The Future of Secure Remote Work: Dharmendra Mohan reveals Sonet.io's approach

In today's episode, we have a special guest joining us: Dharmendra Mohan, the founder of Sonet.io. Dharmendra shares with us his insights and experiences in the world of cybersecurity and remote work solutions. He highlights the challenges faced by both large enterprises and end users when it comes to network security. As remote work and distributed applications become the norm, Dharmendra explains the need for a new approach to architecture and problem-solving. He dives deep into Sonet.io's agentless architecture, which allows for the seamless onboarding of users and access to servers through browsers. Dharmendra also delves into the evolving landscape of sales strategies, discussing the concept of "near bound" and the effectiveness of content-based engagement. Join us as we explore Dharmendra's journey in building Sonet.io, the importance of customer feedback, and the company's mission to solve remote work challenges. This episode is packed with valuable insights for CISOs, CIOs, and IT leaders looking to create a secure and hassle-free environment for their remote workforce. Let's dive in!

Sonet.io
Dharmendra Mohan on LinkedIn

Transcript

Andrew Monaghan [00:00:00]:

Cybersecurity is such a crowded market with overlaps absolutely everywhere. Perhaps the biggest challenge for new entrants is to be differentiated and be able to communicate that differentiation with their ideal prospects. This is what Sonnet.io is doing right now. And their co-founder and CEO Dharmendra Mohan joins us to explain all. Don't go away. Welcome to the Cybersecurity Startup Revenue Podcast, where we help cybersecurity startups grow sales faster. I am your go-to-market guy Andrew Monaghan, and our guest today is Darmendra Mohan, co-founder, and CEO at Sonnet IO. DM, welcome to the podcast.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:00:52]:

Thank you so much and thanks for having me here, Andrew.

Andrew Monaghan [00:00:55]:

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this for three reasons. DM one is kind of random, we ended up chatting last week at RSA. I came out to your booth and you're like, hey, I'm on your podcast next week and we end up having a discussion about what you're doing and you're in a space, secondly, that I've got a little bit of experience with. So I'm interested to know more about how you differentiate and get into that space and all the things that you're doing in there which are going to make a difference for everyone. And thirdly, it turns out that we've got a bit of a common background and that we were both at Symantec two, three years back when we got acquired by Broadcom. You chose one path afterward and I chose a different one, but kind of similar backgrounds right there. So it's kind of fascinating how these things all intersect in our little world of cybersecurity.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:01:44]:

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for stopping by our booth at RSA I'm glad to hear that we come from the same background, so it'll be an interesting conversation since you know all about what we used to do in Symantec and how Sonnet is different.

Andrew Monaghan [00:01:57]:

Well, let's look at your background quickly. DM so you started off at a couple of different places, but the bulk of your career firstly was at Blue Code and then at Symantec. And as we know, Blue Code kind of became Symantec. The management team from Blue Code ended up being the management team over at Symantec. What, about 2016, 2017 or so, right?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:02:18]:

Yeah, I think so.

Andrew Monaghan [00:02:19]:

Tell us about that whole transition. So you're running some engineering teams, it looks like, at Blue Code, and then suddenly you're involved in the Symantec world. How did that transition happen and any great observations or learnings from that process?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:02:33]:

Yeah, I think we went from sort of a mid-sized company where everybody knew everybody else and we can take quick decisions to Symantec, which was a much bigger company and a company that was in transition. Also, as you said, Blue Code Management took over, so they were trying to take it in a different direction. But also for me personally, I was more into network appliances when I was in Blue Code and I was given the responsibility of building cloud services in Symantec. So that was a great transition for me. I could realize the potential of what we can do with the cloud services and how we can benefit the customers with those services.

Andrew Monaghan [00:03:21]:

And how was the integration into Symantec? How were you welcomed, how were you perceived as an outsider at first? How did that work out?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:03:30]:

Yeah, I think that we were sort of still independent in Symantec and so we were part of a business unit in the network security space. So in a way, we were working with a similar management chain that way, but we also were integrating with other services or products of Symantec, as we integrated with DLP when we were back there. So there was a lot of interaction with the teams as well. There was an OpenStack team. We were looking at the infrastructure of Symantec and how we can leverage that. So our horizons widened. We were exposed to different technologies that were not there when we were with Blue Code systems. So from that perspective, it was an enriching experience.

Andrew Monaghan [00:04:23]:

And then towards the end of 2019, you'd been at a medium-sized company, then a massive company and you decided that you were going to actually co-found Sonnet at that point. Take us to that moment, your co-founders, you're sitting around the campfire or wherever you were going. There's this problem that we really should solve and we're going to do it differently. What was your thinking and where were you?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:04:46]:

Yeah, so I think the thought process was we saw closely the struggles that even the large enterprises were having to solve the network security space. We saw the struggle with end users adopting these solutions and using those solutions. And we saw the struggles with even R and D developers who were finding the solution to be quite challenging to build with the landscape of evolving applications, we were getting new SaaS apps every other day. So we were thinking that the way we are doing things, the way we are architecting things, is not the right way going forward in this new landscape of remote work and distributed applications. And we had some thoughts as to how we can solve this problem. Luckily, we had seen the pain points up close and we've experimented with technologies that work and ones that do not work. So we leveraged all that experience and knowing the problem firsthand, we were confident as to whether this is the right architecture to solve this problem. And then that was basically the moment to get out of and start something new because what was there wasn't really working.

Andrew Monaghan [00:06:10]:

And were all of the founders at Symantec or were you at different companies at that point?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:06:15]:

My co-founder is also from Symantec. Okay.

Andrew Monaghan [00:06:18]:

And then, of course, there was a moment right, Broadcom had acquired Symantec. Was that the trigger for you to say, now is the right time because not now is never, or were you going to do it anyway, I think?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:06:33]:

That sort of crystallized the decision because I didn't want to go to an even bigger company than Symantec. We were thinking about it already but we also sort of in a way got an opportunity to exit at that point while we were going through another big transition from Symantec to ProdCom and so it was a trigger point to take the plunge.

Andrew Monaghan [00:06:59]:

And then how did you start? Did you just start writing code? Did you get some funding first and then hire some people and then start writing code? What were the first few steps you took?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:07:08]:

Yeah, so initially we were sort of building upon the ideas that we had and looking at different use cases solidifying how the core architecture would work. Initial year or so we self-funded Sonnet.io we were writing code, and we had Ninja that was all self-funded till the point of building a prototype, something that we could demo, and at that point, we decided to raise it.

Andrew Monaghan [00:07:39]:

Tell us what Sonnet does in your own words. Imagine if there's such a thing, as a twelve-year-old CISO out there and I'm an RSA last week and I walk up and say so what does Sonnet do? How would you explain it? Simply to me?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:07:52]:

Yeah, by the way, our audiences are not just CISOs, they're CIOs or It leaders as well. So we started with a cybersecurity company but I think that it has evolved into a platform to solve the problems of remote work in general. Security of course is critical with workers working remotely accessing applications but I think that we need to make sure that they be able to do so in a hassle-free environment where they can use any device, whether it's personal, whether it's corporate-issued to access work. So we need to take care of the workers as well. Remote work comes with boosting a lot of productivity but we have to also take care of our workers, make sure that they are happy accessing work from anywhere and I think that there are challenges that It staff faces as well. So far we have all these point solutions that are sort of difficult to integrate and leave gaps and so we were also looking for from It perspective how we can accelerate, how we can help them put together a sustained solution quickly so they can onboard the remote workforces instantly.

Andrew Monaghan [00:09:10]:

So when I think about remote work, obviously VPN has been around forever and turned into something that was quite clunky and designed in the still used in the 2020s. So I can see why there's a need for a more elegant solution. But when I look at cybersecurity, there are all these blurring lines between different areas that sort of use cases. What springs to mind is the ZTNA solutions out there. I also think about some versions of the enterprise browser space are doing that sort of thing. So how are you approaching the market such that it's differentiated and valuable for, as you say, CIOs infrastructure folks as well as security teams, right?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:09:52]:

I know the cybersecurity market the sort of divided up into these narrow solutions but ultimately the way we were looking at the problem was to be able to have your remote workers access work and that's how we were looking at it. Not as if we are a ZTNA solution or we are a behavioral analytics solution like that. Ultimately we need to solve the problem comprehensively where we take into account the visibility aspects of remote workforces frictionless access and security aspects as well. Now, if it takes technologies that are traditionally part of ZTNA or part of Behavioral Analytics, or part of DLP, so be it. But what we are building is a platform that ultimately solves other challenges of remote work.

Andrew Monaghan [00:10:48]:

When you talk to your ideal customers, right, the persona you want to go and talk to, what use cases do they immediately latch on to?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:10:57]:

Usually, I think the most fundamental use case is related to sort of growth of business which is let's say if you have found the skills the right sort of skills in some different country or globally the first thing that you want to do is to onboard these users. And that's where the friction starts from its perspective as well as from the end user perspective. So from its perspective, you have to either ship a device, put some endpoint security software, or other kinds of software into the laptop, and ship It, which basically means downtime for a week or so overhead for it. And from an end-user perspective, they're not happy either because they are tethered to a particular device. So I think the first thing that attracts them to Sonnet is the ability to onboard users in seconds.

Andrew Monaghan [00:11:58]:

Why in seconds? What is about what you do know? I know that some of them know they link in with their IDP stuff, right? So I suppose they can happen quite quickly as well so the way you do it, how is it different to how they do it?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:12:15]:

Right? So the way we can do it instantly is first of all there is absolutely no software needed in the device there are no agents, there is no enterprise browser, and there's basically absolutely nothing to download you don't even need any kind of access software to access servers, for example. So effectively we are delivering the connection between the user and the applications and servers to the browser so it's almost like we are having this conversation using a browser right now either using Zoom or Meet there's nothing else to do, just a click of a button. In the same way your end users can access work just by going to a browser and a custom URL that we give each of our customers so that's why it's instant basically just a browser and a URL and you have full.

Andrew Monaghan [00:13:12]:

Access and whereas I think many of the ZTNA players, they have an agent, right? Some use cases or traffic is agent and some of it is agent required. Are there any limitations that you have to deal with because you're an agent less completely?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:13:30]:

Yeah, so I think the majority of those Etna architectures, like you said, either require agents or are primarily agent-based. And for us, the entire architecture is completely agentless and we even allow access to servers through these browsers. And in terms of the constraints, I think that first of all, the way we are approaching the problem, since it's a proxy-less architecture, we can cover a lot of ground. We can cover SaaS applications, all of them. We can cover legacy apps, homegrown apps, web apps, and all servers. So it basically covers a lot of different use cases for enterprises. One use case, since it's completely agentless, is that let's say if you were to have a thick client or a thick application accessing an app, in that case, we cannot secure that thick client in the device itself. However, we have an alternative way of doing this. As I said, you can access the servers, so you can access the thick applications through that approach.

Andrew Monaghan [00:14:40]:

Again, using browsers. I think you said before, that visibility is important. I think one of the things that, let's say, traditional ZTNA has suffered from is traffic going into a black hole. So when they're trying to do security investigations or figure out what happened or what people are doing, they don't have that visibility. It sounds like you've figured that bit out.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:15:01]:

Yeah, that's right. So the advantage, since we can cover all applications and servers, we can provide full visibility to what a user is doing across all your applications and servers. They access these applications and servers through sign IO, so we have full access to what they are doing, these applications and servers. And we can provide deep visibility to what the user did across applications. Also, we can provide what a group of users or your entire remote workforce is doing in real-time, if they're doing any violations or if there are patterns of behavior or behavior-based analytics. So we can provide deep visibility to your entire remote workforce.

Andrew Monaghan [00:15:49]:

And when you show the product to your prospects for the first time, what's the one thing? They usually kind of stop and go, wow, that's pretty cool right there.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:15:59]:

I think that there are different aspects. First of all, from an end-user point of view, they don't really have to chase devices to put agents in them. So that relieves the It staff significantly. From an end-user point of view, they are no longer tethered to a single device. So they are not getting frustrated if they forgot the device or they lost the device and they have less downtime. And I think that the third aspect from Its perspective is this deep visibility that we can provide. We can actually record the entire session that goes beyond just logging all the access and all the violations, et cetera. And that goes a long way from a security standpoint to do the forensics of an attack, let's say, or also from a training or troubleshooting standpoint as well for It leaders who are doing, let's say, application rollout. They can understand what sort of friction they are having or what they are doing wrong and train their users thereby sort of boosting productivity.

Andrew Monaghan [00:17:01]:

And do they see all that in the first demo or do you hold that back a little bit to the second meeting or the third meeting?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:17:08]:

Yeah, usually we show the live demo in the first meeting itself because it's so easy for us to do demos since there are no deployments or anything. So we can easily showcase the full functionality in the first meeting itself and we can actually do the POC for them also within a single meeting as well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:17:32]:

I'm intrigued by that. So first meeting or second meeting, can you have them just open their browser and tell them to go somewhere and let them start playing around like that as a user or do you control it all yourselves in the second meeting?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:17:45]:

Basically, they can do it themselves, so we basically give them an instance dedicated to them and we help them to do the configuration as such. But they are the one in the.

Andrew Monaghan [00:17:59]:

The driving seat leaves the product capabilities to one side. I'm thinking more about the company level now. There are 3400 cybersecurity vendors right now, all with blurring of lines and the same words and it's getting very confusing about where people fit in. I'm kind of wondering how you think about the things that you're doing to rise above that and have people notice what you're doing and want to pay attention to you. What are you doing differently to try and get noticed than everyone else out there? Right?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:18:32]:

Yeah, I think I agree it's quite confusing with all those abbreviations out there. I think the way we are focusing on is the customer problem and what they are facing as opposed to fitting ourselves in a particular category. So we talk in terms of the problem as opposed to different categories that we may belong to. And when we talk to the customers we basically ask what are the challenges that they are facing with their remote workforces? We do not talk in terms of which point solution they have. So that's how we are differentiating ourselves. Our solution goes across categories but ultimately it solves a particular pain point and that's what we are focusing on. And that's basically all our sales messaging stems from that.

Andrew Monaghan [00:19:27]:

I noticed on the web page, I don't think it actually mentions ZTNA because that would probably unfairly put you in the wrong bucket right, even though people might think that's part of what you do.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:19:38]:

Yes, that's right.

Andrew Monaghan [00:19:42]:

DM, before we go any further, let's get to know a bit more about you. I've got a list of questions here and I'm going to ask you to pick three numbers randomly between one and 35, and I'll read out the question they correspond to. Why don't you give me the first number? 1010. What's the first hour of your day like? Every day, the first hour is basically.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:20:07]:

Getting the kids ready to go to school and rushing with their lunch and dropping them off and picking them up. That's what the first hour is.

Andrew Monaghan [00:20:16]:

It's funny, I try and have a very good intentional routine to get my day going right and do the same things all the time. But I'm like you, I've got two kids and two dogs and life gets in the way sometimes. It really does. All right, one more number between one and 35. Let's go with 2020. What is a good book or a good movie that you'd recommend to people?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:20:40]:

Yes, no particular book, but when we started the Journey for Sinodio, I did read Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, and I think that's a very well-written book that I would encourage startups to read, give some good perspectives on the journey ahead.

Andrew Monaghan [00:21:00]:

Yeah, I like that book. It's one of these books that you kind of go back to, right, and you kind of reference and go back to as you experience going from zero to one, you go back and go, yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, I experienced that right?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:21:13]:

Absolutely.

Andrew Monaghan [00:21:14]:

All right, last number. Team one in 35. How about 1515? Is beach or mountains?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:21:21]:

Go with the mountains.

Andrew Monaghan [00:21:24]:

Why mountains?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:21:25]:

Yeah, I love hiking. I love what you discover as you hike up the mountain. The scenery changes, different views, unexpected surprises, some breathtaking views all of a sudden, a bit of a startup journey, and then you are also huffing and puffing at the same time. But there are rewards along the way.

Andrew Monaghan [00:21:48]:

Yeah, I like the analogy there. Yeah. I live in Colorado, so for me, I have no choice. Mountains are the thing here, although I do enjoy the breaks to get ten to the beach once in a while as well. So one important day at a company is when you start the company DM. Another important day is when you win your first real live paying customer. Take us back to that first day at Sonnet and what it was like and the experience that you had as the first PO came in.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:22:18]:

Yeah, it's actually, I think I would say it was not a particular moment but more of a journey. So starting from a prototype to making it to a shippable product, we had our design partners walking step by step along with us and we are definitely grateful to them for their feedback. We constantly evolved and made it better and better and some of those customers are still with us now. They are paid customers and we do have the POS, but I think that it's not one particular moment but the journey and where it was important enough for their customers or their vendors and partners to be onboarded through Sonnet, working from anywhere, including from a plane using Sonnet to access work. So, yeah, I think it sort of definitely gives a lot of joy as we solve customers' use cases.

Andrew Monaghan [00:23:15]:

Tell us about your sales team right now.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:23:18]:

Yeah, we have a sales team of one right now, but we also announced our fundraising that we did, we closed the round in March and we are looking to scale we have onboarded an SDR firm, we have onboarded a head of marketing and we're basically in the process of growing our sales team and scaling our customer acquisition.

Andrew Monaghan [00:23:42]:

So you've got the one seller and you've got the SDR outsourced helping fuel the activity for that one seller. When you hired that first person, were they quite senior or did you go for someone more junior? There are lots of different ways to get into hiring your first salespeople and I'm always intrigued about which way people go and why they do that.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:24:03]:

Yeah, I think we started with a mid-level salesperson and I think that he came through some good recommendations. But more importantly, he came from a company that was having a similar sales motion that we wanted to achieve and so we believed that he would be a good fit. So he's more of a head of sales rather than one seller around which we intend to scale our sales team.

Andrew Monaghan [00:24:36]:

And as you made that move from founder-led sales into having a team, what was your biggest concern?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:24:43]:

I think that when we were doing founder-led sales, we were experimenting. What's the right ICP? Who should we target, the size of the company? And as we got firsthand experience from all those inputs, I think that we've learned enough that we can basically put together something that is repeatable as we scale. Of course, that learning is never enough, so we'll continuously keep learning more. But I think that we are not experimenting as much as before. We know what works, what does not work. And then at this point ready for sales.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:24]:

Were you concerned then about going from experimenting to losing some of the experimenting ability at that point?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:25:31]:

Yeah, it's actually a good question. So right now I'm also heavily involved in the majority of the sales calls and so I do not definitely want to leave touch. We are still early. Seller number two is me. And also while we are selling, it's not just about the sales motion, it's also about understanding the pain points and the use cases so that we can evolve the product further. So, yeah, I'm heavily involved in that. We are not losing any touch right now. At least maybe as we go to sort of the more scaled version of our sales team, then maybe, but we will try to continue to have founders closely work with customers at all points.

Andrew Monaghan [00:26:17]:

And as the person came in to start being the salesperson with your backing, obviously, how did you get them up and running with all the knowledge that was inside your head that needed to come out and somehow come out in a way that they could use it to go talk to people?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:26:31]:

The way we have done it is basically to work closely together. As I said, I'm also a sales guy right now. So we've gone to events together, we've been in the sales calls together and the has learned from me how I'm pitching and how I'm talking about certain things and I've learned from him how he articulates things and so on and so forth. So I think by sort of working very closely together through Osmosis pretty much, we have sort of learned from each other's knowledge base and sort of evolved our sales strategy together.

Andrew Monaghan [00:27:07]:

And then you made the decision that you wanted to do SDR but you wanted to outsource as opposed to insource. Take us back to that decision and how you decided that was the right way to go. Right?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:27:18]:

So I think we are still experimenting. There is an outbound sales motion, but we are also focusing on the inbound sales motion. So there's still a lot of experimentation as to what would work, and what will not work. And so it's easier to sort of outsource our salesperson in the beginning and do more experimentations as to whether the LinkedIn channel works better or email or phone works better. So that allows us the flexibility to experiment before we dive even further and then build our sales team.

Andrew Monaghan [00:27:54]:

So the outsourced SDR then, are they doing inbound and outbound or just outbound?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:28:00]:

They are focused more on the outbound. The inbound, the sort of content-based inbound is something that we are doing ourselves.

Andrew Monaghan [00:28:09]:

And how many months have you been working with the outside company?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:28:12]:

Right now we just engaged with them. So yeah, we will be too early.

Andrew Monaghan [00:28:18]:

To tell whether it's betting in properly or not, right?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:28:21]:

Yeah, sort of the early phases.

Andrew Monaghan [00:28:24]:

Did you pick a company that has experience in cybersecurity? Was that a factor for you or are you looking for just someone who's got the athletes who can do the experimentation with you? Because I'll tell you, let me get it back a little bit. I think sometimes when you go and outsource this, what they need is the more baked playbook, right? They need the what do we say, how do we say it, what's the top questions we're going to get and how do we answer them? Right. They're sometimes not great at experimenting and making up with you as they go along. So I'm kind of intrigued about how you're kind of overcoming that. Is it a company that's used to doing that at early-stage companies or something else?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:29:02]:

Yeah, we did pick a company that has experience in selling to the audience that we wanted to, but at the same time, I think in terms of understanding or answering the questions that the potential customers will ask. As I said, we went through that motion ourselves, doing outbound ourselves, doing the email ourselves, and figuring out what works, and what does not. And we've sort of put together the right content that connects with people that we have FAQ that answers the majority of the questions. And so we are building our content along with the outbound sales motion. So both of them are sort of going hand in hand. So it enables the SDRs to answer because we have built those answers for them and also they can always redirect them to our website where there are answers for the prospects to look at. So it's basically content strategy along with the outbound strategy.

Andrew Monaghan [00:30:01]:

And you must be in an interesting situation because you were a co-founder whose background isn't in sales and reaching out to people and trying to get them to listen to you and engage and things like that. And you had the I don't know, the luxury is the right word, but you had the flexibility of experimentation to try and figure things out. What did you do that didn't work? What do you look back on and go, yeah, I can't believe that we thought that was a good idea in terms of reaching out to people.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:30:26]:

Yeah, I think I'm also experimenting and learning. I do not have a background in sales. So yeah, everything is new to me. So initially we sort of internally set up a way to do email outbound and I was surprised to see how few responses we get through this email outbound. And now we are going to try with the phone outbound. And I think that what we are finding is that content-based engagement might be more effective when we are answering the questions that the customers are posing on LinkedIn or Reddit or any of those. So those conversations seem to be more engaging as opposed to just cold email outreach or cold phone outreach. But I reserve judgment for both email and phone. So that's where we got the SDR from and our learnings are at a smaller scale. We want to see at a higher scale what works and what does not work. And based on the data, we hone our strategy.

Andrew Monaghan [00:31:33]:

Yeah, I suspect that what you'll find is that email continues to go down in effectiveness. I think suddenly we're in a world where everyone is an email genius because Chat GBT helps us craft amazing emails that we send to people. One of the things Chat GBT does not do is make phone sales to people, right? So it's a skill that a lot of people don't like to do for every reason, right? They've got a mental barrier that they feel uncomfortable calling people, they don't know what to say, things like that. So if you've got people who revel in that world of picking up the. Phone. I bet you they'll do better than most for a period of time because everyone else who's a little teeny bit scared of the phone is going to wallow in the world of chat GPT and emails and messages like that and leave it to fewer people making phone calls. So that might work out for a while. I like what you said about the second thing there, but I think these days there are other alternatives. I was talking to someone a CMO yesterday and we were talking about how inbound and outbound are both kind of dwindling in effectiveness and what he brought to me was a new phrase nearbound. So it's all the things except for inbound and outbound. So it's content, it's a community, it's building relationships beyond just a sales relationship and putting yourself in spots where other people go hang out right, that you want to go talk to. I think that's going to be a much more interesting space in the next two or three years. And I've had people on other CEOs on the podcast who've talked about that sort of thing as well and how it's been much more effective for them than just hiring a bunch of SDRs and having them pound the phones and the emails. So I like how you're going in that direction right there. It's not the short game, so if you need a pipeline right now, it's not going to help you out, but it's something that could be effective in the medium and long term.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:33:22]:

Yeah, absolutely, I agree. I think others are learning as well so far and I think that ultimately the product is so simple, we want to sort of engage the customers through a product-led growth or self-service type model. Because if you look at the products that went viral like Slack or Zoom, it was basically they could enable the experience, direct experience of maybe its staff or end users. And I think that's where we are heading as well. I mean, these are early days, but that's basically the goal, to earn the trust either through community-based engagement or through direct product experience.

Andrew Monaghan [00:34:03]:

Well, Liam, I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Sounds like you're in an interesting space trying to carve your way through a minefield of other people's acronyms and other people's trying to characterize the categories that they're it's interesting to see how you're going to thread that needle and get the success that you want to have. If someone wants to continue the conversation or talk about open opportunities, what's the best way to get hold of you?

Dharmendra Mohan [00:34:26]:

Yeah, reach out to me. Either you can book a meeting through Sign IO or reach out to me directly. My email is TM at sign IO so yeah, or just book a meeting or book a meeting for a live demo, all those channels.

Andrew Monaghan [00:34:41]:

Awesome. Well, wish you all the best for this year and into next year as well.

Dharmendra Mohan [00:34:44]:

All right, sounds good. Thank you for having me on your podcast.