From Software Engineer to Marketing Innovator: Gil Allouche'sJourney

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Mark Evans: From the outside looking in, marketing is shiny and sexy. Behind the scenes, however, there is a great deal of grunt work involved. It's time consuming, and let's be honest, marketers have to do a lot of tedious manual work. For many marketers, particularly people working in small departments, marketing needs to be streamlined and automated so they can spend more time on strategy and creativity. This is where metadata comes into the picture. Metadata is a demand generation and ABM platform designed to execute thousands of campaigns in hours, automatically optimizing campaigns for pipeline impact at high velocity. How is that for marketing speak? Today, I'm excited to have Gil Alouch, the cofounder and CEO of Metadata on the podcast. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Gil Allouche'sJourney: Thank you, Mark. Great to be here.

Mark Evans: Let's start by focusing on Metadata's origin story. You're a software engineer turned marketer turned entrepreneur who saw an opportunity to eliminate technical marketers. What inspired you to start Metadata? Was it an immediate success? And if not, what should you have done differently in hindsight?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: Oh my god. Is every start is any startup immediate success? I think they call it a ten year overnight success. MetaData didn't start in the middle of the night. I didn't have this, like, light bulb at, like, 3AM in the morning. Like, it wasn't like that. I am a software engineer in my background. I've been dealing with robots back before I even came to The United States, and so the beauty of automation and how automation can completely take out technical repetitive mundane tasks, I've done it in robotics, which is fundamentally different, but it was pretty cool to see. And I saw what happens when you when you adopt technology and automation. When when I finished my graduate school in The United States, my first job was in marketing. And in fact, I realized that my technical chops are actually very valuable in b two b marketing because b two b marketing is very technical and very quantitative. And my first job was the company called Spotfire, and I remember I got this project from the CMO who told me, hey. This business is grossing, like, 50 k. No one cares about it. We're thinking about shutting it down. Try to do something with it. Zero risk. And with digital campaigns, nothing very sophisticated, like 20 off here, webinars here, like, pretty pretty basic digital marketing campaigns. We were able to lift that business into a $2,000,000 ARR within a year and a half or so. I got the bug of feeling how a few campaigns, a few clicks are generating revenue on the other side of the of the spectrum, and I got hooked. The second thing that happened is that after I did that, I wanted to do it over and over, and I ended up running marketing for three b to b startups. Every time it was smaller and smaller companies, and and I was successful. And I was successful because I didn't have a marketing talent per se. I'm not a Don Draper who came up with, like, cool taglines and, like, billboard campaigns and television commercials. None of it. I had no idea what campaigns to run, and I had no passion to coming up with them either. What I ended up doing is go back to my comfort zone, which is data and software. And I put together an experimentation framework. I have no idea which campaigns are going to work, and I'm not gonna find out unless I run some experiments. And what better way of running experiments by to program them in? And so I put together this experimentation framework. I didn't code it back then. It was like a bunch of Zapier, Zaps, and workflows, and webhooks, what have you, but it worked. Meaning, I realized that the most scientific way or most predictable way to actually find out the best campaigns that generate pipeline is to experiment, to do trial and error at scale. And I paired that together with really good data to make sure that whatever campaigns I am running, I only run against the right companies and the right people within those companies. And that combination of right data and experimentation methodology was just magical. It just simplified life. After I've done it in three companies as a hire, I wanted to see if I can do it for ten companies as a consultant. That was my first stage. I went to my my boss, and I told him, hey. I'm gonna continue the work, but I'm gonna continue it as a consultant. I'm gonna take nine other customers. I'm gonna see if these things work, if this thing has legs. And I've done it for a year, and it didn't work for everyone, and it wasn't fast, but it did work. And it was much more effective than the SAPSchool. After doing it for a year as a consultant, I started getting a lot of requests to join forums and events to speak about this idea of experimentation. And by the way, it's not a new idea. It's been doing it's been done with stock exchange, stock trading for decades. In fact, it even has been done with advertising, just not in the b two b world. It's been done in the consumer world. Companies like Kensho and Criteo, that's what they do. They do trial and error, move through fermentation at scale. And so it wasn't a new idea. Just in our sector, it was completely new, and to this day, we're the only one doing it. And in one of the events I was invited to, it was a Best of My Venture Capital Partner event, and I was talking to 10 or 12 CMOs. And I was giving this talk about experimentation using data, and a lot of them loved it because it simplified the concept, like, that was, until then, very vague. Like, how do I generate demand? There's all these ideas, but this became very clear framework of doing it. And a few I had a few hand raisers who wanted to work with me. And when they asked me about it, I told them basically a lie, and I told them, you know what? I just started a company about that, which was not true. I wanted to, but I actually didn't have the guts to actually do it yet. I was just looking for more and more validation, And that moment in time was that validation I was looking for. And I told them, you know what? I do have a company, and it was not too big of a lie because within ten minutes of that answer, I started my company. I went on LinkedIn in the in the coffee break, and I changed, and I said, you know what? I'm going for this. I'm gonna announce that I'm going for that. I didn't actually plan on updating sending the news. You have two types of updates on LinkedIn. One of them is like a quiet update to your profile. Another one is a loud one when everyone gets an update, and they give me the email, congratulating Gil on his new job. I made a mistake and actually checked that box, and so I ended up getting, like, hundreds of comments on that one. People wishing me congrats and good luck, and and that was the moment. That was the moment that I started the metadata, and it was those kind of commit first, figure out the details later moment, and that was the beginning of it.

Mark Evans: In the marketing world, they would call what you did accidental marketing. The fact that you didn't have a plan, but you technically made a mistake, but it turned out to be the right move in hindsight. I'm curious about the fact that you had some demand from the right target audiences, and, obviously, it inspired you to take the leap from being a consultant into launching a software company. I'm interested in whether metadata was an overnight success. Did you get traction right away, or did it take you time to actually build the platform? And once that was built, did you follow the adage if you build it, they will come? Tell me the the background story in terms of the initial days of metadata and whether you realized you had something and everyone realized you had something that they wanted.

Gil Allouche'sJourney: I'll start by saying it was absolutely not an overnight success. I really don't know any companies who are overnight success. And in my experience, most of the companies that have been an overnight success had something fundamentally some of them, I would say, are. There there is exceptions to the rule. But I would say, fundamentally, companies who do have an overnight success usually have something other than something odd going on there. Something weird sometimes happening with some companies who suddenly have this crazy hockey stick. With metadata, we had all the difficulties you can ask for. It took us years to build the product. We chose to build a piece of software that is very different than the usual Martech software. Usually, marketing technology software and even sales software is is not very sophisticated and has a just very nice UI, like very nice looking products with not very deep technology in there. We built something that is comparable to a real time game or a a military kind of system where it has a real time clock. With metadata, it doesn't give you data or even insights to then go and act upon it. It actually takes the action instead of you. And in order to do that, it needs to be the types of software that is running in the background. Whether you're logged in or not, whether you're asking you to do something or not, it's doing things. It's like a human. It wakes up. There's a real time. It start making decision. It gets some data, and it needs to make decisions all day long. I think our software does something like a million actions a day. And in order to build that software, we needed years. It took us, I think, three years to get the first version up and running. I think it sounds crazy, but it's true. Now I didn't have the luxury of just waiting and hoping that people will come. I also didn't believe it will happen. I've worked in enough companies to know no one comes and just buys your product out of nowhere. No one even knows you exist. And what we've done is worked with whatever software we did build, we worked with. Meaning, the first version was just back end scripts, and then we had some UI. But we always had people operating those things. And so in the first few few years, we're mostly a services company with some software. And over the years, that shift took place and the ratio changed, and it was mostly a software company with some services around it. Not an overnight success. We had to survive in order to get to the place we are today, where today artificial intelligence automation is becoming the status quo. It's not there yet, but it's becoming. Now the market is converging to us versus us being this, like, we're in a weird island saying that this is something that is coming up. And so not an overnight success. Took us years to build the platform. We only launched it at the at the 2019, the 2020, and and it worked. The cool part about it is that it worked. It wasn't an overnight success, but it it did work. Meaning, when we brought the right customers to use the product, the product worked and is working magically for them, and it's only getting better over time. And so the most exciting part about metadata to me was to see that this theory that was marked with, like, patents and algorithms and heuristics and machine learning models, by the time we actually launched it to the masses, it works. And that was very exciting, but not an overnight success. We had to hustle every step on the way to get to the place because I think the first stage for a startup is just survival, just getting to the place where you can launch the product and see if you have product market fit. Most companies don't even get to that stage because they run out of cash.

Mark Evans: If I had to describe many SaaS entrepreneurs, I guess it would be optimism. They're excited. They have a hypothesis about a product and whether there'll be product market fit and whether they'll actually get people to buy the software. From your years as an entrepreneur, when you look at having a product and and maybe it's not overnight success, but maybe it's about getting enough traction to keep you moving in the right direction. What's your advice to entrepreneurs who have launched a product and they're desperately looking for traction so that they can survive, let alone thrive? What advice would you have entrepreneurs who have a product that's early stage and so they're volatile, so very uncertain? There's a lot of risk involved. What should they do to to get traction of some kind? Doesn't have to be major traction, but enough traction to convince them to keep the lights on.

Gil Allouche'sJourney: I think it depends what kind of company you're building. There are two kinds. There's a venture backed blitzscaling kind of companies who are going for the $10,000,000,000, and there's bootstrapped companies. If if you're in the former, you usually only work for that next stage. You work for the seed funding, then you work for the a round, then you work for the b round, then you work for it's very versus when you're bootstrapped, you have to figure out the end in the beginning, and you have a lot more time, and you have to have a lot more patience. So it's different, fundamentally different. But I would say for the former one, for the entrepreneurs who are in a venture backed types of companies, the advice I would have is twofold. One is if you're very proud and content, when you by the time you get very proud and content with the first version that you're releasing to the market, you are way too late. If you're not nervous and you have a bunch of bugs and the UI looks like shit and it's breaking up in the middle of the demo, you're late because the worst thing to do is to build in a room in silo and release something. You're not building an iPhone. You're not gonna be showing this to 5,000 journalists and be broadcasted on CNBC. That's not going to happen unless that's a company you're building and you're Steve Jobs, Rice and Peace. That's not the company you're building, and you should be releasing it v 0.1 should already be in the market. And together with that is my second piece of advice, which is spend all of your time with customers. All of it. Take that little piece of shit using the language that you created. It's not it's like piece of software that is like barely working, doesn't look good, but has a concept behind it and have services surrounding that piece of software and go to those customers that you are that you have an hypothesis that are your ideal customer profile and go and spend hours with them. Make sure that this the problem that we're solving is the problem that they're thinking about day in, day out. Make sure that the idea that you have makes sense in their mind, and then make sure that they're willing to pay for it and how much. And then the final one is work with them from a services point of view to see that it actually is working. That is what fundamentally built our product. Those first few years we spent doing technical repetitive mundane tasks, and every time we detected the pattern, we went and coded it into the product. That's what led us to build the right product. If we would just sit down in a room and try to build something and launch it and assume that everyone is going to buy it, I don't think this would have worked. And I think that's some of the fatal errors that companies are doing sometimes when they start software companies.

Mark Evans: Let's take a step back and look at the big picture of the marketing landscape. One of the biggest challenges facing many marketers is completing repetitive manual tasks, which take time and add to the price of doing business. How do b to b marketers and SaaS marketers eliminate manual repetitive and time consuming work to focus on things like strategy and creativity and driving more revenue? Obviously, this is the essence of of metadata's raison d'etre to eliminate repetitive tasks. But when you look at this problem or you look at the reality of of the day to day jobs that marketers are doing, what's your thinking? What's your philosophy, and and how does that align with what you're doing with metadata and your vision for the company?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: There's a carrot and stick for everything. Right? And so when I think about the technical repetitive mundane task and the change management, there are two factors that get people to move from the technical repetitive mundane to the creative. First of all is their character, the psychology of marketing. I don't think anyone in their right mind signed up to changing a thousand UTM tags in a cell, in a spreadsheet in the middle of the night just for it to break down. No one signed up and said, wanna be in marketing so that I can do AB testing on a subject line on an email editor or find out what hours I'm sending this email so that he has a 2% extra open rate. Like, I don't think anyone signed up for it. They ended up in in that life, but they didn't sign up for it. So if you can tell if you can remind people, look. You signed up for marketing because you saw Mad Men, because you read this book, and you were excited on coming up with cool ideas, cool concepts, and creative concepts, and creating content that resonates with people, and taking over people's minds with these ideas. That's what they signed up for. So if you remind them of that and then you show them, but, actually, look what you're doing day in, day out. You're joining you're creating SQL queries, and you're joining CSV files, and you're uploading audiences and doing a bit like, that's not what you signed up to do. Why are you doing it? There is a better way. That's the carrot. And it works with some people. And there's a stick. The stick is automation and artificial intelligence is coming. It's already here at this point. When I went when we were starting, we were saying it's coming. Now it's it's already here. If you're a vanilla SEO agency who creates, like, fake articles to increase your your domain authority, good luck. ChargeGPT can do it much faster than you today and much cheaper. And so the stick is it's coming. And just if you're a truck driver and you think that you're gonna be driving truck manually for the next few decades instead of training automatic trucks to drive, one of them is going to ride the wave and become indisposable, and the other 90% are not going to do it anymore, and they're going become totally a commodity. And so that's the second thing you have to use to drive people's change. It's basically changing people's behavior, and so there's opportunity and the fear that goes into into that formula. I remember the first one of the first customers that metadata had didn't like the idea of their work being automated, and they were trying to fight it, and they were fired. And that was my first realization that I'm creating one of those companies that they'd be talking about in the movies. Like, it's taking people's jobs. And then you have two ways of looking at it. Either I am going to leverage artificial intelligence and automation and software and do 10 times the power. I'm gonna punch significantly above my weight and be able to do 10 x what I'm able to do with just this piece of software without additional resources, and then it's magical. Or if you're afraid of it and you're gonna try to do everything in your power to stop something that is impossible to stop. And so we usually that's usually how I see it, how you change people's mind into moving into the future and having them ride the wave. And we have so many customers who rode that wave and their career skyrocketed. It truly did. They just became so, like, within three, four years, they became executives in their companies or just moved. The company's exited because they did so well, and they moved to other companies, and that's how it could be. If you're accepting of change and you ride away, that's how life could be for you if you're not afraid of it and you're not afraid of changing and adapting.

Mark Evans: I'm glad you mentioned ChatGBT. For many companies and entrepreneurs. ChatGPT was a game changer. It was a call to arms. It was something that probably scared the shit out of them because it was this amazing technology or this very high potential technology that they had to figure out how to leverage and do it as quickly as possible. And I suspect that you've been thinking about automation and AI for many years. I am curious about how metadata is embracing AI and things like ChatGPT and generative AI and how it's changed, how it will enhance marketing in terms of automation and personalization. For many marketers, as you say, change is hard, and doing things in a different, better, more efficient way is sometimes a great thing, and sometimes it's a challenge both personally and professionally. So how do you see the rise of ChatGPT and AI and and the impact that it's had on metadata as a business?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: Price has been great. We have not ChargeGPT specifically because it's more of a commodity modules, but we have proprietary generative AI models in the platform. We have heuristics in the platform. We have machine learning models in the platform. We have decision trees in the and sometimes the AI is being used as a buzzword. We truly have it built in our platform from day one, and you use the right technology for the right purpose. We don't have neural networks just for the sake of having neural networks. If there's no need for it, we won't have it. We use AI in every aspect of the platform, whether it's combining 20 datasets together and so doing canonization and and and one taxonomy for all of them. We use machine learning models to do regression and prediction. We use heuristics to make decisions, to actually replace the human decision making day day to day activity. And we use generative AI to automatically create create content and and add text, for example. Customers don't have to do it manually today. They we already analyze what works, what doesn't, what creates pipeline, what doesn't for their industry, for their niche. We analyze their website. We analyze their historical ads, and so we can automatically create and generate all of those pieces of text. And now soon you're gonna have in metadata generate generate DVI to take action. But instead of clicking a bunch of places, you can just talk to the software and tell it what you want it to do, and it will take action. And so for us, it's perfect because the platform was built from the get go with the microservices and AI being able to tell it what to do. The software that we built is aimed at taking action. So we are using the generative AI, but we're also using we're already using generative AI in the next version of how generative AI is gonna be used, which is instead of just generating content, we're actually taking actions. With metadata, you'll be able to tell it what to do, and it will do it for you. And that is fundamentally what AI is going to do. It's gonna take actions instead of humans. So we're personally extremely happy about it. It also made it easier to get people to make the change because it's one thing to argue with a 100 people startup, but it's another thing to argue with a billion dollar chat GPT trend. And it made the change more popular, more fundamental.

Mark Evans: That's really good insight because I think a lot of companies have bolted on AI right away, or or they've been forced to bolt it on because if you don't, then you'll fall behind and be seen as a laggard in the industry. A lot of companies have embraced AI from a a brandy perspective. AI powered all over the place these days. So it is interesting to see a company like Metadata already have integrated AI into its platform. I wanna shift gears a little bit and ask you about the the role of brand and brand building. Given the challenging economic landscape, many companies are under understandably laser focused on lead generation. The question to you is how do entrepreneurs and CEOs balance their focus on leads with long term activities like brand awareness and brand building?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: Oh, man. We're going to actually do exact session on that in our demand conference. I myself didn't think much about branding and brand. I would say brand. I didn't think much about brand before. I was like, is brand important? I'm not like a Coca Cola or Nike. I don't need, like, billions of people being like a household name. I don't need my mom to know like what metadata is. It's not important. And I was wrong because the way I was thinking about brand is I was thinking about like colors and design and tagline, and none of this actually matters. Brand is fundamentally a way for you to get a one on one relationship with the market. Basically, show your reputation, show what your company is about without them getting into all the details. Up until maybe three years ago, we didn't invest in brand at all. And the reason I started investing in brand was not because I suddenly understood that brand is important, it was actually because I was looking to lower my customer acquisition cost. Because up until then, we were generating pipeline using metadata, which is performance marketing. I would pay to get someone to show interest, to find the right person in the right time and bring them to me. And while it works, it's very expensive. And while it works, the conversion of a paid acquisition versus an unpaid organic acquisition is extremely drastically different. When someone comes to your website because they heard about you, and then they go to your website and they learn what you are, and then they figure out, this is for me, and they sign up for a demo, the conversion on that is much higher than when someone comes because they want to get a gift card because they saw an ad. And it's also a lot cheaper to get someone to come to you because of a piece of content that you wrote and because your brand is well known. To all the CEOs out there who don't think brand is important, I strongly encourage you to start working on the brand. It doesn't have to be a crazy investment. It can it just means that you need to start talking about your company personally out there. You need to start talking about the values. Why is your company different than the others? It doesn't have to be about the product. It can be about you being transparent in a sea of non transparent companies. It can be about you having a pricing page with a price a dollar price on the page while 99% of the companies you go to the pricing page and it's a talk to sales button without any pricing information. It means that you have a blog post that says why five reasons or 10 reasons you should not buy metadata because it's not for everyone. It means that you choose the tone you talk. Are you gonna be a copy paste of every other marketing buzzword? You're talking about marketing talk. I completely agree. There's this bullshit thing called marketing talk, which you start using these, like, words and descriptions that no one really understands. We use, like, words like synergy. No. Try to use, like, day to day vocabulary. And so I I'm a change man after after after we started investing in brand, and I think it was one of the best investments. And the next time I start a company, I'm going to build an audience, a following, and a brand before I I build a product.

Mark Evans: As someone like me who spends a lot of time helping companies develop better brand position. What you're saying is me to my ears. And my thesis and maybe I'm biased because I make a living by helping companies with brand positioning is that many entrepreneurs and CEOs either underestimate the importance of brand or they ignore it completely because they don't understand it. It's not seen as a priority. One of the biggest battles I have, I think I have from a sales perspective, is that when you look if you're an entrepreneur and you look at your list of priorities, lead generation is number one. It's something they obsess with, and that's why they've got KPIs on dashboards that talk about leads and intent and all that kind of thing. But when it comes to brand, it's a little down on the list. And, hopefully, what you're saying and your experience is are words of wisdom or a wake up call to many entrepreneurs because I think that they're essentially cutting off their nose despite their face by ignoring the rule and value and impact of brand. And I'm just curious about your thoughts maybe on brand positioning. In my where I come from, brand positioning is the essence of everything you do. It underpins your sales and your marketing, your product development, your customer success because it articulates what you do, who you serve, the value that you deliver, and how you're, as you say, unique, different, or better. Do you how do you look at brand positioning and the role that it plays in terms of setting the foundation for growth for a SaaS or b to b company?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: I think things do start with a brand. It's what you do, it's who you are, and it's equally important who you're not and what you don't do, especially in a crowded market. Like, we operate in a space where there are 10,000 other companies. We operate in a space in which no one knows the difference between us and a public company that sells contact data. Even though they're fundamentally different companies with different products and value propositions, the customer, the average customer, I'm not talking about like the 0.1% early adopters who are like the the vast majority of marketers out there have no idea about the difference between those two. And so if you don't have a good brand that tells your story and and explains to them, this is what we do, this is what we don't do, This is who we're for, this is who we're not for. This is when buying us is a good idea, this is when buying us is a terrible idea. If you don't have that and you don't position well against the alternatives because you're never in a one option. Right? It's not like we're not the Coca Cola or Pepsi and you have those two choices. It's not the Burger King and McDonald's and you have Wendy's and you have three choices. There are 10,000 options, and so you have to show exactly where you are in that map, and I think brand and positioning helps you do that so that when you're in an elevator for thirty seconds, people ask you, what is metadata? You can answer succinctly without coming up with odd buzzwords and weird long explanations that includes, like, artificial intelligence and infused and harmony and synergy and all those kind of words that you have to use in order to explain a complex concept. No. It should be something very simple. And even if people don't fully understand who you are, at least when you have a good brand that is clear, people know about you and they want to learn more. If you give them enough of an interest so that they are willing to sit down and listen to what it is that you have to offer versus just say, like, I'm overwhelmed. I don't know what they're saying, but it sounds every other pitch I've gotten before. And so that's I think that's the major difference of doing the differentiation between the status quo and getting to a place where you have a shot in explaining who you are. And I think Brandi is is wonderful for that.

Mark Evans: Two points that that I would add is that differentiation is everything. If you're not different, then you're just like everybody else. And to be honest, a lot of software companies, they walk and talk exactly the same. Their pricing is the same. Yes. And so how do you stand out from crowd? And you have to embrace risk. You have to embrace the idea that, yes, we will be different. We won't charge over the cliff with all the other buffalos. We'll be the ones that will stand apart. And that's the key to success is you can have a great product, but if you're not different, then it's hard to capture the spotlight. So thank you for your mantra. I'm gonna I'm gonna definitely point to this video clip if I wanna convince people about the value of brand. A couple more questions before I let you go. One that I'm always curious about when talking to entrepreneurs who have raised a lot of venture capital. Metadata raised $40,000,000 in March 2022. This is obviously a loaded question. It might take you a long time to answer, but you can give me the Reader's Digest version. What was that process like? And what are the biggest challenges of being well financed and having an aggressive growth mandate?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: Oh, man. I can't talk about this for years. I used to not like raising money because, first of all, it doesn't feel good to ask for money. Two, it doesn't feel good to be rejected dozens of times. And while you're in that process, they point out every possible weakness you have in your company and in your personality. So I used to just fucking hate doing it. It was not my kind of action. But you know what? Thankfully, God sends you challenges that you can overcome. That's at least my perception in life. And everything, especially the shit, is a blessing. And indeed, it was because it made me grow in a stressful environment. It made me grow because of that pressure cooker. And you asked about the series b, so I'll answer that specifically. It was a delight raising the series b. Because by the time I got to raise the series b, the company KPIs were great. It is not my first rodeo. I knew that vast majority of the advice I got, just like many of the copy paste advice you get from the industry, is bullshit. Don't ever say what valuation you want. BS. You should absolutely say what valuation you want. Otherwise, no one knows and no one can aim and agree way ahead of time. Running a process, learning how to say no to the wrong investors, learning how to raise money from existing investors so that you are in a good place and a good confident cash position because it's much easier to raise money when you don't need it. All of those things I've learned by going through this excruciating, painful process in the past. So you're asking how it was. It was a delight. I'm not afraid of raising money anymore. I really don't. I'm not like, that's not what gets me excited in the morning. I'm not like, I think, Adam Newman from, like, WeWork. It's not I'm not like this is not my core competency. Like, Dog and Pony show is not what I think I was born, into. But that said, I have I am enjoying it these days because I get to see what the market thinks about me. And I love truth, whether it's convenient or inconvenient. So I get to be in the market and showing what we build and talking about the weaknesses. I talk about it first usually these days. And it's fucking awesome. I like raising money. And so if you're asking me how it is, I think it's very hard in the beginning. When I advise investors today or when I invest in companies and startups today, I work with them on on fundraise, and I tell them, like, first of all, it's a numbers game. You're gonna get it's an eighty twenty rule. You're gonna get 80 no's for 20 yes. And it might actually be 80 no's. It's not like it's gonna be five no's and one yes. It's, like, very likely to legitimately be, like, forty, fifty no's. And the process of raising money is extremely educating. You learn a lot from it. You learn about yourself. How do you deal with objections? How do you deal when people point you to your weaknesses? How do you take feedback? How do you balance having conviction, which you have to have, and hustle and grit, and like you say, the optimism and never give up attitude with, actually, you've pointed out something that I didn't see before. What are the metrics that you're looking for? What is the pattern of success, that image, that the pattern recognition you're looking for? And having that balance, I think it's very important in life and extremely important for an entrepreneur. So I think it's great. And I like the process, and I think it's very educating. And I actually recommend every entrepreneur, even if you're bootstrapping your company, to go through that experience. That said, I think if you choose to bootstrap your company, it's a very interesting experience as well. I haven't bootstrapped the company completely from scratch, but I think I may actually dabble in that in in the next company because you have the talking the second part of your question, I think, was about the pressure that comes together with raising money. And that pressure, that artificial pressure to be on some sort of a timeline is not helpful. Because when I raise my seed round, I had this thought that I have to continue the momentum that I had in order to then raise my series a. So, like, I continue with the services. I continue with the, like, the building the product but also selling it at the same time, and it was unnecessary. In fact, I should have been comfortable pausing, saying, great. I did what I needed to do to get the the first million and a half in the company. Now I can take a breather and build the right product, take some more time to build it and launch it properly versus continue the same cycle that was on just because of inertia. And same thing goes to scaling. You rate a series b, and everyone expects you to double in size. And guess what? You don't double effectively. You don't offer you're not optimized. You're gonna crush the culture. You're gonna crush the bar of the employees. It's gonna bring in a lot of complexity and bottlenecks and and overhead, and no one tells you about those things. And then and the the percentage of companies that this is a good fit for is small. The vast majority of companies need to grow between organic and. I'm not saying grow 5% and year over year. That's not interesting. I didn't sign up for that either. But you also don't have to always try to grow a 100% year over year, 150% of the year. We grew one year with 250% of you don't have to do that. There is some balance. And so the beauty, I think, in bootstrapping or in raising a little bit less money is being a little bit more of a master of your own domain and having the ability to say no to dogma that is sometimes exactly what it is. It's not true. It's a made up kind of stories that came up in your industry because you read too many articles from TechCrunch or because you think that every company is a Zoom communication or every company is a is a Salesforce, and it's not. And so that's how I think about it. I think it's a great experience. It grows a lot. It it grows you as an entrepreneur. It it shows you how to balance the conviction and being coachable. It shows you your place in the market, helps you work on your psychology. All of those are blessings. But then there's price you have to pay for it too, which is you sometimes try to fit into a pattern that is completely artificial and doesn't fit your actual character and the DNA of your company. And that's a shame because many companies die for no reason because of that. They are trying to fit that DNA. In fact, if they took a little bit more time, I'm not saying ten years, but take another year to build the right product, to try to understand your product market fit. At ease, take a breather, and understand your sustainability, it will actually help you build a much better company. And all of those investors will get a better return for their money. So it's a little bit more patience, but I think it's I think there is something to say about that. And when I look sometimes at bootstrap companies, it's cool to see it because they did have a little bit more time to think about the growth and did have the the pressure to fit an artificial pattern.

Mark Evans: Yeah. That's great advice for entrepreneurs who are not thinking of about raising money, but they're curious about it for those who are gonna raise money and those who have raised money. So, I think a lot of people will get some really great, guidance from that. One final question. The conference world is starting to return. But amid COVID, virtual conferences emerged as a replacement for in person conferences. And while many companies have struggled to make virtual conferences resonate, metadata's demand conference has been a huge success and continues to be a huge success. From your perspective, why do you think that demand resonated so well at a time when a lot of conferences, a lot of virtual conferences, people were excited about the possibility, but the execution didn't work. There wasn't it for one, it's not the same as an in person conference, but people didn't get the value, didn't get the networking, didn't get a lot out of them. Why did demand work, and why does it continue to work?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: The fundamental reason conferences like demand work is because of the focus on value creation at the end of the day. I think most conferences, whether whether virtual or not, suck. Vast majority of the conferences I've been to in my life, especially in marketing and sales, they really have been trade shows. They have been, let's bring a lot of vendors, and let's bring a lot of buyers. And to make sure that it doesn't suck completely, let's put a little bit of good content in between. I remember attending inbound, the HubSpot conference for the first time, and I was like, wow. This is much better than Marketo conference. The Marketo conference is like a dream force. There's like a thousand booths. There is, like, cool music and drinks. And there are some sessions, but that's not the majority of it. Inbound, I remember I went to the vendor floor, there were, like, six booths there. I was like, what is this? Did they are they not interested in, like, sponsorship money? And I realized that inbound was building a movement. And in order to build the movement, you have to have people who follow you. And the the way to get people to follow you is to try to fill in the blanks in the areas where they seek it most, like the value creation. So when we were planning demand, when Jason was planning demand for the first time, we focused on value add, workshop, thought leadership, best practices. Let's take the best people. We even brought our competition into the conference so that they talk about what they do best and better than us so that marketers can learn from them something that they cannot learn from us. Value creation at the end of the day is everything. If you are providing people with content that help them be better at their job, get promoted, get better ROI, and have fun, be ease easygoing, have fun, get to network, you solved for it. And to make it easier and successful, we just we made sure it's not too long. We were prerecorded all the sessions so that it's really crisp, and and it worked. I think in a time where many conferences are focused still on sales and selling, we didn't do any of that. We didn't prospect any of the demand registrants. That was it's not it wasn't about it. It's not a metadata trade show. It's a marketing conference. And so it's not about metadata. We're just the one paying for it and and organizing for it, but it's not a metadata conference. You better see our competition there. And and I think that's one of the key components to a good conference.

Mark Evans: Awesome. One final question. Where can people learn about you and metadata?

Gil Allouche'sJourney: You can learn about it on metadata.io. The demand conference is coming up in the October. Amazing sessions coming up. I strongly recommend joining it. And if you wanna get a taste of what it is to use data and experimentation, you can actually sign up and get the first three audiences for free without any commitment using our MetaMatch product. So I invite all companies, even with a small performance marketing spend, to make sure that every dollar goes to the right company and the right prospect and experiment with metadata for free by going to metadata.io/metamatch.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Gil. And if you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a b to b or SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. Reach out to me via email, mark@markevans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.