Daniel, like, a lot happened the last few weeks.
Yeah.
So...
Yes.
In terms of events, share price reactions, where the market is going, et cetera. So maybe to start off, like maybe to ground ourselves all, like a little bit about your last quarter, what were the highlights from your perspective, and then we can take it from there?
Is that, thanks for the question. I think in a lot of ways, last quarter was indicative in a lot of ways of the progress that we've seen across the year. For those that know me, I'm as open about the areas where I think we need to improve as the areas where I think we're doing well.
Mm.
I think that when I look at the results on Q3, there were some parts in there that I think showed really good execution, and it also, I think, highlighted areas where I think we can and need to do better. So, if I look at where we were kind of going into this year, like a lot of companies in small- cap software that were kind of growing at a relatively fast rate but were burning cash, that's not sustainable, obviously, in the normal interest rate environment that we're in. And so, you know, going into the year, we said that if, you know, we need to just provide some point of profitability year-over-year to have an outsized benefit in improvement in profitability and cash flow.
Yeah.
We would do that.
Mm.
And so kind of going into the year, we're really prioritizing getting to EBITDA breakeven by the end of Q4, which is a starting point. I say internally all the time, nobody's going to throw confetti on us because we're not losing money. That's just getting to a starting line that a lot of companies are needing to do. We wanted to do that in a way that was really building better cash flow, focusing on working capital. I think both those areas, the results in the year have been good.
Yeah.
I mean, we've had 19 points of margin improvement across the last five quarters, and it's been a very steady, sequential way. We've averaged, I think, 375 basis points of operating leverage every quarter for the last five quarters, and we've gone from, you know, you know, - 19 to breakeven essentially in five quarters. Really proud of that. I think we've seen good results in cash flow. Deferred revenue was up 85% last quarter over year-over-year.
Yeah.
But that also reflects how much runway we have ahead of us still in terms of what we're doing with pulling in cash. Those I think are good. An area where I think we, you know, can and need to be doing better is on revenue growth rate, I think. And so if I think about, you know, over the course of the last few weeks, there's been a lot of things that we've been doing from you know folks that we brought in on the leadership side of things, playbook that we're looking to run as we continue to move up market and mid-market and enterprise, a nd we can speak to that if we want to.
Yeah.
We can get into more details on that as well. But I think, you know, the reaction we got to the quarter, I think in general, was, okay, like I'm seeing real market improvement and what we're seeing in terms of profit and cash flow, it's good. You're doing what you said you were going to do, but we'd like you to get there while obviously showing a little bit better revenue growth rates.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes, the macro climate has been tough this year, but I would argue that there's a lot in our control, even despite some of the headwinds, that we can and will, you know, improve and execute that climate.
So, I'm asking you, like, one short-term question, then I want to double- click on some of the points you mentioned there.
Mm-hmm.
But just to get it out of the way, because I know I'm going to get the questions, like, we just had Thanksgiving, Black Friday, et cetera.
Yeah.
Like, what are the stats that you saw this year, and how does that compare with expectations?
Yeah, I mean, we saw between Thanksgiving and Black Friday, I think same store sales basis, 8% year-over-year growth.
Yeah.
Full Cyber Five, total platform was more like a 10% growth rate. This was better than the market as a whole. We're taking share, and I think that reflects that, but it wasn't as much of a premium to the market, I think, where we can be.
Yeah.
So in that respect, I think it was good, but not as good as clearly as where I think it could be. So in terms of versus expectations, going into the year, just in general, I think consumer spending has been fairly resilient.
Mm.
E-commerce growth rates are a little lower than where they were pre-pandemic, which I don't think I expected necessarily, at least to that degree, but it's been in line with how we built our plans.
Yeah.
Thus far in Q4, it's been pretty, for the most part, in line with where we thought things were going to be and where we've set our guidance and numbers.
Yeah. Okay, perfect.
Yeah.
Okay, makes sense. And then, let's go a little bit deeper into kind of where you wanted to go as a company-
Mm.
And then one of the big push areas, and that was pre-IPO already, was you want to be more enterprise.
Right.
Can you maybe talk a little bit about the motivation? Like, what's driving that?
Yeah. So, when Brent joined the company in, as CEO in 2015, I believe, when he stepped in and looked, he said, "Okay, who is following the playbook that open source followed before, you know, in the on-prem era?"
Yeah.
To say, we're going to build a flexible, open platform that moves up market, and then mid-market, and enterprise, and follows that playbook, but does it in the SaaS world. There wasn't really anybody doing that. So, you know, he made a decision at that point to start directing all of our R&D investments toward opening up the platform, and then over time, moving us up market, and to mid-market, and now beyond into enterprise. But today I'd still say we—I'd classify it as lower end of enterprise.
Yeah.
Where we are today, right?
Yeah. So, how do you define that space? Like, do you use on a GMV?
Yeah, for the most part.
Yeah.
For us, an enterprise opportunity starts at probably $50 million a year in GMV and goes up into the several 100 millions of dollars in GMV.
Okay. Yeah.
We do have some clients, we do get some at-bat deals that are doing over $1 billion. That's not our, you know, the high-frequency deals that we're getting involved in. It's in the hundreds of millions today.
Yeah.
That will have changed as we continue to move up market. We, you know, have launched several features over the past couple of years that have kind of enabled us to move up. But as we've kind of pursued that strategy and as the product has matured and its product market fit as we go up, it's enabled us then also to follow the product changes and start redirecting our dollars that are spending, even in now hiring, you know, our company President, Steven Chung.
You know, bringing in kind of that more enterprise B2B SaaS playbook that is focused on land and expansion of existing customers. We talked about on our last call over the last few years, anywhere from 60%-70% of our subscription revenue growth has come from landing new logos or new stores, and that's a very expensive way to-
Yeah
-to fuel revenue growth, especially in a tough macro climate.
Yeah.
So I'd like to see it get towards more balanced, maybe even potentially majority coming from our revenue growth coming from existing customers. I think we can get there, and that's kind of the motivation between some of the, the changes that we've made recently in hires and restructuring.
That's a good point on, like, the mix between new and existing. But look, before we go there, like you mentioned some of the things in terms of, like, people, et cetera, to go more enterprise. What are other ways? Is there, like, you know, more targeted marketing, like, the way you spend your advertising dollar? Like, you know, how do you kind of move up market?
Yeah.
How do you...
There's a few different ways that we're going about that. One, I give as an example, it's a different motion. Like, we tend to be more partner-centric than direct marketing- centric, as an example.
Mm.
So, I tell the story a lot. My daughter sometimes will ask me: "Dad, I'm tired of hearing your competitors' ads on shuffle on Spotify."
Yeah, yeah.
Right? Like, "When am I going to hear a BigCommerce ad on Spotify?" And my answer is: "Honey, you're 15. I hope you never hear-
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
... a BigCommerce ad on Spotify, because you're not our target customer," right?
Yeah, yeah.
So how are we going about that? Up to half of our leads for new customers in any given quarter tend to come from partner channels, whether that's from maybe a technology partner or a systems integrator, or even a performance marketing agency-
Yeah
... on the Feedonomics side of things. It's much more about building that kind of network effect and word of mouth as you're going up market, or about you have a really good performance on an implementation-
Yeah
That builds confidence, add additional geographies. If they're working with a partner, they're going to then recommend you into additional clients, and it kind of starts to build on itself over time.
Yeah.
It's not about, you know, direct marketing spend, brand recognition. That tends to be more of the playbook that small business-oriented platforms follow.
Yeah, somewhat down below, y eah. I mean, like, with the focus, like, if I look and, devil's advocate question now a little bit, like, your growth this year, like, suffered even on the enterprise side, despite all the focus?
Mm-hmm.
Is that just all the cycle, or is there anything you could have done differently?
You know, I'm going to say, I'm going to answer the question with some nuance, because a lot of it, I believe, is macro-driven.
Yeah.
But I think we could have managed through the macro more effectively than we kind of likely have.
Yeah.
What I mean by that is, if you just look at the effects on, y ou know, we've talked in the last couple of delivering calls, earnings calls, where I've spoken about the dynamic we're seeing, where some larger customers are, you know, saying: "Well, listen, I, you know, we charge a, you know, up to a certain amount of orders to be processed on the platform."
You pay a fixed fee for that, and then if you go over that amount, you pay overage charges. And if you have a merchant that signed up during the pandemic, they may have seen great results on the platform, but maybe they got to 80% of the amount of orders that they thought they were going to get to when they signed up during the pandemic.
Mm.
And so we've had, you know, a phenomenon, especially over the past two, three quarters, where they, in some cases, reach out to us and say: "Listen, I'm, you know, maybe 20% below where I thought I was going to be when I signed up with you. Can I, you know, have a. I know we're in the middle of the agreement, but can you work with me on the price?"
Yeah, yeah.
Which these are long-term relationships for us. Like, this isn't a transactional thing for me. So we say: "Okay, we'll have a conversation, and you're not going to get the same discount. We need to talk about the payment, advanced payment terms and things like that." We've seen more of that type of impact this year, a little bit more than expected. If we would have seen the same type of, you know, gross dollarized retention rates we've seen over the past few years, we would've seen growth rates in the mid-single digits higher-
Yeah
... than what we're out looking for this year.
Yeah.
Now, that is macro trigger, maybe macro exacerbated, but at the end of the day, I think that, us organizing ourselves better to have sales own the relationship with that customer end-to-end-
Mm.
... and be the ones leading those renegotiations or focusing on expansion, I think we would've probably had a little bit better results than what we did.
Yeah.
Which has gotten into, you know, by hiring and Steven, we're changing some of the metrics and how sales own those relationships end-to-end. They're going to be goaled on different things. They're going to be goaled on net revenue retention, and there's some very specific things that we're doing and measures and systems that I think are going to improve that a lot. So, I do think a lot of it was essentially the macro, but we're not off the hook-
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because the macros, I mean, investors expect us to perform better in a tough macro than our peers. I think we've done reasonably well, but there are certainly some areas that we can get better.
And then you mentioned earlier the kind of mix between new customers and existing customers, and you want to change it towards more existing, which I-
More balance. I think more balance.
More balance, yeah, yeah.
More balance.
Or more balance, yeah. The, the one question I have is, like, so that means usually you kind of get more from the installed base by kind of upselling, cross-selling.
Mm-hmm.
Like, the one thing that I'm getting from investors is like: That you either buy a system from you or you don't buy a system from you. So, what's the cross-selling, upselling motion that you could do better?
Okay, I would say it's vertical and horizontal.
Yeah.
From a horizontal perspective, we have several different products that are available that we sell. We're not just a platform company, right?
Yeah.
So if it is an e-commerce platforming discussion-
Yeah
Obviously, we have that product. If you're having a conversation with folks that are omnichannel, and they're looking to optimize their spend in omnichannel advertising or selling, that's our Feedonomics product.
Mm.
In many cases, that's a different buyer persona-
Yeah
... than who's buying the platform product. Either one of those are ways that we get into relationships and start building relationships with accounts. We also recently bought Makeswift, which is a small acquisition that we did last quarter.
Yeah.
It's one of the best tools in the world to do Next.js site development, right? That we are going to build into kind of our core page builder and our out-of-box product. But if you are a content, you know, development agency, you may be a fraction of what you do as e-commerce, but you do tons and tons of industry and content websites. Makeswift is fantastic for that use case as well, and by back half of next year, we want to have that towards separately sellable. So different ways and different products-
Yeah.
To get in different verticals, I think, is kind of underappreciated, and then that's just the horizontal. From a vertical perspective, I mean, if you look at, you know, you can get one brand and one geography on the core platform product. You really well get them up and running, and then use that as your way of then getting into the next brand and the next geography, and that type of thing, a nd there's a lot of crossover runway that we have ahead of us.
Yeah, yeah.
More so, the more that we move upmarket, I would add, right?
Yeah.
The more low market, you're kind of more. I landed it, I get it up and running, and then I, it just runs.
Yeah.
As we move up market, it opens up a lot more expansion opportunities.
You can tell also like it and that's why the new hires come in here, like an argument of things like you can do a better job there, like or was it not a focus or not enough focus, or you had to kind of use it-
You know-
Go about it wrong?
We talked about this a lot internally-
Yeah
... over the course of the last few months as well. I mean, that we, you know, we had a restructuring lately also where I was describing to our own employees by, you know, what's the process that we are in the midst of, right? And our roots as a small business platform going back years, some of just the behavior way of thinking sometimes is more high velocity, lower average sales price if you're coming from a small business selling environment.
Yeah.
And then, as the product matures and moves up market, then the go-to-market, the vernacular, the measurement system kind of also kind of follow the product as you're going up market. It's always been a focus of ours to do expansion, right? And to focus on that revenue retention. But some of the ways that we were organized weren't optimized for that, right?
Mm-hmm.
If we land an account, the seller would turn that relationship over to a services and support team that would own that relationship going forward.
Yeah.
If they saw opportunities to expand into other regions or geo- you know, regions or brands, they may pull the seller back in.
Yeah.
Right? But that's not optimal.
Yeah.
I mean, I was an AE for years. That's not how I did it then either, right?
Yeah.
That makes more sense when you're more small business, lower end of the market.
Yeah.
When you're up market, though, sales owns the relationship beginning to end.
Yeah, yeah.
They're built accordingly, and now that we've gotten to a point to where we've, you know, product is there, we've moved a lot of our demands and dollars there. Now, we're moving the structure and the leadership and the way we're doing it in line with that. It's kind of a culmination of a process that we've been going over through for several years. It's why I have just a lot of boldness and confidence on our ability to drive more profitable, faster revenue growth rates than where we've been this year.
Yeah, sure.
This year, a lot was about tightening up the quality of bookings, the quality of earnings, getting profitable and cash flow where it needs to be. And if we can run more efficiently and better, and then macro starts to be a little bit more in line with historical averages, there's a lot of runway on that side for us that I'm really excited about.
Yeah. And then the, I mean, the macro environment is the same for everyone. Like, what are you seeing in terms of the competitive dynamics there?
Mm-hmm.
Especially as you move more up market, it's a slightly different set of competitors. It's not the one big one below.
It is.
Like, what are you, what are you seeing there in terms of, like, how you're competing more effectively or competing?
No, we've seen really good consistent, consistent win rates doing very well against larger competitors, especially the big conglomerates-
Yeah.
... that we compete against. And even more so in some of the larger players that are more oriented towards small business platforms.
Yeah.
We've seen it from- especially for those, you know, competitors we have, whether it's, you know, Adobe or Salesforce, really, Demandware.
Yeah.
From what we can tell, there hasn't been a lot of investment in those platforms, the acquisitions. I mean, we bring over leaders to our team that used to work at those teams, and they kind of echo very similar sentiment.
Yeah.
They're still, you know, formidable competitors. They're good sellers, and, you know, it is a good product. It's not a layup by any stretch. They do very, very well. It depends on the competitor, but we've seen the, the market is very receptive. So our target market, which is, you're looking for customers that have, our ideal customer profile, they have sophisticated use cases, they value the openness of the platform, so they can choose what that platform is doing.
Yeah.
It's not a vertically integrated strategy, where we're trying to get everybody to use white label versions of our product and say: "Listen, if what's best for you is to use this payments provider instead of this payments provider because they're integrated in your systems, and you've been working with them for years, you can use them for this and then add in one-click checkout from PayPal here."
Yeah.
That flexibility, so the enterprise merchants that we're talking to and who we're really focused on, that really, really resonates with them, and it really allows us to compete really effectively with anyone on the market.
Yeah. Okay. And then the then let's spend a little bit of time. So you have the enterprise motion, and that is the one that I kind of probably would be most accountable for going forward because that's kind of the one that drives the future.
That's right.
What have you seen on the kind of more lower end of the market? And, you know, you don't want to totally forget about that-
Yeah, 100%.
Still selling at the end, like, what has been going on there?
What we've seen in that part of the, in that business for us, I think that our product is really, really, really well configured and well suited for established small businesses.
Yeah.
The entrepreneurial set, if you're getting up and running on the product, and you say, " Well, listen, I'm configuring BigCommerce. I have all the selection and configurability and choice."
Yeah, too much.
Except for some merchants, if it's an entrepreneur, if it's my daughter starting a small business, she may not need all of that-
Mm-hmm
... sophisticated capability, and we may charge the same price, and we would argue you get way more out of the box for what you're paying for the commerce than you would for one of our competitors.
Yeah.
But if it's, you know, if you're a really, really simple use case entrepreneur, you may find it easier to get up and running on a Woo or a Wix or a Shopify or something like that. For that segment- part of our business, for me, that business, we're going to continue to invest in it, but it's not going to be a disproportionate grower for us.
Mm.
We've done a number of things actually over the course of last year we talked about. We're really looking to shore up the unit economics in that part of the business for us. We were really spending a lot of demand gen dollars on that part of the market, and it wasn't. It just doesn't have as good of a retention or unit economic profile as we see as we've gone to market. Now, that's gotten substantially better for a number of reasons over the course of the last year. We've incentivized prepayment in that part of the business as well. The amount of merchants that are choosing to pay annually in advance, even in the small business product, is materially higher than where it was a year ago.
Yeah.
Which has been really useful for us from a retention point of view. It's also a really good hurdle to help make sure that we're talking to the right small businesses.
Yeah.
If you're able to pay a year in advance, that is an existing business, it's an established business. It's almost like a done signal-
Yeah
... but that's the right one. We also, we took pricing up pretty materially in line with competition, so we didn't, like, go ahead of what the market was. That also has gone a long way also into shoring up the economics there. So we have a lot of optionality there. I'd like to see that business over the long run growing modestly, but frankly, that business could be flat to growing modestly and doing fantastically well if it's graduating people into enterprise plans-
Yeah.
... and growing up from there, like many of our, some of our VIP clients that we have there on the platform, you know, started as a really small plan and then they grow from there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that helps. The other big shifting gear again a little bit. Actually, before I ask about cost and all the work you've done in terms of, like, getting to EBITDA break even. On the product side, like, I did ask everyone, like, how do you think about AI? Like, does that play a role for you guys?
Mm-hmm.
I mean, in theory, content creation, especially on the advertisement side, you know, there, it's AI generated, AI will be a big role there. Like, what are you guys doing there at the moment, or how are you thinking about it?
Yeah. Let me, let me address that from the point of view of how we're thinking about it in the product and, and how we're thinking about it in terms of the way we're running the company.
Yeah.
From the product point of view, we already have 20-30 different apps that have been developed with AI on the platform. It's an open platform. It's an ethos for us. Like, this is not a, just a business choice, it's a philosophical point of view of the company.
Yeah.
We view customer data as their data, not our data.
Mm-hmm.
And so we have a lot of concern that we have about, okay, how do I think about privacy? How do I think about making sure that IP is respected, if that is their data? But we have a really tight partnership with Google, as an example. Anybody that gets up and running on BigCommerce automatically has a subscription to BigQuery. So, you can take all of your data from our platform and then put it into Tableau or whatever tool you want to use or whatever other things. As a part of that openness, then it also means that there's lots of different developers that can go through and use the open APIs to create apps or modules that can use AI and plug right into the platform.
Yeah.
That's already- we had a hackathon sponsored by Google, like, two months ago, that was doing exactly that. On top of that, we're doing our own development of AI into some of the core features of the platform.
Yeah.
For example, you can already go through and if you are putting new products up on the site, you can use AI to pick out, you know, the picture that you want to use, I believe, and the descriptions and the product descriptions. It's a time saver. That's already built in. We're going to continue to do a number of things like that while keeping it all open, and I think, you know, our openness, coupled with our partnership with Google and others, I think it puts us in a position to have some really leading capabilities, because we're not attempting to do it ourselves.
Yeah.
We're not trying to do it all. I don't for a whole host of reasons, I don't think that's the right way to do it. From how we're running the business internally, I think there's also a lot of really interesting use cases. I have a pretty high threshold in terms of, or maybe not threshold, a high bar in terms of where I think these things can and should be used before I use them in production. I think sometimes we can talk about AI like it's going to solve every single problem imaginable. But I need to make sure that our customers are taken care of, and if I'm really, really confident that AI can augment that, then we will.
So, for example, you know, shortly before holiday, we actually added AI into the control panel, so if you're trying to get to tech support. Our average pickup time for tech support to get a human being on the phone during Cyber Five was, I think, between seven and 20 seconds. A lot of our competitors don't even put a 1-800 number on their website because they don't want you to talk to a person.
Yeah.
They're trying to deflect all of it. We're kind of the polar opposite of that. But we have built an AI in the control panel, so you can use our entire knowledge base of articles, you know, and use, you know, all the different, you know, natural language AI that's available to just enter your question directly in a, you know, Q&A format of the control panel. And we saw actually, you know, fewer calls going into our support queue than we expected because the answers are being taken care of through AI.
Okay.
To me, like, that's a very obvious first use case, and a lot of folks in are talking about a lot of the same things.
Yeah.
I think there's a lot of applications and things like that, that you can do. But I think you have to be careful that you can use AI to create content, right? But you can only tune the model with all of the marketing content that you already have available.
Yeah, yeah.
At the end of the day, you still need somebody with a creative license to look at the copy it's creating and say: This resonates. This fits our IP. This is what we want to do.
Yeah.
We're going to look at them kind of one at a time and make sure that we can drive cost savings, but do it in a way that respects our customers' privacy and their data privacy. Make sure that we're taking really good care of our customers and taking them on-
Right.
If they have questions, not attempting to deflect them. You know what I mean? We want it to augment their experience on the platform, not make it worse, obviously.
Yeah.
Look for a lot of use cases to build this into the product. I'm excited about it. I think it's something that we can grow organically in a lot of ways.
Daniel, in the last few minutes, I want to shift gear a little bit. You, you've achieved something that I haven't really been able by anyone else to, you know, that they achieved that, which is kind of the going from, like, a big location to a break even.
Mm-hmm.
Talk a little bit about the action. And the one thing from, like, that I hear from home from shareholders is a little bit like that they overkilled, you know?
Yeah.
Like, or that they overcut it-
Mm-hmm.
It was not organic enough, and so then you see people coming down because of the overcutting or cutting too quickly. How would you kind of maybe describe what you've done and how you would answer that?
Yeah, it's a great question, one that I get, not frequently, but occasionally. The natural question is, well, could you have had a higher growth rate-
Yeah.
If you had been willing to live with a bigger loss rate, right? And that implies a certain amount of where are you on the efficiency curve in terms of sales and marketing spending?
Yeah.
Let me just clarify what we've done over the course of the last year and what we're thinking as we're going forward, because it's not, it is not that.
Yeah.
If you look at through Q3, our spending in sales and marketing year-over-year was basically flat. Basically flat. Now, I would look and say the, across the entire industry, not just with us, the amount of growth in revenue that was being delivered based on the amount that's being spent, I don't think was high enough.
Mm-hmm.
I think that that's true across a lot of folks that are in our sector, and I've seen this in a lot of peers and competitors and how they're thinking about sales and marketing. If you just look at magic number or pick a benchmark, it's been more challenging across the industry over the course of the last six quarters.
Yeah.
I believe that the way that you can improve that is through a different model, right? I think that focusing more on a balance of you know, expansion and new customer growth can get us much more efficient growth. The way we've gotten 19-point leverage is not through cuts to sales and marketing.
Yeah.
Right? What have we done? How did we get there? Because I think you know, if you look at where we were guidance for the year, I mean, it's we did not get to the revenue growth plan that we had wanted to get to internally.
Yeah, yeah.
Still got to the break-even starting line a little bit earlier than we expected. We just do the math, that means you're just being really disciplined on spending.
Yeah.
How far can you take that? At some point, you have to have accelerating revenue growth in order to get further.
Yeah.
So what have we done over the course of the last year? We've been a couple of areas I would call out in particular. One, just really disciplined about hiring. Not only the number of people we're hiring, the seniority of the roles that we're hiring, and where we're hiring. Our geographic diversity of our employee base is much higher now than where it was two years ago. That's been kind of one of the benefits that we've seen of more of a hybrid work environment, is it's allowed us to not be as concentrated in more expensive markets from a labor pool point of view.
Yeah.
That's one. Two, we've been very much prioritizing what we're doing in terms of build and working capital. A big reason for that is, from a gross retention and a stickiness point of view. Historically, again, all business groups, we tended to charge monthly, our customers monthly. Well, as we're moving up market, mid-market and enterprise customers are used to paying in advance.
Yeah.
I am stuck paying in advance to all my enterprise software suppliers, and so we have been transitioning to focus on that a lot more. Not, not overdoing it, not completely, but just being very reasonable about it.
Yeah.
Well, as a result, you can see, like, our deferred revenue results have improved very significantly, and yet have a very long way to go.
Yeah.
Like, we have such additional headwind that's available to us, and I believe cash flow can track ahead of our profits for the next couple of years.
Yeah.
But one of the benefits of that, though, is we've had far better collections. We've had far lower bad debt expense. Like, the quality of earnings and the quality of bookings and revenues that we're seeing in our business today is materially stronger-
Yeah.
than where we were a year and a half ago. This has not been, "Listen, we're just going to cut everywhere to the bone, short-term way that's not scalable and repeatable, and then eventually you're going to have to pay for that." This has been structural improvements to how we operate, the way that we do sales promotions, the way we incentivize sales reps to focus on higher quality deals with better cash generation.
This is running the business in a better way, such that when we start to see better results in terms of revenue growth, which we need to post and are confident that we will, macro becomes a little bit less of a headwind than it has been. You start to get that kind of switch back to more normal growth rates where things have been.
Yeah.
You're doing that in a much higher quality, both profit and cash. It's a really, really strong financial performing company, and that's really what I get really excited about.
Yeah.
If I look, you know, towards next year, the question about, well, did they cut too deep?
Yeah.
I mean, where we really had lower costs this year was in G&A and R&D, right?
Yeah.
And so I would argue, no. We knew we were going to be able to save some in R&D. We had spent a lot of money developing storefront and some other capabilities, that we knew we could kind of pull back a little bit and still run the business very well. And as I look at next year, I think that we can also see much better leverage in sales and marketing by the changes that we've talked about and how we're going to market.
Yeah.
It is in a tough macro environment, that's not a good time to be kind of disproportionately weighted towards new logo acquisition as your means of driving revenue growth.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right? And we're moving off of that. I think it's going to be a much more balanced, faster-growing and more profitable business going forward.
Yeah. So, we're all looking forward to the cycle picking up again.
Yeah, but, yes, but as I say internally to our team all the time, our shareholders don't hold us accountable to doing better than other companies in all environments.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The macro is not an excuse. We have to perform well and manage well through the macro. There's some ways I think we've done very well with that, but we have high standards, and there's definitely some areas I think we can do better.
Did you guys, last question for me, like, did you guys then, also from the management team, like, how are you incentivized to kind of deliver on that?
So, the way that our incentive system is a function of top-line profitability and bookings, ultimately.
Yeah, yeah.
And the different weightings to that and stuff that we have to get it to layers.
Yeah, yeah.
We did better in some than in others. But again, going into the year, we said, "Listen, like, there's a graph that I show internally in all hands, where I can try to contextualize kind of what the business has been like over the last year for our employees." And it's something that I got from one of our banking partners that showed kind of a plot of growth rate and profit margin two years ago in B2B SaaS compared to today.
Yeah, yeah.
There were a lot of folks that were kind of growing at a higher rate, but they were burning a lot of cash, and it's just very much moved and consolidated all in how the top right quadrant, where it's a little lower growth rate, but everybody is, you know, getting profitable. That's good and rational in this interest rate environment.
Yeah.
But that was a transition period, always challenging and difficult to do that. But I'm really proud of the team and the work that we've done. That said, I, you know, I'm really excited about the upside we have on top line-
Yeah
and the changes that we made to do that.
Yeah, perfect. Hey, that's a good closing statement as well, Daniel. Thank you. I think our time's up.
All right.
Thank you.
All right. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.