The GTM Strategy that Skyrocketed Eclypses’s Cloud Revenue featuring David Gomes
"Using the Tackle platform, we're now attracting high-quality leads, which helps us streamline our entire sales process. This tool provides us with better insights and a more efficient way to reach decision-makers and close deals. Without it, we'd still be working without clear direction."- David Gomes, Chief Executive Officer at Eclypses In this episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market, hosts Erin Figer and Patrick Riley are joined by Eclypses’ Chief Executive Officer, David Gomes, to share the company’s incredible journey and the game-changing Cloud go-to-market strategy that closed many deals. David shares how strategic partnerships, like the one with Tackle, has propelled their growth and drawn significant attention from institutional investors. He also shares insights on building strong foundations, aligning teams, and creating impactful business plans—all pivotal to Eclipses' success in the AWS marketplace. In this episode, you’ll learn: How to enhance your Cloud go-to-market strategy by utilizing the Maturity Model to grow revenue through the Cloud The impact of aligning your business with Cloud Marketplaces like AWS, including Market validation and customer confidence The importance of team alignment and seasoned hires in accelerating sales processes and optimizing business strategies Resources: Connect with David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-gomes-5ab0667 Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmriley/ Connect with Erin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinfiger/ Learn more about Tackle: https://tackle.io Timestamps: 05:43 Advanced technology deployment in record time 07:06 Team discussed technology with security officer Jefferson Dance 12:45 Toolkit methodology streamlined app deployment, scaling success 14:52 Customer's Cloud budget drives product improvement 17:34 Preparing for product launch and Market growth 21:00 Tackle hired Cloud Alliance Director for strategic growth 23:45 Salesforce adoption accelerates sales process and productivity 32:11 Build brand validation by being in AWS 36:25 Exciting investment prospects for ISVs 37:40 Success comes from good team alignment 40:57 Early stage startup shares inspiring Cloud journey
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By leveraging the tackle platform, we are now getting high value leads.
And this gives us a focus on our entire sales motion.
This gives us a deeper insight with a more effective way to get to that
decision-making
and that sale. Without that, we'd still be fine-wind.
Welcome to Unlock Cloud GoToMarket, the series where hosts Aaron Figer and
Patrick Riley share
the essential stages of the Cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize, and
grow your company's
revenue through the cloud. They've helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and
outs of their Cloud GTM
motion. And in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the
people who have
put them into place. Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future.
And the future is now.
Hey everybody, in this week's Unlock Cloud GoToMarket, I'm joined by my friend
David Gomes, CEO of
Eclipse's, where he talks to us about how his investments in Cloud GoToMarket
are prompting
investing from the investment community, lots of investments there. So stay
tuned to hear how
he unlocks Cloud GoToMarket. David, how are you? I'm doing great today, Patrick
. Doing great.
Thank you for having me here today. Awesome to have you and thank you very much
for making the
time to do this. I know you've got a cool story to tell, and so we're going to
unpack a little bit
about that. But before we do, can you give us just an introduction of who you
are and where you came
from for the audience? Thank you for having me here. I'm really excited to be
with both you and
Aaron today to talk about our journey to the Cloud here. And really, the impact
that tackle has made
and helping us get to where we are today. But listen, my background last 25
years is I've been
an entrepreneur. I've had the experience of starting a number of organizations
prior to coming to
Eclifsis, and I brought a couple of organizations to an exit, mostly in the
technology marketing
edtech arena prior to that. But in 2019, I actually discovered Eclifsis. I was
going on it in an
investor presentation back in downtown Boston. And I always recall when I was
there and they were
going through their solution, I was, I kind of said, "Geez, I know they have
something, but I really
didn't understand what they have." And I don't necessarily position myself as a
very technical
person. But after talking with the inventor of the technology and the CEO of
the company at the time,
I was so intrigued with what they had that I decided to ask a favor. And the
favor was,
could I take that inventor of the secure MTE technology, a gentleman by name of
David Schoenberger,
and bring him into Boston with me so that I could actually introduce him to
people within my network,
people who I know like and trust that have a lot, I'm going to say far more
technical,
deeper technical understanding of technology than I did. And this was back in
early 2019,
and the hell came back with the same feedback, which was, "Holy cow, we've
never seen anything
like this. This is very different." But it was a bit immature at that time. And
there really was no
pure go-to-market. So after doing some due diligence for a number of months, I
actually decided to
join the team, not only as an investor, but also as an executive. And so at
that time, I joined as
the chief operating officer in 2019, where we are today, I actually was
appointed as the CEO
in November of this past year. And really, my job right now is to guide us to
this
cloud-go-to-market strategy, which is why we're here today.
That's such a great story. Can you tell us a little bit about eclipses? Like,
what is this
technology? When you talk about cyber technology, there's so many organizations
out there, so many
technologies and solutions. So I guess the question is, how do we cut through
the noise, right? With
eclipses, the way we cut through the noise is we say, we're primarily focused
on one thing and one
thing only, and that is protecting data. And so for any business leader, any
CISO, anybody that
who needs to manage risk within their organization, in a sense, optimize reward
and stay ahead of
the competition, eclipses has a technology that is FIPS 140-3 validated that
will mitigate any
material impact in the event of a breach. So now, what do I mean by that? What
I mean is that we
don't keep the bad guys out. We actually take the stance that bad guys are
probably going to get
into the network. They're going to find a way where there's a will, there's a
way. That's right.
But we have a technology that when they get in, they will get absolutely
nothing of value. And
that's really our position. Somebody gave me an analogy the other day is, the
bank robber's going
to a bank and they still have bag full of money, but there's a bomb die in that
bag. The bomb
die goes off. That money is useless. That's who we are. We're the die bomb in
that bag.
All right. So like, you first heard of them in 2019, it's five years later. How
big's the company?
Where are you in your startup journey? Great question. So the company was
founded in 2016.
So I came in pretty early on. There was a history with the technology that
evolved. Actually,
the birth of the technology came out of the payment processing industry, you
might say.
And the envengers of the technology basically said, hey, if we can, if we can
obscure or protect
any type of credit card data, why can't we protect any form of data? So when we
talk about data today,
we mean any form of data that we're projecting. That could be anything from a
document to a
sensor value to live streaming video. And actually, what about usernames and
passwords?
Anything credentials, because we know that data is going to be breached. We
know that
credentials will be stolen. And that's what we come in. Any data created on any
device in any way.
In any application, 90% of the applications that are up there today, and we'll
explain how
we're able to do that. We started, as I said, 2016. We were primarily an on-
prem solution
prior to where we are today. But there was some configuration. When I joined
the team,
there was quite a bit of work that we had to do on the product roadmap. Because
at that time,
literally took months to deploy up technology. But really, what we've evolved
to, even on an
on-prem play, we were still deploying weeks to a matter of days. We now have a
phenomenal
engineering team. I tell you what, the world class engineering team that has
done just a
spectacular job to bring us to a point where we are in essence self-service,
where we can
get deployed in a number of hours with no intervention from our team whatsoever
, which is very special.
So the team consists of roughly about 15 engineers located in the Colorado
Springs area.
We've got executives, our sales and marketing team is basically focused here in
the New England
Boston area. We're under 25 people, but we are growing right now. So we're
early in our journey
still. We've got a solid product. How did we get here onto this call today?
Where did you all begin
your cloud go-to-market journey? And I think I'm asking a leading question
because I know a little
bit of this already. But for everybody who doesn't, can you tell us how you got
here?
Sure. I think the story goes back to January of 23, where our team was calling
on a potential
prospect, which was a multi-billion dollar leading athletic organization. And
the team had multiple
discussions with the chief data security officer at that time. And the way the
story goes is that
gentlemen had seen the technology, had asked for a number of meetings quickly
right after he had
seen the initial meeting. After about six weeks, I, as the chief operating
officer, I had gotten
involved in actually introducing myself to this particular individual. His name
is Jefferson Dance.
And Jeff said to me, he said, "David, me and my industry colleagues, we've been
looking at certain
problems. And I've never seen a technology that solves the problems that we've
been looking at
till I saw your technology." He said, "Our problem is though, is that here at
this organization,
and at this particular organization, they said, let's, we operate within the
cloud, within AWS.
That makes it easy for us to buy. Right now, for us to manage a one-off
contract, it's a little
difficult. Well, anyways, this particular individual, Jeff Dance, that I'm
talking about,
ended up consulting with our organization because he was so enamored with our
technology.
And Jeff actually left that organization. He is now our chief innovation
officer. He joined
our team in June of 23. And at that point in time, we started looking at, okay,
how can we deploy
through the cloud marketplace? And Jeff actually worked with our engineering
team
to really understand the technology and the applicability in the cloud
marketplace. And so,
he drove, I'm going to say the technology roadmap side of things. We then
brought in our operations
folks, Jim and Beny with Dan Lemoine, who really got to tell you something. We
have a lot of MVPs
on this team. Jeff leading the vision from a technology side, Dan leading the
operational side,
really, we put together a plan to say, okay, this is where we need to go. And
the first thing we did,
Patrick, is we got executive alignment. We got everybody on the team to
understand what is the
value of deploying through the cloud marketplace versus on-prem one by one by
one. And we actually
got everybody to lean in and to buy in. And that started at the board level
from the
executive level to the entire team. But in a weird way, I say this, we didn't
know, we didn't know.
And that's where tackle comes in. What you folks did tackle is that you gave us
really an understanding to validate what our plan was first or foremost. But
secondly,
in joining and working with you on our coaching program that you provided, you
were able to
actually provide us with a refined outlook on exactly where we're going. You
gave us the insights on
how to get there. Patrick, you worked directly with Dan Lemoine. If I'm not
mistaken, you guys
had probably 70 action items after our initial go-to-market strategy for
executives, for our sales,
for our operations. So in a way, we didn't know what we didn't know. And
without your guidance,
without your expertise, without literally the insights that the tackle team was
able to give
us, we wouldn't be here where we are today. You had a product market fit, but
you needed to adapt
that fit for the marketplace. And it sounds like you all were able to change
that around really
quickly. Obviously, we were able to help you then prioritize the internal
action items to go after
next. That's awesome. And working with us at tackle, that helped you validate
your strategy and your
assumptions. So what in there were you looking for to really help you
prioritize cloud go-to-market
with the cloud providers? Again, I'll go back to the insights that you and your
team provided us.
And we were flying blind. We didn't have that expertise in house. Although Jeff
had actually
had it on, you know, from an enterprise side of purchasing technologies, Dan
Lemoine was on a
team that had leveraged the marketplace as well. We really didn't have it from
an ISV perspective.
There were things that we didn't understand. We didn't understand the
accelerator programs
that AWS puts on. We didn't understand the requirements that we thought we knew
, but we didn't know. So
the value that I'm going to say that tackle has brought us is the expertise,
the insight,
but also the technology. I mean, now that we're leveraging the tackle platform
for the propensity
to buy, it's giving us the insights and the actual data-driven metrics on
customers that actually
have a propensity to buy, which is in essence streamlining our sales process.
So you got us
to a certain point where we can actually go live, and now we're leveraging the
technologies to
actually accelerate the sales process. We got you to the point to go live. So
you can actually
like transact in the marketplace. You can understand which customers that you
should start to have
that conversation with, but you also did something else inside of the company,
which you knew you
needed to transact in the marketplace, but you really took a deeper look at the
product
and how to really make it a product-led marketplace experience. Can you share
with us
a little bit about that continuing to build out your product so that it was a
marketplace first
experience? You're absolutely correct. And if you recall, one of the things I
said is that we had a
toolkit methodology, developers to work with our toolkits deployed to mobile
applications at that
time. And as I said, it took days to weeks to sometimes months to deploy,
depending on the
organization and this on-prem. We realized that in order for us to be
successful, we had to have a
licensing platform that would allow us to scale. That's one of the things that
the marketplace gave
us. But we also realized that we had to have a solution that we had to make it
easy, not only easy to
buy, but easy to deploy. And our engineers, in a matter of months, were able to
create a containerized
solution that can be deployed through the marketplace in a matter of hours. And
now,
prior to this, I will say this, we were early on in our journey here in talking
with the engineers.
We felt as though we could do this. We could deploy the client, the server side
, without issue, whatsoever,
no intervention whatsoever from our team. But our team at that time, the
methodology would be,
well, we would then send out a compiled library to our customer and then we
would actually help
them deploy it on the client side. And we said, you know something, that's not
going to work.
That's not a great customer experience. Like, how can we make this customer
experience even better?
Absolutely. And this is where I give our engineers the fullest credit. You know
, again, led by
Jeff and a gentleman by name of Joe John Jukay and another gentleman by name of
Trevor Blackman,
these guys did an absolutely amazing thing in just a matter of months. We were
able to create a
solution that is fully deployable through the marketplace with absolutely no
intervention from
us, both on the client side and the server side or APIs server to server that
is supported by
all of our documentation, supported by our videos that we provided, we've made
it easy to deploy.
And as I said, there's truly no intervention required from our engineers
whatsoever. We're
now live in 140 different countries on a global basis. It started with a
customer saying,
I really love your solution. My budget is aligned to the cloud. Can we buy this
through the cloud?
And you're like, oh, I've got to try and figure out how to make sure I can be
purchased through
the cloud because that's where our customer's budget is. Then you go down this
route of looking
at this cloud marketplace and you realize, wait a minute, this could actually
help us also fix this
other experience that we have that it takes weeks and days to deploy our
product. Like,
if we did this, we not only can our customers now use their cloud budgets to
buy this way,
but we actually fix our product experience as well. And we decrease the time it
takes to deploy
our product. Our customers now have a better experience deploying. They can
actually start
using the product sooner. It can start getting their ROI on what the product
value is sooner.
And we start actually also driving consumption sooner because the sooner your
product gets out
there and used the sooner you start to drive the consumption and you start to
get those meters going
in the cloud's environment. You hit on some great points, you know, in addition
to that too,
by going to the marketplace, what we realized is we went through an entire
foundational
technical review with AWS. So right then and there, along with our fifths 140-3
validation,
along with now the industry analysts following us in writing about us, we now
have market validation
by being in the AWS marketplace. We are a trusted vendor of those enterprises
that are already
committed to spend in the marketplace. They see that we've gone through the
process that AWS has
gone to vet our technology, to vet our processes, our documentation that was
aligned with it.
So we're validated now in the marketplace. We've simplified the procurement
process now.
We don't have any contracts that are going back and forth and redlining and
whatnot.
We're leveraging the marketplace itself, leveraging their end user license
agreement.
We're certainly offering what we call a private offers as well, but that is
again,
a simplified process through the marketplace itself. We've made billing
extremely easy now.
We talked about the global reach, but really what it comes down to is we are
making it easy to deploy,
easy to buy. Our revenue model, it's a simplified revenue model, it's repeat
able, it's predictable,
it's a consumption model, it's actually, it's a pay-as-you-grow in essence. We
could never have done
any of this. We could never have achieved any of those key points without being
in the cloud marketplace.
Recapping, we've just kind of set the table with product, and that there's no
shortage of work
involved in everything you've just talked through. Getting us ready from a
product market fit,
getting us involved in the marketplace, getting the right resources aligned,
shifting how we look
at providing better customer experiences for our customers. And in the spirit
of kind of
unlocking cloud go to market, this whole podcast, we're really looking at
through the lens of
tackle's maturity model. And so, quick overview for those listing that might
not have heard,
we've got a maturity model where we look at customers through various phases of
growth
in their cloud go-to-market journey. And this journey is kind of like rungs on
a ladder where
the very base, you've got to have a sure footing where we establish our
foundation,
and we climb the ladder and go all the way to scaling adoption. And if I look
at
eclipses in this journey, right now, I think you're really definitely in the
establishing
foundation phase. You've built out that product alignment fit, but I'll caveat
that with, you look
a lot further than you are, because you've got some great strategies that you
've implemented
internally with an alignment specifically. And I'd like to dive in now a little
bit more on the
people side of things with you and talk about when you looked at this problem,
and you all
looked at the opportunity in front of you for marketplace, how did you think
about aligning
the rest of ELT, right? You get it, you came in CEO, you had great people
around you, gave you
great advice. But how did you get everybody else behind us? And within that
experience,
like who were some of those people and key players on the team that helped
build that out?
As I said, we have a phenomenal team. I'm going to call it MVPs here that
should go to
quite a few people here. But as I said, I had mentioned Jeff dance before with
an initial vision
and then driving the product roadmap. It did make mention of Dan Lamoy, and I
tell you what,
Dan's a superstar. You know, you've worked with him directly Patrick on the
coaching and strategy
on a weekly basis. And really, he's a KPI metric driven guy. He's also kept
everybody aligned.
The amount of research he did before we even met the you guys and the folks at
Tackle,
you know, was was astronomical here. And he put us in a great position. But
what Dan has done,
he drove us to really understand what the vision could be with Dan's input on
all of his research,
Jeff, myself, Larry Murray, our other chief revenue officer, we put together a
business plan,
we presented it to the board and the board understood it. They understood the
value. What we did is we
talked about again, some of the things that we talked about earlier, we if we
looked in the rear
of your mirror and said, here we had this great technology, we're not
abandoning the technology.
We're just looking at what's the best way to deploy it. What's the best way to
consume it.
Let's create a licensing platform that allows for infinite scalability. Let's
be able to deploy
in a way that takes hours that is self-sufficient, self-service. And we
actually put that in the plan.
And our board of directors had full buy-in on that. One of the things that we
did afterwards,
once we got buy-in, we actually went to all the team members. I needed the team
members,
the engineering team, our marketing team, everybody to understand where we're
going.
And I couldn't be more proud of how we got to where we are today. And it's been
a journey.
It's been a learning journey. And part of the value that tackle has brought us
is identify the
areas that really the gaps that we needed. One of the true gaps that we
understood that we needed
from a people perspective is that we needed a cloud alliance director. We need
somebody to come in
and actually not only lead the sales motion within the marketplace, but
actually create the
sales motion within the marketplace. One of the most strategic hires that we
made was the first
week of April of this year, Taylor Brooks. Taylor is a certified cloud alliance
director. She comes
from the Caddy Shack group. She's worked with awesome partners. She's opened
our eyes to what
is required to really get into the ISBA, the accelerator programs. She opened
our eyes to
understanding how we get to the worldwide service organizations within AWS to
open the doors to
the open doors to other partners. She really is defining that sales motion. And
Patrick,
you may recall you were part of that recruitment process with us. You and your
team provided us
with, I'm going to say certain leads and certain through your network, that's
how we were able to
find Taylor and you assisted us on the, I'm going to say on the interview
process to ensure that we
had the right candidate. And I'll tell you right now, we've learned more from
Taylor in the last
two months than we did in the last eight months combined on this particular
journey when it comes
to the sales motion. So when I look at the people, you know, we, as I said, we
've got a lot of MVPs
here. Jeff was driving the engineering, the tech roadmap, Dan was driving the
operational side
of things. Taylor, along with Larry and the sales team are driving the sales
motion, the cost cell
sales motion in the coal bill, the coal brand within the partner network.
I always tell people like, yes, you can do this. Like you can figure all this
out and you can
build your cloud, go to market and you can operationalize it and all these
things. You can do this
or we can do it faster together. So I love that you guys are taking that
philosophy of
there are experts out there in the industry who can help us do this faster and
you hiring Taylor,
hiring tackle to help you learn faster so that you can get to market faster. It
's such a great
like bus practice. When you hire Taylor and she's kind of opening your eyes to
here's all the things
that we have to go do. And now that you have tackles platform, what are the
next steps you're
taking to really start to operationalize your strategy inside of Salesforce?
If we talk about Salesforce remote, that was another strategic move for us to
adopt Salesforce
as our CRM. But we also realized again, going back to working with you folks
and with Taylor
understanding things that we didn't understand. I'm going to say AWS had
certain requirements for
their ISVA programs. And that's the independent service vendor accelerator
programs. And in order
for us to be assigned a PDM, we needed Salesforce. But we had a different CRM.
I don't have to
name who they were, but that wasn't part of what the lines properly, not only
with the ACE portal,
but also with the tackle dashboard as well. So bringing Salesforce and adopting
Salesforce
integrating with the tackle dashboard with the propensity by platform combined
with the insights
that we get from the ACE and call it the ACE portal truly gives us the benefit
of accelerating
our sales process now and understanding the insights of the customers buying
the buying habits and
their propensity to buy, which again, I'll go back is accelerating our yield to
productivity.
You talked about a lot of cool things so far. I wanted to unpack a little bit
more on
this foundation that you've built with. Yes, we did product fit. Then we had
executive alignment.
Something cool, I think that you skimmed over which everybody should listen to,
is that you went and spent time one on one with all the employees. I know that
's not scalable
at huge companies, but like getting everybody on board with the pillars of this
venture and
this go to market strategy was nothing to skim over. So like, who does to you
for doing that?
But that was an important phase of getting that alignment, not only from the
executive team,
but from individuals. And then you just talked about Salesforce. We've got
people in place.
We've got alignment across product, but now we need to look at how do we
implement the right tools to
do so bringing in a different tool. Obviously, that's not an easy thing to do.
It's a transformational
change. So I think you're really looking at this as a business transformation,
which is something
that a lot of companies aren't looking at it that way. So how did you come to
the realization that
the company is going to need to change what we're doing from a tooling
perspective. And we're going
to need to leverage some new things in order to grow scale. Like, what was the
realization for
you? Was it just simply that, hey, tackle and AWS have come in and said, hey,
this is kind of
the way forward? Was there anything particular in any of these tool sets, like
maybe prospect or
something else that we're motivational to say, ah, this is something we should
probably get into
future proof or whatever customer feedback. Once we got that initial feedback
from Jefferson,
we then started talking to other clients. And when they said the same thing, we
have another,
what I'm going to call on prem client that has said, yes, this would work for
us. In fact,
through this journey, we did what we call a soft launch in the last call last
month as we
really truly became live in the marketplace with our certain customers that
know us know as well.
And our initial soft launch was really to get feedback on the actual experience
, which worked
out tremendous on preparing ourselves for our true goal live in the marketplace
. But listening to
our customers was was extremely important. But I also listened to the
marketplace as well. And we
did some research. There's an organization that many people know. It's one of
your customers,
Wizz. And I try to say that we're trying to follow the Wizz playbook. Wizz is
the fastest growing
organization to 100 million in revenue. And you guys were part of that market
strategy.
That's when we said, how do we get to tackle IO? That's when we had our initial
, our initial
meetings right now. And again, Patrick, you and your team validated our
approach after you took a
look at our technology. From our perspective, or from from an executive
perspective, it was talking
to our customers doing some industry research, understanding, I'm going to call
it the growing
market, you know, the growing transactions in the marketplace. I was truly
unaware of how big the
marketplace was in terms of services and technologies being deployed to to
enterprises. And then
understanding the value that we kind of went through that not only that we can
offer our company,
but this better together story that we've created for the AWS wraps themselves.
And because it's
driving consumption in the marketplace, it's driving consumption for the
enterprises that
have committed spends. And the reality is because we're in enablement
technology, we get too deep
into our tech, but we're at the application layer. We're an easy add on to any
web application,
or any mobile application in the marketplace. You know, the analogy somebody
had given me
early on, they said, well, you know, the AWS reps and the reps that are out
there servicing
their enterprises, they're trying to sell them an ice cream sundae. But once
they sell them the
ice cream sundae, you guys are the cherry on top of the hot fudge and the
sprinkles that go on.
You're an easy add on for any application that is requiring data security. Most
applications
require data security. So we're looking to make it easy to buy. And then the
last pillar here
is the industry analysts. We started talking to the industry analysts out there
. One in particular
organization called HFS research, when they really dove in and looked at our go
to market strategy.
Early on, they said this will make a difference. In fact, I will tell you, I'm
very proud to announce
that just this past Friday, we was selected and highlighted by HFS research as
a hot new vendor.
This was a five month study done by Joel Martin and his team at HFS research,
looking at our technology, going out of the covers, talking to our customers.
And this
report just came out. And in this report, he writes, "Eclipses has game
changing technology.
We don't have the market brand of the other big boys yet, but we have something
that really
nobody else has when it comes to protecting data. And by deploying it through
the marketplace,
we've now got an entire TAM that we never had before that allows us to
implement quickly,
easily. And let's call it what it is. I've talked to another vendors. We're all
in this together.
I mean, this competition, but what are we trying to do? We're trying to protect
the integrity of
organizations. We're trying to protect data. Some people are just doing it in a
different way.
But we are so complimentary, not only to applications that are out there, as I
mentioned,
but also to other cyber technologies that we're already talking to, because we
are the last mile
for them as they help their customers protect their data as well."
You said it, right? So you've got this whole new TAM, a bigger TAM than you
originally thought
you had. So how are you getting to know your TAM and how are you starting to
use the tools you
have at TACL to really help you understand that TAM and figure out which
customers you're going to
go start to approach with your joint messaging of Eclipsis and AWS through the
marketplace?
Well, I mean, that's where the TACL prospects platform comes in for us. I mean,
that truly
streamlines our sales motion. Being able to understand, providing a list of
enterprises that
we're going after and understand what they're buying propensities are. I mean,
this is data-driven
optimization for us. Let's call it what it is. Bottom line, you got it by
leveraging the TACL
platform, we are now getting high value leads. And this gives us a focus on our
entire sales
motion. This gives us a deeper insight with a more effective way to get to that
decision-making
in that sale. Without that, we'd still be flying wide. And that kind of starts
to give you the
next momentum around creating coastal opportunities and starting to engage with
AWS.
Correct. I mean, because that is aligned into the ACE portal itself. This is
where our
coastal motion comes in with Taylor Brooks, who's really led this initiative
right now,
in bringing us in into alignment into that ACE portal. It's truly all coming
together for us.
And giving you an opportunity to start to build your brand inside of AWS. You
said earlier,
by being in the marketplace, it gives you market validation because you're a
startup. People don't
know who you are. But the fact that you are in AWS's marketplace, there's brand
validation by aligning
your brand with AWS's brand. Now customers have more confidence to try this
product that they've
never heard of because, well, it's certified to be in AWS's marketplace. It's
got to be a good
quality product. And then you've got to go tell your story to AWS so that when
their customers go
to their AWS rep and they're like, "Hey, we're thinking about this product.
What can you tell us?"
You need to start to get those AWS sellers educated. So using CoSAL as a way to
also start to build
your brand inside of AWS so people understand who you are and what you do.
Tae's doing a great job at that right now today. Using that platform to help go
educate folks.
And the last we talked to you all were at various events. And I think you're
going to be up that's
coming up. Taylor, we call her Tae. We've learned more from her in her
experience from the CoSAL
understanding than we had in months before. And her experience that she brings
forward in leading
this effort has just been exponential. She is creating that as I'm going to
call it her and
you talked about it. What's the benefit to the AWS rep? That's our better
together story.
Yeah, you got to sell to the cloud before you can sell with and sell through.
Listen, we're one of thousands of vendors. Again, how do we cut through noise?
What we want to be
able to do is show them what the advantages are that we bring to their
customers. How do we make
their life easier? How do we actually help them? I'm going to say in their
endeavors and help
create that better together story with them. And Taylor's been fantastic in
working through that
with us. And all of this investment that you've made in establishing the solid
foundation in doing
all this research around proving out that this is a strong go-to-market
strategy for you.
It's also played in your favor in the investment community. I don't know if you
can share or to
what level you want to share, but this has also been a game changer as a
startup in the investment
community and how they look at you. It really is a game changer in how the
investment community
views us. When we talk about the investment community, we've raised a
significant amount of dollars
to date, but all from high network individuals. We haven't gone the
institutional private
investor route just yet, but we did speak with some folks early on. We just
didn't fit their
criteria on who we were, what we were doing. Fast forward to where we are today
. We're now active
in active discussions with some institutional investors. And the primary reason
is because
they've highlighted our strategic move to the cloud as I'm going to keep using
the term game
changer. They see the value and the scalability that we've created by moving to
AWS to the AWS
marketplace and to deploy through the marketplace itself. It's not just that
you invested in getting
listed and that you're in the call marketplaces and you have this cloud play.
You've actually
productized being in the market. The institutional investors have seen and they
pointed it out,
they see that we're aligning ourselves with experts like you guys. They
understand, you know,
through the coaching program that we have, they understand that we are getting
this expert advice
from you folks that we're getting the tailored strategies, strategies that are
proven. They've
worked for companies like Wiz and your other clients. They see that. And they
also understand
that this strategy is going to optimize our sales process. And so this
highlight us being in the
marketplace, it's alignment with experts like tackle that have the experience
in working with
other companies to really burst them out has really played in our favor as we
tell our story to these
investors. And it's cool for us to hear these kinds of things. And I know we
got a preview of
this when we were chatting with you around having this podcast. When you say
that and you talk about
it, it makes me excited for all the other ISPs that are out there trying to
start up in their
category. And they're looking at where do I go from an investment perspective?
And what's the
right method for me? And no matter which you decide, you're going to get more
attention. If
you put the right people in the right positions, you look at this from a true
channel, a true go-to
market investment. And you surround yourself with others in a product that are
going to really be
driven by on and through that cloud. So kudos to you. It definitely makes me
excited to hear it.
Speaking of other ISVs and those that are just getting started, we've talked a
lot about a
bunch of different topics from the product fit to the executive alignment to
cross functional
teams to a little bit of your technology and sales force. But holistically, if
you could
sit down with a CEO of another young startup and give them some lessons learned
on
what would the few two or three or four things be that you would say are like,
this is what I
would convey to them. As I look back in my career, even in my previous
leadership roles
at other organizations, I've always taken the position that you need to
surround yourself with
good people to be successful. And I do feel confident that this company is on a
tremendous
journey and we will be on a rocket ship very soon. And it's not going to be
because of me,
it's going to be because of our team. And so the advice I would give to any
other CEO is,
first and foremost, you need team alignment. We need to make sure that
everybody is all in.
We need to bring in people that have experience and expertise that you don't
have. And, you know,
I will say humbly, I was completely unaware of the true value of being in the
marketplace was
in January of 2023. That was a learning experience for me, but I learned from
people
that we brought in so I can get their feedback, understand their feedback,
process it together.
I mean, this was a true team event and putting together a strategic business
plan. We had a
completely separate plan on this cloud go to market strategy. And we presented
this to the
board. We made sure it was easy to understand. We just really want to put it
out and plan words.
This is where we were. These are the issues. These were the obstacles that we
had to overcome.
And with each one, we kind of drew a line to say, this is what's going to bring
us. By going to
the cloud marketplace, this is how we're going to address that particular
obstacle. And by just
creating a picture in that business plan, that's easy to understand. That's
where we got the alignment
right away. Again, taking that same approach with the team members, because our
team members,
a lot of these guys were in a lot longer than me. And they want to see growth
as well. And having
buy in on this new vision, this new strategy was so important. One of my
advisory board members,
who is the chief business officer for a very large cyber firm said, your team
in six months
did well, took us 18 months. So we know that we moved at the speed of light.
And that's because
we had everybody all in. Guys on our engineering team were taking time during
their holiday breaks,
weekends, you know, and I've got a young engineering team. I know that these
people have young,
really young kids. I don't want them to miss their little league games and
their plays and whatnot.
And then hopefully they never did, but they got done what they needed to get
done. And they did
it in a timely fashion because they all understood where we were going. My job,
honestly, as a leader
is, I need to drive the bus. I just want to make sure everybody's on the bus.
Well, when you're excited about what you're doing, giving your time, it's so
easy. Like,
you just do it because you're like, I want to see the outcome of this. And you
don't even actually
think about how much time it's taking you because you're so excited and you're
so passionate about
what you're creating and the outcome that that's going to drive. So it sounds
like you have a really
great team. We do, Eric, thank you. And again, we wouldn't be here without them
. This is a true
team play. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I feel like it's so
important for our audience
to hear stories from every type of company out there trying to build cloud, go
to market strategies
and partnerships and having you guys more of an early stage startup share your
story. And the benefit
that you have of being an early stage startup of being able to create your
product to really be
productized inside of the cloud marketplaces and how that is accelerating your
journey. I feel like
that's inspiring and motivating for our more established companies that are in
this huge
transformation mode of like, I know I need to transform my product. This is
going to take a while,
but now hearing stories like yours gives them validation and hope and
motivation to like go do
it. You know, when we look at the marketplace, we are, you know, application
driven, as I said,
in terms of what we're covering mobile applications and web applications and
APIs.
We feel so strongly that we have an applicable solution for 90% of the data tr
ays actions that
are happening in the cloud today. And so we believe that without this move,
without the expert experience
and assistance from tackle that we wouldn't be where we are today at this
moment in time.
But the reality is by aligning ourselves with experts like you, we are truly in
a position where
we can increase our success in the marketplace. Well, thanks for joining us
today, David. This
was super exciting for us to hear, not only for those I have speechless thing
who are in earlier
stages, but also as Aaron mentioned, those that are established and looking to
pivot their products.
So thank you for sharing your stories. I know it was a huge block of your time
that we've taken
up over the last week or two, but I sincerely appreciate you joining us on this
episode.
Patrick, Aaron, I just want to say thank you not only to you personally, but I
want to thank
the tackle team as well. I appreciate the support. I appreciate the insights.
We look forward to a
long business relationship with you folks. Thank you very much for this time
and thank you for
your consideration. So pull up a chair, grab a notebook and join us as we share
the essential
stages of the maturity model to start, optimize and grow your company's revenue
using the cloud.
For more resources on executing your cloud go to market strategy, you can visit
our website at
tackle.io.