Ep # 161: How to Build Outbound That Survives Gmail Summaries and AI Filters ft. Vladyslav Podoliako (CEO, Belkins & Folderly)

Vladyslav Podoliako 00:02: AI can draft you thousands of strategies. But what would work, what would potentially bring you the result? You will decide it eventually. Taylor Kenerson 00:10: Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearthed the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 00:27: Hey, greetings, everybody, this is Hyperengage podcast. I know it's, it's been more than 40 days. We've been rescheduling a lot of episodes ever since I was in New York City, and I know that this has been a long time coming, and that's why we had a, like a, really unique experience this time around. We're not talking about a lot of these GTM leaders and CS, CCOs and VP of Customer Success or Sales. We're talking about the founders that are absolutely in the trenches working these B2B SaaS companies with one of the biggest pain points in the industry because number one, funding is funding. Raising capital has been the hardest. Number two, acquiring customer has been the most expensive. If you don't have a lot of funds, your investors with a handful of money in the, at the back of their pocket, and, they're not letting you do 20, 30,000 acquisition on the customer, invest into these, events and a lot of these startups that you see hanging around in New York City and San Francisco spilling and spraying money onto these events. But it has been the hardest, to acquire customers for people that are in the first three or four years until they hit the series A to acquire customers, and they're trying to see outbound sales as one venture, one avenue that they can really capitalize on because it, it cuts us the cost and a lot of this. So that's why we have Vladyslav, who's a longtime founder of Belkins, have been doing it for a lot of tech companies for years, through how to, do, and I know that outbound sales has evolved over time, really fast with AI and all of that. And it is to create more noise and more competition and a lot of these founders, including myself, think that, hey, if you're not sending more than 30, 40,000 emails a month with 50, 60, or a hundred different domains, you're not gonna succeed. So thank you very much, Vladyslav, for taking the time today, and we're gonna be exploring a lot of these topics. Vladyslav Podoliako 02:19: Yeah. Thank you Adil. Thank you for having me today. Adil Saleh 02:22: Love it. So let's a little bit about, your journey when you guys started Belkins. I know it is, it was a service model initially, and now you're trying to more prioritize it for B2B SaaS or tech companies, mostly in the industry that are, not so much tech savvy or system heavy. You can talk, you can call about it and then your building going in and building. But if you just go back a little and give me a little bit insights into how it all came into inceptions and how did you start, a little bit about your project? Vladyslav Podoliako 02:51: Yeah, it's been a while building Belkins. I'm building it for 10 years already and we totally bootstrapped everything. And Belkins is the first company that I ever created in a way. And, we've got over the years, tons of experience of what's working, what's not. We did a lot of fails myself, the personnel, a lot of mistakes that I learned from. And from this journey I can tell that there's more looks as a getting street MBA with all the kind of things that I learned so far. So I think there is a lot of, always misconception around, is it outbound is like dying or is it living or is why it's not died already. I can address that. It has always been the one of the main acquisition channels for the clients, how you get clients. And again, all the businesses in the world will need and always would need clients, for growing their businesses. No matter what you're doing, either you like B2B SaaS founder or in the manufacturing of Fortune 500 company, or a small pop and mom shop. It doesn't matter actually, but you always will go for like marketing, sales, and even different ways and forms. I built a company when I, saw a lot of pain, like bringing clients on board. And we are starting to do, like at the beginning, everyone doing this. And right now, as you Adil said, if you are, not good, like cool or good founder, if you wouldn't send 30,000 of emails with 60 domains. But it's always been like that. It's, always been like, you need to send a lot of emails, you need to get a lot of replays, you need to play with your conversion rates. But what I can tell from this and was the key learning, it's not always about the quantity, about the quality and this kind of even more, in a way useless phrase because everyone telling you, everyone speaking about this and telling everyone about this. But what I can tell and explain around that is that when you focus specifically on your kind of a CP, like five, 10 companies, and right now it's outbound looks like that. And trust me, I know how it works because we are serving like 500 clients, enterprise mid-size small companies, and it is working so. You getting your a CP tied in a way, industries, you know your value proposition, your, customers, job titles, and all the critical data for it. You go for it one by one, not you don't want to spread, like with having thousands of leads, spending a lot of money on Apollo, ZoomInfo and any other tools or any AI advanced, hyper. Search tools. You just wanted to stick to the basics and basics. Always been like, I have my ideal ca profile, let's say that would be the like hundred manufacturing companies in, San Diego, let's say. And I wanted to hit on, chief marketing officers. I would. I know their link ins. I connect them and link it in. I send emails to them, I send link ins to them. And the you tailor approach per person rather than per campaign anymore. So in a way, how we used to do outreach or generation campaigns and how Belkins capitalize in that, we just straight, the point was, tight, not like tight acps. For our clients, knowing everything, for each and every prospect, not focusing anymore on thousands of companies, but focusing on like Congress companies and working through each and every channel, like email, call, call content to get them on meeting. And eventually they come to the meeting and it's more about coverage rather than, reply generation. The firsthand, obviously this is the important thing, how you generating SQLs and everything, but in the first hand you need to cover your database and know who you're targeting to. And who, potentially be your client. So this is one of the secret sauce that we, build our operation excellence around. And this is what helping us to serve small companies to, Amazon type of companies to, any other type of company. So this would be always the key. And again. There's also a lot of, acquisition channels like emails. I would frame this around the emails, but there is also calls when you need to do the same with like cold calling, ads where you do the same with the small audiences and building the small campaigns around that and capitalize on that because right now if you would do the best like millions in marketing, you wouldn't be that successful. You just need to move smart right now. Adil Saleh 08:09 : Yeah, love it. So now that I know that there are so many notions built around outbound, why is it not working? A lot of founders, they're thinking of it as like, since it's more crowded, more AI tooling coming in, and people writing more, people that are not capable to write good copy, now they are with the AI. So that means the 30, 40% of the people that are not able to do mass outreach, they are now able to do the mass outreach. So that creates a lot of noise. And especially these platforms like G Suite, they have like summarized email features. So I get my email on the phone, I get a summary, I don't open it if I don't like it. So open rate gets hurt the most. So what are you currently doing around these problems to mitigate these, to help your clients increase open rate, and then it comes down to, you know, the delivery, sorry, the conversion and everything. So delivery is pretty much being sorted, because you can get verified emails, a lot of tooling that can do it. But open rate is the biggest, and then the conversion. So how's it working for you? And what kind of clients that you're serving it? Could you also explain some of the playbooks for that or give example of some B2B SaaS company or productized service that you recently served? And that'd be super helpful. Vladyslav Podoliako 09:24: Yeah. So the first hand, the strategy matters the most. We're spending a lot of time on kind of ideation stage where you can implement like different AIs, but also you need the human who goes through the strategies and jumps on the call with the client to get the jobs done, get the great synergy around the strategies, et cetera. So I would say that the strategy is the key to create the great content strategy behind, not just like, you don't want to send email like, hey, how are you doing, well, and let's jump on the call. My name is Vlad. I'm doing B2B gen. Do we have 10 minutes of your time next Monday? That shit email will never come through. And even though if you will be like strictly like one sentence, it's again, not about that. It's more about the strategy and the logic behind the campaigns before I jump to the content itself. So for example, we've got this like B2B AI automation SaaS product that's helping clients to get maximum from the LMS that they're using from within their subscription, within their tokens used or their APIs. So what kind of works the most is the strategy around like face-to-face meetings. Even though if you wouldn't attend the face-to-face meeting, but let's say, you know, that you're a prospect in New York, near sort of like Starbucks on Fifth Avenue, you're sending email and you don't need an AI for that as well. So I'm like, hey John, I am near Fifth Avenue, the Starbucks. I know that's near your office. Let's like meet up and like talk about AI, for example. You definitely would get anyhow answer. And again, as you said, probably Gmail will summarize this as someone wants to meet near your office. It would be really nice to read instead of this company proposing new lead generation services, so fuck them off. So it works better. So this is one of the examples, but more advanced where you like strategizing around recent events that the company like did or recent blog posts. Job openings has moved on already, everyone doing this. I would say that strategy around industry events, not even meaning that you need to go to the roadshows, but again, there is certain biggest events in like pharmaceuticals or healthcare or manufacturing or AI, like Nvidia meeting, for example, that they're doing in San Francisco annually or quarterly. So you can build up on the conversation around that, if there is a certain topic that's related to your client, that would be the good option. So the strategy requires most of the time right now, not the self-content generation, because you can like get your strategy done, go to ChatGPT 5.1 now or Claude or Grok, for example, or Gemini and set this: this is my strategy, I wanted to send emails to this, my ICP, and you get all the like great prompting, et cetera. And you came up with a good email probably. So this is one of the things where the most human capital required right now and where I don't think the AI will make any difference, because you need to think creatively about the strategies. And again, AI can draft you thousands of strategies, but what would work, what would potentially bring you the result, you will decide it eventually. And regarding the content, by the way, we've collected 15,000 templates over the 10 years of working with email channel. And I've built a tool that I trained on 15,000 different docs, PDFs, all the texts that we have collected and all the results, performances of each and every email that was sent across all the industries, across all the sizes, across all the countries. And I built the tech around that, generating emails based on that. And it's generating really good emails. So I capitalize on the experience that we have. Adil Saleh 13:41: Now, could you also say, name the product that's AI agent? Is that by the same name, Belkin? Vladyslav Podoliako 13:49: That's under the Folderly. Folderly is a, the side note Adil Saleh 13:52: Folderly, yes. Yeah. Yes. Vladyslav Podoliako 13:55: That's one of my products. And we built a product that's called Folderly email gen solution. So you go to generate.folderly.com and you will see the interface where you just… Adil Saleh 14:05: How is it different than Instantly? Because Instantly helps with the warming up the emails as well. Because if I don't warm up my email, my domain would get knocked down in days. So could you also explain some of the processes as well for founders? Vladyslav Podoliako 14:20: Yeah, yeah, sure. So this is actually my favorite question. So to end the note on the content. So under the Folderly is creating emails based on all the content and generating the really great solutions. So basically go to checkout. So in terms of email deliverability, it's a tricky question. So all the products out there, I really don't like them and I don't want to trash talk on them. But there is one thing that I don't like about Instantly, like Warmly and all of those tools and how it's different actually. So we spent around four or 5 million to build a product so far. And we bootstrap and we managed to do this a great way. So that's really a nice story. And we're kind of on a really good MRR, so we're growing. What would it take to build a product that sent emails through the SMTPs or through the Google APIs? Basically, any AI, any person can build this product today. And imagine that everyone thinking that if I would build this product and I would send emails back and forth from email to email, and this would mean the warmup is the greatest solution in the world and how we can earn all the money in the world. So that's it, the main bottleneck. So all those companies thinking that this is the email warmup and this function and the word itself corrupted in a way, so we don't like warmup. Adil Saleh 15:50: Hold on a minute. Are you talking about SMTP integration, like doing it from SMTP and you’re recommending email to any third-party tooling and sending emails through that third party versus having a direct integration with Zoho or Gmail or Superhuman? Could you explain more on this? Vladyslav Podoliako 16:02: Exactly. Yeah. So there's a lot of technicalities around that. So all of those tools… Adil Saleh 16:08: Warmly's co-founder is a great friend of mine. He was sitting on my panel last month in San Francisco. He's a great friend of mine, but he's a great guy, more a product guy. So you're absolutely open to speak anything about Warmly, any feedback out on live. We are all about doing it really, really candid. We're not scripted, that's why. So we don't do only flashy conversations and all. So I appreciate that you're bringing this up. Vladyslav Podoliako 16:30: Yeah. Yeah. So there was… I also… We had a conversation with this guy as well. So the problem on the market of the warmup solutions is that there is a lot of outsourcing of the seed listing to certain companies. And those seed lists that they provide is just thousands of, I don't know, suspicious mailboxes that's sending emails back and forth between one another. But this is not how it works anymore. Maybe this is how it worked five years ago. Adil Saleh 17:05: Oh, I know. Right, you’re talking about a lot. There was one of our… My friend runs a recruitment firm and his email got knocked out just two years back and then Instantly was growing up that time. So my co-founder is also the CTO. He just jumped in. He was my friend. He said like, what's the solution? So he helped him integrate Instantly. And a month later, I asked like, how is this solved? How is it fixed? And they said like Instantly has like 15 or 20 different set of accounts that actually get emails and send emails every single day to actually warm it up. You don't do anything, like it's just like autonomous kind of emails or domains. Is that what you're talking about? Vladyslav Podoliako 17:43: Yes. Yes. And also everyone using their clients’ email boxes too. Like basically you connect and I'm connected to the system and we are receiving one's emails from each other. So there's the compliance issue as well there. So a few things. So many things I wanted to talk about right now in a second. So let me like structure this in my head. So first thing first, the technology itself. Is it based on API or is it SMTP? Is it directly integrating to Microsoft or Google or Yahoo or Outlook? Is it the seed listing, double sourcing, or is it your clients or is it your own cost? So we're charging at Folderly $200 per seat. And right now we have a lot of deals like we're charging a hundred dollars per mailbox, which is quite a lot compared to any other tools because we're managing to maintain this, the seed listing across all of our G-Suites, Microsoft Outlooks, et cetera. And just to shed more light on some numbers there, one mailbox on Microsoft costs 30 bucks. One mailbox on Gmail on the lower end costs five, four on the high end, like enterprise solution costs like 39, 30, something like that. So if you put like hundreds of those mailboxes, this would be $4,000 on my Google and $4,000 on Outlook. And you need to always rotate them and you need to grow in the volume. So basically your technical costs rise, like skyrocketing basically. And that's the first problem, right? So another problem, how you connect to the mailboxes. So you need to get all the Google compliances and Google wouldn't comply. So we've built integration with Google directly, with the Google team actually, that helped us to make this in the right manner. And we're basically not violating anything and we've got all the compliances, like as a Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet. We've got SOC, ISO, Google integration, Microsoft integration, we're a Google partner, we are Microsoft partners. So we get all of those. And there's a lot of compliances around that. And we're getting all the seed list by our own, creating, recreating and the tech itself, we kind of… That's why we actually spend a lot of money on building this product. And to answer one of your questions, if you ask me how they're different. So a lot of companies out there, using the outsourcing of the seed list, because this is the cheapest solution to do so. And I know that Instantly is doing this, I know that Warmly.io is doing this. And again, it's not like they're bad or we're good, it's just the business model. And if so far it's working and you're generating all the margins, that makes sense. But this is why also in the Folderly we're working with more upmarket enterprise companies and connecting thousands of mailboxes from clients. It's not like you're sending emails, we're connecting one mailbox to warm up. We're connecting entire domain infrastructure and creating the infrastructure in between how domains works, how IP addresses works and talk to each other, how mailboxes works and content itself. So there is a lot of on the backend happening. So yeah. Adil Saleh 21:10: That's why you spend $4 million to build a product, right? Vladyslav Podoliako 21:14: Yeah. Adil Saleh 21:15: Love it. So Vlad, I know that a lot of these problems still remain, persist with a lot of these companies that want to do and crack cold outbound and outreach. I know that goes hands in on with cold calling as well. So how do you sit well with the workflow and integration with the workflows like CRMs and all of these for B2B SaaS? If you could give some examples of any B2B SaaS companies, you may not take the name, it’s fine. I guess tell us how it works, it more relates to the SaaS businesses. So I'll be your first customer, by the way, right after this podcast. A lot of my friends listening to this episode, they will be too. So it's all about solving this problem and you have done it really good at Folderly. So I'm more about talking more about Folderly than Belkins. Vladyslav Podoliako 22:04: Sure, sure, sure. A hundred percent. This makes sense. Yeah. So when it takes to B2B SaaS outreach or acquisition approaches, I would say that this is bloody red ocean in the way, anything that you are selling. Imagine selling CRMs, imagine selling the email outreach solution. That's madness to sell. And again, there's a lot of moving around the AI agents and the AI SDRs. Some of them make sense, some of them not. I actually don't believe that AI SDRs would make any difference because of the technicality of the setup. Like for example, with deliverability, we just dived deep for 10 minutes straight to even comprehend how complicated and how good or bad the setups are out there. And the agent obviously can like set up mailbox and send emails and will it bring any result? I don't know. So when it takes to B2B SaaS acquisitions, I would definitely start at the first stage when we are working on your value proposition, who is your target, who we wanted to target to, what's the industries and how we can focus on certain kind of unique thing that would give you the best clients and can scale within this kind of niche. Rather than, let's set up mailboxes, let's send emails and do the calls, or do the spam ads campaign and bring, I don't know what the end result would be. So the first would be, again, strategizing around your value proposition, what is the tool, what's the unique, what's the weak sides, what's the strong sides, how they're different, et cetera, et cetera. When we've got this and we certainly know that there is something unique about that, there is something unique that you're solving the problem. For example, for bankers, for small bankers that like providing loans to startups, you addressing this pain point, you would be more successful if you would speak their language and put the strategy around that. So this also takes about the positioning in the businesses. So again, you can be the competitor of the famous tool, like Instantly and Warmly, or like Salesloft and Outreach, or like CRM HubSpot and Salesforce, but you're always sitting in the segments that you wanted to serve. There is right now, and if I would say AI, it would be a SaaS, for example, frame it as a separate category. There's the Wild West right now. There is a lot of different opportunities where you can capitalize and there is a lot of companies that can benefit from what you're doing. And I think the main thing where we need to spend much more time and how to make it work is who we're selling to, what's the positioning, what's the serviceable obtainable market that you have, and how you can get to them with which channel. Once you get this, we can scale the channel for it. With the channel, you've got email, phone calls, ads, content, SEO, and right now it's AI SEO as well. Adil Saleh 25:30: Yeah, you got to be in the recommendation. So nobody talks about Google, but ultimately it's the ranking on Google that gets this recommendation. And there's so much to unfold, ranking on LLMs, especially Claude and ChatGPT. Perfect. So now if I go on and talk more about Folderly, I know that you founded quite some years ago, like it's almost five, six years. So now what is best Go-To-Market? Like what kind of audiences that you're going up market with, especially in B2B SaaS, or you mentioned some of the companies in San Diego that is more heavy in manufacturing and also how is that growth going and how you're investing back into the customer success? Because initially I started this podcast as a customer success podcast three years back. And I recently had this event where we had the CCO from Vercel and ContentSquare and a lot of other founders, like this guy from Warmly as well, like Alan, great friend of mine. So I just let him know a week prior, like he flew from Spain and that was a great event. But this is the biggest thing. You make good bucks and return on your growth year and year, quarter and quarter, but how much of you you're investing back in the success of those customers? So anything around go to market, and then we talk a little bit about your post sales at Folderly and how you measure success for your customers. Vladyslav Podoliako 26:56: Yeah. In both Belkins and Folderly, we were working with hundreds of different clients. Within Folderly, we always, and again, this is also related to like how you bootstrap your product, because if you are not reinvesting to your client, not realizing your client success, you wouldn't bootstrap a thing. So I bootstrapped Belkins for 10 years to really good numbers. And with Folderly, we're doing the same because when we are providing our solution, client's ready to pay for it because it's solving a certain problem. And if we would frame this as a Folderly, we're providing email deliverability solution. The core problem that we're solving is the email placement. So we wanted to be sure that the email went to prospects' mailboxes and they will see them. So in order to achieve that, we've built comprehensive technology. And without basically putting the guarantees in front of your clients that we know what you're expecting with email channel, with your mailbox, with your domain, with your infrastructure, with speaking your language, we actually kind of going for all the metrics that we directly can kind of have an effect into with the Folderly infrastructure to the clients. And again, it's a bad example because it's more enterprise sort of solution where you just have building infrastructure. The clients in a lot of cases don't understand what you're building because there is a lot of data technical things involved and all the cybersecurity and everything. But the good example would be how you are basically facing the pain of that. You are selling your product. For example, let's take your company as a frame. You're doing AI customer success agents, which makes sense because you're saving a lot of time that people spending on clients’ conversation, Intercom, like any other chats, HubSpot chats and others, which makes tons of sense. The actual value would be for the clients that their clients that would be interacted with your AI agent would be satisfied with the outcome, with the conversation, with like the words that your AI agent will know. And that's just what I'm talking about. So that it would imitate that there's an actual human that care about their problems. So I think once you would get this feeling from your clients, and this is how all the great products were built so far. Once you get to this point where clients like interacting with your product, and again, love's not meaning that solves this problem. It's best when you finding the common ground with great usability of your product, great UI/UX, great solving of the problem. And then you can always reinvest all the love and like money that clients paying you into that client to grow with them, get like build their, build your product with your client, basically. Ask them for the feedback, what they wanted to see, what they wanted to hear, and build a roadmap with them. So this is basically how you can capitalize on relationships with the clients. But in terms of how we acquire those clients, for Folderly, for example, we are leveraging the AI suggestion system with the content we’re creating. Right now, I think there is a mindset shift with the user journey and user experience, how people choosing software to buy. So I think the main thing is that you need to create lots of content to be recommended by the AIs and people would find the solution within the AI that you are the best solution for it. For example, if you will go and ask ChatGPT about the best lead generation companies, it will be Belkins, and if you will ask about the email deliverability solution, probably will be Folderly. And this is because of the content and the expert rating that we are producing and all the references across all the different websites that bring tons of traffic that we’re converting right now. That’s one of the channels that we’re leveraging. And I think that’s the 20% of the traffic that we’re getting right now. Other 40%, I would say that would be the outbound. We actually reach out. It’s no brainer for us to do the outbound because we’re basically healing all this infrastructure and doing this for ourselves. Adil Saleh 31:41: We are the patient and we have our own method. Vladyslav Podoliako 31:44: Yeah, yeah. It would be weird if we wouldn’t use outbound. This would be super weird. And the other would be the inbound that we’re getting not just from the AIs, but from the constant collaborations with different brands, like with Clay, like with… I forgot the name. Adil Saleh 32:14: Lemnis? Vladyslav Podoliako 32:15: No, not the Lemnis, but the violet one. I forgot the branding. I forgot the brand name. Never mind. They’re creating great content for emails and Lavender. Lavender, yes. Adil Saleh 32:26: Lavender. Oh, Lavender, they’re big in marketing. They’re marketing-first company. And I remember when they were growing early stage, I was just starting a podcast and they hired a GTM leader back then that actually changed the game. I don’t recall his name, but that actually changed their game, the entire game on LinkedIn marketing, B2B. And then at that time, GPT-3… Yeah, not GPT-3, GPT-2 was coming in and they capitalized this early on. Great. So it’s all about partnerships, like people that have websites that have huge traffic, you collaborate, like content collaborate. That’s what we started doing that too. I started this podcast, quite honestly, just for education. I never wanted it to be a fancy live stream, like edited in-camera. I have the mic, pretty expensive mic and all the lighting and everything, and I’ve never used it. I’m more about like getting the content. But now as my team gets on top, they’re like, why don’t you improve the production? Why don’t you do the co-marketing with these folks? You make friends and you go to bars and, you know, lunch and dinner and all over the US, but you don’t do co-marketing. Why is that? Like they have millions of traffic, and you’re creating content with them. So why don’t you? So we recently started doing co-marketing with a lot of these folks that came into our podcast, these companies, their team sharing. So they’ll be doing with you as well, but I get that. Like it has to be like that. So I was not able to do it back in the years. I could have been. Just imagine I have like 157, close to 160 episodes now and sitting in the editing team, 170 pieces of content that are blogs, newsletters, Substack, all these stories, like 45-minute-long stories with 10, 15 snippets that we could have distributed. And we could just let them know like, “Hey Vlad, like these are the snippets that we created. Next newsletter, just add those snippets. This is a blog we created.” Newsletter, Substack is going really big. So in just two weeks, we got more than 200 signups on our Substack. We never did it in the past. So it’s just about like learning from people like you and companies like you and getting partnerships like you did back with Lavender. Perfect. So now talking about your post-sales, I know this is a critical component for any founder to, you know, make sure the customers we can, gross revenue at the end of the year. And also you have a strategy or system or processes around to expand them, to increase the lifetime value. As you mentioned before, you’re charging per channel, per mailbox, right? Or per seat. So what kind of a system have you built to expand those users as they grow? Let’s say today I’m just a, what, like two, three people, very early, say two, three people marketers. And now a year from now, I’ll be seven, eight, two years from now, 10, 15. I raise funds, I get like 15, 20, 30, 40. So how you’re keeping track of that as your success team, customer success team, and you’re enabling your customers to evolve with their goals and grow with them? And of course, eventually retain and expand them. Yeah. Vladyslav Podoliako 34:24: So first off, we’ve got our customer success system that’s helping to get all the health scores and everything, understanding who is using the tool or who is not, who is not active anymore, who hasn’t signed in for a week or so. So it’s like all those triggers affecting the account health, and my customer success managers are working with those who are kind of in the danger zone. Adil Saleh 35:50: What is the name of the platform? Is that just a CRM, building on top of CRM yourself, or is that a… Vladyslav Podoliako 35:55: Yeah, we’re using CustomerSuccess. I think this is the same name. So this is basically customer success platform. They call it CustomerSuccess. Yeah. And why we like it, it’s just integrating with our tech stack in a manner that we can utilize all the data. Adil Saleh 36:13: Got you. I mean, workflows with the CRM. Vladyslav Podoliako 36:16: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And HubSpot as well. Adil Saleh 36:18: HubSpot. Okay. You’re using HubSpot. Okay. Vladyslav Podoliako 36:21: Yeah. So then Intercom. The part of the tech stack is Intercom with all of their AI agents that they have for customer support. But for the customer support and troubleshooting at the first hand, it was the help center. Adil Saleh 36:37: We’re talking about Fin? Vladyslav Podoliako 36:40: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Adil Saleh 36:43: The AI agent that they have, like Intercom? Yes. They have Fin. And the customer success platform you mentioned, that integrates with your chat support, Intercom, your sales CRM, HubSpot. Are you also using any kind of Mixpanel or Segment for product analytics? Because success is a bigger part in the consumption of your platform, how you track it, how you relate it with the ROI every quarter, every year. So is there any kind of integration that you have with Mixpanel with the CS platform? Vladyslav Podoliako 37:11: We’ll build our own. Adil Saleh 37:12: Oh, love it. So I mean, you do have something that tracks. Okay. So you have something that tracks the product usage and makes sure it relates to the ROI. And of course, starting with onboarding to product adoption and make sure that they’re using the power features. Vladyslav Podoliako 37:29: Yeah. Yeah. We’ve built this on top of the user behavior patterns. So basically, we actually… there is quite a data like there with all the email that’s going back and forth within Folderly and how our clients are using their domains, mailboxes, maybe addresses. Adil Saleh 37:51: Gotcha. There are some events that you need to track, not all the events, because there are so many events that you’ll go mad, like your success team will go mad. Yeah. So it’s always important to define a hundred percent that these are the success metrics for growth and expansion. These are the indicators for, let’s say, churn. Like these are “not potentially using the product,” or these are the indicators for some really, some other partnerships and opportunities that we can have. And all of that is getting piped into your sales, like HubSpot and CRM, where your success team is sitting right on top. Perfect. Love it. I mean, I’m so glad that you’re already doing that success platform and we will talk more on that, how we can, you know, work together on that part, because our platform co-pilot always sits between the success CRM, chat support, product and links. And we are sort of a headless platform that helps your team keep an eye on high-value accounts. And of course, at-risk accounts. Health is just predictive. Nobody has nailed the health, even the Gainsight that’s a market leader in customer success. I’ve been talking to Gainsight customers a lot. I know their team as well, but again, health score is something in the air so far, even with this much of AI. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, why I did like 18 months of validation on my podcast interviews with all these CS leaders and GTM leaders, because I wanted to build the right product. And we don’t want to rely only on product analytics or chat support engagements or external data sources like LinkedIn and other spaces. We rely on a qualitative layer, intelligent layer on top that predicts the relationship of the actual buyer and gives you recommendations, and now with an agent actually gets it done for you. So across any stage of your customer post-sales. So that’s why we’re integrating all of these friends that come to our podcast, getting them, showing them the product and helping them integrate. So we’re doing that too. So now thinking about your product, I know that Belkins sits on top of Folderly. What is the relationship of these two separate companies? Like Belkins is more like consultants, professional services that go inside your system and help you execute it. Folderly is a platform that works with the team at Belkins that integrates that. And of course, it’s a supplement and it’s an augmented solution that is more productized. 40:13 Vladyslav Podoliako: Actually, not quite. So I built Belkins in the first hand as the company where we reinvested all the profits to build different products like Folderly. And we never overlap the clients from one to another yet. We don’t want to do that yet. At Belkins, we’re saying that this is our tech that we’re using for some certain channels, like Folderly, that makes sense, but Folderly doesn’t make any sense to integrate within those clients because there is a slightly different ICPs. And we are working more on the tech side where all the marketing and sales already is set up and running and where Belkins is omnichannel, like 200, 500,000 annual contract value, where they’re doing a lot of work across different channels altogether, like omnichannel approach type of thing, all-bound. And yeah, those companies are separate and I’ve built them separately with a separate team and no overlapping. I do overlap certain legal, finance, CPO-type of thing, because it makes sense. And there’s also a few other products that I’ve built so far. I just need to keep… Adil Saleh 41:17: We’ll have a couple of more podcasts to talk about them too. Vladyslav Podoliako 41:18: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got a lot in sales tech and MarTech especially, but my favorite one is not in sales tech and MarTech. This is the AgriTech product for farmers. Adil Saleh 41:31: Love it. Love it. Tell us more a little bit about that too. Vladyslav Podoliako 41:36: Yeah. Adil Saleh 41:37: It’s a data analytics… Vladyslav Podoliako 41:38: you will like this a hundred percent. So we’re getting all the farmers’ data to our system. We’ve put some AI layering, orchestration of the prompting, and we’re training AI on their data to implement their data into their action, to their fields, for example. Adil Saleh 41:59: Weather is the biggest problem. Weather is the biggest problem too. Vladyslav Podoliako 42:05: Weather. Yeah. There’s weather data. There is chemical data, soil data. There’s a lot of data. So it’s basically gigabytes of data. So this is why I like the product. So we’re just like analyzing everything like, Adil Saleh 42:15: Oh, it’s engineering-heavy. And it’s… somebody like Australia is really big in AgriTech and Australia and Canada, both. Yeah. Canada, Australia, both. And they’re like building huge data layers and data centers only for agriculture industry and helping farmers feed at the right time, taking care of the health of these animals, making sure they have the temperature in control, weather reporting and all of that. Love it. We have one product here as well that is helping them with predictive weather analytics for farmers. So love it. So is that hard? Yeah, it is. It’s not like getting from random places like newscasters and news channels. That is not a hundred percent, like even Apple is not a hundred percent accurate. So when I saw how they’re measuring, it’s actually like they’ll let you know this is the weather reporting for somebody 10 meters closer to Union Square, San Francisco. So it’s that precise. So love it. Also this has been growing really, really fast too. And I’m glad that you’re jumping in that too and we’ll explore. I know this is just our first touchpoint. We’ll keep on having more of these conversations. So yeah, we have a lot. Like I also have so many passion projects that I’ve done, but not as long as you. Like I’ve just started building back in 2019 till now. So it’s so many other things like professional services, we are doing services like marketing tech as well for a lot of companies. So now keeping it as an ending note, like I know that you being, as a founder, I would call you more of an entrepreneur, like serial entrepreneur, building products, technologies to make an impact in MarTech, AgriTech, sales tech. What makes you excited going into this next year? I know AI evolution, so much people talk about like, we’re going to do this, we’re going to change the world, AI, whatever. So what makes you excited as an entrepreneur? Vladyslav Podoliako 44:22: So for 2026, I’m excited to always progress in what we are building here, to progress and grow with my team. I really like to see how over the years all the teams that I’ve really been lucky to manage or be a leader of, growing so far, and how we adapt to all the AI thing, how we adapt to all the uncertainty of the market, because there is plenty planning for the next year that it will be hard in the recession-wise or the US-wise. But what I can tell is that we’re always up for the challenge. Adil Saleh 45:07: Absolutely. All great minds, all great minds, all great entrepreneurs always find a way. They always find a way even when they’re surviving. So that’s what I see in you and it’s quite inspiring. And all that you’ve shared today, as young as you are, like how old are you? Is it close to 30, not more than that? Vladyslav Podoliako 45:22: 11th of September, I turned 30. Adil Saleh 45:28: 30, right? I always guess right. I always guess right. So I’m so big at guessing people’s age. So great. Love that. Vlad, it was really nice catching up with you. So until the next meet, thank you very much. Vladyslav Podoliako 45:43: Yeah, thank you, Adil. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Adil Saleh 45:46: Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please hear your feedback at ail@hyperengage.io. We definitely need it. Uh, we will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower. Engagements with some building, some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.