Brendan, thank you so much for joining us for our favorite thing, the No Bullshit demo. Uh, we have a wonderful relationship with Knak here at marketingops.com and in the MO Pros community, you’ve been tremendous contributors, you’ve helped our research, uh, in the latest iteration of that, which, you know, we’ll start the, we’ll kick off the 2023 version here.

But we’re not here for research. We are here for deep insights into how Knak actually works for marketing operations professionals. And so with that, uh, would love for you to sort of introduce yourself and then we’ll dive into our very first question, uh, which is all about, you know, what the product is, what it does, and why it exists.

So take 

us away. Awesome. Yeah, thanks Mike. Uh, really excited to be here. Um, you know, Real excited for, for, uh, Mo Pros and all the success that you’ve had. I, I, you know, still consider myself, uh, a mo Pro, uh, every day. I’m, I, uh, I, I think, you know, most of the company here at Knak is, uh, kind of marketing ops people and, uh, love, love your community that you’ve built and, and, um, you know, love the people, uh, in it, because again, I, I, you know, we really.

Ourselves to be, be those folks. And, and that’s, um, you know, why, why we built Knak, but, we’ll, we’ll talk a little bit about that. Uh, I, I guess, uh, here, uh, so looking forward to it, but, hey, my name’s Brendan. I’m co-founder, chief customer Officer here at Knak. Um, I’m a career marketing guy and, uh, I’ve worked, uh, most of my career in large enterprises, um, started in product marketing campaigns.

Uh, then moved into kind of more, uh, marketing operations and actually was placed, uh, into the field as well. So I’ve done field marketing, um, oh, , kind of lived a lot of lives in, uh, you know, an enterprise marketing organization or multiple enterprise marketing organizations. And, um, you know, felt a lot of the pains I think of, uh, you know, that, that marketers feel.

And, uh, I think that’s partly why, uh, I love my job so much is, is because, uh, I still every day get to talk to, uh, my people. I get to talk to marketers, I get to talk to marketing ops people, field marketers, demand gen people, uh, campaigns, people, uh, every single day. So, um, so yeah, that’s, that’s a bit about me a little bit.

Also, like on the personal side. , I’m a dad. That’s, that’s my real job. Uh,   and, and a car, car nerd. Uh, and that kind of stuff. So, um, that’s, that’s, that’s kind of me right there. Awesome. 

Well, we appreciate the insights, uh, all across the board. I love it when organizations have, uh, individuals leading the helm, especially product orgs that really have a true understanding of marketing operations, revenue, operations at its,

I do love that you’ve been in the field too, uh, field marketing wise. I too have had that experience. Uh, and it is, you know, it, it brings you full circle for sure. . So, um, well let’s dive in. So tell us a little bit about Knak. Uh, our very first question is, what is the product? And it’s sort of a three parter, like really help us understand what does it do and why does it exist.

Okay. So what we do, I’ll start with the, what we do part, um,  really at its core, Knak helps, uh, helps marketing teams kind of shrink the time to market for their campaigns, right? Um, so a lot of big marketing enterprise enterprise marketing teams, Um, there’s a lot of steps and things that they have to go through to get campaigns created and out the door.

Uh, and, uh, at the end of the day, again, what Knak does really collapses that time to market, uh, and makes that creation a lot easier and more efficient and cost effective. Um, and the reason why we exist, the why, uh, Knak. Is really around, uh, it, it’s really around making marketers more creative and more efficient.

And that’s actually our, our company mission is to help enterprise marketers kind of take creativity back in their own hands, uh, and, and do that in an efficient way. And, um, you know, that kind of goes back to my story, uh, as a marketer, right? Uh, you. I think a lot of marketers in enterprise organizations get really frustrated when, you know, they get, they get sit down in a, in a seat at their, their new exciting job and they’re, they’re there to make a big impact and, and be creative and they’re excited to do things and then they’re told, oh yeah, but you know, you can’t do that yourself.

Right. Go to our central team, send that a request to our central team. We’ll do that. You know, it’ll take a few weeks and you’ll hear back later about it. Uh, you know, those things that you wanna do, that campaign you wanna execute, or Hey, here’s some budget. Just go work with an agency. You know, let us know when it’s done, when they’ve kind of finished building it for you.

And, and then, you know, again, I lived this for a little while, uh, you know, in my career. Why am I here? You know, I, I, I thought I was here to kind of make an impact and do things and take control and, and be creative and, and, you know, make a, a big revenue impact, uh, at the company. So, so, um, that’s kind of where, where it stems from.

Does that make sense, Mike? 

Yeah, yeah, that absolutely makes sense. Resonates greatly too. 

Right on. And just, just to cover on, like really specifically before we move on, like what the product does. So the product.  is we basically, we create, we make creating emails and landing pages really easy. Uh, I am, again, going back to my story, I don’t know any html, the joke around the office here is that I can’t even spell HTML properly still to this day,  and, uh, and that, and that’s okay, right?

Because, uh, I’m a marketer, right? I’m, I’m at my company. I’m creative and I have great ideas and, and, you know, I can really contribute. Uh, and so, uh, you know, one of the, the job requirements was not has to know, uh, how to code html. And, and so again, throughout my career that’s been a, a, you know, a big theme, um, where I don’t know those things and, and, but I do know how to be a great.

And, mm-hmm. . Uh, again, that’s kind of the, what we wanted to do is create a platform where marketers can create emails and landing pages, which are still, of course, the core of every marketing campaign. And they can do that with no code. Just really easy. Anyone can do it. If I can do it, you’re gonna see it today in the demo.

I can do it. Uh, and if I can do it, anybody, uh, can do it. . 

I love that. I love that. Yeah, I agree. Most of the jobs that I took on in any, any marketing function, even marketing ops often did not require html, uh, by a skill. I happened to go teach myself that stuff because products like Knak didn’t exist before

So back in when I got started, I was like, I’m gonna have to learn how to build a website, like if I want to do marketing, right? Uh, and, and that.  a burden that I took on that I actually forever regret. Cuz , uh, once someone knows that about you, they’re like, Hey, you do websites, right? , 

Uhhuh, . Yep. Yep. You get tap you, you become one of those, those special resources that everybody wants to tap, right?

Yeah. Yeah. 

So, uh, little tip for everybody watching this, if you do know it, don’t tell anybody.  Yeah. Say no. There’s better things to do with my time and I have other tools that help. Uh, cool. Well, let’s keep going. , let’s talk about why marketing operations professionals use your product. And, uh, this is a part where we really like to see right around like three examples of where it really shines and, uh, would love for you to show that off.

Awesome. Yeah. Uh, well, so this is the part where I’m gonna do the, uh, the demo part of the NO BS demo, uh, talk. Not to say that there’s BS in here or anything. There’s definitely not. But, uh, but yeah, so, so let’s, let’s dive in. So, uh, number one, you know, I wanna make sure everyone knows that Knak is, is really built for enterprises, right?

And not only are we this no code solution for marketers, but we are also, we have all of the enterprise functionality that enterprises need to keep their market.  on brand, on messages, right? Working efficiently, um, you know, all that kind of stuff. Sharing best practices, those kinds of things. Uh, and like having the permission so that they need and ha you know, able to go through approval processes and things that, that enterprises need.

So, so I want to kind of. Go through three. Mike, you said kind of three specific examples or, or three, three points here would be good. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna actually take you through three examples of our actual customers, uh, and what we’re doing for them, and we’ll kind of walk through some of the Knak functionality kind of in relation to that.

Okay? Awesome. Okay, so I’m gonna go ahead and, uh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna venture to share my screen here. , this is the fun part of that call where you all , listen 

and watch awkward, and we get to rely on the 

tech . Yeah, that’s it. Okay. So Mike, we’re, you can see my screen now? I’m hoping. Sure can. Okay, great. 

So look at that on brand 

picture, by the way.

Right? I know you go, that’s, that’s, that’s all those user permissions and brand controls here that we have in that here. That’s helping me. That’s fantastic. I love it. So, So, yeah. So the first example that I’m gonna go through here is, uh, an example of, of a company called Meta. Uh, you’ve all heard of Meta, formally Facebook, um, and we work with a gentleman over at Meta.

Uh, his name is Don. Don’s a great guy, uh, and some of you may know him. Uh, and one of the, the main things that Meta was struggling with was their newsletter. Uh, creation process. The in order for meta to create a newsletter to go out to their constituents. It was just this horrible, convoluted process that involved, uh, Marketo templates.

It involved, uh, agencies in region who were kind of populating templates. Uh, and then it involved a lot of kind of back and forth between those agencies, uh, and internal. Uh, in order to get kind of those, those newsletters actually out the door, it took weeks and weeks to, to do at, at meta. Uh, and that’s really what, you know, why Meta is working with Next.

So what we’re gonna do here, I’m gonna use, uh, I, I, I’m using a, a Nike example here cuz this is one of my, one of my favorite brands here. We’re gonna go into, on the left hand side here, uh, we’re gonna go into some of the email campaigns that I’ve created here for Nike. I’ve created a couple already, but we’ll go ahead and create a.

one for, uh, for Nike, and we’ll just use this as the example for kind of what Meta is doing with their newsletters. Okay. So just to give you an idea of, of what Meta’s enabling here. Um, and so basically what, what I, what I’m, I’ve jumped into now here is, is our drag drop editor. Okay? And so when I’m creating an email here in.

I can create a number of different ways. I can create from like kind of a full on template or I can kind of drag and drop things in here. What am I’m gonna do today? I’m gonna start with dragging and dropping some specific modules in here into my email just to make it easy to build. And so this is the kind of thing that now regional marketers at Meta are doing.

to create their newsletter. They’re able to drag and drop their modules that they need right into the email, right? These are specific modules maybe created just for that newsletter, for example, that are fully editable here in the Knak. So I’m gonna go ahead and edit. Edit this text here. Just as an example.

I might, even if my administrator allows me to do this, I might even bring in a different section. , bring in another text block here. Maybe I’ll bring in a button sort of thing, right? Or maybe a whole other, uh, whole other module here that I need. Uh, okay. So all I’m showing you here is just the ease of use.

It’s really easy to kind of get in here, you know, do things like, you know, edit button text, which I’m doing live here now. It’s kind of resizing automatically. Or I can size that on my own if I’d. You know, you, you can style this and of course in your brand, uh, specific brand colors and styles and things like that.

Uh, and not only that is one of the things that Meta is doing is they’re locking down some of these sections in their newsletter to make sure that their regional marketers aren’t going too far off brand or, or off message, those kinds of things. Or kind of putting too much text in. So all of these attributes here, all.

Different things, uh, in the text blocks, in the buttons, uh, in, in the images and things like that in my email can be kind of completely locked down or kind of, you know, put into a, a particular, uh, style that, that is required at, you know, uh, in this case at Meta, for example. Okay. Does all that make sense, Mike?

Yeah. That’s awesome. So, so. , just point of clarification. So here you can lock down certain aspects of it. Do you actually mean like character count two? , like you could potentially limit character count or just like in general, like this is only for an H one, therefore don’t put copy in here. Like, put paragraph text 

in here,

Yeah. So I guess the answer to that, I guess Mike, is yes, you, you can do kind of both of those things where you can lock down really specific sections, like this text block for example. I could say, Hey, I, I only want 200 characters in, in this text block. Uh, , uh, you know, uh, you know, I had a, had a, you know, childhood, uh, you know, traumatization with italicized texts, so I don’t wanna put any italicized text in there.

Uh, for example, like, you can do that, right? So you can set those very granular permissions on, uh, those kinds of things. Or, or you can, like you say, just kind of have those like maybe more standardized kind of, uh, more macro.  colors and, and styles and things like that. Uh, and, and you know, different kind of fonts and stuff like that, uh, that align to your brand.

So you can do both of those kind of very granular or a little bit, um, uh, kind of more broad, uh, kind of controls. Does that make sense? Wow. 

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. That’s, that’s pretty killer. Uh, I, I can tell you as you know, even at marketingops.com, right? Like we, we definitely have brand guidelines around writing and tonality.

Rules around whether or not you’re allowed to use italics . So this is cool. Very, very cool. 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We, we talk to a lot of customers who have a real problem with, uh, pink Comic Sands font, , and, uh, you know, marketers, I don’t know why, I don’t know what it is about marketers. Like, we love comic sands font, I guess, but, uh, not always on brand, right?

Not always . Uh, so one of the things that, that really helped meta. Uh, newsletter creation process was the collaboration. Okay. And, and Mike, one of the things that when we talk to enterprises about, uh, their, their campaign creation process end to end, a huge part of the conversation ends up around the collaboration and approval, like reviews back and forth, that kind of thing.

That can be a, a really big source of swirl in their process. And take a lot of time, uh, and, and likely costs, right? Uh, kind of, and add that to the process. So one of the things that Meta really wanted us to do or to help them with is kind of that, that back and forth between the creator of the newsletter and the reviewer of the newsletter, or even like collaborating around content.

Just, Hey, you know, uh, what do you think of this content for our, our regional newsletter? Is this good? You know, before we kind of, uh, Get, get approval from global, that kind of thing. So our collaboration capability really allows meta to, to make that super easy. So you can see here I’m in the Collaborate tab.

I can go ahead and do things like, Hey, I’m gonna just drop a, uh, a, a comment, drop a pin here on the, the time of this, of this Nike shoe here and say, Hey, you know, um, hey, uh, hey Don, you know, what do you think? This shoe, wish I could, wish I could type. But, uh, you guys get the, the idea here, right? That, that I can kind of drop pins and, and get feedback and Don would kind of get a, a notification, uh, you know, in here, in Knak, uh, that says, Hey, Brendan tagged you in a, uh, you know, a comment.

He’d like to get your feedback on that. And, uh, and he can kind of jump right in here. He can reply in line to. Uh, that kind of thing. You can even resolve the comment once it’s, once it’s, uh, you know, in good shape or maybe, uh, has been addressed, those kinds of things. So that collaboration experience, the, the, all the back and forth that they used to do, uh, believe it or not, uh, and actually you probably believe it, Mike, um, you know, uh, lot of, lot of Marketo test emails were being sent around, uh, to, to a lot of people.

Uh, I remember back, back in my Marketo days, uh, my in. Is full of test emails from lots of people all over the world. Um, so that really kind of cuts down on all of that kind of stuff and makes that that collaboration process a lot easier. 

I, I love this , lots of test emails usually fly back and forth and, uh, and this like, you know, I think you could limit it down to maybe one or two, right?

Cuz you’ve got all the collaboration happening here. I like that it can get you pulled out of, you know,  a shared doc environment too, which, you know, I think a lot of things should start there from an outline perspective, but like, once you get the copy in the actual email, sometimes things change, right?

It becomes obvious. You need to, you know, reduce the amount of text in one area, or, you know, the, the headline breaks kind of funny because you’re limited by space, uh, and characters and those kinds of things. So it makes a big difference. Like once you go from production of. Uh, and copy to an email or landing page for that matter.

It often can change, which is why I’ve, in my experience, I’ve seen so many designers say, you know, give me everything first, and then I’ll design around that. Because then I have, I know my constraints, right? I know how much copy and content I need to fit on there. And, and templates are often hard, but when you’ve got a collaborative environment that already has that capability for you to do those adjustments, it makes a lot of sense.

Right. And elements of this, I use Figma a lot with our. , uh, I see a lot of like Figma esque type of things in here, which is really cool. Yeah, 

yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, yeah, maybe we can all thank Figma and Google Docs and stuff for, for, uh, you know, Uh, probably for us building this whole thing that was every single customer we had, you know, before we had this capability was like, why can’t I drop pins and, you know, collaborate as easy it is as it is in Figma or Google Docs.

And so those kinds of things are, are, you know, always a good thing, right? Uh, help us. Yeah. It makes 

a big difference, right? Like, and, and when you bring it into the tool, you’re, you’re actually doing the build, like major change, right? So big win, like, I don’t know how new this is for y. . Pretty cool. I love it.

it’s been a few years, but yeah, definitely remember when it first came out. Pretty, uh, people were pretty blown away, uh, by that. That’s awesome. Yeah, no, it’s great stuff. So, so the next, the next kind of part of, of this, the, the, the second example here that I want to give, uh, is, is around a, a different customer.

We work with a company, uh, called Trimble and we work with Chris and Tricia, uh, over at Trimble. And their challenge. Their marketing ops team was really overloaded with work, okay? And one of the main reasons for that was that they kept getting pulled into the creation process at Trimble. And believe it or not, actually Trimble has last, at last count, nine Marketo instances, okay?

So that’s a lot, right? Mm-hmm. , uh, and not only that, they actually acquire companies on a, on a pretty regular clip. So, so they not, not only do they have nine Marketo instances today, they are, you know, every year they’re acquiring like a handful of, of companies that have like, you know, Parto or Eloqua or HubSpot or, you know, other platforms, right?

So they’re tasked with not just maintaining.  brand and, you know, you know, ensuring their, their creation process is kind of somewhat similar across all nine Marketo instances that they have, but they also have to do the same thing as they kind of acquire and kind of subsume companies. Uh, that that was really challenging for them.

And, and everyone, uh, who’s listening to this probably understands even how, how difficult it would be to manage template.  across nine different Marketo instances. It, it’s, it’s almost impossible. Right? You know, that kind of. And, and those different instances have different kind of, you know, product lines inside of them and different regional teams and things like that.

So their templates aren’t actually the same, right? They’re, they’re different, but they have to be maintained across all these instances. Anyway, they were getting kind of completely, totally overrun by just their whole job just became kind of maintaining these templates and trying to kind of keep on top of those things and troubleshooting and uh, and all that kind of thing.

And, and that’s why they came to. To help them kind of manage all of that. And, and I’m gonna kind of continue on this example here. So we’ve created this email, maybe we’ve collaborated around it. Now I’m gonna go ahead and hit the, the, the published button. And we’re gonna actually sync this email, or I’m gonna show you what it would be like to sync this email right into my Marketo Eloqua Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pardot.

Right, and then it goes right into that location. So in this case, you know, we have this Knak instance, uh, my, my demo instance here connected to, uh, a Marketo instance and an Eloqua instance at the same time. So this is one of the things that our, a lot of our enterprise customers need is, hey, we don’t just have one instance of, of one marketing automation platform.

We have a bunch, right? Uh, and so we can connect to, to multiple, you know, of the same platforms or multiple different. And again, you can just create in one place and sync the emails or landing pages into any marketing automation platform that you work with. Uh, and so in this case, you know, Trimble has all nine Marketo instances, you know, hooked up to their one Knak instance.

And when users are creating. Content, they’re creating content and then they’re, they’re, you know, either prescribed to sync it into a particular Marketo instance, or even like a folder in a Marketo instance. Uh, and so like the, the user permissions and, and, uh, those kinds of things can help guide the marketers, you know, for, for where to push their email or landing page, uh, after they created and, and maybe even after it’s approved sort of thing.

Uh, does that make sense? So I’m, I’m actually navigating. Through my, uh, in this case our, our marketing activities folder tree here in, uh, in our Marketo instance. And I can just kind of navigate through that, uh, you know, select a program and, and sync it right into that program. You know, looks like I’m doing a, a peaches, uh, program here.

It looks, looks exciting. So I can go ahead and sync it right into there and it’ll sync right into that program as an asset in the program. Uh, It never has to be opened in the marketing automation platform at all. It’s ready to go, ready to send, uh, and actually synced over with all of the proprietary code and syntaxes and all the things that those, uh, marketing automation platforms need, uh, again, wherever you’re syncing it to.

Does that make sense, Mike? 

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.  managing nine instances, daunting, uh, let alone the ability to try to like manage all the templates and all the things, uh, beyond that is, is, is sort of incredible. So I know that. So we talked about, um, meta’s sort of use case around newsletters. Now we’ve talked about enterprise integration into multiple platforms.

um, and sinking from like one environment to many, which is super, super cool. Talk about, you know, quote unquote doing more with less, uh,  and, um, and I now it’s, I, if I recall, I think you actually have three examples, so I’d love to, to hear what that third one is. 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so the next example I want to go through, we’re gonna shift gears a little bit here and, and see some of the admin side of, of the Knak platform.

I know that that excites a lot of, a lot of you mo Pro. Uh, sort of thing. So, uh, and, and the example I’m gonna use here is with a customer that we work with. Uh, they’re called Stripe. We work with r Rochelle and Raimondo, uh, over at Stripe. And, and they actually had a task on their, their kind of their, their central marketing ops team to provide self-service to their 200 plus marketers around the.

okay. Those marketers really wanted to get hands on with creating their own campaigns, uh, instead of it being kind of an arms length kind of scenario. And, uh, so, so we were able to help them with that. They, they, they, they were able to kind of fully de uh, kind of fully decentralize and, and and, uh, kind of arm their marketers, their 200 plus market.

With Knak so that they could build all of, of their campaigns themselves. And so I’ll show you a little bit about kind of how, how they did that, uh, and, and some of the things that, that they, uh, that, that they used, uh, especially from the beginning. So I’m gonna just jump into our, what we call our inspiration center.

And what this is, is this is a library of hundreds of emails and landing pages that are, are all. Created already here in the Knak platform. We curate all of these and we, we actually build them in the Knak platform as kind of examples to, uh, you know, to inspire, uh, marketers. And what you can do is you can kind of take these, one of these emails or landing pages, right?

You can take a look at what it looks like on, on desktop and mobile. I can even just go ahead and, and use this particular email. I’ll drop it into my campaign. , and it’ll open right up in the editor, and I can go ahead and just edit it. It’s fully editable. Um, and again, you know, no coding required, no HTML required.

This is really just to help inspire designs for, uh, you know, for marketers. And you can even, uh, easily kind of rebrand these emails into your brand guidelines, uh, your, your, uh, brand colors and things like that, and never any HTML required. I can’t spell html. So, um, and so what we’re gonna do here, I, I’m gonna just go back just, and, and we’re gonna look at kind of the, the brand section here of Knak.

Just while we’re on that subject and in this kind of demo instance here, I have my favorite Nike brands all, all kind of defined here in the Knak platform. A lot of our customers will kind of break out brands by things. You know, region, regional team, product line, those kinds of things. And so you can see kind of like product lines and regions kind of, uh, you know, represented here.

And some of the things that you can, uh, define at the brand level is things like fonts, colors, you know, uh, those kinds of things that are all preset for your marketers. So they don’t have to think about those kinds of things when they’re, when they’re creating. Uh, and then one of the key things that, that they use at Stripe to, to really arm their marketers to be self-service is modules.

And modules are basically just, you know, Lego blocks, right? Pre-built content that marketers can take and build from. You saw me build one of those when I, I was talking about face, the Facebook newsletter. Um, and so these are, uh, again, fully creatable and editable, uh, right here in Knak with no. And you can publish those out to your users so that they can kind of take and use them, and you can actually, uh, lock those down as well and make sure that your marketers aren’t, you know, putting too much text in or putting huge images in that are, are, you know, look horrible or tho those kinds of things.

Uh, so you can get pretty granular with that. Uh, and then I want to show everyone kind of our, our exciting, uh, integrations. And so you can kind of take a look at some of the, kind of the common integrations that we. Uh, with our customers here at Knak, uh, you can hook up to just about any marketing automation platform or email sending platform.

You can even bring in things, uh, like live content and, and collaboration and those kinds of things. SSO is also popular, uh, with our enterprise customers. All of that kind of stuff. Uh, really important for, for Stripe in order to really, truly kind of offer that self-service, uh, scenario for their marketers across the.

this is really, really cool, and I love that you were able to jump in and look at the, uh, integrations that are kind of commonly used within your product just by immediately showing off. That’s one of the core questions, uh, that we ask. And as we’ve seen in, you know, state of the Mopro research or on martech.org, uh, all the publications from sort of the, the landscape, right?

Uh, integrations are always like the number one request, right? They’re still one of the key reasons why someone would select a product, um, mm-hmm. . And so very, very cool that you’re able to show that off. So let’s, let’s jam through the last of these questions. I think, uh, they should be pretty straightforward for, for y’all, and I feel like they’re, um, semi unanswered through that really awesome, uh, set of examples.

But, but let’s make sure, uh, we tackle them head on. So, , I’m gonna go ahead and assume that the average size of your customers is, uh, up to enterprise , given the examples you just provided. Um, but would you say you’re catering more to that audience these days, or, uh, you know, can you, can someone who’s like a sort of an SMB take value out of the, the product as well?

Yeah, so, absolutely. So number one, you know, we work with customers typically that are, you know, 500 million in revenue sort of range. Uh, that’s kind of our, our real focus. Um, and, uh, but you know, a lot of our largest customers all really started with just kind of one business unit, right? One team, one group, uh, at, at those big companies.

Uh, and then, you know, typically what happens is they kind of see success and, and, uh, the ROI just kind of, you know, uh, shows for itself. And I don over at Meta always talks. Knak is like wildfire, right? Marketers get, and they see others using it and they go, man, I I I gotta have 

that right. Get my hands on that thing, right?

Oh yeah, that’s awesome. 

Just they want it. So, so, uh, so yeah, that’s kind of, uh, our typical customer is kind of in the, certainly in the enterprise, uh, enterprise space. And that’s kind of what, what we’re building the platform for. . 

Fantastic. I love it. I love it when an organization understands its value and where it fits in.

You know, that that is no BS right there, right? Like, you know, you know, where you’re immediately gonna see value for our teams. Um, and, you know, I’m sure others will find ways to make it useful, but man, you know, your audience, so that’s, that’s awesome. Um, let’s talk about the average time to complete an implementation

Uh, how often does it, you know, or sorry, rather how long does it take to sort of get implemented with. . Yeah. 

So I mean that a lot of times depends on the size of the organization and the size of the implementation, of course. But, uh, one of the, the things that we’re really laser focused on is making sure that our customers can see value very quickly out of the platform.

And one of the things that we’re, we, we typically kind of really push for and, and, uh, you know, work towards is, you know, most of our customers, the vast majority.  are sending their, their first email or pushing their first landing page within, uh, the first 30 days of, of having Knak. Okay. Uh, and that’s a really key metric because then they can see, you know, the full end-to-end cycle.

They can get the value and the ROI kind of right away out of even that one asset. Uh, and then they can just start to replicate it. And so usually like a. , you know, complete transformation of, of the, the end-to-end kind of campaign creation process, which is what we work with our customers on. Uh, it takes, you know, 60 days, uh, kind of thing on average.

Okay. Very cool. Uh, and tell us a little bit about your pricing model. Uh, how you structure the pricing itself, you know, seats or platform or mix usage based, and then are there any setup costs? 

Yeah, so, uh, pricing is actually based on, on number of. So, um, you know, however many users are actually creating, or, you know, editing content, uh, you know, emails or landing pages.

Uh, that’s kind of how we, how we license. Uh, and we actually have three different packages for, uh, for our customers that we offer. Again, depending on what they need. Right. Um, most large enterprises, or extremely large enterprises certainly need things like sso, uh, you know, some things around dynamic content and translations, you know, very kind of key things for those really big enterprises.

And we have kind of that enterprise, uh, plus package for, for those size companies. And then we kind of. Pair that down for, for companies maybe who are, uh, not, not necessarily smaller companies, but, but you know, smaller teams within those companies, right? Hey, we don’t need sto uh, you know, we’re not translating so much content right now.

Uh, those kinds of things. So kind of, we have different packages that kind of, uh, adhere to those, uh, those groups. Uh, there is a, a a a one time cost for a setup fee, uh, but it’s usually pretty minimal, uh, because really what we’re all about is training. Customers to be completely self-sufficient. We, we don’t want our customers coming back to us, asking us to build things for them or, you know, tweak things for them in the platform or something.

Our goal is to, you know, train the customer, uh, and have them completely self-service in the platform and, and so that, uh, they don’t have to rely on, on us for, for anything, and they can mm-hmm.  do it. . 

Yep. Yep. No, I think, uh, , you know, frankly, I, I feel like that should be the goal of every SaaS organization.

thank you. But I feel like somehow it gets lost, uh, on so many different products out there, , like, uh, so make it easy, make it easy to use your tool, uh, so that I can make it easy for my other teams to use the tool. Speaking of teams, um, which internal teams would you say. Uh, are needed, um, in order to get fully implemented.

So, you know, this, this product definitely touches a few, you talked a lot about marketing ops folks, um, but who else comes in usually? 

Yeah, so, you know, we talk to a lot of teams. Um, we always, almost always, uh, actually I’ll say we always, we do always talk to the marketing ops. , uh, they’re a, a key stakeholder for us.

Uh, and you know what? The marketing ops team, you know, I, I was one of ’em. I can say this, you know what I always wanted to know was, is it gonna integrate? Is it gonna be more work for me or less? Right? That’s really key. Uh, and is it going to do all the things that. It says it’s going to do right. Uh, and so, so marketing ops, that’s where we work with marketing ops on mostly.

It’s really just about making sure that they’re, they’re feeling great that this is gonna take. Uh, you know, work off of their plate. It’s not gonna be difficult to manage at all. Uh, you know, they can set in, forget it, and, uh, you know, that kind of thing. We also, a lot of times we work with the demand gen team or the campaigns team, who’s actually kind of maybe creating some centralized content.

And then a lot of times we’re working with regional or field marketers who are the ones building, right? They’re the ones that, you know, when we talk to, uh, our customers like Google. They want to delight their marketers every day. They want to make sure that their marketers are super excited to come to work and build things, build campaigns themselves, uh, and that’s what they’re using Knak for.

So that’s, uh, you know, uh, the regional marketing teams are, are, are kind of our end users, but they typically are the ones that, that are, are, you know, the, the company is trying to. Implement for, right? Mm-hmm.  and the, and the rest of the folks are obviously an important part of that. Uh, but usually just around making sure that it, it does work and it’s, and again, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s gonna save them time and money and not kind of cause more problems, which I know can be a, an issue in, in, in this crazy MarTech world, uh, that we have

Yeah. No kidding. Time of this recording. It’s like, what, 10, 15,000 MarTech solutions. Who knows? . It’s so crazy. Uh, cool. Well just a couple more questions here, um, sort of around this idea of success, um, and support itself. So, sort of fire the first one at you. It’s, you know, do I need you, you think about like, um, a Salesforce for example, right?

Like, Typically to get implemented in Salesforce, you either, you either need really strong talent in-house, uh, or you go to sort of an external consultant of some kind to get going. Um, would you say that Knak falls into a category where like you’re gonna get implemented by any type of consultant or external agency, or typically is it just sort of in-house?

Um, for, for those, for those. 

Yeah, so there’s kind of two aspects to that, Mike. I think. I think one is the implementation of the tool, and the other is, kind of goes back to, to the meta example where, um, you know, a lot of big enterprises rely on agencies two, do the work that Knak has kind of fully automated, right?

Mm-hmm.  and made really easy and. You know, I want to touch on that part really, really quickly because, you know, one of the things that we’re seeing is that our customers are able to remove agencies completely from the equation for, uh, campaign cr, campaign creation. Uh, and or they’re actually giving the access to Knak to their agencies so that they can actually.

in, you know, 21 minutes is our average creation time for an email or landing page. Right? Oh, nice. Nice. You know, compare that to two week SLA or something for, for a typical agency to turn around, uh, like a hand coded, uh, email or landing page like this is, this is huge, right? And, and this isn’t about taking money away or taking budget away from the agencies.

What it’s about, what we’re seeing actually, Mike instead. Our, our cu our customers are able to turn their agencies into more strategic partners for them, right? Yeah. We’re able to get them out of like, Hey, you know what? Stop hand coding emails for us. Come on, come on over here and help us design the campaign.

Right? Help us. Kind of be more strategic. Help us do the analytics after the campaign, help us decide what our next campaign should be. All of those kind of highly strategic things that, you know, most enterprises don’t mind paying agencies for, because that’s what they’re good at. And, and you know, what our customers are doing is letting the tool do the, the, the grunt work, the, the HDML coding and all the syntaxes and the, you know, making sure it works perfectly.

The marketing automation platform, and you don’t, you know, the testing and all of that stuff, that’s all done in Knak. It’s all behind the scenes. You don’t have to worry about that. So really taking those, those, you know, external agencies and up-leveling ’em, that that is what Knak can bring, uh, from 

that perspective.

I love that. I love that. That’s, that’s a super solid call out and yeah, like why, why spend budget on something that’s been sort of relinquished to a product? That’s exactly why SAS was created, right. To streamline process and make things more efficient now, now use that budget for something else. Right?

Be more strategic, keep it in the agency, why not? Nice. Um, cool. So last, um, last two questions here. It’s what support options are available and do they cost anymore? 

Yeah, so, uh, all of Knak subscriptions, uh, are, include support. Uh, we have a great support. Uh, they also, uh, you also get a, a customer success manager assigned to your account as well.

Uh, we also, one of the cool things, and, uh, this isn’t around support necessarily, but something we offer all  of our customers is a a Knak certification program. And, uh, that’s, that’s really exciting cuz uh, we, we’ve actually, we’re just about to send out, uh, a almost a hundred, uh, NAX certified, uh, t-shirts, uh, right here at Oh, that’s awesome.

Here.  So we’ve. Uh, we do rounds of this all the time, and, uh, we have hundreds and hundreds of marketers coming in, getting certified on Knak. Uh, and, and so that’s something that we love, love offering all of our customers. Uh, and you know, like I said, we have a great support team and all these resources, uh, you know, for all of our customers.

But one of the real things, this goes back to what I said earlier, like we, you know, our hope is that our customers don’t need support, right? Mm-hmm. , I mean, maybe that’s every. SaaS company can say that maybe, but, um, but you know, again, we, we put a big, a big focus on training our customers to be self-sufficient again, so they don’t have to come back to us for anything.

Um, they can kind of just go off and, and build things and, and men things and, and do everything, uh, that they need to do in the platform themselves. . I 

love that. Well, uh, Brendan, this has been fantastic. Um, personally, uh, I think that you’ve answered the, the last question on sort of average time to, to see success.

We talked about 30 days. You can get an email at the door, you know, 60 days. You’ve probably, uh, could be optimally set up for an entire sort of overhaul of your campaign ops sort of process maybe. But if you want to add anything to it, happy to hear it. Um, but yeah, 

anything else? . Yeah. No, I, I think the, the only thing I would say there is, um, you know, our customers, you know, the, the second they create their first asset in Knak, they have saved time and they have saved money.

Mm-hmm.  and, and I think especially in this economic climate right now, right. I’m sure Mike, you’re hearing it a lot. Everybody’s trying to do more with less save money, be more efficient, you know, uh, all of that kind of, , like we’re working with huge companies, one of the, the largest pharma companies in the world, uh, was spending almost $50,000 on an email to create Whoa.

To, to get it out the door. But, and, and this is like, I mean, it sounds unbelievable, right? And I know this is a no BS demo, so I’m not, I’m definitely not BSing here. Uh, these are real numbers and you know, again, in this economy, Give me a break. That’s, that’s nuts, right? So, um, yeah. 

You know, frankly, in any economy, right?

Like  Yeah, you’re absolutely No, stop it. . 

Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Like why? Right? And, and in weeks, months and, and, you know, tens of thousands of dollars like this, it’s 2023. Like, give me a break. Yeah. We can do this better. Uh, and so I talked a little bit about kind of turnaround time. Our average, uh, customer or average user is building, uh, an email in under 22 minutes.

Uh, or emails or landing pages, uh, sort of thing. Uh, our, our average customers kind of end to end turnaround time, including approvals is under two days. Mm-hmm. , right? And again, we’re talking to customers who have, these are weeks or months sort of thing. Uh, and I just to, to address the MOps audience here again, you know, my people, you know, imagine what you could do with the time that you get back from.

Spending two months creating, uh, you know, the, the one email template to rule them all, uh, you know, for your marketing automation platform or troubleshooting HTML code for marketers or training marketers, how to navigate your complicated marketing automation platform and populate a template and you know your time is worth more than.

Uh mm-hmm. . And so anyway, there, there is a better way and you can do it while making marketers happy. , that that right there, right? Like yeah. 

There’s no measurement for 

happiness, . Yeah. It’s all, that’s what it’s all about. Right? Like, but that’s, that’s the goal. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, that’s, that’s all I wanted to, to kind of say at, uh, at the end here, Mike.

Awesome. Well, Brendan, thank you so much for doing a no bullshit demo with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you for the continued support within the community as well. Uh, it is, uh, felt and um, it resonates, right? You all know what it means to be in marketing and revenue operations. Um, and so we, we really appreciate you taking the time to do a no bullshit demo.

Oh, well thank you. I’m, I’m just thrilled to have the opportunity, Mike. Uh, it was, it was a lot of fun and thanks. I, I, I would like urge. Just ping me on LinkedIn, reach out. I’d love to, just like, if you think this is, this is BS or something, I want to talk, uh, if, if you want to talk more about what our other customers are doing with Knak, I want to talk or if you just want to jam out on some mop stuff, I also want to talk.

So just reach 

out. I love it. Thank you.