work for

26:39

us. In fact,

26:40

through this journey, we did what we call a soft launch in the last call last

26:45

month as we

26:46

really truly became live in the marketplace with our certain customers that

26:50

know us know as well.

26:52

And our initial soft launch was really to get feedback on the actual experience

26:56

, which worked

26:57

out tremendous on preparing ourselves for our true goal live in the marketplace

27:02

. But listening to

27:04

our customers was was extremely important. But I also listened to the

27:08

marketplace as well. And we

27:09

did some research. There's an organization that many people know. It's one of

27:13

your customers,

27:14

Wizz. And I try to say that we're trying to follow the Wizz playbook. Wizz is

27:19

the fastest growing

27:20

organization to 100 million in revenue. And you guys were part of that market

27:24

strategy.

27:25

That's when we said, how do we get to tackle IO? That's when we had our initial

27:29

, our initial

27:30

meetings right now. And again, Patrick, you and your team validated our

27:35

approach after you took a

27:36

look at our technology. From our perspective, or from from an executive

27:40

perspective, it was talking

27:41

to our customers doing some industry research, understanding, I'm going to call

27:46

it the growing

27:46

market, you know, the growing transactions in the marketplace. I was truly

27:51

unaware of how big the

27:53

marketplace was in terms of services and technologies being deployed to to

27:58

enterprises. And then

27:59

understanding the value that we kind of went through that not only that we can

28:03

offer our company,

28:06

but this better together story that we've created for the AWS wraps themselves.

28:12

And because it's

28:13

driving consumption in the marketplace, it's driving consumption for the

28:17

enterprises that

28:18

have committed spends. And the reality is because we're in enablement

28:22

technology, we get too deep

28:23

into our tech, but we're at the application layer. We're an easy add on to any

28:29

web application,

28:30

or any mobile application in the marketplace. You know, the analogy somebody

28:35

had given me

28:36

early on, they said, well, you know, the AWS reps and the reps that are out

28:40

there servicing

28:41

their enterprises, they're trying to sell them an ice cream sundae. But once

28:44

they sell them the

28:45

ice cream sundae, you guys are the cherry on top of the hot fudge and the

28:49

sprinkles that go on.

28:51

You're an easy add on for any application that is requiring data security. Most

28:57

applications

28:58

require data security. So we're looking to make it easy to buy. And then the

29:02

last pillar here

29:03

is the industry analysts. We started talking to the industry analysts out there

29:08

. One in particular

29:09

organization called HFS research, when they really dove in and looked at our go

29:14

to market strategy.

29:15

Early on, they said this will make a difference. In fact, I will tell you, I'm

29:20

very proud to announce

29:22

that just this past Friday, we was selected and highlighted by HFS research as

29:28

a hot new vendor.

29:29

This was a five month study done by Joel Martin and his team at HFS research,

29:35

looking at our technology, going out of the covers, talking to our customers.

29:39

And this

29:40

report just came out. And in this report, he writes, "Eclipses has game

29:45

changing technology.

29:46

We don't have the market brand of the other big boys yet, but we have something

29:51

that really

29:52

nobody else has when it comes to protecting data. And by deploying it through

29:57

the marketplace,

29:59

we've now got an entire TAM that we never had before that allows us to

30:04

implement quickly,

30:05

easily. And let's call it what it is. I've talked to another vendors. We're all

30:09

in this together.

30:10

I mean, this competition, but what are we trying to do? We're trying to protect

30:15

the integrity of

30:16

organizations. We're trying to protect data. Some people are just doing it in a

30:19

different way.

30:20

But we are so complimentary, not only to applications that are out there, as I

30:26

mentioned,

30:26

but also to other cyber technologies that we're already talking to, because we

30:31

are the last mile

30:32

for them as they help their customers protect their data as well."

30:36

You said it, right? So you've got this whole new TAM, a bigger TAM than you

30:41

originally thought

30:42

you had. So how are you getting to know your TAM and how are you starting to

30:48

use the tools you

30:51

have at TACL to really help you understand that TAM and figure out which

30:58

customers you're going to

30:59

go start to approach with your joint messaging of Eclipsis and AWS through the

31:05

marketplace?

31:06

Well, I mean, that's where the TACL prospects platform comes in for us. I mean,

31:12

that truly

31:12

streamlines our sales motion. Being able to understand, providing a list of

31:18

enterprises that

31:20

we're going after and understand what they're buying propensities are. I mean,

31:23

this is data-driven

31:25

optimization for us. Let's call it what it is. Bottom line, you got it by

31:28

leveraging the TACL

31:30

platform, we are now getting high value leads. And this gives us a focus on our

31:34

entire sales

31:35

motion. This gives us a deeper insight with a more effective way to get to that

31:40

decision-making

31:41

in that sale. Without that, we'd still be flying wide. And that kind of starts

31:45

to give you the

31:46

next momentum around creating coastal opportunities and starting to engage with

31:53

AWS.

31:54

Correct. I mean, because that is aligned into the ACE portal itself. This is

31:59

where our

31:59

coastal motion comes in with Taylor Brooks, who's really led this initiative

32:04

right now,

32:04

in bringing us in into alignment into that ACE portal. It's truly all coming

32:09

together for us.

32:11

And giving you an opportunity to start to build your brand inside of AWS. You

32:15

said earlier,

32:16

by being in the marketplace, it gives you market validation because you're a

32:22

startup. People don't

32:22

know who you are. But the fact that you are in AWS's marketplace, there's brand

32:27

validation by aligning

32:29

your brand with AWS's brand. Now customers have more confidence to try this

32:34

product that they've

32:35

never heard of because, well, it's certified to be in AWS's marketplace. It's

32:40

got to be a good

32:42

quality product. And then you've got to go tell your story to AWS so that when

32:47

their customers go

32:49

to their AWS rep and they're like, "Hey, we're thinking about this product.

32:53

What can you tell us?"

32:54

You need to start to get those AWS sellers educated. So using CoSAL as a way to

33:01

also start to build

33:02

your brand inside of AWS so people understand who you are and what you do.

33:06

Tae's doing a great job at that right now today. Using that platform to help go

33:12

educate folks.

33:13

And the last we talked to you all were at various events. And I think you're

33:17

going to be up that's

33:18

coming up. Taylor, we call her Tae. We've learned more from her in her

33:22

experience from the CoSAL

33:25

understanding than we had in months before. And her experience that she brings

33:30

forward in leading

33:32

this effort has just been exponential. She is creating that as I'm going to

33:37

call it her and

33:38

you talked about it. What's the benefit to the AWS rep? That's our better

33:42

together story.

33:43

Yeah, you got to sell to the cloud before you can sell with and sell through.

33:47

Listen, we're one of thousands of vendors. Again, how do we cut through noise?

33:52

What we want to be

33:54

able to do is show them what the advantages are that we bring to their

33:57

customers. How do we make

33:58

their life easier? How do we actually help them? I'm going to say in their

34:02

endeavors and help

34:03

create that better together story with them. And Taylor's been fantastic in

34:09

working through that

34:10

with us. And all of this investment that you've made in establishing the solid

34:16

foundation in doing

34:18

all this research around proving out that this is a strong go-to-market

34:24

strategy for you.

34:25

It's also played in your favor in the investment community. I don't know if you

34:30

can share or to

34:31

what level you want to share, but this has also been a game changer as a

34:36

startup in the investment

34:38

community and how they look at you. It really is a game changer in how the

34:43

investment community

34:43

views us. When we talk about the investment community, we've raised a

34:47

significant amount of dollars

34:49

to date, but all from high network individuals. We haven't gone the

34:53

institutional private

34:54

investor route just yet, but we did speak with some folks early on. We just

34:58

didn't fit their

34:59

criteria on who we were, what we were doing. Fast forward to where we are today

35:04

. We're now active

35:07

in active discussions with some institutional investors. And the primary reason

35:11

is because

35:12

they've highlighted our strategic move to the cloud as I'm going to keep using

35:17

the term game

35:18

changer. They see the value and the scalability that we've created by moving to

35:26

AWS to the AWS

35:27

marketplace and to deploy through the marketplace itself. It's not just that

35:32

you invested in getting

35:33

listed and that you're in the call marketplaces and you have this cloud play.

35:37

You've actually

35:39

productized being in the market. The institutional investors have seen and they

35:46

pointed it out,

35:47

they see that we're aligning ourselves with experts like you guys. They

35:51

understand, you know,

35:52

through the coaching program that we have, they understand that we are getting

35:56

this expert advice

35:57

from you folks that we're getting the tailored strategies, strategies that are

36:01

proven. They've

36:02

worked for companies like Wiz and your other clients. They see that. And they

36:06

also understand

36:06

that this strategy is going to optimize our sales process. And so this

36:10

highlight us being in the

36:11

marketplace, it's alignment with experts like tackle that have the experience

36:17

in working with

36:18

other companies to really burst them out has really played in our favor as we

36:23

tell our story to these

36:24

investors. And it's cool for us to hear these kinds of things. And I know we

36:29

got a preview of

36:30

this when we were chatting with you around having this podcast. When you say

36:33

that and you talk about

36:35

it, it makes me excited for all the other ISPs that are out there trying to

36:39

start up in their

36:40

category. And they're looking at where do I go from an investment perspective?

36:44

And what's the

36:45

right method for me? And no matter which you decide, you're going to get more

36:49

attention. If

36:50

you put the right people in the right positions, you look at this from a true

36:55

channel, a true go-to

36:58

market investment. And you surround yourself with others in a product that are

37:03

going to really be

37:04

driven by on and through that cloud. So kudos to you. It definitely makes me

37:08

excited to hear it.

37:09

Speaking of other ISVs and those that are just getting started, we've talked a

37:15

lot about a

37:16

bunch of different topics from the product fit to the executive alignment to

37:20

cross functional

37:20

teams to a little bit of your technology and sales force. But holistically, if

37:26

you could

37:27

sit down with a CEO of another young startup and give them some lessons learned

37:33

on

37:34

what would the few two or three or four things be that you would say are like,

37:39

this is what I

37:39

would convey to them. As I look back in my career, even in my previous

37:43

leadership roles

37:45

at other organizations, I've always taken the position that you need to

37:49

surround yourself with

37:50

good people to be successful. And I do feel confident that this company is on a

37:55

tremendous

37:56

journey and we will be on a rocket ship very soon. And it's not going to be

38:00

because of me,

38:01

it's going to be because of our team. And so the advice I would give to any

38:07

other CEO is,

38:08

first and foremost, you need team alignment. We need to make sure that

38:12

everybody is all in.

38:13

We need to bring in people that have experience and expertise that you don't

38:19

have. And, you know,

38:21

I will say humbly, I was completely unaware of the true value of being in the

38:28

marketplace was

38:30

in January of 2023. That was a learning experience for me, but I learned from

38:35

people

38:35

that we brought in so I can get their feedback, understand their feedback,

38:40

process it together.

38:41

I mean, this was a true team event and putting together a strategic business

38:46

plan. We had a

38:48

completely separate plan on this cloud go to market strategy. And we presented

38:53

this to the

38:53

board. We made sure it was easy to understand. We just really want to put it

38:57

out and plan words.

38:59

This is where we were. These are the issues. These were the obstacles that we

39:04

had to overcome.

39:05

And with each one, we kind of drew a line to say, this is what's going to bring

39:10

us. By going to

39:11

the cloud marketplace, this is how we're going to address that particular

39:15

obstacle. And by just

39:18

creating a picture in that business plan, that's easy to understand. That's

39:22

where we got the alignment

39:23

right away. Again, taking that same approach with the team members, because our

39:28

team members,

39:29

a lot of these guys were in a lot longer than me. And they want to see growth

39:32

as well. And having

39:35

buy in on this new vision, this new strategy was so important. One of my

39:40

advisory board members,

39:41

who is the chief business officer for a very large cyber firm said, your team

39:47

in six months

39:48

did well, took us 18 months. So we know that we moved at the speed of light.

39:54

And that's because

39:54

we had everybody all in. Guys on our engineering team were taking time during

39:59

their holiday breaks,

40:00

weekends, you know, and I've got a young engineering team. I know that these

40:04

people have young,

40:05

really young kids. I don't want them to miss their little league games and

40:07

their plays and whatnot.

40:09

And then hopefully they never did, but they got done what they needed to get

40:13

done. And they did

40:14

it in a timely fashion because they all understood where we were going. My job,

40:19

honestly, as a leader

40:20

is, I need to drive the bus. I just want to make sure everybody's on the bus.

40:24

Well, when you're excited about what you're doing, giving your time, it's so

40:30

easy. Like,

40:31

you just do it because you're like, I want to see the outcome of this. And you

40:36

don't even actually

40:36

think about how much time it's taking you because you're so excited and you're

40:41

so passionate about

40:43

what you're creating and the outcome that that's going to drive. So it sounds

40:48

like you have a really

40:49

great team. We do, Eric, thank you. And again, we wouldn't be here without them

40:54

. This is a true

40:56

team play. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I feel like it's so

41:00

important for our audience

41:04

to hear stories from every type of company out there trying to build cloud, go

41:10

to market strategies

41:12

and partnerships and having you guys more of an early stage startup share your

41:18

story. And the benefit

41:20

that you have of being an early stage startup of being able to create your

41:25

product to really be

41:26

productized inside of the cloud marketplaces and how that is accelerating your

41:33

journey. I feel like

41:35

that's inspiring and motivating for our more established companies that are in

41:40

this huge

41:41

transformation mode of like, I know I need to transform my product. This is

41:46

going to take a while,

41:47

but now hearing stories like yours gives them validation and hope and

41:52

motivation to like go do

41:54

it. You know, when we look at the marketplace, we are, you know, application

41:58

driven, as I said,

41:59

in terms of what we're covering mobile applications and web applications and

42:03

APIs.

42:04

We feel so strongly that we have an applicable solution for 90% of the data tr

42:10

ays actions that

42:11

are happening in the cloud today. And so we believe that without this move,

42:17

without the expert experience

42:19

and assistance from tackle that we wouldn't be where we are today at this

42:23

moment in time.

42:24

But the reality is by aligning ourselves with experts like you, we are truly in

42:29

a position where

42:30

we can increase our success in the marketplace. Well, thanks for joining us

42:33

today, David. This

42:35

was super exciting for us to hear, not only for those I have speechless thing

42:38

who are in earlier

42:39

stages, but also as Aaron mentioned, those that are established and looking to

42:43

pivot their products.

42:44

So thank you for sharing your stories. I know it was a huge block of your time

42:49

that we've taken

42:50

up over the last week or two, but I sincerely appreciate you joining us on this

42:54

episode.

42:55

Patrick, Aaron, I just want to say thank you not only to you personally, but I

43:00

want to thank

43:00

the tackle team as well. I appreciate the support. I appreciate the insights.

43:06

We look forward to a

43:07

long business relationship with you folks. Thank you very much for this time

43:10

and thank you for

43:11

your consideration. So pull up a chair, grab a notebook and join us as we share

43:16

the essential

43:16

stages of the maturity model to start, optimize and grow your company's revenue

43:22

using the cloud.

43:23

For more resources on executing your cloud go to market strategy, you can visit

43:27

our website at

43:28

tackle.io.