Episode 293 - Alex Shevelenko/Todd Westra

 

Todd Westra

Alex Shevelenko

 

01:53 Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Growth and Scaling podcast. Today we have got a special guest, someone who we have reconnected with through business, even though we have a very, very fun past together in high school. So we're gonna jump into this interview like that. Alex, tell us who you are and what does your business do. 

 

02:16 Hey Todd! Alex Shevelenko, I'm a founder and CEO of RELAYTO. And RELAYTO helps anyone who knows how to use PowerPoint or sends PDFs all of a sudden become a magical content creator. They become web designer in seconds. So that's, uh, the value prop we could get into how we do it, but um, democratizing interactive and web content is, is, is sort of the special sauce of what we're doing. 

 

02:47 Well, and this is a huge thing, right? Because, I mean, everybody uses PDFs to send a deck or send information or send, and it's boring. It's flat, it's two dimensional. How are you bringing this to a, a, uh, a more colorful way to present your information?

 

03:05 Uh, sure. So look, the start was the good news. The PDF, everybody knows what it is. Everybody knows how to create it. The bad news is it looks like everybody else's pdf. And so what, um, we decided to, to do is help people take what you have as a PDF or a PowerPoint and turn that into a website. So what does a website have? It has navigation that's weblike, so you could immediately get to the right bits. It has right videos that are embedded inside versus like, you know how you click a, a video on a PDF and then you go off to YouTube, takes you do another browser, or go off to watch cats or dogs or, you know, so, so you could invent 

 

03:48 I never get stuck doing that.

 

03:49 No, you're good. Uh, but, um, the point is that, that you can enrich it with all the goodness of the web. And it does, you know, you, the, the PDF or the PowerPoint is still the base. So if that's what you really want, you can put it out there. Then you could start bundling content into hubs, right? So you have this PDF, that video, that other PDF. So instead of sending three attachments and, and a video link, you kind of bundle it into a kind of experience hub. And then you could, uh, okay, share the security, right? Whether it's web-based or you could control like who accesses it. And finally you get the analytics of actually who's looking at who side? Is it working? Did they get on the page five, and did they actually click on that video? 

 

04:34 And did they share it with other people though they were supposed to? 

 

04:38 Exactly. So you could really capture the digital body language or the way that websites do, like on a consumer side, but we don't really get a chance to understand that in a business side and sometimes the most important message that we send out are the worst communicated one the worst understood. So that's sort of the tragedy of the modern, uh, buyer journeys and, and sale sellers and marketers that we are trying to fix. 

 

05:03 So these are like a microsite, essentially like the, an informational site that you're just sharing the information with people and I'm assuming there's all sorts of cool stuff like templates and you can like just tweak the intro and send off the.. Right? I mean, prepare once, send it out a hundred times.

 

05:20 You can, uh, personalize it. Um, we have templates of you, like if you don't have your PowerPoint worked out, we have templates of PowerPoints or Google Slides that you could start using. And they're already optimiz. To look like they're gonna be a killer website and some of them, like, so they're microsites, but they could be like a flip book. Which, which is like a book re reimagined, which is much richer media. It could be an infographic. It okay. It's a, it's a, we, we now do videos, so you could make a static ecstatic video and make it interactive without thinking you know, too much about it. Like typically interactive videos hard to do. So it's a broad range. Boring content or same old content that you could transform now to really engage your audience at the end of the day, right? And make sure they have a positive experience and know what, what they need to get out of that content. 

 

06:14 All right, so now I know what you do. Who are you doing this for and and how is it benefiting them? I mean, you know, a lot of people when they're launching products, they, they start with really small clients. I mean, from what I gather and from what I see on your. You, you are like, you're amazing, really big companies with your tech. How, who are you working with and how does this, how does this affected the growth of your company?

 

06:40 Yeah. Well, we, we've been very fortunate. Um, we, uh, we've been backed by, you know, great institutions like the Wharton School and some of our earliest design partner slash customers are great companies. They're, they're like Accenture and Professional services and Salesforce in tech. And if you, the common thread was with companies like this is they, they were leaders in consumerizing, B2B, right? Like it, like essentially the first one to do advertising back in the days. Salesforce is like Disney for B2B companies. You know, like it's, it's like they really create, like, like kids love their Salesforce toys more than they love their Disney toys. So these are.. 

 

07:26 They love their Salesforce more than their own business sometimes.

 

07:28 Yeah. So, so yeah. So we've been very fortunate and so we learned from them. We kind of grew with them. We met their needs and then, um, recently we opened this up. Uh, and so now, you know, anybody was a great idea, can actually bring that idea to life and make sure it, it has a chance at success in the noisy world. Uh, but we own a lot to these large companies that obviously they start in one place and because, you know, PDFs are everywhere, presentations are everywhere. Microsoft are everywhere. It sort of spreads and expands across. So that's, that's been our growth story. 

 

08:06 That's awesome! I mean, it is not every day you hear people with, uh, uh, a business that has clients like that. I mean, enterprise solutions are hard to create and develop because they all have their internal teams. I mean, tell me about this growth journey, because like I said, I mean the companies you're mentioning, the, the Salesforce, the Accentures, companies like that to produce a product that they will actually incorporate and utilize is not an easy chore. How did you determine to like create something that they can use as opposed to starting with a, a solopreneur and trying to service them and then hopefully grow into that. I, I'm curious the mindset there. 

 

08:45 Yeah. Um, great question. So, so a couple things. So one, we, um, we bootstrapped at the beginning. When you're bootstrapping, if you go to solopreneur, you're gonna get exactly what solopreneur has, which is nothing, uh, as far as kind of paying you. And so then you might get feedback, but it's, it's not gonna, uh, it's not gonna pay the bill. So we, we, we took a philosophy that we would rather work with small teams in like these large organizations, but that they have budgets, so like they're solopreneurs or small teams or underserved teams inside a larger entity. But yeah, they're not starving and they, if they, they found a valuable solution, um, right. That would help. Then you look at, the other reason is like, you look at somebody like, Accenture, like they are the world's largest user of Microsoft Office. They are the world's largest reseller of Microsoft Office, right? And so what we are did know that, right? We, and all same probably for Adobe, you know, uh, platforms, so we love these platforms. We are not trying to kill PowerPoint. We're not trying to kill pdf. We kind, we help you use the ones that, you know, if you, if you love those tools, if you know how to use them, make the most of it. So, so I think for us it was very complimentary and we just you know, saw the, saw the big opportunity, and then we paid, you know, the cu it was customer funded, gross, and then that, you know, that was one idea. The second one, kind of what I mentioned is like, um, in my past lives, I work at great companies like SuccessFactor, which became part of SAP and led SAP's cloud journey.

 

10:31 That's cool. That's a big deal, yeah.

 

10:32 And, and Salesforce even I turned at Salesforce when I was at Stanford Business School and, and what I learned from there was that having flagship customers that are awesome does help. 

 

10:43 Yeah. And so we, we kind of, it to totally helps.

 

10:46 We, we sort of proactively, we didn't do a lot of selling, but we did reach to Salesforce and Accenture. Hey, do you guys want to use us first? Went through their innovation programs. They told us to go mind our business. But we just, you know, cause we were like, you know, little startup couple guys and an idea, but eventually, like they saw what we can do and, and uh, they've been great innovators. And this to them cuz the, the teams that picked it, they've done really well, they've won awards. Um, and really they're, you know, they make us very proud to be on a journey with them because they're innovators inside these large companies. And these companies wanna innovate. Like, I think, you know, hats off to both of them. They're, they're, they're, despite their scale, they're, they're, in some ways they're more innovative than much smaller companies. So we are, we don't want to like, we don't believe it's like large companies are, you know, not innovating. I think they, they, they want to do it. So we, we've been just very fortunate.

 

11:41 Well you bring up a really good point and I think that a lot of, a lot of founders kind of forget this. The fact that you've got these bohemoth companies like Accenture who, who are staffed with normal people,right? Like we have this image in our mind, but we're a startup and we're like looking at these huge companies. We seem to think that everyone there is a giant and somehow they're smarter than us, they know better than us. They, they've got better tools than us, and the reality is they're just people trying to, to pull levers to move that business, right?

 

12:17 Yeah, I mean, imagine organizations like that, right? Like they, they have to work a lot internally and, you know, just to, to get attention there. But, uh, you know, the, the, I will tell you this, that like they are discipline in terms of security and so we had to take, we had to take, uh, a lot of, um, attention, uh, in, in our early development to make sure we have enterprise grade security architecture that passes. You know, the, the necessary requirements for, for companies that sell security solutions or like, Salesforce is the largest cloud, you know, cloud vendor, so they like cloud security is a big deal for them. So we were very fortunate to also that they took us through a journey of like passing their security requirements. So like I think I wouldn't have recommend this for everybody, but if you kind of identify that you have innovative people, they use a lot of slides and whatever, like in our case, and we are a team solution. That worked well as an enterprise, so we didn't need to go sell to the CIO of Accenture on day one. You know that that helped. Like, but eventually, you know, this goes up, right? Like, and so that's the exciting thing about, um, no code platforms is you could start with individuals and teams, right? And then over time..

 

13:36 And they just kind of shared out with other people. 

 

13:39 They spread out. They spread out. 

 

13:40 How did you do that? 

 

13:43 How did we do that? 

 

13:44 No, no. I mean, like, you share it with one or two people on a team and all of a sudden the other team members like, how did you do that? That is so cool. How did you do that? 

 

13:52 Exactly, that helps when you have creative customers, right? And then they, they start getting internal recognition and so we're getting you know, getting people like, “Hey, I want to, I want to get recognized too.” Or, whereas something like it's psychological, right? A hundred percent. I want, like people want to say, “Hey, I have a competitive advantage when I go into my important meeting. Or like, I'm going into my, my biggest event of the year, am I gonna wear my suit from 1989 Samme high school, freshman year, prom”. You know. Or am I gonna wear something that's modern, right. That fits me, that, you know, let's like improves my chances in the, in the game of life and, and work. And so like we are basically, people kind of start think, oh, well this is. This is a competitive advantage. This is kind of not a burden. This is something that's gonna help my project, uh, my company, a hundred percent design. Um, and so, and the, our customers care about their customers, right?They want, so they, they like, it sort of starts, it's very, it, you know, it's very much, I want you to have a great experience engaging with us. Unfortunately, because of Covid. And the way the world is, we can't go and take you out and buy you steak and, you know, you know, totally have a lot of nice red wine and convince you that we're awesome, you know? Let's start with some, some substantive and, but how do we make that substantive experience feel interesting, natural, you know, high end right? To, to degree like the reflects our values. 

 

15:29 And I wanna dive in just a little deeper into this because I, I think that what you did, to grow your business is so different than the way most people are trying to grow and scale the business, and that is you really understood that your initial avatar, your, your, your client persona that you were going for was enterprise. Like I, I think that when you started enterprise and you, and you build a structure around their requirements, It makes it so much easier to taper down as opposed to starting with small guys who have no requirements and then building up into, uh, an area that does require more work. I mean, in a sense that's really the hard route, but now that you've gotten past that.

 

16:14 Now it's easier. Now it's easier. But it was, I think it was a very hard and, um, you know Todd, like I don't, I think it does, the credit should go to, to our development team because they've architected. So would be sufficiently easy to use for anybody, right? Unit of one in an enterprise, but it would still like meet the enterprise requirements.

 

16:37 I love it. 

 

16:38 And that's not the way most people approach it. They start with, like you, you said, entrepreneurs and then, so we always knew that the way we could grow this business, Is in a similar way that, you know, something like slack rose, right, or like that it would just kind of start spreading and, and then eventually, like if you look at where the revenue for those businesses is, it's not an SMB. It's in the, it's in the enterprise. Enterprise, but the way to grow, the way to succeed in the enterprise is actually to create an awesome experience for individual, right? And I think that's what a lot of people miss, right? They think the way to succeed as an enterprise is to hire a bunch of expensive reps that, you know, have 300K on target earnings and you know, and then like use their relationships and do dinners and like, it's nothing wrong with that. For some solutions, 

 

17:28  It does work for some solutions. Right. 

 

17:32 Like you gotta, you gotta find like, what's, what's the immediate value that you could get? Oh, well I, you know, you, I'm gonna, I'm gonna succeed was my most important project because I'm not gonna look like a douche bag that talks about digital transformation, but shows up with a PDF piece of paper, which is analog, you know, analog paper, right? 

 

17:52 Hundred percent.

 

17:53 “I'm gonna show you the way of digital transformation. It is gonna be amazing. Follow me.”  you know,  well, and, afterwards I'm gonna fax it to you just to make sure you got it right, like, I mean, this is silly. 

 

18:07  Dude, It is silly. No, it's silly. And, and I love, you know, the fact that you are, uh, you know, when I go to your website, relayto.com. You go there and you've got this inter, the first thing, the first option is an interactive presentation and it is like full of explosion and excitement and it's like, okay, wait, I thought I was coming here to like fix up my presentation. And I, I think it's rad. I mean, this thing is so cool how you are practicing what you're preaching right now. And for those listening, like I gotta tell you, for those who are trying to build and scale their business, there's a lot of ways to grow and scale their business. But think of yourself with the most perfect client you could have. An enterprise client is not for everybody, but for this, it's a perfect client. Start there, fit the match, ma, match your product for what your perfect client would look like and want and need And it's much easier to grow down. I, I think, I think that you've just demonstrated in just a few minutes, proper growth and scaling tactics are to attack your dream client first. Then tapered down and, and dumb it down for the people that are great clients, but they're not your dream client. You know what I mean.

 

19:21 Well, and I think, um, Todd, what what we are learning is we are evolving, right? And we've been very surprised by, uh, you know, maybe like commercialization. It's, it's, you know, it's obviously larger clients mean more revenue. But I think, you know, the beauty of, of something that's fundamental to human nature and to business, which is communication is like all of us have to do this. So I'm not even any anymore sure that a mid-size organization or is no longer a dream client because they, they're savvy. They know some tools already and they just onboard really quickly. And they go create great things and then they go sell to the enterprises. Some other people and those people go, what is that amazing thing that a tiny startup well is pitching us that we don't have ourselves? And that's sort of, so we, fortunately, because of the viral nature of what we're building, you know, we, we love, we love all sorts of clients, right? Like whether it's a nonprofit was a great cause that makes our team, you know, just super motivated and work work harder to enable folks like that all the way to businesses in the world.

 

20:33 Well, well hit me with your biggest challenge because, you know, we've talked about the fun of the growth of your business. Talk to us about the hurdles you've had to hit, uh, you know, one in particular. What's been the hardest thing about getting your business to this, this level where you're at right now?

 

20:48 Well look, I, I think you've heard that we bootstrapped, right? And I think, when you, when you, um, are somebody that is like me, where I had been at a company that went public before and as an early employee, so like I could have raised the money and, and yet I made the choice to bootstrap it, work with the customers, see the longer wrapped. I think that was, that that was not the obvious choice. It feels very smart now that the startup funding market is imploding, but at the time, you know, um, that was counterintuitive, uh, that we, we raise some money from strategic, you know, advisors and, you know, CEOs of other cloud companies, but it was sort of, um, relatively small compared to what we could have done or other folks do. But that challenge forced us to, to be like very knitty and like very gritty, you know, work on the product. Right. Be scrappy and resourceful. And I wouldn't trade that culture for, for, for nothing. But yeah, like back to our, you know, connection on, on high school, like the you know, I was fresh off the boat immigrant, but the one thing I, so that's kind of endurance in itself, like how do you go through this? But what I remember is like, I was, um, barely spoke English and I joined the high school wrestling team. And I was not the best athlete, but I wa I got the award for the one that is the most endurant, the one that sticks. You know, I think that was sort of that determination and, and 

 

22:20 That's a bootstrapper right there.

 

22:23 So I think that sort of, so they have to thank. You know, I have, uh, I have to thank that for, um, for that, that challenge. And then the, on the longer term thing. So speaking of high school, we're, we're just kind of joking before the call. So what, what are, what else did we learn? Well, Um, I mean somebody in, in, in, um, when I was in, when I was just kind of saying, Hey, I want to go to a good university, they told me you need to show leadership skills, right? And, uh, I was like, well, you know, I was just barely spoke English, but did I know, and I, I knew how to play chess. So I became a president of the chess club, you know, at Sam Amish. 

 

23:01 A natural leader. 

 

23:03 Natural leadership role, you know.

 

23:04 Everybody in the school, looking at the chess club.

 

23:09  I was not the best player, but, um, but I think it does learn to see, like when you play chess, you do see the long game, right? You have to react right in the moment, but you have to kind of play, play it out. And I think that, um, Eventually towards the end of high school, I didn't figure out how to be a real leader and other things, but it was sort of the ability to see the, the long game and kind of cut, see a couple right, you know, couple steps ahead. What's gonna happen ahead of the curve that allowed us to make that decision, right? Well, let's go, you know, let's go kind of, we always think about consumerizing, but can be more, be monetized with real customers and real pain points that they have, that they're willing to pay money for. 

 

23:52 Well, I love that. And that's, that's some great advice. And honestly, um, I think the lesson that you learned from chess is, you know, you could be in this battle with somebody going, just moving your pawns back and forth, and all of a sudden you recognize they slip up and then you have an opportunity, right? I mean, you, you, you have, uh, you know, and I'll just say this, we went to high school together and, and when we were in high school and you were fresh off the.

I remember how scrappy and innovative and, and eager you were to kind of join this new American culture you were part of and, and to see you now years, 30 years later, uh, as someone who has taken the, the time to go through these other business growth journeys and, and build businesses and be part of such an exciting movement and have the vision to say, you know what? I grew up in such a different place. And now here I am selling products and services to multi-billion dollar organizations. How cool is that? Like what advice do you give to people who are, who are out there thinking there's no way that, that my future has this in it. What do you tell people like that?

 

25:04 Well, that's, that's interesting. Um. Yeah, so, so for context, I was born in Ukraine, in Kyiv, uh, which is, yeah, newsworthy right now, but at the time was not at all. And, um, what I have to say, well, I I, I think it's, um, you know, one of the magic of America and like the, the industry in America where kind of I got the spirit of, you know, as an immigrant is that, you know, everything is possible if you know, you know, early to bed, early to rise, work your butt off and evangelize or, or build your product or whatever it is,right?  Like, you kinda gotta, you, you kind of, everything. Like I think there is that spirit, um, that, that comes. But I, I also would say, uh, yeah, like if somebody told me like at that age, right? Like, Hey son, you're gonna be, you know, living, like, living between London and Paris and San Francisco, the working king was great companies, right? That work. Um, uh, building technology that, you know, reimagines the book, which for like me was pretty, is pretty cool. Like re reimagining the, the long form content.

Uh, you're gonna be married to a French lady. You know, like I would've never, I would've never, like, Selemish didn't have that, like in the.. 

 

26:23 No. That, that wasn't in the, like the, the Gold Book, you know? 

 

26:28 Right. Like, you know, so I would've said, Papa, which is Russian or Ukrainian for, uh, for father, like, you know, and then Ukrainian, uh, like I said, like put down the vodka. You know, this is not possible. This is not happened, but it's, you know, life, life was unpredictable and I think, um, staying open, uh, sure part of the entre being what entrepreneurs need to do, right? Like, have a plan, but but kind of be adaptable. 

 

26:54 I love that. 

 

26:55 And I think it's, um, the world

 

26:56 Adaptable is key.

 

26:57 The world is different now. Right? So the beauty of running a business globally wasn't a real option. You know, back when, back then. So I think we just, uh, I don't, I think I, my advice is gonna be more limited now, right. Other than don't constrain yourself, right. Like the, the world is..

 

27:16  Don't limit your own self.

 

27:17 Right! Yeah. Just be, be out there and like, meet great people like you, Todd, and. Be open and, uh, you know, I admire your, uh, your parental capacity mixed with entrepreneurial capacity. So I need to take lessons from you. Like, how, how do you do that? That's, that's the most important thing for me because my kids are not at all impressed with anything of the stuff that we talked about. Right? Like, they're like, 

 

27:40 I know right. 

 

27:42 How good of a dad are you? Right? Like, that's sort of the, the real question of like, um, so I think that's the stuff that I, I'd say, You know, entrepreneurial journey is not, is, is not, uh, somehow separated from the life journey and you know, we need to be the, the entrepreneurial journey is your life journey, right?

 

28:03 I mean, everything's a part of it. Part of it, yeah. Yeah. It's like, 

 

28:09 Well, Alex, who do you look at in your journey? Like who do you look at in your network as you, as you try to get things off the ground and and build your business? Is there someone that you have in your network that kind of inspires you to keep out, keep it going?

 

28:23 Well, I've been, you know, super blessed, um, became being, being bootstrapped. There was, there were kinda a few folks that, that, you know, helped us in the, before we even knew what we were doing. And one of them was Aaron Au, co-founder and CTO of SuccessFactor, where I kind of, grew up up professionally in the south business. But what I'd say most interest, most recently we've been very blessed to work with, um, Dean Stoecker, uh, who is the founder and CEO of Alteryx, and he bootstrapped alri to a public company that was, that was a public CEO.They democratize data and we are democratizing digital experiences and so, you know, we are learning a ton from him. And so it's been, you know, amazing to have inspirational leaders on the journey. I think that's been a real gift. 

 

29:16 I love it. Well, we're gonna tag him in the post and, and for those listening, I hope you picked up a lot of the stuff that I did. You know, there's a lot of background that Alex and I have. That we have not connected. To be totally honest, I don't think we've connected in 30 years since we graduated, but I will tell you right now, the journey that I've seen and the, and the sparkle in your eye when you talk about your business and your growth and your family and all these things, real growth is possible. When you're trying to grow and scale like a business, it sometimes feels like you're never gonna get there. You're never gonna get that break, you're never gonna get that connection that ties you into that, that dream client. It is possible, and, and Alex and I have both lived this vision in our lives. And, and I would just say for those that are aspiring to grow and scale the companies look out, you know, look, look for people who have been there, as he mentioned, his shoutouts. You know, there's always someone that's, that's 10 steps ahead of you. Don't be afraid to ask him, Hey, What did you, how can I shortcut this journey? How can I get from here to there faster? And you'll be surprised how many people who are as passionate as Alex and I are, and sharing with you our journey and how you could shortcut a few errors that we make along the way. Am I right in saying  that? 

 

30:34 Absolutely, and you know, on the, on the Dean Stoecker for example, he has an amazing book out, um, which I recommend everybody reads. It sort of takes the whole journey, an emotional journey, human journey. Exactly what we were talking about, Todd, like it's a. Practitioner Philosopher of, of building a, uh, at least a software driven business, if you're, you're into that, you know, as I am, but I, I couldn't recommend it. Hire. Um, great, great, great insights. Todd. I think I should be interviewing you next time. 

 

31:08 I think maybe next time we'll do that. But thank you Alex, so much for being here. It's been great to reconnect and, and I hope this episode does impact some people's lives and I think it will. So thanks for being here and we'll see you guys next time on the Growth and Scaling podcast. 

31:23 Awesome. Thank you Todd. Great to reconnect.