Ep. 568 w/ Griffin Parry CEO/Founder at m3ter
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Kevin Horek:Welcome back to the show. Today, we have Griffin Perry. He's the founder and CEO at METR. Griffin, welcome to the show.
Griffin Parry:Thank you very much for having me, Kevin. Nice to meet you.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. You as well. I'm excited to have you on the show. I think what Meter is doing is really, really important, whether you're a startup or a company that's been around a very long time and every everywhere in between. But maybe before we get into all that, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up.
Griffin Parry:Several places. I'm actually I'm an expat brat. So my dad was a journalist and my mum was a teacher and associate worker. And I lived in New York in the seventies. So I'm originally British and still British, actually.
Griffin Parry:I grew up in New York in the seventies and then Ottawa and then we came back to the UK for a bit and then we moved to Hong Kong. I did most of my secondary schooling in Hong Kong. And then eventually I came back to the UK and I've been here pretty much all my adult life, except for a rather glorious 2 years in Italy about 10 years ago.
Kevin Horek:Very cool. So walk us through, you went to university. What did you take and why?
Griffin Parry:So I went to Bristol University in the UK and I studied economics and politics, which clearly is highly relevant to what I've gone on to do.
Kevin Horek:Okay. But what got you passionate about that early on?
Griffin Parry:I wish I could say that I've applied a lot of thought to what I studied and why I didn't. I've actually I've just gone through the my oldest daughter is going to university next year. So I've just spent the last year helping her plan where she should go, what she should do. And she's definitely applied an awful lot more thought to it than I did. But, I mean, in the UK, you narrow it down to 3 subjects when you're sort of 16, 17, 18.
Griffin Parry:And mine were English, maths and history. And so I enjoyed the history bit most and economics and politics looked like there was a lot of that with a little bit of math. So that's what I went for. I mean, I mean, I am interested in both subjects still. So it wasn't that wasn't a waste of time.
Griffin Parry:It just wasn't very vocational.
Kevin Horek:Interesting. Okay. So walk us through your career, maybe just some highlights along the way because you've done a ton of stuff, and then I really wanna dive into your end, what you guys are doing there.
Griffin Parry:Cool. Sounds good. So I. I sort of I spent 2 or 3 years sort of being an accountant and being a management consultant and sort of finding my way. But where my career really started taking off is I started working at Sky, which is the big pay TV business in the UK and now across Europe.
Griffin Parry:And then I stayed there for 12, 13 years. So I sort of think of myself as a sky, man and boy. And in terms of what I did, like there was a through line from, I was a management consultant when I joined. I did a lot of strategy work, but then I started bridging into sort of business development and new product development. So it was a really exciting time in media at the time.
Griffin Parry:So, you know, all the traditional analog media businesses were turning digital and so there was huge opportunity and threat. And so I was one of the people who was assigned to sort of working out what, what we should do. And Sky was a really interesting, dynamic, growing company. Still is. But at the time it was a real buccaneering, piratical type of place.
Griffin Parry:So everything was possible. And eventually I ended up running one of the things that I recommended that we invest in and do, which was television via the Internet. So when I first proposed it, remember, this is going back 20 years, everybody laughed because people assumed that television should be distributed by the airwaves or satellite. But, you know, we were given a little bit of money, we were given a little bit of rope, and we basically built the online TV portfolio within Sky and it eventually became core business. So, yeah, that was the exciting thing I did in that sort of corporate career.
Griffin Parry:And then I jumped into startups about 10 or 12 years ago.
Kevin Horek:Okay. So what made you make the leap from kind of corporate into doing the startup? Because that's quite different. Different set of challenges.
Griffin Parry:Definitely a different set of challenges. And it's also definitely true that you have to unlearn an awful lot of things that make you successful in the corporate world because they're actually a bit of a drag and an obstacle in a startup. There is a through line. So I was essentially I was corporate venturing like I was doing the crazy stuff in a big company. And a lot of that is about overcoming objections sort of internally.
Griffin Parry:And I sort of wanted to be free of that. I wanted to sort of properly innovate and do it at a faster clip. So that was, know, there was a sense that of unfinished business or I was frustrated from doing something I wanted to do. So that was definitely one of the things. And and sorry, I should just explain.
Griffin Parry:We've had 2 startups. So the first one started in 2012, I think. It wasn't my idea. It was actually the idea of my co founder. But I knew him well because he, he was the sales and marketing leader of the business that Sky appointed to build the back end platform for the online TV portfolio.
Griffin Parry:So we had a customer and sort of salesperson client management relationship. And he said, look, we've been looking at various new opportunities for us as a company. And there's obviously a big opportunity in games, video games, where the skills and capabilities that we've developed in the television industry are applicable. And, and they had some interesting data points, sort of projects that they'd done as a business, which suggested there was a big opportunity. So he propositioned me.
Griffin Parry:I was just at the right moment. I said, fine, let's go for it. And, yeah, that that was the start of our first business, which was called Gametox.
Kevin Horek:Interesting. So did you self fund? Did you raise some money? Walk us through that.
Griffin Parry:Oh, that was so very different funding journey from the current business. So, yes, it was largely bootstrapped. So I got a bit of earn money in, then it was friends and family. And then we sort of graduated through sort of richer and richer angel investors. And then we did do some institutional funding towards the end of it.
Griffin Parry:But, yeah, I mean, from a 10,000 foot level, it was broadly a bootstrapped business.
Kevin Horek:Very cool. And then you sold it off, correct?
Griffin Parry:We did. Yeah. We sold it to Amazon in 2017, which was, and it became an AWS service. So Amazon Games Box was a thing. To explain a little bit about the business, it was the way Amazon now describe it is they would call it fully managed games back end.
Griffin Parry:So the reason that the opportunity existed at the time is the video games industry was changing quite a lot. So previously most games were basically code that you could put on a shiny disc or its digital equivalent and sell as a product to someone. And there was a migration towards games becoming more services so that they would have online components. And some of those would be because some games features were online, like leaderboards, you have to be online. And some of them were because it gave the people who are running the games the ability to manage them over time.
Griffin Parry:But in both cases, you needed basically online platforms and an understanding about how to build and operate them. And so that understanding was relatively scarce in the video game space at the time. It's completely different now. But so what Games Fox was, was it was this, I call it cloud infrastructure, but the way to think about it is a managed back end. It basically allowed video games makers to to quickly build and adapt a back end for their games so they can do updates and leaderboards, etcetera.
Griffin Parry:And we ultimately sold to Amazon because they were very interested in the game space generally and the game sector was a big segment for the AWS infrastructure business. So, yeah, we we ended up selling to to Amazon working at AWS in our own app, which was an absolutely fascinating experience.
Kevin Horek:Interesting. So walk us through your your time in Amazon and then deciding to build a meter and then let's dive into that.
Griffin Parry:Yeah. Sure. So we kind of so our time at Amazon was split between 2. So the first half, we were running the service as a or integrating the service integrating the company into AWS and setting up the service. And then the second half, which is largely geographical because we were based in London and Dublin and the center of gravity for the business, the borders was on the West Coast.
Griffin Parry:So that was quite difficult from a time standpoint of view. So we migrated into field roles in Europe. But and it was, you know, AWS is a really interesting place. I know less about Amazon, more about AWS. Okay.
Griffin Parry:It's very deliberate the way that business has been designed. And there's a reason why it's scaling as fast or continuing to scale as fast as it is. It's an incredible business. And the three line between GamesBox, AWS and Meter is about pricing because at Gamespots we deployed a usage based pricing strategy. So the broad summary is we sold them, we basically charged our customers on the basis of the number of players their games had.
Griffin Parry:And that worked well for us. But at the time we experienced a lot of operational and go to market challenges associated with it. And we thought it was just us. You know, we'd done it wrong or we were overlooking some key tooling that everybody else was using. When we arrived at AWS, they are also a usage based pricing business, albeit on a much, much bigger scale.
Griffin Parry:And what we saw is that they had exactly the same kind of operational and go to market challenges that we'd had at Gazebox. So that's when we started thinking, oh, maybe it wasn't just us. And so we just started asking around and we realized that the problems that we've been experiencing were absolutely endemic in software where companies were adopting usage basic pricing strategies, which had been pretty rare and were becoming much more common. So we, when we finished our run out, we launched META and METR is focused on solving those problems that, we'd experienced ourselves.
Kevin Horek:Okay. So what made you actually start building METR, and and what was the caveat to or basically, like, the kind of final straw to say, like, look, we need to really build this.
Griffin Parry:Well, we were always intending to launch another company. So Okay. Even as we sold, you know, sign the deal to sell, we knew we were going to go again. So it was less about intent to build a company and more about finding the right idea. And we basically decided to take a slightly different approach because with Games Box, we knew we knew quite a lot, but we hadn't really experienced the problem that we were solving firsthand because we weren't games developers.
Griffin Parry:And so we were determined this time around to understand the problem much more intimately. And so when we were thinking about what we'd like to do, we thought about the things that had frustrated us most and where we thought it was a common problem and other people had it. And this point about pricing or pricing enablement became the clear favorite pretty quickly. Yeah. This is stuff that we really understood and we knew was a real problem for lots of people, so we wanted to solve it.
Kevin Horek:Okay. So walk us through what is meter and and how does it work?
Griffin Parry:So, a wise man described it, Meta to me as a pricing enablement platform the other day. I actually thought that was rather good. So I might start using it. But, to explain what it is, so we're a platform and we help B2B software vendors build painlessly and change prices easily. And we're particularly focused on companies who are deploying usage based pricing strategies and particularly focused on companies that have reached a certain level of complexity.
Griffin Parry:So our customers tend to be scale ups and above. And to explain why it exists, the tailwind for us as a business is the adoption of usage based pricing strategies. And 4 years ago, maybe 30% of software vendors use some kind of usage based pricing and now more than 80% of them do. And if that surprises you, it's worth just caveating it slightly. This isn't just pure pay as you go usage based pricing.
Griffin Parry:This is the deployment of usage based pricing strategies all along the spectrum. And at one end it looks a lot like subscription still. It just has usage based elements integrated into it. So a classic example would be, you know, it's a feature based or a seat based subscription, but you've got usage allowances And if you exceed those allowances, you have to migrate to a higher tier or pay overages. So it's all along that spectrum.
Kevin Horek:Okay. Go keep going. Sorry.
Griffin Parry:Well, I was going to say, like, as soon as you start doing it, there is a task that you have to do that you didn't previously have to do if you're only doing subscriptions. And that's bringing together pricing information with product usage data and processing them to work out what needs to go on the bill. And the existing quote to cash stack that is typically used by software vendors doesn't cater for it because it assumes subscriptions. So early adopters of usage based pricing like Gamesparks either have to rely they have to fill that gap with a manual based spreadsheet system or build their own tooling. And so what we're doing is basically preventing them having to do that.
Griffin Parry:Like this is a we're a specialist vendor which allows them to do that combination or calculation of taking product usage data and pricing.
Kevin Horek:Got it. No, that makes sense. So how do I actually go about implementing meter in my application?
Griffin Parry:Well, we would assume that you again, remembering that we tend we tend to focus on those slightly more mature, more complex businesses. You will have established tooling in your quote to cash stack.
Kevin Horek:So you
Griffin Parry:will have a sales CRM and you will have a finance stack, which will include an invoicing system. And we don't want you to replace any of that. Okay. What what META does is integrate with it and makes it work as it needs to when you're doing usage based pricing. So the integration points are with those existing toolings and then with your production systems where the production system is about taking in product usage data and then you configure this and meet it.
Griffin Parry:And then hopefully at that point, meter begins to disappear into the background. Like you still want your, your staff using the tools that they're already used to, like Salesforce or the Sales CRM or NetSuite or the finance stack side of things. But they now work as they need to for usage based pricing with a high degree of automation. And in terms of impact, it takes away a huge amount of pain associated with billing. So drilling operations, which are a real cause of stress and heartache, are automated and become painless and our customers love us for that.
Griffin Parry:But I would say that I don't think that that's the major return on the investment for implementing META. I think there are much bigger impacts or transformative impacts on the business. And they are, one is you eliminate errors. So billing errors are a carrot, a killer. They erode customer trust, obviously, but they also result in revenue leakage, meaning a whole bunch of revenue you should be getting, but you're not because you're not billing effectively for it.
Griffin Parry:So that is one big transformative impact. The second is, meter delivers information to the billing system at invoicing time once a month, But it also delivers information about bills or running totals of bills on demand at any point during the month. And that information is really useful for various teams around the business. So salespeople want to have informed conversations with customers. They kind of need to know where the bill is tracking.
Griffin Parry:And it's really useful to be alerted about changes in behavior or if the bill is tracking towards a limit above which maybe charge down regions, etc. So it really improves the productivity and performance of the sales team. Same thing is true of customer success. Product teams also really like it because you can build billing dashboard for the end customer within the product rather than requiring them to ring up customer success to find out, well, what the bill is or is likely to be at the end of the month. So that impact on performance productivity in various teams around businesses is really key.
Griffin Parry:And then the final thing is because you've introduced automation, it's much easier to change pricing. And so you've delivered pricing agility to the customer. And that is key. Firstly, it helps sales teams design custom pricing, which, helps win and retain the most important accounts. And it also helps the product team with new product development.
Griffin Parry:It's much easier to add new features or launch new products. So those are the real so, yes, meter takes away all the billing stress, but the things that really matter is it eliminates errors. It makes sales, customer success and product teams more productive and it delivers pricing agility to the business, which really helps with, with sales and the new product development.
Kevin Horek:No. That that's interesting. So you you brought up something interesting about obviously, different customers are gonna and you mentioned, like, sometimes you give maybe a better deal to some of your bigger customers or or whatnot. But do you help at all with recommending what should be charged? Or are you not doing that at all?
Kevin Horek:Or like a minimum at
Griffin Parry:least? We don't do that now. So we have one product in the market, which is an infrastructure product, and it allows you to automate those processes that I was describing. Yeah. And one of the one of the great things about that is it allows you to change pricing easily.
Griffin Parry:What your pricing should be, that's something that you're going to have to work out at the moment. Okay. So I would always say we are not pricing strategists. So, you know, I'm obviously an observer of the market when it comes to how people are pricing and how strategies are evolving, but I don't have a strong conviction view about what's best and what's worse. I'm just looking at all the various things people are doing, going, wow, isn't there a lot of creativity there?
Griffin Parry:Where I do have a high degree of conviction is about how you have to set up your pricing and billing operations. Like, how do you how you have to operationalize pricing like this within the business because that that is what Mesa does. That said, we obviously onboard lots of very useful data onto the platform. And the next step for us is to introduce what we call decisioning software, which is basically recommendations about what the pricing should be based on patterns in the data. Interesting.
Griffin Parry:And that's coming later this year and is actually the the area of the business that I'm most excited about.
Kevin Horek:Sure. So is that leveraging kind of machine learning and AI to do some of that, or what's the strategy to implement that?
Griffin Parry:So the I'll I'll answer the question directly, but with a story. So the first person in the room after And so we've been planning for this from, from day 1, which is 3 and a half years ago now. But you have to build the business in sequence. So you have to deliver the infrastructure product, which is great and transformative for our customers. But you have to do that first to start accumulating the data, which you then use to distribute those to deliver those recommendations in terms of what the pricing should be.
Kevin Horek:Makes sense. So how did you land your first customers and get people to wrap wrap their head around kind of this business model? Because injecting yourself right in the middle is actually really smart. But was it a hard sell, I guess, is the question?
Griffin Parry:Yes and no. So the way I've got product brand background, so we sort of did it in sort of classic product best practice. We did lots of discovery and, we talked to a lot of people. And so we and we'd also experienced the pain ourselves. So that was quite an easy process.
Griffin Parry:We talked to a lot of people. We basically said, look, this is the problem we have. Do you recognize it And is it a big deal? And we quickly generated a lot of feedback like, oh, my God, this is an itch that needs scratching. And we got a strong sense about who cared about it in the organization.
Griffin Parry:So it was quite easy to get going. And we did sort of, I would say, 70, 80 discovery conversations. It was slightly easy because of what business to Amazon. You know, we're quite interesting. We're talking about having experienced the pain ourselves.
Griffin Parry:It was quite easy to open doors and get people to talk to us. We had a high degree of conviction even before we started building about what was missing. The difference So that's the good bit. The thing that's slightly difficult is pricing affects a lot of different teams within an organization. Sure.
Griffin Parry:It's something that doesn't have a clear owner. So it's relevant to finance, it's relevant to products, it's relevant to marketing, it's relevant to sales, engineering, or we always need to be involved as soon as you're building or implementing new tooling. And that's one of the challenges of the business because you've got to work you've got to work out who you want to talk to, who's your primary person you want to sell to. And you also need to work out how the buying committee is composed because it's heterogeneous, because pricing affects so many different people around the org. And the problems that we solve for, a lot of them our customers don't realize they have yet.
Griffin Parry:So things like, for example, sales productivity, like the fact that you understand the usage of your customers and you can be alerted about certain patterns which would indicate you should proactively reach out to the customer. That's not necessarily identified within our customers as a high priority pain point. And so there's no point selling a solution for a problem your customers don't know they have. So we had to work. So obviously we would start by talking about our grand vision, which really excited us.
Griffin Parry:We realized that when the people we were talking to got excited about some parts of it and were kind of more quizzical about the others. So we just ended up working out over time. And this is a class you know, path startup journeys is let's just zero in on the thing that really matters to them right now. Sell that and then introduce to them all these other things we're going to do to them afterwards. And so the thing that we really zero in on is billing operations.
Griffin Parry:You know, it's a huge pain point, and we introduce a high degree of automation which, solves those pain points. And then we explain what else it does to them.
Kevin Horek:Okay. Any advice for getting some of your first clients and actually getting them to convert? Because that's the hardest part, especially when you have to convince that many people at a company.
Griffin Parry:Be lucky.
Kevin Horek:I mean,
Griffin Parry:you know, that's that's definitely a part of it. Like I've never that's applicable to this business and our previous business. Like you've got to you will rely on brakes and what you need to do is prepare yourself so that you can take advantage of them when they come. The way we did it is that we obviously talked to a lot of people, like I said, and then we recruited a design partner group of 5. We were deliberately looking for a bit of diversity in there because we were still not completely sure who the ICP was.
Griffin Parry:And we found those basically by doing through the discovery work. Like, you know, we talked to a lot of people and then we identified those who we thought were most interested in what we were doing or had the most urgency. And we recruited them. But there were other things that we got lucky in that we just didn't we joined a community because that community, it was a rev op community and that community was talking about these problems. And we put up a hand and said, look, you know, full disclosure, we're planning to solve this problem.
Griffin Parry:Is anybody interested in chatting to us? And so we recruited one of our design partners through there. And another one came through like a VC connection. So one of our VCs introduced us to someone who introduced us to someone and we explained what we were doing and they were interested. So yes, there is a lot of love, but there's also a lot of grind.
Griffin Parry:And one of the challenges here, obviously, is that this is critical infrastructure for the company. Like this is billing. Yeah. So you have to build quite a lot of product and you have to generate a lot of trust with the customer. And I think it did help us a lot that we had had a successful previous business and we had raised our seed funding in one of the most favorable environments you can imagine.
Griffin Parry:And so we had a lot of money from a lot of high quality backers. So, yes. I mean, that that's what happened.
Kevin Horek:No. I'm glad you're being brutally honest about it. I I think that's like, it's good advice in itself. Right? Like right?
Griffin Parry:Yeah. For sure. I mean, I I I could pretend that we played a perfect game, but startups are about grit and grind, aren't they?
Kevin Horek:A 100%.
Griffin Parry:That's what we did.
Kevin Horek:And and leveraging your past experiences, to hopefully help your future ones. Right? And if you don't have a ton of past experience, it's potentially a lot harder.
Griffin Parry:Totally. It's yeah. You've got a you've got a toolkit in front of you. Like, use it. Be creative.
Griffin Parry:And that's what we did.
Kevin Horek:Very cool. So I'm curious because you've been through this, the whole, like, idea to acquisition, you're working on another startup, you bootstrapped, you've raised money. What advice do you give to other founders that are maybe coming up or have been added a long time in there? And, you know, just what advice do you give to people?
Griffin Parry:Let me think. I mean, I think we just touched on one thing that I generally say if people ask me a question like this. I mean, the fact that grit counts for a lot. So for me, startups are about learning and iteration. You know, you have an idea, you test it, you learn, you adapt.
Griffin Parry:You're constantly failing, but learning from the failure. And that means that you need high energy levels and a lot of resilience to keep going. That's just that's just part of it. And so if that sounds like a turnoff, if you're considering doing a startup and that sounds like a turnoff, you probably shouldn't do a start up. What else could I say?
Griffin Parry:I'm a real believer that it's about the Sorry, go on.
Kevin Horek:Before you go, I'm going to like, sorry to interrupt you, but when you what got you through kind of the some of the low points? Like, how did you not quit? What got you through that?
Griffin Parry:Because I didn't I guess 2 things. Firstly, I didn't see it as unpleasant or tough. I just saw it as part of the process.
Kevin Horek:Yeah.
Griffin Parry:So that's a mindset thing. It's like, you know, people do endurance sports. You could ask somebody doing, you know, who's doing a marathon like, how do you get through the 26 miles? And they go, well, I enjoy running. So there's definitely an element of that.
Griffin Parry:I mean, I generally don't get that stressed or that concern. I just see it as part of the process. But the other thing I'd say is that I've never felt alone because I have a very good relationship with my co founder. So it's always everything is always shared. And there's always a fellow traveler there with me.
Kevin Horek:And you said you met them working together at play, right? Is that correct? Or Skye, sorry not funny.
Griffin Parry:It was when I was at Skye. Yeah. And, you know, this guy started lurking around my office because he wants to sell me something.
Kevin Horek:Okay.
Griffin Parry:And then, you know, and I, I humored him and eventually we became friends and then eventually he didn't sell something to me. I think he keeps reminding me that about the amount that we spend with him. And it makes me feel ashamed because that was sort of my responsibility. But we just became friends because I was his most important customer. And obviously he wanted to make sure I was looked after, but we became friends.
Griffin Parry:And I do have a lovely relationship with him. I mean, we are we share a name, which is one thing. So my name is Griffin Perry and his name is John Griffin. So we still get each other's emails, which is quite funny. But we are, we're contrasting.
Griffin Parry:We're different. And we understand why we're different. And we see ourselves when we bring us together, we make a whole. And there's a lot of empathy, a lot of communication, a lot of trust between us. And so and that's really nice.
Griffin Parry:And I know, again, that's I've been very lucky with that relationship.
Kevin Horek:No. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds awesome. That's that's cool, right, that you found somebody that compliments you.
Kevin Horek:You could work to get like, there's so many factors in being able to work and find a cofounder. Like, it's it's crazy when you find somebody that you you have that relationship with, what you just outlined.
Griffin Parry:Yeah. But I but I would say, I mean, it's you have to work at it as well. It's like hosting. It's like a marriage.
Kevin Horek:100%. Yeah.
Griffin Parry:I mean, you know, you can fall in love with a person, but you've got to really work at it. And it's just those things that I mentioned. It's like you're you'll be in a good place if you if you establish a high degree of trust and you continue to communicate and you really empathize about the perspectives of the other person. And so but you've got to work at work at that. And I'm lucky that I found a person who sort of thinks similarly and, yeah, this sounded mushy.
Griffin Parry:But, yeah, we we've worked successfully together and continue to. It's nice.
Kevin Horek:Very cool. So, obviously, you've taken basically ideas from a corporate job, moved it into another company, and then ended up selling that company, and then moved another problem that you saw at a company to create a startup. But and I it sounds so simple, but it's actually really hard to say, like, this is a problem, and it needs solving, and then going out there and validating that it needs solving. So, like, what advice do you give to people that are trying to come up with an idea that wanna be an entrepreneur? They're just, like, struggling with actually coming up with an idea.
Kevin Horek:Because it's easy to come up with an idea. It's all about the execution and then getting people to actually buy into that and then giving you money for it, really.
Griffin Parry:Yeah, it's I mean, I've gone through 2 really different journeys. I'm sure. I know the one I prefer. Okay. This time around it was much easier because we'd experienced the pain firsthand.
Griffin Parry:I think it's, I'm not saying that every startup has to be like that. And I know that's not true because this wasn't true of our first startup. But if you really understand the pain firsthand, it's much easier. You're just much more confident about what you should be doing. You know, you can trust your instincts that much more.
Griffin Parry:But I understand. It's again, it's a lucky thing. If you've got that, you know, you've experienced pain, which is actually a pain around which you can build a big business. You know, you've been quite fortunate. So if you're not in that situation and this was true of us in Games Fox, and I should probably give a little bit more flavor.
Griffin Parry:Like what we were doing with the original business is taking a bunch of intellectual capital that was developed in an adjacent business. So we understood television and the delivery of television online extremely well. And you could apply that to the video game space. But we didn't really understand the video game space and how it worked and who the personas are and how they how they speak and what their day to day struggles are. So we had to learn all of that.
Griffin Parry:But we knew what we we had a good sense of what the broad problem is and we had confidence that we could solve it given our experience. But we had to really learn the market itself. And I mean, the advice I give is listen, listen, listen, listen. Talk to people. Listen.
Griffin Parry:Like, you know, this is, I guess, product, sort of product management best practice. But you have to accumulate data, and you do that by getting out there and talk to people.
Kevin Horek:So, no, I 100% agree with you. You keep mentioning luck. And I think luck is has a lot to do with it. But I also think you need to almost, like, create your own luck, and you need to keep trying different things and putting yourself out there and reaching out to people and doing a bunch of different things to to hopefully get lucky with, you know, your first client or somebody introduces you to something like like talk about or what are your thoughts around that? Do you agree with that?
Kevin Horek:Or how did you, like, create your own luck?
Griffin Parry:Yeah. I totally agree with what you're saying. It's a process. So a lot of what I was saying about grit is part of this. It's like you've got to be thoughtful.
Griffin Parry:You've got to worry, how are we going to solve this problem? You then got to attack it with a lot of energy. You're going to fail a lot, but you're going to generate a lot of understanding. You synthesize that understanding and you move forward and do something again. So it's, this is quite similar to sales in a way.
Griffin Parry:Like sales is a numbers game. You've just got to pick up the phone 100 times to make sure you're going to win twice and you've got to learn constantly from every failure. And so you've just got to commit to the process. So, yeah, I mean, it's obviously you get good fortune, but you've created the opportunity for you to that good fortune to happen. And also the process allows you to take full advantage of that good fortune when it happens.
Griffin Parry:So it's not luck like you've won the lottery. It's you can set yourself up before it's much more likely that you will be lucky and you'll be able to take advantage of that luck. And but that's a lot of that's where the yeah. It's thoughtfulness and grind. That's what you're gonna do.
Kevin Horek:No. I think that's really good advice. So you brought up something earlier that I think is really interesting that I I wanna dive a little bit deeper into, and it's really around your road map because you said earlier that what we talked about was kind of AI and helping predict what people should charge for a product is also, like, how did you know to not chase that out of the gate that you needed to build an actual product? And then you can add that. Because as a founder, especially as somebody that's maybe it's a first time around, they want to go to step, you know, 10 today, not wait until they have, you know, 1 to 9 done.
Griffin Parry:I feel like I mean, it's worth saying that when we founded the company 3 or 4 years ago, like there was less excitement about machine learning and data science. I mean, so we we felt it because we'd come out of AWS, but it wasn't as much a thing as it is now. But I think the main response to your question is it goes back to that thoughtfulness. It's like how are you how are you going? And you also mentioned roadmap, which I think is exactly right.
Griffin Parry:It's like how are you going to build this business? You need to break it down into a series of steps. It's like, you know, if you look at a mountain, you've got to go, I'm going to climb to the top of that mountain by getting to base camp and then camp 1 and then camp 2. And so you sort of set it up. And once you start thinking about it like that, the sequencing for us was pretty clear, although we were really, really, really excited about what we can do on the data science side.
Griffin Parry:We knew that you need to accumulate the data to enable you to do it. And you also need to establish the back channel so that your customers can benefit from your recommendations. And by that, I mean we will guide our customers to better pricing that will deliver better longer term outcomes. And we could just deliver it to them in a slide deck, but it's much more useful for them that we can say, click this button to implement this pricing now and then you implement it back via our infrastructure. So we've got a highly synergistic business.
Griffin Parry:And so once you start thinking about that, where you go, okay, well, you know, this is the boring bit, but this is addressing a powerful pain point that lots of people have. Once we've done that, that buys us the right to go on to this more interesting bit. And we just think about it like that, one foot in front of the other.
Kevin Horek:No. That it's the best way to put it. I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm I'm curious though because you can like, you just mentioned, you could do it manually in a PowerPoint, for example. Would that be enough of a V1 for certain customers to maybe test the idea before you actually go build it in code because we all know that it takes a long time, right?
Kevin Horek:And obviously, I know doing it manual sucks, and it's not scalable. But you do it for, you know, a couple of customers, you put it into PowerPoint or whatever, and then you send it to them get their feedback. What are your thoughts around kind of building something manual as you're trying and growing and feature set into your roadmap?
Griffin Parry:So a couple of things. So firstly, even before you think about what we do, there's plenty of data about this process and the appeal and the value of it. There's a huge industry of pricing strategy consultants out there. And what they do is they gather together a bunch of data about customers and their spend and their usage. They crunch it in a spreadsheet, very complicated one, and they make recommendations about what the ideal pricing should be, both broadly and for individual customers.
Griffin Parry:And then they deliver those recommendations on a PowerPoint slide. Now, those businesses make lots of money, like, and I have huge respect for them. And what META will be doing, we'll be automating some of that process. And so, you know, hopefully will be seen as a fantastic enabling tool for really good pricing consultants because we're doing a lot of what they would need to do themselves. So, yeah.
Griffin Parry:So I had that data point. So, you know, this is from complete speculation. I could see the value of this in the market already. But the other thing that I'd say is you're asking like, can we do some kind of prototype basically to prove whether there's value? And yes, of course.
Griffin Parry:And yes, we are doing that. So we have, you know, our data science team has been working with our customers on prototypes. We've been delivering technical proofs, basically how you build the models and can they be effective and sort of value proofs. Like, does this actually make a difference? Would a customer want to pay something for it?
Griffin Parry:So, yes, that is ongoing. And then so it's not I don't want to suggest that it's paid because it's not we're actually doing quite it's quite there's quite a lot of expensive development there, you know, involving expensive data scientists. So we're not fully operationalizing it because that would be an additional level of spend. So, yeah, you find ways of testing and validating cheaply. And, yeah, we do that.
Kevin Horek:No. That that makes a lot of sense. So we're kinda coming to the end of the show, but is there any other advice that you would like to pass on to anybody that's either, you know, in a startup or doing a startup or or just something that you maybe wish you knew earlier on in your career when you were starting out?
Griffin Parry:What I was gonna say before is I was gonna say that I really think that people should think about it as being a journey and not a destination. So for me, I think startups are about like minded people coming together to tackle something daunting. And I think the process is its own reward. And the process is camaraderie of working with other people, the learning. I mean, I think you learn more quickly in a startup certainly than in a corporate.
Griffin Parry:I think there's a lot of satisfaction because you're doing something challenging and it's the sense of agency and possibility is brilliant. You wake up every morning going, right, we can do something completely new. So when I think about what I do, like people ask, why do you do what you do? And I'm, I'm not doing it for the money. Might not get any.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. Fair enough.
Griffin Parry:And I'm not I'm not doing it because I want to make a dent in the universe or whatever the phrase would be. I think it's slightly different for John, my co founder. But for me, that's not the reason I'm doing it. I'm just doing it because this is what I do and I enjoy the process. And I think that's the right mindset to take to a startup.
Griffin Parry:You don't want to be mortgaging your future. You want to enjoy the day to day. Yeah. And that's why I really, I really encourage people to think that way. I think it makes you much happier.
Kevin Horek:No. I actually think that's really good advice, and that's kind of how I see it. It's like, this is what I do. It's not like, there there isn't anything else I wanna do. There's also nothing else I'm qualified
Griffin Parry:to do. Oh oh oh my god. Me too. I can I I'm unemployable now, unfortunately? Yeah.
Griffin Parry:Yeah.
Kevin Horek:It's like I could ask you if you wanna upsize your combo. That's probably the best thing. But, let's how about we close the show with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, meter, and any other links you wanna mention?
Griffin Parry:Sure. I would encourage people to go to our website, which is me set.com. So M3 T. R. And to give a specific suggestion, we published a report about 2 or 3 weeks ago about predictions for how pricing is evolving in software in 2024.
Griffin Parry:Involved 10 experts. Unfortunately, one of them is me, but we had some proper experts. And it's really interesting. Like, I've talked about this trend towards usage based pricing. You'll be unsurprised that that's one of the predictions, but there's 9 other really interesting ones as well.
Griffin Parry:How do you use pricing to achieve results?
Kevin Horek:Perfect, Griffin. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward keeping in touch with you and have
Griffin Parry:a good rest of your day. Cool. Thank you
Kevin Horek:very much for
Griffin Parry:having me. Thank you. K.
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