The following interview is a conversation we had with Godard Abel, Co-founder & CEO of G2, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: How B2B Market Categories Are Created with G2’s Godard Abel
Godard Abel
Thanks Bret, so much for hosting me, and I love talking category strategy, so look forward to it.
Brett
Nice. Well, let’s dive in. And before we dive deep into category creation and everything that’s going on at G2, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Godard Abel
Sure. So I’ve been a SaaS entrepreneur now, I think for about 25 years, and I first started getting involved in enterprise software. Back then it wasn’t quite called Cloud, but I started getting involved in building online software in 1998. Helped a little startup, Alianza, acquired by a bigger startup called Niku that went public, the.com heyday, I don’t know if you remember it. In the beginning of 2000, I decided it was a great time to start my own company. And so we started big machines. That was a configure, price, quote, software company, eventually bought by Oracle after a long twelve year struggle, became the Oracle CPU Cloud. And then we built another one of those steel brick because after Oracle bought Big Machines, we thought there was be a gap in the salesforce ecosystem. And then steel brick just two years later was acquired by Salesforce. We became the Salesforce CPQ and billing salesforce revenue cloud.
Godard Abel
So that was an exciting time. And in parallel to that, we started G2. My Co-Founder Tim did a great job leading it, and I rejoined the company after salesforce to scale it into what is now the biggest site where software buyers around the world go to discover great apps at G2 and 25 years in SaaS.
Brett
That definitely makes you an OG in space. And many of the founders that we have listening in, they’re first time founders or they’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. So I’d love to just talk a little bit about that. How has the world changed or how has the software world changed from today compared to 25 years ago when you were just getting started? I’m sure there’s a lot of changes, but what are some of those big changes that you’ve experienced?
Godard Abel
Well, one, I think the software is getting so much better because I do remember, you might remember some of those Internet 1.0 apps. Honestly, they were really clunky and really slow. And even I remember when we launched our first startup machines in 2000, our users were still on dial up Internet and there was just so many problems and trying to make it was a sales application for channel Partners. But trying to make that work was almost like impossible because the UI UX, if you look at it now, it’s so clunky and the performance was so bad. And so I think in that sense there was no AWS, there was no Azure, so we had to build our own hosting infrastructure to colo. So honestly, everything in terms of technology was so much harder and so much worse. And so I think in that sense, it’s such an exciting time to be a SaaS entrepreneur because the tech now, the user experiences we can create are just incredible, amazing.
Brett
I love that. And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founders and as a CEO. First one is what founders do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Godard Abel
There are probably a couple, I think, right here in our world of SaaS. I would say it’s. Mark benioff. Yeah, the founders and CEO of Salesforce. And I would say that because frankly, my first couple of startups were built as salesforce partners in their ecosystem. And my first company, Big Machines, as I mentioned, we struggled for years, were ahead of the market. And then I do give Mark Benioff a lot of credit for making Cloud trusted and popular in the enterprise. And ultimately also he acquired our second company. But I just felt like I learned so much about Mark, the V Two mom, and he’s written a great book, behind the Cloud. And with all kind of his secrets to building a SaaS company, I highly recommend it. So I feel like I’ve learned so much from Mark. And probably the second entrepreneur, maybe a little bit outside of SaaS, at least originally, would be Jeff Bezos.
Godard Abel
Just his philosophy, especially one that I really like 25 years into it, as day one. I think as entrepreneur now and all these exciting things happening around AI and all the new opportunities, I still think it’s truly day one for G2 and for our industry. And I just love the bezos mindset of always be innovating for the future.
Brett
Yeah, two great examples. And I read the Mark Benyoff book a couple of years ago, and my big takeaway was just declaring war on an enemy and creating an enemy and then using that to really galvanize the team and the industry around that enemy. Mark Benioff just did such an amazing job with that. And some of those stunts he pulled, like the fake protests, I think it was an idea that he had that never actually worked out, but he was going to drive a tank at a competitor event. All of that kind of stuff, I think is just very fascinating, especially today when some of the SaaS marketing out there just is very, you know, product focused. It was super interesting to see how Mark Benioff approached marketing and everything he did there.
Godard Abel
Yeah, I totally agree, Brett. And I think he had the whole no know mantra and those buttons, no software. And I think even he tells a story in that book, how his whole team resisted. They’re like, Mark, what do you mean no software? We’re building a software company. But I think he just saw how disruptive the cloud delivery versus Siebel. Siebel was our big enemy. And I’ve also taken that to heart, frankly, at G2, the big incumbent in our world is Gartner, and I think they have their magic quadrants. And we created some no magic buttons. Frankly, as soft entrepreneurs, we always thought the magic in the quadrant was unfair because it just takes forever to get in the quadrant, takes forever to be the leader. So we had passion to change that and give more real time insights to software buyers and also help software entrepreneurs validate their apps in real time.
Godard Abel
Not having to wait for analyst to publish a report. Yeah, love that.
Brett
And we’re going to dive deep on that in a second. One last question for you. If you had to pick one book that really had a major impact on you as a founders, and we can’t do the Mark Benioff book, we have to go outside of that. But if we had to pick one book that’s had a major impact on you as a founders, what would it be?
Godard Abel
Probably even as a founders and as a human, I would say Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankel. And I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it, but he was famous psychologist, psychiatrist, and obviously he had a very painful, sad like story where during World War II he was know in Nazi concentration camp. But what’s so inspirational is how he used that to really find meaning in his own life and just get through the toughest circumstances. And as founders, oftentimes we think our lives are tough, and they are right. Like, I experienced my first company, I was failing for years, almost bankrupt. It feels like my world is ending. But then you just realize Viktor Frankl, even in the harshest possible circumstances, was still able to find meaning in his life and ultimately thrive once he luckily got out. And just the lessons he takes from that just for, I think, for any human.
Godard Abel
And we all have to persevere in our lives, especially as entrepreneurs. So I’ve just taken tremendous inspiration for it. And I highly recommend Viktor Frankl’s book to anyone.
Brett
Yeah, it certainly puts things in perspective. And that’s one of those books that I read probably eight or nine years ago, but I need to go back to it because it’s such a good book, it’s so powerful, and I think it’s definitely not a business book. But the lessons that he teaches you in that book absolutely apply to building a company and running a company and trying to live a happy life as you do it. So that’s a great call out. And definitely we’ll reread that one.
Godard Abel
Yeah.
Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive into G2. So you just take us back to those very early days where you were playing around with this idea. What was going on in your head? What were those conversations like between you and your co-founders? And what made you decide, this is it? This is a problem that I want to dedicate to solve.
Godard Abel
Yeah, and GT was really the second company we started, just about parallel to steel brick, but I remember were our basement, and at the time, I was living in the Chicago suburbs. We’d built Big Machines in Chicago, and I had a little bit of a break. And then after I left Big Machines, I had about a year where I didn’t really do much. It was an interesting time because Big Machines ultimately was a big success. Oracle acquired it for over 400 million. But I remember I was home. I was feeling lonely and kind of just missing something. And I think a lot of my friends couldn’t understand. They’re like, oh, you just had a great exit. You got a nice house. What are you worried about? But I was just kind of after a while, I just realized I missed the purpose of building. And so I got together four of my best friends from building Big Machines.
Godard Abel
We got together in my basement, and honestly, we first kind of decided, hey, let’s build another one. And we also decided we wanted to build a peak culture. And one more great book we read at that time was Peak by Chip Conley. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but Chip was the founders of an amazing boutique hotel chain in the Bay Area, and then he was the head of hospitality for airbnb. So obviously great entrepreneur in his own right, but he wrote this very philosophical book on applying Mazov’s hierarchy of need to business cultures and how a business culture centered on heart and love and caring can ultimately elevate everyone involved in the business to their peak and with inspired employees, evangelical customers, proud investors. And then we all align in still our peak culture today and we have our peak values. So we kind of thought first about what’s the culture?
Godard Abel
And then we brainstorm probably like most found up startup team. And we’re also lucky. This is our second company. So we had some money so we could take a little bit more time and actually think about the culture first. But then we thought about, hey, what business do we really want to build? And I remember we brainstormed basement, we had all those flip charts and had a bunch of great ideas. At some point actually, I look back and I’m like wow, they were all great ideas. Probably just because 2012 in hindsight was a great time to start any talk company. And were also brainstorming names. One of the names we brainstormed was Datadog. That turned out well. Another idea was like, oh, let’s do something like Shopify, maybe a little bit more for B2B, but let’s just make commerce really easy and pretty.
Godard Abel
Every idea I look back, somebody built them well because it was just still such a nascent time for SaaS and cloud startups. But ultimately we kept coming back to this idea of G2. And like I said, one we chafed under the Gartner model and having to wait for Magic Quadrants took us nine years of getting Gartner report at big machines, twelve years to become a leader. So we just thought there could be something better. And then as consumers, ultimately we came up with this G2 idea which we said, hey, let’s build a Yelp for business software. And in 2012 Yelp was quite hot and it’s still a great site, but I like to say that was before Google went evil on them. But this idea of user reviews and we also just thought it was missing our industry. And again, going back to the traditional analyst, we always said it was like a restaurant critic that couldn’t eat the food because the reality is none of the analysts could actually use the software in the right business context.
Godard Abel
That’s like the restaurant critic standing outside the door and waiting for the customers how did the food taste? Right? Why don’t we just ask the people eating the food, right? Aka the real users of software. And we thought we could provide better, more real time advice if we asked real users about their experiences with software. And shockingly to us is that it didn’t exist for industry because in the consumer internet world it had become obvious and bezos. I mentioned I’m admirer, I read his biography, but I think they launched Bezos and Amazon launched reviews for books way back in 1996. And it was interesting also what Bezos discovered. Like the book publishers initially were really mad at him because they were like, jeff, I thought you’re trying to sell our books. Why do you allow people to say nasty things about them? But obviously, Amazon always a very data driven company.
Godard Abel
Bezos went back in with data and said, look, a book that has just one negative review will sell more than a book with no reviews, and a book with 100 reviews, mostly positive, some negative will sell 20% more. And so we also just so proven in the consumer world that consumers need reviews. It builds trust, allows faster buying decisions. We were just shocked it didn’t exist for SaaS and cloud software. So it just seemed like one of those things that was meant to be built. And probably the final reason was Discoverability for SaaS. And the reality is, like today on G2, there’s over 100,000 apps. We also saw a lot of our early big machines customers. I remember RollsRoyce made truly big machines, big gas turbines. We created Configurators to help them. But I remember they finally found us, became a customer, but they’re like, wow, we wish we discovered you two years earlier.
Godard Abel
We’ve been trying to build a software in house. We didn’t know vendors like you existed. And so that was the other key goal, is let’s help business people, knowledge workers, find the best apps. Because the cool thing now with all these SaaS entrepreneurs, there’s purpose built apps for every business problem, every industry, every use case, and if you can quickly discover them, you’ll become more successful as a knowledge worker, your business will become more successful. So we just thought it was this essential utility that our industry was missing.
Brett
And on the topic there of discovery, as I mentioned in the intro there, I use G2 a lot. And my normal path to getting to G2 is from Google. So you mentioned there Google going evil on Yelp. Do you ever have any concerns about Google going evil on G2? And has Google done any changes that has impacted G2’s search ranking and search results?
Godard Abel
Well, to the liner question, yes. And I think any of us that play the SEO game like Google changes algorithm all the time. And I do think generally for the better. I think they are trying to make their search engine for good and get the higher quality content to rank near the top. And we’re constantly aiming to produce better and better content. I think that G2 flywheel has always been like the first category we tried was CRM software. I mentioned we are a salesforce, a Siebel and Oracle partner, so we do the worst CRM World well. So we said let’s test it there. And then we’ll usually find a category like CRM. Once we have enough reviews, we have good comparisons of, let’s say, salesforce and dynamics, then we do naturally start to rank on Google and that’s where Google certainly does good, right?
Godard Abel
So we’re continuously working on Know and we’ll probably continue to forever because and I think that’s consumer, most of us still shop on Google start there, and that’s certainly true for business software. We do rank for most of our category returns. We always aim to rank the top three. So that’s how most buyers do discover us. And do I have some fear? Yes. Obviously Google’s done a lot of categories, right? Travel, Local, where they then put their own reviews tooling on top of the third party site. So do I have some fear of that? Yes. Who knows when they might do it? And obviously also the key, I think the reason Yelp is still successful, we’re really aiming to build our own brand. I think our dream, Bret, someday you come to g2.com instead of Google. And I think the other disruptive force out there now is AI, and I think everyone’s talking about it with Bing partnering with OpenAI where they’re trying to change the interface from just that search box to now having a chat GPT like interactive experience to find information on the web.
Godard Abel
And I’m sure you’ve tried it, Brett. I’ve signed up for the $20 a month and I’m like it’s brilliant for my own work, but I can just write draft stuff faster, find information faster. So I do think that may change the game for all of us. And at G2 we are experimenting with AI ourselves because I think that may really change this whole Google search paradigm and we think can make it much easier for software buyers to discover information from G2 through a chat, GBT kind of Q and A interface. So I think it’s exciting to have an industry and that may finally change how dependent so many of us are on Google.
Brett
Yeah, it’s a wild time just even hearing that there is a challenger to Google Search and that Google Search could change. I think just in my brain it was just default that Google Search was always going to be there and it was going to just keep getting better and better, but that was it. Then all of a sudden now they’re talking about Microsoft and really being a challenger, google being concerned about that. I think it’s a fascinating time to be in tech in general.
Godard Abel
Sure.
Brett
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Brett
It feels like almost like a black hat tactic, but somehow it’s just widely accepted and it seems like no one really talks about that, and that idea that it is largely pay for play. So can you just talk us through what that traditional research analyst firm business model looks like? And then I’d love to talk about the G2 business model from there.
Godard Abel
Sure. And certainly, like at Big Machines, we did learn how to play with a traditional research firm model. And like I said, ultimately were recognized as a leader by Gartner, Forcer, et cetera. And I think still a lot of enterprise software startups. It’s still important, right, because especially Fortune 500, CIOs, a lot of them will disqualify you, right, if you’re at least not in the analyst report. So that’s why it’s always been important. Of course, I think sites like G2, the Internet is changing that, I think the importance of lessening. But it’s still there and certainly what we learned, and it’s not like black and white pay to play because it’s also true. The analysts will say, hey, even if you don’t pay us, if you’re good enough, we’ll include you. That’s true. But obviously by paying, you gain access, right? And so we always paid.
Godard Abel
You pay for strategy days, you pay for annual subscriptions, you pay for them to speak to your conference. And yes, they can give you some good perspectives. But frankly, I was as entrepreneur, I got better perspectives from my customers. I love listening to my customers. Honestly, I prefer that to listening to analysts. But I think at the end of the day, I remember Big Machines, like, at the end, were probably spending 150,000 a year for analyst access. And that certainly didn’t feel great, where I felt like I had to do it and to be fully represented. And that certainly didn’t feel good. I think that model is still out there today. And ultimately, like I said, if you’re really focused on selling the big enterprises, I’d still tell entrepreneur to do it. But it also takes years, right? Because even if you start pitching analysts, they tend to only update the reports one or two years.
Godard Abel
By the time they create your category, it might be, like I said, big machines took us nine years till they really launched CPQ research. So it’s just super frustrating. It costs a lot of money, a lot of time, takes forever. And that’s where our dream is. Sites like G2, when it’s just customer voice. And at some point all you have to do is talk to your customers. And as an entrepreneur, if you don’t love talking to your customers, you should probably find a new job. You know what I mean? I think any good entrepreneur, you live and die by user feedback, right? Going back to bezos customer obsessed, the number one Amazon leadership principle. But you want and have to be customer obsessed because that’s why you start a company, right? You want to create a better mousetrap, a better solution for your customer.
Godard Abel
And that’s what we hope happens with G2, right. Customer voice wins and the best apps win faster, right? The ones that customers love the most. In some ways it seems so obvious and in that sense it’s kind of, I think a bit of like a legacy thing, right? That our B2B tech industry is still so dependent on this analyst model versus just being 100% customer obsessed.
Brett
And can you talk to me about the G2 marketplace and what you do there to build trust in the marketplace?
Godard Abel
Yes, and trust is very important for the G2 marketplace. And we’ve also seen that we’ve learned from the consumer review world going back to Yelp, and I still use Yelp, I like Yelp, right? I trust it overall. But we’ve also all heard the horror stories like in New York Times about fake reviews on Yelp, pay per views on Google. And I think that’s the one downside, right? And we’ve seen that at G2. Also, once you become more influential to buyers for software or restaurants or whatever, it also creates a big incentive for fraud. And there’s all those stories where a restaurant will blame their competitor or the uncle of the restaurant owner writes a great review. So there’s all those concerns in B to C reviews that are also true in B2B. And so we’ve tried to do from day one at G2 is really make trust a priority.
Godard Abel
And we think the most important thing is to know the professional identity of the user, of the person writing the review. And so originally we only allowed sign up by LinkedIn profile. And Bret, I’m sure you and I, I think we all live on LinkedIn, right? I know it’s the first thing when I start a new company, when I’m ready to launch it, I’ll update my LinkedIn profile first. And so the good news is everyone in our industry does that, right? So it’s a very up to date real professional identity. And not only does it let us know you’re really Bret, but it also gives us professional context about you. What industry are you in, what size company do you work for, what’s your job role? All of which provides interesting additional data to put a G2 review in context. And so one, we continue that one, we verify everyone’s professional identity so we know who they really are.
Godard Abel
And then obviously, we can algorithmically catch the really obvious fraud. Like if you try to review your own company, Bret, or competitors, we’ll automatically take those down. And we do also have a research QA team, and yes, we’re working to automate that, but we do end up rejecting over 30% of reviews that are rejected on G2 because either we suspect fraud or frankly, there’s really low quality. And so it’s a continual game. I don’t think we’re catching 100% of the bad reviews, but I like to think we’re catching 98, 99% of them. But it’s a continuous challenge. Right. I think for any site that uses, you generate content, how to make sure it’s quality, it’s trusted, and we’re going to keep working on it. The AI does really help because AI can do a bit of initial scan of, hey, does this appear fake or real?
Godard Abel
But then, like I said, we still have a real human validate every review.
Brett
Yeah. And I’m sure it’s a cat and mouse game there, right. I’m sure law enforcement faces something similar. They face that in cybersecurity, that you probably close one loophole and then someone finds a new loophole and you’re just constantly trying to beat them as they come up with different innovative ideas, I would assume.
Godard Abel
Right, that’s true. And also, I think the FTC has actually put out official guidelines about reviews because it has become an area of sadly significant fraud and deception. And now there’s industry consortia that we’re also a part of that include companies like Google and Yelp, because I think everyone obviously, it’s bad for the Internet right. And especially review sites to have fake content out there. So I think we’re all trying to win that arms race.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And I’d love to talk and dive deeper into category creation. That’s a big thing that we talk about on, of course, the Category Visionaries podcast. And I know G2 is very influential in that process. So could you just give us a behind the scenes look like, what it looks like when G2 builds a new category and how you think about category creation and rolling out new categories.
Godard Abel
Yes. And so at G2, we have over 2100 different software categories. Now, as I mentioned, when we started ten years ago, we only had one, which was CRM software. And so in terms of we try to be thoughtful about creating new categories. And we have a research team, we have over 50 researchers that own different sets we call the G2 taxonomy. So there’s one researcher that owns, let’s say, sales tech, another one for Martech, another one for AI, et cetera. And they then work with the vendors, with entrepreneurs to make a judgment on when do and don’t we create new category. And one of the most basic rules, and some entrepreneurs are like, oh, I have this really special. Thing, I’m a category of one. And of course, that never works. And the reason it doesn’t work is that’s not what buyers want, right?
Godard Abel
Buyers of software, you at least want, let’s say three choices, if not more. So I think one criterion, always discuss with entrepreneurs, hey, no, you really need at least five to ten competitors in your category. Otherwise buyers won’t be interested in it. Right. And frankly, as a vendor, you won’t be interested in it either because there’s no demand. And so it’s a bit of a judgment call. When is there a tipping point? And I do remember over the years we’ve created many new categories. One of the most that’s become the most exciting is conversational intelligence, and obviously well known leaders like Gong and Chorus, which was now acquired by Zoom Info. But I remember conversational, you know, six or seven years ago, it didn’t exist. Gong and corus. Were just starting then. You know, we do get a lot of input from vendors because I remember I talked to the Gong founders, AMI, the Chorus founders, Roy, and now our research team are having these conversations.
Godard Abel
And then obviously we start to see a pattern. Wow, all of a sudden there’s five or ten startups funded in this area of what’s now called conversational intelligence. And then we also work with the vendors to define the right questions for the buyers, because also for each category we define a unique feature set and we try to keep it somewhat high level. But let’s say there’s 20 key features for conversational intelligence that you really need. Things like call recording, AI transcripting, and then we also ask for reviewers to rate those products against those category features to validate. A vendor really does it. And then also to compare how good is the vendor on each of these features. And I think we haven’t found a way to let AI do it. Maybe someday, but it’s still human research, dialogue, and obviously other things that also help, things like Google Trends, we can start to see, okay, how many people are searching for this type of a term?
Godard Abel
That can be another, I think, good clue. Once buyers are really showing a lot of interest, obviously an obvious one today would be like chatbot software. Obviously everyone’s looking for that, right? So then it gets to this crescendo, and clearly there’s more than three vendors now trying to build AI powered chatbots. So then you realize, oh wow, this is coming to a crescendo. And what I do love, over the years, we’ve seen many also robotic process automation with companies like UiPath, automation anywhere like that one also didn’t exist five or six years ago. And at G2, frankly, we try to create them first because unlike the traditional analysts, they have to hire analyst. That analyst has to be able to generate enough revenue. Right? Since our platform is all digital, yes, we have some human work but for us, it’s, let’s say one man month of work to create a new category and then it just starts flying from there so we can do it much faster and better than the traditional analysts.
Godard Abel
And we’re really proud to have created many great categories. Let’s always pull a few years later conversation with RPA, all of a sudden we’ve helped create five unicorns. That’s really cool.
Brett
Yeah, that’s amazing. And how many categories do you create per year, roughly?
Godard Abel
And I would say, like I said, we have 2100 in total. And if anything, it’s growing exponentially. So I would probably say it’s probably about 300 a year right now. And I think AI, we’re doing work on our AI taxonomy right now because these whole areas are merged and all of a sudden there’s so many flavors of AI. We, like everyone else, are trying to make sense of it. And ultimately that leads to many new AI categories on G2.
Brett
And what do you think that’s going to look like for the buyer five years from today? Are we going to be in this world where buyers just have to navigate through this insane number of categories? Because it kind of seems like at a certain point, then that defeats the purpose of having a category. If there’s way too many categories to choose from, then that kind of defeats the purpose. So how do you think about that future and what that’s going to look like if there’s just going to be more and more categories?
Godard Abel
Yeah, and I do think the categories are going to keep growing. And I agree, arguably that’s bad for the buyer because who can keep track in their head of 2500 categories? No one. I don’t even know anymore what categories we have and don’t have on G2. So I do think AI is also the solve my view. Because also that traditional Google search paradigm we talked earlier, that obviously works well with category terms because those also become Google Keywords then, where conversational intelligence is then a Google Keyword. Right. We have a page for it, the vendors have a page for it. And I do think AI is going to change that. We just launched an AI Monty as. We do think it’s going to be a much better way to navigate a site like G2 with tons of data, tons of categories. And then frankly, the beauty, I think, of an AI chatbot interface and we just launch our AI Monte on our home page.
Godard Abel
You can see it, but it’ll be a different way to navigate because you no longer have to know the category name, you know what I mean? In that world, it could just be like, hey, I want a better way to kind of track and manage my salesforce. Which is probably what most people want. Most people probably. Maybe now it’s so well known, people think of like a gong or cores, but a few years ago. It’s just like, hey, I just want to make my sales team more productive. I want to be able to coach my sales reps better. I’d love to be in all of their conversations, but as a sales manager, I can’t be right. I’m managing eight reps. And so I think what you can do now with the Chat AI interface is just list those needs, list those challenges, and the magic of tools like Chat GBD we can automatically match you to.
Godard Abel
Be like, oh, by the way, to better manage your reps, to better coach your reps, to see how they’re doing on every call, by the way, there’s this whole category of software, and there are tools like dong, chorus, et cetera. And so we think that’s really going to make it so much better for the buyer to discover the apps, right? And I think that’s not just data on G2, that’s the whole Internet. Right, because we’ve all had to be good at Google search, but you kind of got to know what you’re looking for. I think now with AI, the AI bot di Amanti will go find that data for you and then can actually tell you, Brett, what categories you should be shopping in and based on your company size, your industry, your use case can likely recommend, based on the data we’ve captured, what’s the best app for you?
Godard Abel
And that’s where I’m just so excited for the future of G2 and just the whole Internet. Right, because I think AI is just going to be such a better interface, make it so much easier to discover the best software for your business.
Brett
Yeah, that’s insanely exciting. And I can see how that’ll have an impact because it sounds like at that point, then the buyer is really searching more based on jobs to be done and then the category is recommended based on that, whereas now it’s kind of hard, I think, for buyers, right? Like, they have to know these terms. And I don’t know about G2 categories, but a lot of those gartner categories are four letters and these complex phrases that no one’s going to use.
Godard Abel
Yeah, I pass. Das. And those of us that are Sass nerds, we know them. But, yeah, for most people in the world, no one’s looking for ass. You know, it’s a platform. As a service, you’re like, oh, that’s a very easy way to build an app as a business user, if you’re deep in our industry, you know that, but you never know that, right? Whereas now, I think in the future you’ll just be able, instead of searching for Pass, you’ll be able to say, hey, I’m trying to build my own apps. I need an easy way for business analysts to be able to configure their own app without having to be a coder. And then yeah, and I think what’s going to happen then? The Amanti will recommend, oh, by the way, did you know there’s past tools or Airtable that actually help you do that?
Godard Abel
So I think it’s going to be just so exciting for software buyers and really anyone seeking knowledge on the Internet. Right. And Google’s been great. Like, I’ve been lucky. It’s been there my whole career. But I think AI is going to make it so much better, right, and that we’ll be able to guide software buyers so much better to the apps based on their business problems, right. And not based on these category names.
Brett
Yeah, it’s amazing. So exciting. Now, last question, because I know we’re over time here, so I’m sure you speak with a lot of founders and a lot of vendors who say, I don’t fit into these existing categories, I need a new category. And I know you touched on that with you need some more competition to do that. But what other advice do you have for founders that feel like they don’t fit into these existing boxes and want to create a new category? What should they do?
Godard Abel
Yeah, and I think usually what I recommend to founders, one thing is usually it’s easier to first draft off an existing category. And I’ll just share my experience. Big machines, were actually creating CPQ. It didn’t exist yet. And honestly, we almost went bankrupt. And that took like ten years. And then the second one, steel brick, obviously is a few years later. But CPQ existed. Lots of people were buying, right. So we just said, hey, we’re just next gen CPQ and drafted off existing demand in the existing category. And honestly, that’s just so much easier if you can do it. And then I think one other interesting story, though, if you do really have passion, you want to create a new category. I remember I was recently talking to Songrim, he was one of the co-founders of Terminus, and now he’s leading GTM partners that advise on go to market strategies.
Godard Abel
But when he was building Terminus and they helped create ABM, account based marketing. But I remember he went to a bunch of competitors, including John Miller, who’s now with Demand Base, he was starting his own ABM vendor. But he said he went to ten of his competitors and said this was like in 2015. He said, hey guys, let’s all call it ABM, let’s all call it account based marketing. And in hindsight, that was brilliant, right. Because now account based marketing has become huge. And now we have like six subcategories, like ABM Execution, ABM Ads, et cetera. But I think that’s also a clever, courageous strategy, right. As founders, usually we’re like, oh, I don’t want to talk to my competitors. Right? But I think if you really want to build a category, I love that idea of actually recruit some of your competitors, especially the up and comers, because I also learned that in CPQ, obviously, day to day, you kind of hate your competitors, because you’re like, oh, I’m losing deals to them.
Godard Abel
But then you also realize this is true. When were building Steel Brick, there was a competitor, Aptis, and obviously they wanted to beat us. We wanted to beat then, you know, we both helped popularize the terms of CPQ, configure price, quote QTc, quote to cash. We both had big dreams at, you know, marketing quote to cash, marketing, CPQ. And yes, we wanted to beat each other, but we also tremendously helped each other and we had like four competitors doing that. So I think also coming to that realization, hey, if you really want to do category building, you actually need some competitors. In some ways, you want to team with them to create the category. And that’s a bit counterintuitive. And that’s what I actually tell most founders, and they would work with us at G2, right? If you just come say category of one, we’ll say no, thank you.
Godard Abel
But if you come with five to ten well funded, cool competitors, we’ll say, hell yes. So I love that strategy of actually aligned with your competitors if you really think you’re going to create a new category, amazing.
Brett
I love it. And such actionable and useful advice for founders listening in. All right, I know we are over time here, so we can wrap. I’d love to keep you on and keep asking you questions, but we’ll have to save that for the next interview for part two. So thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I really appreciate it. If founders want to get in touch with you or just follow along with G2 as you continue to build, where should they go?
Godard Abel
Yeah, well, one, go to G2, check out our new AI monte two, Godard at G2, feel free to email me. And three, LinkedIn is always great godard able connect with me on LinkedIn because I love nothing more than meeting my fellow entrepreneurs and comparing notes. So please do reach out. And thank you so much, Bret, for hosting. Really fun conversation.
Brett
No problem at all. Thanks so much.
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