Ryan Walsh at Pax8 on Community-led Growth!

Watch the Interview HERE! 

Harry Brelsford  00:00

Hey nation nation. Harry here just wrapping up the Pax8 beyond conference, the inaugural conference. First of all, Ryan Walsh. Yeah. Congratulations. Good job. Thank you. Yeah, you got that first one across the finish line, man. That's the real. Yeah. Ben didn't know a thing or two about events. But Ryan, more importantly, I want to talk about community led growth. You know, I shared with you the other day in the hallway that academic journals are starting to discuss this. And honestly, it's what a lot of us have been doing for 20 years. So talk to me, what what's your job? What do you think about community ground? Yeah.

Ryan Walsh  00:34

So my job first and foremost, is Channel Chief, I'm kind of a Swiss army knife with Pax8. I'm currently the Chief Strategy Officer, but I'm a co founder. So I was there in the basement days talking about what we were trying to do. And very nice. We're really yeah, we're really, back then we call ourselves a cloud commerce marketplace. And then the, the market didn't understand what that was. Yeah, I heard that speak. And we're back there now. But one thing that I used to talk about along the way, is that when we got into this business, there were so many other marketplace options. And we thought the difference between an empty mall marketplace, and one that's thriving is enablement and community. And so this has been a part of our DNA from the very beginning, which is we, we describe this differently, but we were going to ride shotgun next to our partners to help them educate them, teach them something they may not know. And that is the difference in the power in a marketplace.

Ryan Walsh  02:02

Well, I tell you, I was with John's prior startup, Amex, logic and MX logic, and it's got Jason was their CTO. But we wrote integration to Odin dot, okay. Yes, we did. Yeah. So I'm very familiar with it. But you know, in terms of what you're talking about, here at this conference, what we're talking about, it's not that it's not that penny for the transaction anymore. It's the Attach dollar services, those things that surround a product really where the money is being made for partners and serving the SMB community. So

Harry Brelsford  02:35

Looking forward, here we are mid-June 2023, you made some announcements. What can we look forward to in the next quarter to here's

Ryan Walsh  03:03

We gave a visual reveal mockups. Right after that, we went into sessions with partners who had a lot of questions like, how's this gonna work? What about this specific use case? Right now, we're moving from this time into design partners beta, into the fall. And so what we're going to do is take all this feedback and start working with a few select partners. And we'll shape what they're going to see. And we'll shape what that vision is that we got presented today on the stage by Scott, and then we'll release that coming into the first half of 20. Okay, first half, okay, cool. And we're an iterative agile shop. So you're gonna see things roll out into q1 and q2. So we have to stage that you saw a lot of things today, or we talked about a lot of things today. And so we'll prioritize those things that are most important to partner. And I think one of those things that's going to be up front is something we called opportunity to explore. Yeah, you know, so your ability to find data driven insights into opportunities and serving your customers that that just, you're going to get a return on that pretty quickly. Yeah, not to do that, though. For anybody listening, please start working on and thinking about your data, data's got to be clean, because that will ensure to us right, as well, as you know, identifying an ideal customer profile, those things will arm us to figure out what's the best solution for your customer.

Harry Brelsford  04:19

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Why before we wrap up? I am not sure I heard it maybe haven't announced. Have you announced where next year's conference is going to be because these things take a year in advance. Oh, yeah, it's

Ryan Walsh  04:30

here. Oh, it's

Harry Brelsford  04:31

here in Denver again.

Ryan Walsh  04:32

Oh, cool. Yes. In fact, I don't you know, I might be you might need to check me on that, because I'm pretty sure it's gonna be here.

Harry Brelsford  04:40

Yeah. And I'm assuming maybe the same time of year. Yeah,

Ryan Walsh  04:43

yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. No, we have early sign up and details will flow. But yeah, we're trying to encourage people to come back.

Harry Brelsford  04:49

Oh, definitely. Well, continued success. Ryan,

Ryan Walsh  04:51

thank