➡️ Summary ➡️
Griff Parry, co-founder and CEO of m3ter, and Marek Rubasinski, Head of EMEA and VP of Partnerships, join just days after closing their acquisition by Salesforce to tell the story of how they got there. m3ter is the data infrastructure that lets big enterprises move from subscription to usage-based pricing — metering usage, rating it against complex pricing logic, and automating data flows across the quote-to-cash stack. Griff and Marek trace the journey from their GameSparks and AWS roots, through a rapid $17.5M raise in a founder-friendly market, to the deliberate bet on an enterprise ICP and an integration-first, partnership-first strategy. They dig into the connector and native Salesforce managed package they built while competitors just shipped an API, the hustle that turned a thin network thread into a Salesforce relationship, and the honest failures along the way — a bad-fit partnership, underpricing by 10-20x, and trying to do too much at once. The conversation closes on why AI has made usage-based pricing obvious, why pricing is 50% strategy and 50% operations, and what m3ter inside Salesforce could unlock for ISVs.
➡️ Guests ➡️
Griff Parry https://www.linkedin.com/in/griffinparry/
Marek Rubasinski https://www.linkedin.com/in/marekrubasinski/
m3ter https://www.m3ter.com/
➡️ Takeaways ➡️
m3ter is data infrastructure for enterprises shifting from subscription to usage-based pricing — it does three things: meter usage, rate it against complex pricing logic, and automate data flows across the quote-to-cash stack
The founding team had felt the usage-pricing pain firsthand twice — at GameSparks (acquired by AWS) and inside AWS itself — so they knew the problem cold before writing a line of code
m3ter raised $17.5M in three quick steps by the end of 2021 — a ~$2.5M seed, then $10M, then $5M from Insight Partners — riding a uniquely founder-friendly, post-COVID SaaS funding market
Early design partners came from deliberate discovery conversations through the founders' network, framed as discovery rather than sales — good discovery naturally led to design-partner relationships
Letting enterprise customers, not early-stage engineering teams, shape the ICP made m3ter distinctive versus competitors like Metronome and Orb — luck with judgment led them in the right direction
Integration-first, partnership-first: the product simply doesn't function unless it plugs into a sales front end (Salesforce) and a finance back end (NetSuite), so know exactly where you sit in the ecosystem
They bet an entire engineering team on a complex, enterprise-grade native Salesforce managed package and security review while competitors just handed customers an API — that became a durable differentiator hard to catch up to
The Salesforce relationship started from a tiny network thread — a VC intro and an ex-Zuora colleague's connection — plus relentless hustle; the founders insist they had no special advantages
Salesforce ultimately pulled m3ter in: they saw the usage-pricing trend, wanted a trusted partner to introduce customers to, then partnered, invested (March 2026), and acquired
Honest failures: a strategic partnership with the wrong ICP fit wasted time and money, and like most startups they priced far too low early — now charging 10-20x for comparable deals
Winning the customer isn't the finish line — getting them activated and live in production is, which in the early days meant heavy support before building an SI/consulting partner ecosystem to scale it
They tried to do too much in parallel — core metering/rating plus a "decisioning" analytics product — when they should have won in series; the lesson: stick to the knitting and earn the right to expand
For founders without a network: lead with genuine discovery instead of selling, ask ex-founders for their time, and remember The Mom Test — listen far more than you talk
On the acquisition: don't overthink it — be the best possible partner, and acquisition conversations flow naturally from there
AI made the pitch obvious — usage pricing used to need explaining, but now customers open calls with "we're launching an AI product and need to sort out billing"; pricing is 50% strategy and 50% operations
➡️ Youtube ➡️
Watch this episode on our Youtube channel
➡️ Keywords ➡️
m3ter, usage-based pricing, metering, rating, quote-to-cash, billing, Salesforce acquisition, Salesforce Ventures, ISV, NetSuite, managed package, AppExchange, product strategy, partnerships, Griff Parry, Marek Rubasinski
➡️ Hashtags ➡️
#AppsemblyLine #Salesforce #ISV #UsageBasedPricing #QuoteToCash #Billing #AI #m3ter
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