Ep # 165: Bootstrapping A Support Platform In An AI Hype Cycle ft. Vlad Shlosberg (CEO, Foqal)

Vlad Shlosberg 00:02 Your AI is only as good as the data that you feed it. So I think the agents themselves aren't necessarily the things that are having to change. The prompts and the instructions and the things that the agent does usually are the same because it's a support function. Intro 00:17 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management, so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Adil Saleh 00:30 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is the Hyperengage podcast, and we are so glad to explore another avenue into a spectrum of customer support. I know we've had so much of GTM operations or GTM tooling in the recent past, and a lot of these call themselves AI-native or AI-first or AI-powered. I know that it is definitely a buzzword, but a lot of these platforms are actually doing and delivering and using AI to create a difference and make an impact. We are going to talk about how customer support has seen a transformation over the recent, I would say, three to four years with the impact of AI, and a lot of that has been replaced or automated by AI. Actually, it was first to be replaced when GPT-3 came up, GPT-3.5 came up, and all this generative AI, conversational AI, and a lot of these text platforms that turned into marketing tooling and all of these. So a lot of this industry shift has happened in the past three years, and I'm so glad to have the father-founder of Foqal. It's a Slack plus Microsoft Teams first platform enabling customer support teams to manage support inside these environments and make sure that they do it right and at scale. So thank you very much, Vlad, for taking the time. Vlad Shlosberg 02:04 Anytime. Always happy to be here and glad to be back. Adil Saleh 02:08 Yeah, absolutely. Perfect. So I know that since we last spoke, a lot of things are different. A lot of that you may or may not have anticipated in terms of how fast things moved. So what's your take on the current situation in support? Every startup, even bigger companies, are trying to treat their customer support as something that they don't use, and they have AI or agents or all of this to replace them. And how do you see this customer support as a category? Vlad Shlosberg 02:47 There has definitely been a lot of change. It's funny, you can't talk about customer support without AI nowadays. About a year ago, we went to all of our customers and we were thinking about different AI features. At the time, we were really just focusing on Slack as a support function. We were really just focusing on that and we tried to propose AI features to our customers. At that time, nobody was really ready for it. Their legal departments weren't ready for it. Their security departments weren't ready for it. Nobody was excited about it yet. Over the course of about a year, at this point now, every single one of our customers is coming to us and saying, we need some AI features. What we've seen is a lot of it sounds like it's coming from the top down. It's a lot of CEOs and founders and the heads of the companies pushing and requiring AI features from their employees. To the point where, I don't know if you saw the article the other day, that Microsoft is requiring all their employees to start using AI features. I think that's definitely the biggest shift, which is not something that necessarily we expected. I guess we saw it coming, but we didn't necessarily foresee it to this degree. With Foqal, we always had AI features. We actually started using ChatGPT with version 2, or we used OpenAI with version 2. So before it was even ChatGPT, we were using AI to try to answer questions. At that time, it wasn't as good as it is today, but it was actually pretty good. We've always had that functionality, but in the last year, the adoption of all that functionality has been so strong that we had to expand it and build in a lot of features and build in a lot of reporting and everything else. So it's amazing how much that's taken off. I think that's definitely the biggest category. Adil Saleh 04:42 Amazing, and it has gained such huge volume because support is the core of your success. It is so critical to any customer success function, even the core of post-sales and all. We see a lot of these implementation teams using tooling and products, and they're also living mostly inside workflows like Slack and Microsoft Teams. What kind of customer segment are you guys targeting? I know that you've gone upmarket recently as well. So could you tell us more about your customer segments and how you guys have expanded in the past four to five years? Vlad Shlosberg 05:27 We've always had, I guess, our segment hasn't changed too much in the last year. We've kind of been all over the place. We have a pretty wide range of customers, starting with somewhere where it's one or two people on the support team to hundreds. We've seen that one metric, one way we measure it, is based on number of agents; one way we measure it is based on number of channels. Usually we see it from about the 10 to 20 customers, probably more in the 20-customer range, to hundreds of channels. And some of our customers have hundreds and thousands of customers in Slack and Teams. So I think that segment has probably been about the same in terms of where we are. Sorry, what was the second part of the question again? Adil Saleh 06:16 How it's expanding. I know that more and more enterprise teams are using multiple tooling for chat support. All of this, how it encompasses a larger perspective at scale for enterprises. I know that it's more that you think of support and using automated tools and AI-powered tools for live chat and email support. You think of SMBs or max mid-market companies. So how do you see this has changed or has not changed in enterprise? Vlad Shlosberg 06:51 On the enterprise side, first of all, we don't see as many enterprise customers. I think enterprise customers still typically are not yet doing Slack support or Teams support. On Slack, on the enterprise side, we do see more Teams. However, in general, I think we're still seeing that it's probably like 80/20, 80 percent Slack support, 20 percent Teams. The separation that we see is also a lot of companies that maybe are using Slack internally. They don't necessarily want to be using Teams, or maybe they're using Teams internally and they don't want to be using Slack. One of the things that we've seen is a lot more of this mix and match where in the past companies would say, hey, we're using Slack, we can offer you Slack support, we're not going to offer you Teams support. Now I think people have realized that you have to do both. And I know some companies are even looking at some of the other platforms. I think it depends on what segment you're in. I think the other big change is that in, I kind of mentioned four years; in the last few years, I'm not exactly sure of the timing, but when we started doing this, it was not as common of a thing. Now, if you're a B2B company, especially startups, especially mid-sized with a few hundred to a few thousand employees, you are probably offering customer support in Slack and Teams. I think that's been one of the biggest changes, that it's not necessarily the biggest adoption in the enterprise space, but it's definitely a lot of adoption in that small to mid-market range. Adil Saleh 08:36 Interesting. I also wanted to explore this adoption part, as you spoke backstage as well, thinking of all of these B2B core, B2B SaaS startups in the early days to mid-size, up to 200 to 300 people with 20 to 30 plus support reps. Do you think that it's easier for them to do the enablement around Slack support for their customers more often than regular channels like email, chat support, and all of those? I know that you guys can integrate with it, but in terms of operational excellence, how do you manage to enable your customers with that operational excellence so you're resolving the tickets really fast, which is a top KPI of customer support? Vlad Shlosberg 09:31 There are a lot of people going into Slack support or messaging support expecting that the KPIs that are going to matter most are just resolution rates, when in reality it's not resolution. It's more first response rates. I think what we've seen is that our customers are mostly looking at that. Our customers want their customers to get a fast first response and know that somebody is on top of it, but they don't necessarily need a full resolution right away. They just might need a, hey, we're looking into it. The nice thing about that is a lot of people compare messaging support to chat support. With chat support, you have to have your resolution within a few minutes. The reason for that is somebody is waiting on your page. Sometimes they're in the product, they're using it, and it's probably a little bit okay. But a lot of times somebody is just waiting on your page and they're waiting for you to respond, so they're just staring, and often they'll just go away. With Slack, it seems it's not really an issue. When a customer is asking you something, you can respond with something initial, but if you answer the actual question a couple of hours later, they're still going to get notified. It doesn't matter; they're not waiting on your website. So the metrics that matter aren't necessarily the resolution time. Obviously a better resolution time will still make customers happy, but I think the first response time is probably a more important metric for that kind of stuff. And then I think a lot of companies are just looking at the standard metrics like how many tickets are created and that kind of stuff. People build a lot of SLAs around making sure that if a customer writes something, you automatically respond or you respond within a certain amount of time. But it's not necessarily around speed. I think I went off on a completely different tangent. That wasn't what you were asking, was it? Adil Saleh 11:28 Yeah, I mean, because my first job in the software industry when I was pretty young was customer support rep. So I 100 percent agree that I feel it because getting the first response back then was so hard to do for hundreds of customers every single day, as small as three people. And there was not so much technology. I remember there was a platform back in the day, I think it was Crisp, C-R-I-S-P, a support platform. We were using email support with Help Scout and all of these platforms. And live chat becomes critical, especially when you have some sort of product-led growth model and you have some sort of freemium trial or you're not capturing credit card, a lot of information and you're tracking the usage and people are having some issues or trouble with anything. And I mean, you do have documentation and the knowledge base and all, but they don't have time to go look at it. So there has to be someone or some out-of-bandwidth responses or AI to cater to those kinds of live chat responses in real time. So now thinking about this whole category, I know that when Slack came up for these SaaS subscription-based economies and it was a big boom and a lot of these companies, even from the Valley, actually it started from the Valley, they started building communities. I'm a part of 30 of them. To be very honest, it's such a pain in the ass; somebody tags you in there and you have to go look. And just yesterday I was looking at, we were doing an event in financial district SF on October 28th. So I was just looking for some communities that I was part of back in the years. And I thought, hey, these folks I know, let me find those spaces. So of course, I actually got out of those spaces recently and then I tried to find those workspaces and there are loads of them. But you get my point. It has become such a pain for people to stay in Slack with these communities and engage. You get all of this; I know that a lot of these marketing teams are sitting on Slack communities. So to be pretty much candid, what do you think? How do you think support and all of this is unfolding in the coming years? I know that it was such excitement, like we are going to be, there was a platform that came onto our podcast that is helping companies, SaaS companies, build communities on Slack and all. Still, it works. But I think, how do you see it unfolding for support, doing support or having the customers on Slack? Vlad Shlosberg 14:20 Well, I think there are a couple of things. One is most of the customers that we're seeing are not building communities; a lot of our customers aren't necessarily building communities. They were just using Slack's direct message feature, or not direct message, but the shared channels or that kind of thing where it's a direct communication between two companies. So it's not visible to everybody else. It's not something that's available to everybody. So they're not necessarily using communities. A lot of times these channels will get set up, and it doesn't necessarily mean that people will always use them. Sometimes a channel gets set up, somebody will use it for some amount of time and then not need support for a while, forget about it, and then come back and maybe even create a new channel. With some of our customers, obviously we offer our customers support over Slack and Teams. Some of our customers will come in and create a channel, and then a few months later they remember that they have another question, and instead of finding that existing channel, they'll create a new one. We've seen that kind of stuff. But to address your initial thought of this sprawl of community, yeah, I agree. And I'm assuming the product you were talking with is Tightknit. They're a cool company; we talk a lot. Adil Saleh 15:39 Zach is a great guy. Yeah, great guy. Yes, I'm meeting him next week in New York City. Very cool, great guy. But I need to check on him. How is it going in terms of adoption? And how is he tracking value and success for his customers? Because these are some really tough metrics that he's after. Vlad Shlosberg 16:01 Yeah, and I think we can both sing Zach's praises. They're building a great product, him and Steven. I think it's definitely a necessary thing. And I think it's not just the community and community management; it's making it into something that's not just a community. It's also making it into something that's a program so that you can manage not just the members but use it for marketing and use it to generate knowledge and that kind of stuff. In general, we're seeing, especially compared to when Slack communities started being a bigger thing, probably 10 years ago at this point, or eight years ago or something, that there are a lot fewer communities nowadays. Fewer people are trying to build them. It's definitely harder because people are realizing that it's not just you build a community, you invite your members, and then everybody is there. You build a community, you invite all your customers, nobody really talks for a while, you need to engage the whole community, and you basically need somebody there full time. Unless your community is by default gigantic, you're going to have a hard time trying to do that, and it's going to be a lot of resources and time and money. So one of the things that we've always recommended and that was worthwhile for us is just piggybacking on existing communities. Early on, we were part of Support Driven, for example. One of the things that we did was we worked with them and said, hey, instead of building our own community, why don't we add a channel here about Slack? That became one of the channels where we talk about Slack, and the same thing with other communities. One of the things we advocate is to realize that a community is going to take a lot of your time and resources. You probably need somebody full time to do it, so is there an existing community you can work with and adopt instead of having to build your own? There are a lot of benefits because that community has a lot of people, so you just have to lure them in. You can invite your customers to it so the community is growing and they're happy about that. At the same time, there's a lot more potential in getting new customers because of conversations happening in the community and because all these people already in the community, hopefully you're picking a good community because they're going to be good potential customers. I think the other thing you were talking about was there's a lot of GTM strategy and Go-To-Market around community. I think there is. It really depends on the community. Some communities are very pro marketing, pro talking about products and trying to help evangelize, and some communities are very against it. It's also not even the people that organize the community. A lot of times it ends up being just the members. I'll give you two examples. One community we're part of has strict guidelines around you having to explicitly say, hey, I'm representing this product, when you're stating an opinion or if you're talking about your product in a way that's promotional; you have to explicitly say that. And even with that, some people will go, yeah, okay, whatever. Versus we have another community where we're part of a different community where we don't have to say anything explicit. It's implied that, hey, we're representing this product, and people are like, oh, great, I want to talk to you, and they'll DM you. So it's not even the organizers of the community that set the rules there; it's more about the community itself. Adil Saleh 19:35 Yeah, and that's where products like Tightknit come into play. You don't need community managers to manage because it's a lot of work, as you mentioned, managing and keeping the community engaged and consistently delivering value and education to the people that signed up for you. So now, how do you see a lot of these developer tools that came onto our podcast, a lot of these platforms that are mostly open source platforms? They are more community-led support and all of that. On Slack, I know that you also have some of your customer segments in open source platforms. There are loads that came onto our podcast. So how is that support different compared to regular SaaS platforms for other tech companies like yourself? How do you see the difference? How is that panning out? Because that support has been there for a long time, a very long time. These developer tools always had support inside their own systems and platforms. Sometimes it's Slack. So what's the difference that you see in adoption, developer tools compared to regular B2B SaaS? Vlad Shlosberg 20:51 Well, I think in general, developer tools and open source tools in general usually already have a large community that has started on something like GitHub. When Slack is brought in, there's usually already some kind of conversation or some community in Slack or some community already in GitHub. With that, you're not really building a new community; you're finding a new home where it's a little more conversational from GitHub into Slack or Teams. With B2B SaaS products, it's not exactly the same thing. First of all, the audience is going to be a little bit different; it's going to be whoever your ICP is. It's not necessarily going to be developers. Developers are definitely heavier users of Slack, so they're more into it. That's the biggest differentiator: you're probably bringing the community into Slack when you're coming from open source. The model is going to be a lot different. With B2B SaaS, you're really worried about every single customer. You might not have as many of them; you probably don't have as many customers as you have in open source tools, where you might have a project that has 10,000 likes or something. You have to support all those people, and you can't really support them by answering every single question; you have to do it at scale. So there are a lot of things like AI that need to be powered on. With B2B SaaS, there are typically fewer customers. There's usually a good mapping between companies; it's not individual people. It's usually companies that are asking you questions, or a handful of people at a company that are asking you questions, and they're usually working together. So that model is a little different. The short answer is if you have an open source community, if you're building something open source, if you're using a Slack product or something, you need to incorporate a lot of AI. A lot of it is pretty good in terms of, hey, can you go get all those docs that you probably already have for your open source product? If you don't have a lot of docs, then you probably need to do that anyway, because if you want people to be able to adopt you and use your product, they probably need some documentation. Can you get all that documentation into something that the AI can read so that when you power that community, it can read it and answer the questions and it can actually be iterative? It's not just answering one question at a time. The more examples you give it, the more data you give it, the better the content, the better these AI products can answer these questions. At the end of the day, even with as much AI as you can use, there are probably going to be some tickets that are still routed to a person. That's why a lot of these communities still have a support function. That's why a lot of it is still not only managing and engaging people, but also having support people in there that are answering the customer questions that can't be answered by AI. That's more typical of open-source products because a lot of those are engineering products, and engineering products usually have more complicated types of questions. That's the other thing we see: AI support is great on the B2C side; AI is great, and that's why we're seeing Intercom and others taking off very well. On the B2B side, it depends on the product. Sometimes if your product is simple, if you're building a marketing tool, there's not going to be that much complexity in the product and the users in the product are not trying to do as much complex stuff, so AI is going to be great. If you're building a heavily technical product that engineers are building and writing code... Adil Saleh 25:03 Implementation managers, yeah. Solution architects are coming into play working in support alone. Perfect. I know that it's the next big game, even in support. It started with support, by the way, building specialized agentic workflows. You mentioned different products, different segments. Just imagine a product doing support for three or four different industries for all different products. There has to be some sort of standardized playbook, like at least 60 to 70 percent, so they can build some agentic workflows around giving them specialized context and helping support be more personalized, maybe gathering some information from the knowledge base. I know a lot of these tools are doing that. How do you see it applying? Foqal, I know that you have a very smart AI assistant. I know that your enterprise plan has some of the capabilities that are more specialized to different use cases and more tailored for specific segments. So how do you see these agentic frameworks panning out for you in the long run, especially where you have the biggest chunk of customers, small to mid-market? Vlad Shlosberg 26:22 I think what's interesting is that the actual agents don't have to change too much. It's more of the data sources that change. I like to say that your AI is only as good as the data that you feed it. So I think the agents themselves aren't necessarily the things that are having to change. The prompts and the instructions and the things that the agent does usually are the same because it's a support function. When somebody is asking a question, you want to maybe change the tone slightly. Some of the things are going to be a little bit different, but ultimately you're either trying to answer the question, run some kind of automation, or answer the question if you can. So I don't think the agents themselves are very different regardless of industry. I think it's really the data that you're connecting it to. This is where things like MCP are going to be really interesting. One of the things that I'm most excited for is more and more MCP. Everyone is building an MCP server, which is actually really cool. But I think the data is the absolute difference in industry; it's going to be what MCP servers you're connected to. And not only are those MCP servers getting you better data, it's what actions they are taking. So if your product has MCP built in, can you get your AI agent to go and change someone's password? Adil Saleh 27:48 Can you get it to enable having the right prompts, having the right context to the prompt to get the best outcome? We've been building; we started building co-pilots about some quarters ago, a couple of quarters ago. We started with CRM and all these basic data sources, like product analytics and all of that. Then we thought, hey, at the same time, we tried to validate it with some initial pilot customers, and we realized we need qualitative data sources as well. Why not get data from meeting notes, get data from external LinkedIn, price-based Trustpilot, all these platforms? Then, hey, why don't we get data from Slack to put more context into it? If that is for post-sales or a GTM tool, it needs context across a full 360 view of customer journeys and all of those. So yeah, again, 100 percent, it's about the data sources as well as how smartly you engineer it. You tell the agent, hey, this is the outcome. This is what is needed for you to go and check and validate and support it. It's also a big use case. Every product has a knowledge base. They have help docs. They have pricing and packaging pages. You can identify their customer segments by looking at their pricing a little bit. A lot of them have their listed segments and industries as well. If not, looking at their knowledge base, you can see if that is going to be more product-led, product-led sales, these kinds of things. This is how we are envisioning doing the engineering, engineering to build the agentic workflows for a GTM tool. And it is highly dependent on the data sources, as you mentioned. So now, talking about Vlad, I know that Go-To-Market has been getting harder and harder and raising funds has been the toughest. I would say in the beginning of this year, it started with a lot of these investors, even angels that I know, banging their heads, messaging into these AI tools that look so flashy. And then there are so many category leaders and they actually replace them or acquire them. This has happened with a lot of technologies. We've seen, you know, Focus, yeah, Correlated shutting down. We've seen June shutting down. We've seen a lot of these platforms that touched on this just because they thought they would build and they promised in their messaging to the investors that they were building something AI-native and out of this world, not to name all of these. But again, what is your situation in terms of competing in the market? I know that, at the same time, you spend some money out of your back pocket on customer acquisition and marketing. I was looking at some stats this year, 90% of these GTM tools are spending more than 60% of their yearly budget on marketing and customer acquisition and sales, all of that. So now, with a lot of founders going lean, profitable, which is good, but again seeing competitors spending a lot of money on the internet, digital marketing, all that, how do you feel as a founder from a business standpoint, commercial standpoint? Vlad Shlosberg 31:20 I think one is we're kind of lucky in that we've always bootstrapped ourselves to growth. So we were profitable. We've never had to rely on outside money. Yes, we are definitely affected by the tides: when people are buying more, we have more revenue; when people are buying less, we have less revenue. But we're not as affected by the funding market. But that also means that some of these competitors are better funded. At this point, we're also seeing more competition from the legacy or bigger companies, right? Companies like Zendesk and Jira and ServiceNow, all of those companies are building their own AI agents, they're building their own AI functionality. So there's more competition from more places. It's funny; I used to have a spreadsheet of all of our competitors, and it started being crazy long, and then it was kind of hard to track, because we would see a startup that just started, then they start doing something, and then they shut down, or they don't exist anymore, or they just pivot to something else. So that has definitely been interesting. There are definitely a lot of competitors spending a lot. The interesting thing is, I think it depends on who they are and what they're spending on. Without naming any competitor names, I remember a couple of years ago there was a company that was spending a lot of money on marketing and really talking about Slack as a support space. We haven't seen much of them in the last year; no idea what happened to them. At this point, some of their customers were leaving and stuff. So that's an interesting space. Then there are others that we hadn't heard about a couple of years ago, and now they're a lot bigger. So I think that segment is playing itself out. In general, I think the support segment is playing itself out. Because AI and Slack are newer, Slack support is a newer thing. There's a lot of stuff up in the air. In the past, we used to think, what happens if this company comes in and starts out-marketing and outspending? We've seen that. Those companies sometimes do well, sometimes disappear. So it's not necessarily that we have to focus on competitors. The way that we try to look at it is, instead of focusing on what our competitors are doing, the standard notion is, let's look at what we're doing, let's build the best product for our customers, and let's make our customers happy. One of our biggest marketing efforts is word of mouth: our customers talking to each other, customers finding out about each other. One of my favorite things is that we have certain customers that will work somewhere and then, due to layoffs, they might have to leave, and then they'll contact us. This happened, actually, I think last week. We have a call soon with a person that was our customer; they got laid off, or I think they actually found a new job or something, and then after four days of being on that job, they're reaching out to us to get Foqal back in. So I think that's been a good marketing strategy for us. It's not necessarily, let's go spend lots and lots of money and try to do that. But at the same time, we are doing a lot of targeted things. We're trying to do, as we talked about with communities, a little bit of conferences and figure out which conferences really are best for our ICP. We're trying to do different smaller events. So there are a bunch of different things that we're trying to do and really figure out. And yeah, things like email are kind of dead and things like LinkedIn are kind of dead. Somebody I was talking to a few months ago, one of those AI BDR agents that go out and do all this cold outreach, and I asked him, okay, so you're saying email is dead, what do you recommend? And somebody was like, oh yeah, one thing that's worked is sending voice notes on LinkedIn. Apparently, that's a thing. So I think that at the end of the day there are all these tools, but at the end of the day they're really feeding into the same channels. So really it's just what channels still work. Adil Saleh 35:51 Also the SEO part and all of these ranking and recommendation games are going big too. I was just talking to my team last week; we were having a meeting around this. They said articles on these episodes are coming up in the recommendations for some of the keywords, because maybe we haven't done anything, we just had this conversation and put it out, and that has been sitting for all this time. It's always good to put out content as well, so you rank in recommendations. We have, on average, three to five signups on one of our products every single month from Change Equity, on average. So that is also one thing. Love it. So Foqal is, I know that we have seen it long enough, and you guys are doing a great job at retaining and having the right customer advocacy. I know that a lot of companies already know you; a lot of these customer support reps go into different companies or senior roles or pitch tutorials, and they always advocate about Foqal. That's why we have you again, really appreciate your time. Think about just one little thing on the Go-To-Market side, how you guys are trying to go multi product or something adjacent, because it has been hardest for the support tool. Either you go big, like Zendesk or Intercom, or you do the product right. And you survive and you have a bottom line funnel. Maybe it's hard to beat these giants, for several different reasons, not just product. How do you see it for the Go-To-Market strategy to go multi product in some way? Because I think of it as, let's say, a GTM tool, a customer success tool can go about having health scoring, that's an entire different product, a whole product. Journey mapping, success tracking, NPS tracking, you can have five, six or seven different overlapping, I would say, adjacent use cases for customer success or both seats in support. How do you see it panning out, the adjacent use cases, because the category has never expanded as big as other GTM tooling for sales, marketing, attribution, advertising, product analytics, all of this. So as a founder, what's your viewpoint on expanding in a longer term view to go about multi product or serving those adjacent use cases of what, let's say, your adjacent might be technical support, might be strategic customer support, like these enterprise companies, they have separate divisions on that. So I'm just thinking around while sitting and doing some research on Foqal and your industry. So do you think it's hard? Is it good? Is it bad in a longer term view, because everybody's going multi product, everybody's building agents and all of this, you name it, from Salesforce to Skaling and all of these platforms. Vlad Shlosberg 39:15: I think, so your question is, how are we looking at multi, kind of multi-product or how are we Adil Saleh 39:21: Yeah, how do you see, from a product perspective to serve adjacent use cases? Because there are not many that we see in support compared to like, sales, marketing, integration, what's your next go-to strategy in terms of like expansion and all of that? from a Go-To Market center. Vlad Shlosberg 39:42 Got it, got it. Yeah, what we see a lot is, instead of necessarily building additional products in that space, what we're doing is focusing on other ICPs that have similar requirements. I think a lot of it is internal. There are a lot of IT teams that want very similar product, very similar features; it's almost all the same. You know, it's like IT, HR, revenue ops. So there's a lot of internal operations and a lot of teams internally that want a lot of the same functionality, including all the AI stuff, including a lot of the same features. So I think a lot of our expansion is towards other teams. And the way that we usually like to be brought in the door is, this is one of those nice things about being on Slack. I was talking to one of our competitors one time, and one of the nice things about this product being on Slack is that it's very viral on its own. As soon as somebody installs it, lots of other people see it, lots of other people start interacting with it automatically. And it kind of goes both to other companies and internally. So what we see a lot is that one of our customers will install Foqal, start working with their customers. Those customers see it and go, oh, that's great, we also want to use it. That also works internally as well. Somebody installs it, IT teams go, hey, we want to do that, and CS teams or HR teams and revenue teams and finance teams and legal teams all see that and go, oh, we want to also do that. So I think a lot of our market expansion is really just getting in the door. It's a standard land then expand. We get in the door through CS, we get in the door through IT, we get in the door through HR, and then we expand out to other use cases, trying to fit those use cases. So I think a lot of the complexity ends up being, what are those unique things for these different teams? We find, as we were talking about earlier, it's not necessarily that the agents are too different. It's just that the way that the data sources, or what they talk to in the background, is different. For support, somebody is asking a question, you might be talking to Salesforce about that request, you might be talking to your documentation about that request, about how to do something. When you expand it out to IT, they have the same. The number one question from customer support is, how do I reset my password? One of the number one questions for IT is, how do I reset my password? It's the same thing; just the function of how you actually do it is a little bit different. From the external side, you go talk to the product or whatever, change something in the database. On the internal side, you go talk to your Okta or something and reset it. So it's a lot of the same kind of things; it's just that the tooling and what you actually talk to is a little bit different. So I think a lot of our expansion is not just support use cases, but other use cases. That's one area. I think there's always going to be new features and new functionality. The other side is looking at other channels. If you asked me a year ago what we were looking at expanding to, I would probably say, oh, we need to do WhatsApp as a common channel, which to some degree still is, or other chat platforms like Discord. Now we're kind of going, do we really need to do that? When we first started going into Slack support, that was the hottest thing to do. That was the thing that people were expanding to. Now I'm thinking, in five, ten years, is that still going to be a thing? Sure, there's going to be some communication, and sure, there's going to be some communication tool, whether it's Slack, Teams or something else. But is that where people are going to want support? Is it really just, do we have a ChatGPT connector and that's it? Or do we have an AI connector and really we're just a headless agent where we can answer questions that wouldn't necessarily have to be inside of a messaging platform? So I think the future we're looking at is it's not necessarily just chat. It's maybe what is that next communication channel or what's the next place that people are going to expect to get support. So I think that's the area that I'm most excited to explore as well. Adil Saleh 43:54 Love that, man. Love the way that you're pushing it, getting in the door first, understanding the vicinity, then looking at what operations and workflows, products, use cases, support verticals they have across different organizations. Love that. It's always been a pleasure following your journey on LinkedIn, and our entire team loves the way you push on different commenting and posting and contributions on your LinkedIn. Such a good educator you are, just like you are today. So thank you very much for your time, Vlad, and look forward to your journey at Foqal, and I'm super excited about how things are unfolding and you're expanding within teams, within organizations, and I think that you're going to crush it. Thank you so much. Vlad Shlosberg 44:48 Always happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Likewise. Adil Saleh Likewise. Bye Bye. Outro Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com.