This episode, Guru’s co-founder and CEO Rick Nucci talks about the difference between selling high-ticket and low-ticket SaaS products, how he built a cloud-based product, and bought his company to over a million dollars in annual revenue.

Rick Nucci has been an entrepreneur in the Philadelphia area since 1999 and is currently the co-founder & CEO of Guru.

Guru is the collaborative knowledge management solution behind the next generation of knowledge workers. With hundreds of customers including leading enterprises such as Shopify, Square, Spotify, and Zoom, Guru is reshaping the way teams create, find, and share institutional knowledge to create knowledge-driven cultures.

Prior to Guru Rick was the Founder and CTO of Boomi, which defined and led a new segment as the industry’s first cloud integration platform-as-a-service. Boomi was acquired by Dell in 2010, where Rick went on to run the Boomi business for Dell, helping grow the organization into the industry leader it is today. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Cache Flow Podcast:

• The difference between selling high-ticket and low-ticket SaaS products.
• The challenge of finding product market fit.
• How to get traction as a new startup.
• Building a cloud-based product.
• Getting a company to its first million in annual revenue.
• The difference between a PLG motion and an SDR motion.
• How product-led growth works.
• The benefits of product-led growth as a strategy.

Resources:

• Guru
• Boomi
• The All-In Podcast
• Curotec

Connect with Rick Nucci:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Connecting with the host:

• Brian Dainis on Linktree

Quotables:

• 13:19 - “Before you have it you’re standing in the desert and the problem is you’re walking through the desert and it can be hard to know if you’re getting out to the oasis or walking further into the desert and that’s stuck with me because I feel like that’s what the journey can feel like for sure.”
• 21:56 - “PLG is product led growth and essentially it’s a sales strategy used by SaaS companies typically B2B SaaS companies where instead of having a sales team go out and pitch your prospects and close deals through a traditional sales model you let the product do the sales for you and typically it looks like a 14 day trial or a 30 day trial you sign up you get full access or some limited access to the product you get to experience it and use it, there’s a really well designed UX around the onboarding process so you can get your data in their quickly and easily and get the full benefit of that product in the trial period.”
• 22:47 - “If you do product led growth too early you might actually be shooting yourself in the foot because in order for you to do product led growth successfully you need to really know who your ICP or ideal customer profile is you need to really know what problems your solving, you need to know what process to guide them through to convert them and if you try to do product led growth too early it might not be that the product is wrong it might just be that your audience or your targeting or your ICP is wrong and you just need to figure that out and the sales environment provides so much feedback.”
• 37:30 - “Knowledge is this untapped asset within companies and it’s hard without automation and capabilities like AI to manually find knowledge, write it, and share it, make sure people are using it and all that and we are just looking to rapidly reshaping this category.” 
• 30:43 - “It’s huge this AI platform revolution, it’s a true platform revolution like the Metaverse thing that was hype I think, Web 3.0, metaverse, NFTs that was hype but it’s not hard to see the real practical use case of AI.”