The following interview is a conversation we had with David Campbell, CEO and Co-Founder of Tropic, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $68 Million Raised to Redefine SaaS Procurement

David Campbell
Absolutely happy to be here, Brett.

Brett
Yeah, so before we can talk about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

David Campbell
Definitely. Yeah. So I grew up in Southern California, in the Mojave Desert on a cattle ranch actually, of all places. And then I went to school at UC Berkeley and was in the Bay Area for a while, and where I majored in Renaissance literature, which has not been the most helpful major. After that, I more or less came to the East Coast, where I got plugged into the tech ecosystem, got started in sales on a brief detour to try and be the next great American novelist. Which didn’t pan out. But I think helped me solidify my vision of entrepreneurship by giving me some time to focus on something that no one else was telling me to focus on. And alongside that, started to build up a sales career. I hit my stride at a Martech platform called Bounce X, where I was the top individual contributor and then eventually the VP, and scaled that business up to $80 million in err from basically zero.

David Campbell
At the end of that journey I went to Microsoft and did a stint of big company work as a global business manager with a 500 million dollar patch there. And over the course of that journey saw a lot of different shapes and sizes of company and a lot of different ways of buying and managing the technology that I or someone on my team was selling. And it was over the course of that journey that I started to get clarity on the problem space that we’re focused on here at Tropic. 

Brett
Now let’s go back a little bit then. So growing up on a cattle ranch, what was that like? I think you’re the first person to come on the podcast that grew up on a cattle ranch. 

David Campbell
Yeah. Honestly, it was awesome in hindsight and in the moment, terrible. I just wanted to be in a suburb playing ball with kids in the street. But my father and my mother were both in advertising in Chicago in the leading kind of a wild lifestyle. There’s been this ranch that’s been in my father’s side of the family for generations. And when they decided to have children, they wanted to do it somewhere a little bit quieter. So they picked the ranch. So I had exposure tons of fort building, lots of hiking. We played baseball, using cow s***, basically, as the bases and things like that. All the things that you might do in a cattle ranch. And I’m really grateful for the upbringing now, but in the moment, I just wanted to be around other kids. 

Brett
Yeah, I grew up in the mountains, and it was the same thing. Looking back, it’s awesome. And it was so cool. But when I was a little kid, it was awful. I wanted to be in a real city with a bunch of other kids and not live the mountain life. So I can relate there. 

David Campbell
Yeah. That’s the human condition. We’re never satisfied. 

Brett
Yeah. Now, on Bounce X, were you there when they had the office in The New York Times building? Do they still have that? I went to that office a long time ago, in 2017, and it was one of the sickest offices I think I’ve ever been to. 

David Campbell
Yeah, I was actually there before that. So the OG Bounce actors, like the first five were at an incubator. I missed that by a couple of weeks. Joined as the 15th employee, though, at an office on Hudson Street, which was not the sickest office ever, and then did work in that New York Times building office for a couple of years, and then I left before the move happened. But they’ve since rebranded to Vudrakin and relocated to One World Trade, and apparently that’s truly the sickest office ever, although I haven’t seen it. 

Brett
Got it. Wow. They leveled up from the New York Times. One. I thought that was as cool as you could get. 

David Campbell
Me, too. I thought that was the upper limit, but we’ll prove this wrong. 

Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. Now, a couple of questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. First one is, what founders do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 

David Campbell
Yeah, great question. So this answer changes for me quite often. It’s kind of just like, who am I obsessing over and inspired by in a given moment? And right now, I’m drawing a lot of inspiration from Parker Conrad, the CEO of Ripling. And I think that Ripling’s product strategy in particular is brilliant. We have a very similar product strategy at Tropic, where casting a wide net with your product enables compounding value for your end user. And what I also like about Parker is that he had, I think, a less than graceful exit from Zenfits. There was lots of bad blood, I think, associated with the departure, and he went through all of that. I think for many people, a Founder’s worst dream came out the other side, dusted himself off, and built a much better company right after and I think that kind of resilience is something that I really admire.

David Campbell
So he’s the one that I’m focusing on right now. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. Yeah. I just listened to an episode with him on 20 VC, that podcast, and he said it was his first chance to really tell his side of the story or really tell any story at all. But he basically just sat there and took it for years as everyone essentially s*** on him and beat him up for everything that happened. But then I don’t remember how he worded it, but it was something along the lines of success is the best revenge. Something along those lines that was very clever and seems like he’s definitely pulled that off with his latest company.

David Campbell
Yes, absolutely.

Brett
What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be classic business book or a personal book that influenced how you view the world? 

David Campbell
Yeah, books that influence how I view the world. Absolutely. Hands down. Dune by Frank Herbert. I’ve been a Dune head since before it was cool, before they had the remake with Timothy Chalamet. Great book for kind of understanding the dark side of leadership and the politics of big or scaling company movement. Although that’s kind of not at face value, what that book is about. There’s a lot to learn from that book on that topic, really. The book that I think has had the biggest impact on Tropic, though, would have to be The Hard Thing about Hard Things. I think it’s Most startup founders Bible by Ben Horowitz. And I think that most of the lessons in that book have made their way into my operating principles of Tropic. And my favorite takeaway, I think, is the concept of a wartime CEO and a wartime company. 

David Campbell
I think if you’re leading a business in 2023, especially if you’re at the growth stage like we are, where the funding market is very challenging, the customer market is very challenging, and the downturn has flipped a lot of tenants that you kind of held to be stable on their heads. You have to recognize that it’s wartime and the maneuverings of a wartime CEO are required. So took quite a bit from Hard Thing about Hard Things in that respect, as Mr. Horowitz had to navigate 2008 and all of that. 

Brett
Nice. Yeah. And I think that’s probably the most recommended book or the top book that founders come on and say. So definitely. I have heard that one before. What are some of the changes that you’ve had to make as you transition to a wartime CEO? 

David Campbell
Yeah, I think that more than anything, I’ve always kind of been that way and have been able to hit my stride at a company that is navigating a wartime environment. And what I mean by that is I’m generally uncomfortable if everything is going okay. Like, if there’s a reason that it’s okay to sign off at  p.m.. I feel like surely something is wrong. I actually feel very engaged and checked in when there are big, heavy problems to solve. And I think that probably the biggest way that I’ve seen the impact of the economy show up is the market that we’re in very quickly became extremely crowded almost overnight, because everyone, at least in our ideal customer profile or in our addressable market, needs to save money because of what’s happening in the market. And that’s what our company does. So we had one competitor we’ve linked. 

David Campbell
We have like 30 now. And I think there’s actually an upside to having a crowded market and an upside to having lots and lots of competitors if you’re the one that is willing to lean in extremely aggressively and kind of address that challenge head on. And that’s something that we’ve done with our sales culture, with our product strategy. Like Parker, who I mentioned a moment ago, we’ve stolen a lot of those ideas without realizing that we’d stolen them. And we’re building lots of different products at once really rapidly. And I think that wartime for me is not about violence or anger. It’s about really fast paced decision making in the absence of data and with lots and lots of ambiguity and with an eye towards meeting the challenge head on and directly addressing the competition, that’s where I think we’ve seen it show up the most. 

David Campbell
And it also, I think, has an effect of really galvanizing the culture of the company. I think that if there’s one thing that we’ve done right at Tropic, I do think it’s the culture. And that really just means that we’ve hired the right people, because the people create the culture. You don’t really have that luxury, even as a CEO. And the culture that we have is one that I think is really rallied around the vision and really excited to go to war, in a manner of speaking. And if you don’t have that wartime backdrop, you don’t have that galvanization. If you don’t have an enemy, you don’t have the same inspiration to exceed expectations and succeed as a business. So I think that’s where we’ve actually gotten a lot of value from the chaos in the macro economy right now. 

Brett
And just from a personal psychology point of view, has that been hard at times to read the news and just keep seeing competitor after competitor raise funding and launch? Did that ever get in your head? And if so, what did you do to overcome that so that it didn’t distract you from the business? Because I think there’s a lot of founders who are in a similar spot where in the 2021 or early 2022 boom, when funding was going crazy, tiger was throwing money around like wild. There was a lot of noise there. And I think that can be a little bit overwhelming sometimes for a Founder to see did you experience that? 

David Campbell
Oh, of course. I mean, I tell everybody that asks me about being a Founder is like, with regards to competitors, with regards to terminations of executives, whatever it is you have to go through, it hurts tremendously, I think, to be a Founder. You’re signing up for pain most of the time, right? That’s at least me. I’m not a stoic individual at all. It’s not weird for me to post something on LinkedIn at  A.m. About the anxious spiral that I’m going down in my head that I think is very typical of the fatter experience. But what’s really important is that you feel those feelings and move through them. And that’s the key, because moving through those feelings puts you in a position of inspiration. And that’s when kind of my best ideas come to me. But if you’re stuck in those feelings, if you can’t get out of them, if you don’t have levers that you can pull in your life to move through those feelings, that’s when you get really distracted. 

David Campbell
Right? So I don’t care almost whatsoever what any of our competitors product roadmap is because I believe that ours is better. Right. And as soon as I get distracted from that gut instinct that I think CEOs really have to listen to and I start chasing somebody else’s features, I’m basically signing up for being one to two months behind forever. And is that what I want to sign up for? Definitely not. That’s not the legacy that I want to leave a Tropic. You have to move through those feelings and then put yourself in a space of generative thinking. None of my ideas are rocket science, and they’re all stolen pretty much when it comes to how to take care of yourself. But the most basic things I’ve been implementing that have been extremely successful recently are like just turning on Do Not Disturb after I send my last email of the night, and then in the morning before I turn it off, I do meditation first, then I set my intention for the day. 

David Campbell
Then I run all the things that I’m sure a million other founders have said. But then I turn off the notifications, and it kind of brings me to a place of calm and confidence. So that if I see that a competitor raised money, if I see that something exploding with the product, those things that will inevitably happen to you, they kind of pass by. Like, I feel the acute pain, and then I move through it and get back to a place of generative thinking. So that’s kind of like but yeah, I mean, if you’ve had a Founder on here who’s like, yeah, it doesn’t bother me. I want whatever that guy’s having, because this is a painful experience. Although also the most rewarding. 

Brett
Nice. I love the honesty there. Now let’s talk about the origin story. So take me back to those early days as you were sitting there with a notepad or whatever it was, thinking about the idea, what was going through your mind and what made you decide to really pull the trigger on this idea? 

David Campbell
Yeah, definitely. So I’d been thinking about software as a category for a long time, like software for software, the Meta software space. I’d been thinking about that since I was an individual contributor on the sales side. And the reason is because I tend to think that the optimum conditions for an excellent business to emerge are when there’s some kind of pre Cambrian explosion in an existing ecosystem that changes behaviors materially. But the industry attached to that explosion hasn’t yet caught up. And in this case, that explosion is software. Cloud software is everywhere. Like investors, I’m sure, have all seen 1000 pitch decks that have that like loomiscape with 10,000 Martech vendors on it and the software is eating the world. Quote, software has exploded, but procurement either doesn’t exist if you’re a tech startup or mid sized company, the companies that I initially started selling to, or it really exists. 

David Campbell
But it has nothing to do with buying software, because it was designed for buying hardware, for buying widgets, for buying the plastic that goes into building the Tesla. So one side of this ecosystem, which is the side that I grew up on, you have this laser focused sales motion with the most highly efficient process attached to it, with this vast ecosystem of tools, zoom, info, inside squared. We used to have gong, outreach, whatever, the list goes on and on. And on the other side of that ecosystem, the buyer has basically nothing, right? Even today it has basically nothing when it comes to software. It’s still, I think, very early innings on the enablement of the buy side leveling up to match the enablement of the sell side. And the AHA moment for me, like the moment where I decided I want to take this on and take up the mantle as the one that solves this problem. 

David Campbell
I was at Microsoft, I’d been there for a year. In a couple of months I took a title that was above my weight class because I thought it would be amazing. And quite honestly, what I learned was big companies are not my thing. Way too slow, peacetime. No matter what’s going on, right? There’s already a deck for everything. So just not my vibe. And the opportunity presented itself when a customer in my patch had a $100 million per year Microsoft renewal coming up. They’d missed the opt out date. The main reason they’d missed the opt out date was they had crazy turmoil inside their business. They’d had CEO turnover, 10% riff, a giant global insurance company, right? So the sales rep on my team that was supposed to grow this account was like, hey, this is not going to happen. There’s way too much turbulence inside this customer. 

David Campbell
So I’m escalating it. Can you talk to them. So I got on the phone with the procurement team and the message was more or less, look, our entire team is new, I’m sure you’ve seen the news. The whole company turned over. Like the whole leadership team turned over rather we’ve had a 10% riff. And I’m looking at this order form from Microsoft that has 300 SKUs in it. I have no idea what these are. I have no idea who bought this stuff. I have no idea if these prices are fair. I have no idea if we’re using this. But I know that we don’t need 200,000 seats anymore because we don’t have 200,000 people anymore. We just laid 10% of them off. So we’re not ready to do this. Like we really need your help. Can you please help us right size this, get through this year and we’ll make it up to you next year. 

David Campbell
And I asked the powers to be at Microsoft and the answer of course was no. It’s not our fault that they’re terrible at buying and managing their technology. That’s their fault. And this company got locked into a contract for software that they could not afford, no budget, didn’t even need plenty of tools that had no value to them as a business for seats that they certainly didn’t have because they laid people off. So all around totally without value agreement, like no customer value in the agreement and to pay for it they had to lay more people off because of course, traditionally the SaaS provider, in this case Microsoft, actually has the leverage if it’s an entrenched player like that. So the day that those layoffs happen I was like, okay, so I’ve seen small companies fail at this because there’s no infrastructure for it. I’ve seen mid sized companies fail at this because the infrastructure is wrong. 

David Campbell
And I’ve seen enterprise companies fail at this so completely that it’s actually led to thousands of people getting laid off just to pay a SaaS bill. So that says to me the problem is big enough, software is going nowhere but up. The Tan is big enough, it affects small and giant companies alike and there’s no sales force for buyers is what it amounts to. So that system of record was really the idea and I thought with my exposure and empathy from having been on the sales side, I was uniquely positioned to solve it, quit that day. I’m a big believer in torching your safety net. I think that’s actually, at least for me, a critical step to launching the business. If I was still getting paid anything, I don’t think that I would have been all in. So as soon as I realized my next paycheck is going to have to come from venture capital and to raise that venture capital, I’m going to have to turn this into something real. 

David Campbell
That was when I started working around the clock to make it happen. And I actually coded the prototype myself that we used to raise the initial capital from Founder Collective Design prototype. We got it in the hands of a bunch of different companies to start giving us feedback. And then basically right after the funding cleared, COVID-19 happened. And oddly enough, much as the market conditions are a tailwind for us right now, in an inversely proportional way, COVID-19 was as well. And it really launched the business as people became really serious overnight about managing spend. And that was kind of the springboard for us. Nice. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode and looking at the logos there that you have on your website, you have obviously the big names. Intercom gusto DocuSign notion. Zapier, those are customers, right? 

David Campbell
Yes, those are all customers. 

Brett
So for you, does that ever put you in an awkward situation where your customers are also the ones who are on the other side that are having the cost cut? 

David Campbell
You would think so, but oddly enough, no. I think that everyone sort of recognizes that this is the cost of entry. Like, if you want to benefit from the scale and the data that we have, and that’s really kind of key to our product strategy. Everything that we build on top of a product schema of our first party data that we’ve collected, and weave that first party data in valuable ways throughout the customer journey. So if you want to access that, then you have to kind of participate in this collective, in a manner of speaking. And also at the same time, in many cases, these teams are not as directly in touch with one another as you might think. The finance team is using Tropic for one thing, and the sales team is using Tropic for another thing. One way of kind of extending an olive branch that connects those two teams and sort of enforces harmony across this ecosystem that is totally unique to Tropic is we have what we call an open source marketplace. 

David Campbell
And what that means is we have a marketplace where there’s zero commissions exchanged at all. We collect nothing from it. And we’ve made this decision very intentionally because this is a market where there’s tremendous bias and where every platform that is supposed to be helping you is actually funded privately by the supply side, even including Gartner. Right. So we’ve chosen to do things differently. And what that does is it gives the customers that we’re saving money for an opportunity to list on the platform in a way that’s going to drive business for them at whatever an approved discount is for that particular category. So that’s kind of how we balance things. But I think that the main kind of philosophical tenet that is most powerful for how our business is driven today is that the power of the finance team in 2023 outweighs the power of basically any other team. 

David Campbell
Because we’re all, Tropic included, not graded explicitly on top line growth anymore. We’re actually graded much more explicitly on bottom line efficiency, retention. All those metrics are what we’re getting graded on in the late stage private sector. And because of that, the CFO has tremendous empowerment to enforce a mode of operating within the parameters of Tropic as platform. So that’s probably more detail than you were looking for. But those are the various ways that we kind of balance everything. 

Brett
We like detail. So that’s really interesting and that aligns with things that I’ve seen and what some other guests have mentioned, where regardless of the market and the industry that you’re in, you’re selling to the CFO. And that’s just the status quo for 2023. There’s no way around it. And for a lot of companies, I think that’s a new motion for them, right? Like, they have totally change the pitch and change how they talk about the product, because the CFOs, they’re probably far more skeptical than an average buyer, right? 

David Campbell
Yeah. And they don’t want the wine and dine experience, like they don’t want the next tickets. They want outputs and impact. Right. And they’re under tremendous pressure right now too, because remember, the CFO probably has a board level OKR, that might be like job defining or job ruining to save money and bring efficiency into the company right now. So you better come correct for that. I do think, though, this, again, is like my emphasis on kind of a wartime environment. I think that environment is perfect for becoming an absolutely amazing seller, right? If you can navigate this, if you can remove all the frills and fluff associated with selling all the relationship driven sales, that in an upmarket might help you. I actually think that those are crutches that the industry needs to evolve away from. And I actually think that this is a good time for pulling those things into the light and kind of reestablishing the fundamentals of how to create value for a customer in a real way with your product. 

David Campbell
So it’s tough, but it’s good. It forces us to be honest, it forces us to better. And for that we’re grateful. 

Brett
And given the focus now on revenue and profit that startups of your size are facing right now, was that a hard decision for you to make that open source marketplace, non commission based and to not have that revenue stream coming in? Because I’m sure that would be nice to have that revenue oriented. So what was that decision like for you? 

David Campbell
Yeah, honestly, it was a very easy decision for us not to be like, cheeky about it. The only reason it was easy for us is because we got crystal clear on our vision at the beginning of launching Tropic. And our vision is purchasing paradise, as we put it, hence the palm tree and all the fun branding. And that means that we’re 100% aligned to one side of the equation. We’re 100% aligned to empowering the buyer. And it makes it very easy to see revenue streams like marketplace revenue as a conflict of interest that ultimately will erode the trust of that buyer. So it’s like, obviously we don’t want to do that. Maybe there are quick wins to be had if you can get this up and running for a year. But I don’t like referral fees as a general premise. Like, I prefer SaaS. I think it’s if you call it marketplace revenue, then maybe you can get away with a big multiple, but if it’s really just a referral fee, it’s kind of tough. 

David Campbell
And also we just knew that monetizing that area would again erode trust with the CFO who is the most important person to us from a product strategy perspective. And with that being said, we did continue to stay aggressive in our growth trajectory and we continue to kind of invest in growth. We just chose to keep it aligned to the one side versus another. I think it’s like a snappy looking investor pitch, but I’m not convinced that it’s what the industry is asking for. I think the industry is actually asking for something that is ungameable and that’s what we’re trying to create. 

Brett
And on the topic of brand, there what’d you call it? Purchase paradise. 

David Campbell
Purchasing paradise, that’s right. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. When I was reviewing the website before this interview, I was looking through and just thinking, wow, you guys have done such a good job on branding and you’re just doing a killer job on marketing. I think people are coming around to it now in the enterprise B, two B world to understand the importance of brand and branding, but it seems like you guys have really nailed that. So was that a priority from day one about what the brand would look like and what it would feel like, or did that come later on in your company’s journey? 

David Campbell
Yeah, no, it was actually extremely intentional. A friend of mine, his partner, does branding and naming, specifically, professionally, and we had like a two day pizza party with her where we locked ourselves in a room and figured out what we wanted the brand to be. But what I knew going into that is that I didn’t want a company that ends in Ly or ify I didn’t want a brand that sounds enterprise, because when I think about our end users, every CFO. Literally 100% of the CFOs that I’ve sold to at Tropic are millennials. Lots of the people at our company that we employ are gen z. And this generation, millennials in particular, like me, like these CFOs that I work with, are extremely skeptical of what came before, and they’re also very conditioned, I think, to a very consumer, streamlined brand experience. Like, we all grew up with iPhones. 

David Campbell
We grew up used to speed and immediacy, and enterprise technology to me is literally the opposite of that. It’s like, here to slow things down. It sucks, it’s disgusting, it’s hard to read. And I just wanted to be the opposite of that. I wanted to be light and airy and breezy, and Tropic made a lot of sense in that respect because it’s like, we want to disrupt procurement. What’s like the least procurement sounding thing we can think of? Procurement is like a disgusting word I almost hesitate to even use. So we really wanted to be the opposite of that. I really do believe that on the brand side, the companies that win that are doing a really good job with that are the companies that fully embrace the idea of a consumer look and feel for their enterprise B2B SaaS brand. And I think that we’re going to see a lot more of that as younger and younger people come into the workplace and some of these more legacy players age out. 

Brett
Where did that come from for you? Do you think that understanding of the importance and brand and wanting to make it fun, was that from bounce x and wonderkin? Because I feel like they always had fun branding or they would try to do fun branding. Do you think it came from there or did it come from somewhere else? 

David Campbell
Yeah, I think there was a bit of that. What was nice about the experience there is our clients were all at least when I started there, they were all up and coming hot ecommerce brands, right. With great branding companies like Casper, right. That were kind of Reimagining stodgy or legacy spaces with a fresh coat of paint that really spoke to a younger generation that was in that era. 2012, 2014, New York City, a ton of venture capital investment was flowing into those consumer type brands. At least it felt like that at the time. Maybe it was because I was working at badsex, so it just planted this seed for me that I was like, that model could so easily be applied to B2B SAS. Why is nobody doing that? And the answer, I guess, that many would give is like, people don’t want that for B2B SAS. 

David Campbell
And I fundamentally disagree. I think that they do if they’re being honest with themselves. So probably that experience had something to do with it. And I also, before that, worked briefly at a marketing agency. On the content side, I thought I was going to be a writer for most of my life, and that was really about bringing a fresh voice to legacy brands as well. I’ve just kind of always had an inherent distrust of authority. I’ve had an inherent rejection of whatever the traditional path is, and I don’t see that screaming more loudly anywhere, as I do in Enterprise SaaS, which I think is just so boring and could be so much better. And I think that whether you realize it consciously or not, the power of the right brand influences CSAT, influences sales, influences employee engagement. It really has a profound impact if you’re willing to embrace it, in my opinion.

Brett
Nice. I love that. I think that’s super valuable for founders to hear because I do think there’s some founders and marketers who are skeptical on that. I had a conversation a few weeks ago with the CMO who literally told me that brand does not matter. They weren’t investing in brand, they weren’t doing anything with brand. And just from my perspective, I thought this person was kind of a moron. Like, it didn’t make any sense to me. It seems like you don’t really have an option now, you have to invest in brand. And that seems like very outdated thinking. 

David Campbell
Absolutely. That’s funny. We have how big is it today? I think a six person marketing team. Just a couple of weeks ago, though, it was only a three person marketing team. A company of our size and stage should arguably have a ten person marketing team. And we just hired we’re three years in Series B company. We’ve tripled revenue the last couple of years, and you would expect that we’d be investing in debandgen at some point on that journey. We just hired the first person for that. Everything that marketing did before that was brand. Everything. It was PR strategy, which were able to cultivate organically to get some placements. It was me writing a bunch of crazy s*** on LinkedIn all the time and building brand that way, which I think is actually a better alternative to paying for PR nowadays and events and speaking engagements. 

David Campbell
We really invested heavy on the brand side, and all of our demand either came inbound through word of mouth and because of the branding stuff or was through our SDR team. We had zero investment in driving demand for marketing, and now we’re starting to do that. I’m not saying that what we did is exactly the right way, but it actually worked for us. Like, capitalizing on our brand has always shown up in the numbers for us. So I’m a big believer. 

Brett
And what were you doing to measure ROI? Or did you just say, for right now, for the short term, as we build out this brand, I’m not going to care about ROI? Because how did you balance that of you wanting to spend but also not wanting to be crazy and just blowing money on things that you can’t track back to ROI. 

David Campbell
Yeah, great question. So at the risk of citing another book that everyone on your show probably talks about, I’m such a huge fan of amp it up. Frank Slubin. I’ve read it three times at this point, and the first half of my operating principles are probably the Ben Horowitz book, the second half of the Slibin book. And one of the things that I really like about the Slibman book is the favoring of execution over strategy at certain key lifecycle stages as a business. So when we started, we said, let’s execute. Like, let’s not worry too much about strategy, let’s not worry too much about accountability. And execute, by the way, doesn’t mean spending millions of dollars. Right? It meant let’s spend a couple of thousand here, a couple of thousand there, and see what starts to happen. And then as we started to see what was starting to happen, we got better clarity on how to measures, and we started to see that website traffic was going up. 

David Campbell
We started to see that were getting mentioned all over social media. We would see things like Tweets that are like, hey, what’s that? Purchasing Paradise Company or whatever it’s called. And that, to me, is indication that it’s working. Those would be the things that we would look at. We don’t have a way, even now, of tying that back to meetings, booked and then closed one. But that kind of wasn’t the goal. The goal was like, can we start to suck the air out of the room because were late to the party with our marketing? We have competitors who’ve raised way more money. We’re winning in deals competitively, eight times out of ten. So we’re like, we need to show up to this party in a very real way, and let’s throw money at it until we figure out what showing up actually means and how to measure it. 

David Campbell
And that’s kind of what we did. 

Brett
Nice. Love that. Now let’s talk about market categories. So I introduced you saying the word that you don’t like, I guess procurement software procurement platform. So apologies there for starting off on a rocky foot, but what is your market category? Or how do you think about your market category? 

David Campbell
Yeah, so I was thinking about it before the call. We’ve been trying to figure out what to call it. Some people call it a SaaS purchasing platform. Some people call it like, SaaS management plus service. I think that what it really is, even though it’s unsexy, is unified spend management for finance and it together. That’s really what it’s about. I was thinking finance lifecycle management. I don’t know. I don’t have a snappy word for it yet. But really what it’s about is, like, one platform where you can control every single dollar that’s leaving your business and where finance and it can partner strategically. Right? Because if you look at it in the past, it’s been about provisioning, about security, about kind of making sure the trains run on time, making sure that I can access gone when I start as a new employee. And finance is laser focused on the dollars, you’d sense. 

David Campbell
But finance for software is an ongoing kind of always on lifecycle, right? It’s like you’re coming up to the renewal, you’re negotiating the renewal, you’re buying, you’re provisioning the seats, you’re flexing up, you’re flexing down, next thing you know, it’s coming up for renewal again. Or it’s a consumption based tool like a snowflake that’s fluctuating month over month in ways that can be challenging for finance to forecast and project. And I think that we’re seeing unprecedented partnership now between finance and It to realize that the stack, the software that we have, which for our customer base is usually the second most expensive thing they have behind their employees, is red Amok. And the only way to actually control it is with something that’s always on that is influencing the process for finance and for it together. So integrated spend management, I’ll tell you, if I ever figure out exactly what it’s supposed to be called, but that’s what it’s supposed to do. 

David Campbell
Ensure that you’re scrutinizing every dollar leading the business and that you’re getting value from everything that you’re paying money for. 

Brett
Interesting, and makes sense. Now, I know we’re getting close to being up on time here, so let’s just end with the final question. Let’s zoom out three to five years from today. What’s the future look like? What is that vision for the company? 

David Campbell
Yeah, so I believe that there’s a very big opportunity for this platform. And I mentioned the sales force for buyers earlier. That was by design. I think that in a lot of cases, procurement is not such a four letter word that I won’t use it. We’re bringing procurement practices into companies that don’t yet have them. Right. Companies are realizing at 800 employees, 1000 employees, that in tech, they traditionally won’t build out a dedicated procurement function until much later on the journey because they think, we don’t need procurement because we’re not buying widgets in plastic. Right. And I think everyone is kind of collectively waking up all at once to the fact that we need some functional way of controlling our costs. Maybe it’s procurement, maybe it’s not. And there’s no system of record in place for doing that. In many cases, we’re coming in and they’re using a spreadsheet to track all of their contracts, and there’s no record of who actually bought what, and they don’t know who’s negotiating these agreements. 

David Campbell
And probably most painfully, if you want to buy something, especially if you’re at a smart company, there’s like 100 steps that you have to follow manually. You have to go to the wiki and notion or guru or whatever and say how to buy software. And it’s like, well, if it’s over $50,000, you go to Fred over here. If it’s under $50,000. You use a credit card, but you have to get it approved by your frontline manager. If it’s $70,000, it has to go to legal, then finance, and the onus is on you, the contract owner, to go do all of those things. So it’s like that kind of like chaos. And Siloing is the same world that salesforce stepped into on the sales side, right, and created the CRM category. And we intend to do the same thing on the buy side. And where we intend to go from there is broadening. 

David Campbell
So can we cover more and more categories as well as depth? Can we deepen further and further into this workflow and tackle more and more of this value chain? And as we continue to grow and scale, one thing that we’re approaching differently from, say, a salesforce is we’ve built this gigantic first party data asset, and we see that as a really powerful battery to power really interesting products in the future. So I see a very large all in one encompassing platform for folks that want to manage technology, manage spend and the like. And then I see an ecosystem of partners that can build on top of that and hook into that and kind of extend the window of value that we can create for the customer. And if we’re able to realize that ultimate vision and really squeeze kind of every volt of power out of that network effect battery of first party data that I mentioned, I think that will be a very big business. 

David Campbell
And I believe that as you think about ultimately exiting a company, which of course is the goal, I believe in protecting optionality, but building every step of the way is if you’re going to take it all the way, because that’s going to be the path to a good acquisition anyway. But we’re pursuing a very big vision. 

Brett
Epic. I love it. All right, David, we are up on time, so we’re going to need to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go? 

David Campbell
Yeah. Best place is LinkedIn. That’s where I tend to be most active. Follow me on LinkedIn and you’ll get pulled into the Tropic world pretty quickly. 

Brett
Awesome. David, thanks for coming on. Thanks for being real on this podcast. I feel like you weren’t full of s***. You were giving us real, honest takes and not just giving us fluffy PR answers. So thank you for that and thanks for sharing this vision. This is all super exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision and hopefully have you back on in a couple of years. 

David Campbell
Awesome. Thanks so much, Brett. Pleasure being here with you today. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B, two B Founder looking for help one launching and growing your own podcast. Visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode. Search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.