Michal Pisarek: If you’re gonna build on top of Microsoft 365, you have to understand that it’s this constant race it’s not about competing with Microsoft. Like you would be crazy to do that, right? You really need to have the story of.

How can we build on top of the Microsoft 365 platform and provide additional capabilities to help customers get more value out of Microsoft 365.

Jeremy Balius: Hi, welcome to Go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives, and industry Playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market. Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to-market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or a partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is going to market in the Microsoft ecosystem. I’m very excited because I’m joined by Michal Pisarek from Orchestry. Michael is the CEO of Orchestry that helps users and organizations use the right office, 365 tools at the right time with over 10 years of experience in SharePoint and Office 365, as well as being a seven times Microsoft, MVP, and a Microsoft service adoption specialist. Michael is the guy to be talking about this. He’s also the co-founder and former director of a product called Bonsai Intranet, which he’s gonna cover extensively in our conversation. This was a phenomenal conversation, really diving deep on how the concept of a gap within Microsoft 365 was identified.

How that was validated and verified how the founding team took this to market, and then eventually grew it to what it is today. And clearly they’re still on a,, very sharp growth curve there. I think there is a lot of value in this conversation that you’re gonna take away from this. I, myself, have a lot to reflect on and apply to my own life and my own business.

Let’s get straight into this.

Hey Michael. I am so stoked you’re on the show. Welcome to Go to Market Playmakers.

Michal Pisarek: Hey Jeremy. Thank you for having me.

Jeremy Balius: So excited about today’s topic. The theme today is going to market in Microsoft ecosystem. Before we get into all that, I want to go back to your origin story. How did you get your start?

How did you get to where you are today? I.

Michal Pisarek: So, uh, previously to this I had a, a different career. I used to be a chef, uh, and worked in some of Australia’s finest restaurants, uh, including, uh, Tetsuya Restaurant, which is a pretty well-known place there in there in Sydney.

Um, but then. Afterwards. Uh, hospitality is a pretty difficult profession, one might say, right? Lots of hours, lots of, lot, lots of stress. Went back to university, uh, did a computer science, uh, degree, uh, at the University of Western Australia. I. Kind of did engineering for a couple of years and then moved more into the business analysis side.

Uh, and then in 2008, sold everything backpacked around the world, uh, for close to a year. Went all through Southeast Asia and ended up here in Vancouver, Canada. Where I am now, and I’ve been here, I. For the past 17 years and when I came here, uh, I was a broke backpacker as you are after your backpacking adventures.

Uh, and I was like, I need to get into something, right? And what can I basically make the most money in? And there was two things at that time in 2008, which were really popular. One was SAP and one was this thing called SharePoint. And I didn’t really, haven’t, didn’t haven’t heard much of SharePoint, uh, back in Australia.

We used to use a lot of the Atlassian suite, but hadn’t heard much of it. Um, couldn’t find any information about SAP. Um, it was really difficult to find anything. But around SharePoint, there was this huge community of people sharing knowledge. Uh, so I’m like, all right, I’m gonna go and become a SharePoint expert.

So, uh, studied really hard for a couple of weeks. Uh, basically bragged an interview to be honest with you. Um, and then did the interview and, and, and got the job. And I’ve really been, uh, in love with kind of the Microsoft SharePoint and now Microsoft 365 space since then. Um, so a bit of a different origin story.

I, I, I guess, but it was something that was really well suited to my skillset, which is. I wasn’t smart enough or technical enough to be a, a developer. Um, I was kind of could understand people and talk to people from a business requirements perspective, so that Microsoft 3, 6, 5 platform with a lot of those configuration options and, and kind of low code, no code solutions, uh, at that time suited me, suited me really well, and I’ve been there ever since.

Jeremy Balius: You’re the breadth of experience. You know, I, I, I have a soft spot for anyone who starts out in hospitality, uh, particularly fine dining, because you learn this level of impeccable service that I find just resonates in people’s li throughout their lives. And, uh, and so I would imagine that start, uh, really set you up, um, and then, you know, your global experiences to then bring that into 365 in the, in the Microsoft ecosystem is so awesome. So tell me, what was the spark behind ry? Where did that. Start.

Michal Pisarek: Yeah. So, um, previously I had another company actually before this Jeremy. Okay. So, um, started off a consulting company here in Vancouver. Um, really more around the intranet side of things called, called Dynamic Out.

When we, we quickly found that we. We were doing intranets for a lot of, a lot of clients and back then a lot of organizations were doing these very heavy customized intranet projects. You know, developing on Microsoft, uh, developing on SharePoint, on-prem as, as it were, a little bit of Microsoft 365, but a lot of custom expensive development to create these intranets, which were ultimately.

Very similar from customer to customer, right? I mean, if we went into a customer, we could kind of tell you without even asking you any questions, the type of information and content you might want on your homepage, for example, right? Or the common use cases that employees are, are, are, are gonna get. So we quickly kind of pivoted that kind, uh, and created a product called Bonsai, which was an intranet platform built on top of SharePoint.

Um, and really the value proposition around that was instead of taking, you know. Weeks or months typically to build all of these custom intranet components. Why don’t we go to market, have all of these Conan components built out, but also have a delivery process built out around that with best, uh, with, with best practices as well.

So we had that company for about four years. Um, lots of great success. Two of our customers, one, uh, Nielsen Norman top 10 intranet awards using Bonsai, which which was amazing. Big, big US customers. Expedia was one of our customers, am a MD, the Chipmaker, for instance. Um, and that company was acquired in 2018, so there was about a five year journey.

Uh, had a bit of a break. Got a dog, if you’ve seen my LinkedIn, Archie features prominently, uh, had a baby and kind of got, got bored, but. What happened during that time was teams came out and all of the same kind of challenges and issues that organizations used to have with SharePoint in terms of sprawl and permissions and duplicated content really started happening in teams and was happening much quicker because teams made it even easier to go and create a team and, and, and do these things.

Also, around that time, uh, COVID happened. Which we were really lucky. So we kind of had this idea for, uh, for a business. And the original idea with Orchestry was, well, how can we help organizations kind of stem that flow of, uh, teams and SharePoint sites sprawl by offering a more streamlined way for users to be able to request teams and SharePoint sites, but also add additional governance rules, which Microsoft didn’t have.

Things like naming conventions so people don’t create teams called one or Bob’s team. That sort of sort of stuff, approval processes and everything else, uh, did that started orchestrate with, uh, two of my other co-founders, uh, launched in probably September, 2020 and this was really when remote work started.

It was really when, you know, a lot of organizations who were hesitant to move from Microsoft 365 and had a three year roadmap. That roadmap, Jeremy went from three years to over a weekend, right? When everyone went remote, it was crazy, crazy time. Right. Um, so we were really, really fortunate in terms of where, where that happened.

And again, you know, we saw, we saw that solution really, really, um, hit. Early on because a lot of these organizations, maybe they were on teams and SharePoint, and again, we were just on, on SharePoint online, on the Microsoft teams online, uh, really kind of resonate with, Hey, we’ve got a lot of the stuff, you know, we need to stop the, the, the sprawl around these particular pieces.

But ultimately, the solution or the vision for Orchestry was to create a complete Microsoft 3, 6, 5. Uh, governance and management platform. Like I always believe that Microsoft 365, and Microsoft in general creates amazing capabilities. Uh, they keep bringing them out, but there’s always gaps and there’s always going to be gaps.

I mean, I think the reason for that is there’s just so much stuff coming out from Microsoft 365, constantly. I mean, look at what’s happening now with copilot and everything else. Um, and I ultimately think that for a lot of organizations, they need additional help from a third party tool to manage. All this stuff.

So we started Orchestry off really around the creation side of the challenges that organizations were having. Then we moved more into the management side, so things like reporting to understand the usage of teams, SharePoint sites, fever, engage communities, adding archival capabilities on that. And since then, over the last five years, orchestra has really grown to kind of an end-to-end platform doing things like security Now.

Uh, doing things like user use, user adoption, but ultimately the main goal is how can we help organizations better manage Microsoft 365 so they can get much more out of it. And in particular now with the whole push for copilot and making sure that you’re secure, making sure that your content is, is, uh, correct.

Um, I think that’s more important than ever.

Jeremy Balius: I firmly agree with your view that the big end of the ISVs can’t be all things to all people and don’t want to be in many ways. And it requires partners to come around , and solve these gaps that just don’t become a priority.

On that note, I’d really like to dive into that component just briefly in, in, in recognizing that there was a gap around the sprawl and the provisioning. And, uh, I, I, I forget what you mentioned, a bulk onboarding perhaps. Can you go a bit deeper into what was that gap like? Where, where was the pain point lying?

Is it on , the user’s end in order to manage, , people moving remotely? What, what was that initial pain point that led you guys to say, Hey, we can actually start a whole business around this.

Michal Pisarek: Yeah, the initial pain point, um, was kind of twofold and, and I think the reason that Orchestrate has been, you know, successful so far is we really view adoption and governance.

As really as two sides of the same coin. And really it is that merger of IT operations and your content owners or your end users there, Jeremy. So, you know, there’s a lot of tools which are just IT focused tools. Yes. But I think especially now, what we heard when we do our, when we did our initial research was from the end user perspective, their frustration was.

You know, I want to find, uh, where we are doing a project. I have no idea whether it’s a team, a SharePoint site, a group in someone’s OneDrive, um, you know, a Veva engaged kit community. I have no idea. Also, I have no idea what I should be creating because one of the challenges, and it’s still, uh, you a apparent for Microsoft 3, 6, 5, there’s like a million ways to do a million things.

And the challenge was, well, uh, as an end user. We think that our end users are experts, so we’re gonna give them a SharePoint site, for instance, Jeremy, and they’re gonna go and drag on web parts and create customized lists and understand that, you know, if they want to use task management, they should use planner rather than than a list.

The truth is people don’t care. I mean, they don’t really give a crap, they just want the quickest way to be able to to to do that. So when we talk to people really early on, we found from users the same thing. I just want to go somewhere central. If I wanna do a project, or if I wanna respond to an RFP, or if I wanna onboard an employee, for instance, I just wanna be able to click a button and have this thing built out for me.

Right? It might not be perfect, but it’s much further on than you know. I would have. Then a blank SharePoint site or a blank team, for instance. Through, through, through the concept of of, of templates on the IT admin side, their challenge was, you know, we might be a thousand person organization. We got 20,000 teams in SharePoint sites.

Right. 80% of them after a month don’t get used. Mm-hmm. And we’ve got 250 sites with test in the name because people just go in and they’re like, this is interesting. I’m gonna, you know, create something called, uh, test. Yes. So from their standpoint, it was a lot around security. It wa it was a lot around com uh, compliance, but it was actually just the, the kind of simple point of managing all this stuff and Microsoft didn’t really give you an option to control that.

It still really doesn’t either, and a lot of people think that’s a huge fallacy, but I actually don’t think that’s an issue on, on Microsoft side. I mean, if you think of it as Microsoft, Jeremy, their goal is for you to get your content. Into their cloud as quick as possible with as little friction as possible, right?

Mm mm Um, now there could be controls after the fact, but really that’s what Microsoft goal is and they do a very, very good job. Some, I’d say too good is making that process super easy. So when we started Orchestry, we had these ideas. Probably spoke to about 50 potential customers or so. Um, and since this was the second time doing this, you know, had a little bit more experience than the first time.

But I found really quickly on, everyone thought it was an issue and everyone thought it was a challenge and everyone thought the solution was gonna be awesome. Turns out people just tell you that because everyone’s really, really nice. So my thing was, if you think this is a great solution, we haven’t built it, we’ll have it built in six months.

Would you be able to pay for the solution now? And then it’s a very different conversation with people. Mm. Right. Because you’re asking them for money. They’re like, well, you know, not sure if we really need

Jeremy Balius: it.

Michal Pisarek: Yeah, yeah. It does.

Jeremy Balius: It hurt badly

Michal Pisarek: enough. Exactly. Right. So is, you know, are we selling a vitamin or are we, are we selling a, a a a painkiller here?

Mm-hmm. So, and what we really found was, you know, if we could get 10% of those people that early on to commit some money to a product that didn’t exist. You know, three people just kind of making something up. And then we could, for all intents purposes, be running a huge hoax, but we found that even if we could get 10% of people to put some funds in, then we knew there was something there.

Um, and that’s essentially what, what, what happened. It really allowed us to understand those, uh, those, those, those challenges. And again, then we could build kind of orchestra from, from there. And that’s what we’ve done with a lot of our feature development. Uh, as, as, as well. We’ve really tried to understand.

Where Microsoft is going and try to understand, uh, where organizations need to be as well. And they can be very different places where Microsoft is and where organizations are, we’ve found, can be worlds apart of where they they need to be or where organizations think they are.

Jeremy Balius: Fascinating. So you, you effectively went to market with the idea first.

And then validated that idea with commitment and then built it.

Michal Pisarek: Correct? Yep.

Jeremy Balius: Wow. Okay, so, so you validate the concept. You spend six months building the MVP. How do you take that to market? Is it just to those pre-committed or do you then start a launch process?

Michal Pisarek: Yeah, so we start a launch, uh, process and. I mean, I’ll be honest, with startups, just like hospitality, Jeremy, you gotta bust your ass.

I mean, it is, it is what it is. So there’s, you know, funny stories around Orchestry where, you know, the first year and a half, uh, I was the sales guy, you know, I was doing marketing, I was doing webinars, I was doing support, I was doing everything. It, it got to the point where it was a little bit ridiculous where we actually made up.

Other users in our tenant because what would happen is someone would jump on, I would do the demo and you know, we were dealing with some fairly decent sized customers, really, companies that were too large that shouldn’t really be talking to us at all. You know, our first customer was two and a half thousand seats.

Right. Which is a pretty reasonable size, size, size organizations. They’re, they’re still a customer. Absolutely. Um, but. We kind of had this idea and then, uh, you know, we were kind of doing a little bit of a, a little bit of everything. Go to market was pretty much the standard stuff. We had a website. Um, I am a huge proponent of LinkedIn.

Uh, was, and still, still am. So using some LinkedIn automation tools, getting some social stuff going through LinkedIn, uh, also, and then really where we first started with orchestra, we. Um, was really around trying to get a partner network set, set up. So again, from my previous company we had a partner Net partner network.

I kind of understood that Microsoft 365 partners were also helping their customers with the common set of challenges. I. Of course partners didn’t wanna build everything, custom, custom provisioning solutions and management solutions and and writing scripts. So we really thought that orchestra could be a good fit for a lot of partners to help ’em drive additional services revenue there.

So for the first, I would say year, it was just that it was a lot of webinars. We found those extremely useful. It was going to kind of partners. There was no in-person events. Remember this was 20 20, 20 21, so no one was going anywhere, which was actually, was an advantage for us. Um, ’cause we didn’t have money to fly anywhere anyway.

Um, but it, it really was a lot on LinkedIn. Um, you know, a lot of thought leadership type of material. Uh, uh, a lot of marketing as well. You know, we didn’t have any money. We, we were completely bootstrapped. We didn’t have any money to spend on things like Google ads for, for, for instance. So a lot of it was really around creating great content, publishing that through the website on LinkedIn as well.

And then finally, um, doing a lot of webinars of which we continue to do today, but slightly different, you know, instead of the typical webinar, which really most of the time is, you know, come to our webinar to learn about X topic. You know, it’s some dude who talks about X topic for like 10 minutes, and the other 50 is here’s a, you know, plan Toine demo of my product.

Jeremy Balius: Right.

Michal Pisarek: Um, right. And that drives me crazy. But for us, it was really around trying to educate the, the, the market. And what we found with orchestra in particular was a lot of people, uh, had those challenges. They knew, but they couldn’t. Put a, uh, kind of a name to the pain that they have. Mm-hmm. Right. So it was really around educating, hey, if you’ve got issues that people can’t find anything, or if you’ve got issues around storage, for instance, you might have lifecycle management issues or you might have, um, you know, governance issues, um, provisioning issues.

Uh, but yeah, the first year and a half was just the three of us really, um, until we got to about 50 customers. Um, and then we had enough revenue to start hiring. I. Additional people and the company grew from there.

Jeremy Balius: That’s so interesting. So initially the, uh, the pain point wasn’t necessarily articulated or recognized.

By your prospects. You needed to articulate it for them. For them to have the aha moment that, hang on. Yeah, this is an issue and I do want to find out more. So you’re needing to reach them first, tell them they have a problem, them to recognize it, and then that starts the the sales cycle momentum. That’s fascinating.

Really, really interesting.

Michal Pisarek: Yeah, it was a little bit different maybe than, um, some of the other, uh, approaches. Now keep in mind, you know, I came from the consulting world, so we kind of knew that this was a challenge because, I mean, Jeremy, you work in Microsoft 3, 6 5. You ask any admin, you know, I. How is it like administrating Microsoft 3, 6, 5, 90 9% of people are gonna say it’s a, it’s a nightmare.

Right? Right. It’s a challenge. And the same thing, same thing with end users. I, I, I don’t think that’s, that, that’s not, not known, but it really is, how can we articulate that pain and how can we can provide a solution that ultimately is gonna provide, uh, customers value. So there was a lot of work, a lot of, a lot of education around that.

And, you know. Three, four years ago, it was really around. We have, we have had this huge rush to remote work. How can we help you streamline operations when all of your employees are now working remotely in this new world? Now in particular, it’s all around co-pilot, which is how can we get you ready? How can we get you effective using all of these AI tools, uh, within Microsoft 3, 6, 5.

Jeremy Balius: I really want to get onto that. Uh, but before we do, um, take me through, you go through the first wave you onboard 50, uh, presumably highly targeted customers or partners that, uh, either came from your previous lives or who were known to you in some capacity. In, tell me about that second wave. You, you start hiring, you’ve got money to start expanding.

What is the expansion roadmap within the community? Uh, after revenue?

Michal Pisarek: Yeah. So, uh, it really is, I mean, we needed to expand in areas. Where we had weaknesses in, so getting marketing people, for example, or getting a sales person. So it wasn’t me doing all of the demos for, for, for instance. Um, so it was a lot around that side.

You know, luckily my two co-founders, so our, our, our, our COO, who’s Denise, who’s my wife, she was previous, previously with me at my previous startup as well. And then we had Sarah, who’s our CTO. Um, you know, we’ve had kind of a little bit of experience in this, so on the operations side and the technical side, um, we could do it relatively well, but in order to scale we had to look at things like sales.

Um, marketing was a big one, uh, partners as as well. So we got a partner manager to kind of manage the partners and bring on new partners for Microsoft 3 6, 5. Uh, and slowly over time, kind of the business grew, so, uh. You know, we kind of bootstrapped the company for a, for, for two and a half years. Uh, then we got some seed funding, uh, as well.

So that helped a little bit. And it’s really nice because when you’re bootstrapping, it’s very difficult to hire before revenue unless, you know, unless you’re one of these AI startups like, you know, cursor for instance, which went from zero to 30 million in like six months. Fortunately, that doesn’t typically, it’s typically happen, but it’s, it’s really hard and you’re always behind ’cause you’re always like, wow, I wanna hire this person.

But I can’t close this deal. You know, we have to close, close this deal first, and, and it becomes annoying. So that was really, really positive when we did, kind of did our seed round, uh, through there. And that gave us, again, the opportunity to be able to hire a little bit ahead of revenue, like six months to a year ahead, knowing that we would catch up with those deals late later on.

And today. We’re about 45 people. Um, most of the people based in North America, we’ve got a couple of people, uh, within the uk. Uh, also vast majority are in, are, are are in Canada, but we’ve got a pretty sizable US contingent now as well. Um, but it really was, you know, I didn’t want to do the. And especially remember in 21, 22, if anyone was in the startup land, you could get funded for any crazy idea because money was cheap.

Um, you know, everyone was going through, through the, through the roof. So I didn’t really know anything about VC funding, to be honest with you, Jeremy, like we had never done that process at the previous company, so I didn’t really even consider it. Um, but I also didn’t want the company where, you know, let’s get 10 million bucks.

And burn through it in two years, and either in two years we’re rich or the company’s gone. And I don’t wanna run my business like, like that. I know that’s a very popular way to, to, to be able to do that, but you know, I view this as a much more longer term thing. So we wanted to grow it slowly. Um, so that’s why we can kind of went down more of the slower, slower route.

But again, what I think it’s, it’s a much better way to build a much more sustainable business. And we’re lucky that we did that way because if we took. Funding in 2020 at these ridiculous multiples. I mean, there was, you know, 20, 30 times a r multiples then. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and we didn’t do too well. Trying to get a bridge around now is really, really difficult.

Mm-hmm. And you can see the carnage in the, the, the VC market around those. So I think we made, we made the right decision there.

Jeremy Balius: Tell me about,, as you, you mentioned you hire a partner manager, you’re starting to grow the channel. What does a, what does an ideal partner look like for orchestra?

Is it an MSPA var? Who’s in that space, who’s understanding, orchestrate, and then reselling onsell, baking it into their services? What’s that look like?

Michal Pisarek: Yeah, so it’s, it’s, it’s definitely, uh, a system integrator. Okay. So it’s definitely someone that’s providing professional services around Microsoft, 3, 3, 6, 5.

For us, the ideal partner is. You know, a partner, um, greater than 50 seats. And the reason for that is typically once they’re greater than 50 seats, um, they have some marketing and they have some sales capacity, uh, uh, through there. Even. They’re doing a lot of work around Microsoft 365, um, and they’re looking to kind of streamline that process.

Also, the other thing that we’ve found over the last couple of years as well is, uh, partners or Microsoft si, which have some sort of reoccurring services component. To it as well. And we’ve found, again, over the last couple of years, you know, every Microsoft partner that’s doing project based consulting is trying to move to more of a reoccurring services revenue model.

’cause again, the revenue is much more predictable. You get closer relationships with, with your customers. And we’ve really found that could, you know, RY has a really great role to play in that, um, with a product that we have Beacon, which is like a monthly kind of reoccurring, um, kind of health check.

Product through, through there. But you know, we’ve got really successful partners that we signed early on, which are only 10 people, but every deal they do has an orchestra component to it. Um, and we’ve got some very, very large partners as well in the, in the, in the thousands that do, that do really well.

But ultimately I think the part type of partners that we look for are the types of partners that. Aren’t going to market Jeremy and selling ry, they’re selling a service or an outcome with RY as the vehicle to drive that. Mm. So, so at the moment, you know, it’s a lot around obviously security and copilot readiness.

Um. It’s fascinating for us because we’d always talked about Microsoft 365 governance being really, really important and I think a lot of organizations understood that governance was, was important, but it wasn’t particularly sexy, so I’ve never really bothered doing it. Last couple of years though, with Copilot, all of a sudden we’ve changed Microsoft 3 6 5 governance.

We’ve given it a much sexier title called Copilot Readiness, and all of a sudden everyone is interested in that. Right. CIOs, CEOs not interested in governance, very interested about getting ready for for ai. Yes, and it’s. It’s funny for us ’cause we’re still doing the same activities, we’ve just re re rebranded it.

So at the moment our most successful partners are the ones which are really getting organizations ready for copilot from a security and from a governance perspective. Um, and, you know, making sure that. These companies are ready to start bringing in tools like Microsoft 3 6 5 Co, uh, Microsoft 3 6 5 copilot, or the plethora of other AI tools that Microsoft is offering.

Jeremy Balius: So what I’m hearing is, is that the system integrators that are the most ideal, you didn’t go to them with. A pitch for additional revenue opportunity to onsell or co-sell Ry. You’re coming in as an example with, Hey, you want to help your clients with their copilot readiness or their AI readiness more generally.

We have a very efficient process. For you to achieve that. And we have all the numbers that stack up to make that a profitable, uh, margin for you. And that’s from what I’m here, is how you were able to attract such awesome and sizeable partners.

Michal Pisarek: Yeah, I, I think it’s a little bit of both Jeremy. Okay. Like for a lot of our partners, um, you know, they look at RY as being able to provide additional revenue streams.

So, you know, maybe they’re. A consulting company that typically does, does intranet, so they do the power platform for, for, for instance, their customers are asking them about governance, asking about copilot readiness. Orchestra can come in and, and help them with that. For other partners though, the main challenge that they had, or two main challenges, I.

Is either they can’t find skilled enough people to do the work. And that has really become evident over the last year. Wow. I always make a joke that every partner is a purview expert now, and that’s absolute crap. ’cause no one knew about purview. About, about, to, about a year and a half ago. Right now, every partner is a purview expert because it’s the hot thing, because of copilot readiness and, and, and security for example.

Those people are very, very hard to find. With orchestra, we’ve kind of built that platform where. It’s not just showing you information, it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t just show you the symptoms. It helps you diagnose and it offers you the cure as, as well. So you can use less technical resources to be able to get this worked up.

Which can be, which can be really handy. But the other part that we see constantly with orchestra, just with some of the capabilities that were built into the platform. We don’t view co-pilot readiness as a, as a project. We really view it as an initiative or a mindset that organizations need not only to get ready, but to stay ready over, over, over time.

And that’s a great opportunity for partners to come in, do an initial assessment or do an initial project, but also add on reoccurring services towards the end there. And that what we’ve found really resonates with Microsoft Partners ’cause it can be a completely new. Dependable revenue stream where, you know, maybe it’s a couple of thousand bucks a month or a thousand bucks a month.

Once the project’s done, they have these reoccurring services going on. Super valuable for the customer, but super valuable for the partner as well because they can almost view those, um, you know, view that reoccurring services a great way to provide value. But obviously it offers up more, uh, opportunities for consulting revenue and every, and, and, and everything else.

So that’s what we’ve found has really resonated with our partner network. This idea that we can use orchestra on a project basis, but we can also use it to create a new, a new revenue stream, typically around some sort of reoccurring revenue model. And like I said before. Everyone wants to get out of project based services.

’cause it’s difficult. Yeah. It’s difficult to find people. Right. Revenue’s up or down. Um, you know, I’m not sure, you know, I used to run a consulting company, like it’s hard ’cause there’s either too much work or there’s not enough. There’s never a happy medium. Yeah. Ever. Right. So having some sort of reoccurring model really makes sense.

And with the way that I think subscription software is kind of being bought now, it lends itself more to that model of having more of a kind of reoccurring revenue. But also I really believe that customers are looking for Microsoft partners, not just to act as break fix, but really to act as strategic advisors, right?

And that’s again, where orchestra can, can help with the tool and can help manage that relationship closer with, uh, with the partners.

Jeremy Balius: So the partners wind up almost adopting Ry into the DNA of their go to market. Firstly, because you’re unlocking MRR. And you’re enabling them to get outta the lumpy projects and having an a RR mentality almost, you’re adding value by keeping them in the business and therefore they’re in the room when other things pop up and they’re able to land and expand in other ways down the track.

Beyond that baseline, MRR. Plus you’re also shifting the partner up into the strategic advisory relationship conversation as opposed to an order taking, um, break fix that. That’s a, that’s a pretty seriously cool route to market to offer that for partners. Have you, have you toyed with the idea of going all in on partner only?

Michal Pisarek: We, we have, yeah. So it’s funny. So, so one of our seed investors is Brian Cook, who used to be the CEO of Nintex. Um, you know, very large, very well known. I-S-I-S-V. And their model was, uh, was partner only. They never did any services. They never did any direct, um, for us, probably about 60% of our business is through the partner channel.

Uh, 40% is direct. We don’t offer any, any services though. But what we found Jeremy, is a lot of these larger organizations and these enterprise organizations that, that, that we work with, they kind of want that relationship directly with, with the vendor. So what we would typically do is. We can transact on the licenses directly through ry.

They can get access to our customer success team, but we also bring in our partner network for them to provide services. Um, I don’t think we could go all in. I. Just with the partner only play at the moment. I think there’s always gonna be a little bit of a bit of a mix. Um, but definitely for us, I mean, the partner relationships and the partner network that we have has been fundamental in, you know, keeping orchestra alive and, and making us grow.

And we love working with Microsoft partners because again. We get to get so much information from partners as well. What’s working, what isn’t working? Yeah. What are you hearing from your customers? And especially as a small startup, the nice thing is I don’t have to hire 20 salespeople. Right. What I can do is get two partners I.

If they have 10 salespeople each, then if we can empower them, they can go out and act as that sales force for, for ry. So it’s, it’s worked really well for us. Uh, current currently, uh, but probably a little bit too early to go partner only.

Jeremy Balius: Well, it sounds to me like there is a fairly clear and definitive enterprise who doesn’t want.

SI involved coming direct. We’ve got the partner offer and it seems like there’s very low competition there, uh, in terms of competing with partners. I think that’s all very straightforward. Now, RYS just announced that you’ve been added to the Azure marketplace. Congratulations on that. I know that would’ve been a huge effort.

Tell me about what your roadmap is, uh, there in Microsoft Marketplaces.

Michal Pisarek: Yeah, so, um, we were never in the marketplace up till up till now, so I know that sounds really, really odd. Uh, we just didn’t really have, have time to do that. So there’s, there’s two things. Um, a RY was just added to the Microsoft Pegasus program for startups.

Also, not sure when this is going out, Jeremy, but we’re making the announcement hopefully next week. So I. The Pegasus Program for Startups, um, invite only program for, for Microsoft that really helps startups like ours get in front of Microsoft Sales teams get in front of their customers, and it’s all based around enterprise customers, which for us is great.

Great as well. So as part of that program, what Microsoft allows you to do is to become co-sell ready, straight away. But you need to have an offer within the actual, uh, marketplace there. Um, so that’s really why the offer went out onto the, onto the marketplace there. You know, Orchestry is instantly co-sell ready.

We don’t have to have a, a, a, a minimum sales, sales target. And I think for us at, at the moment. Working with some of these larger enterprise customers. You know, if they transact through the Azure marketplace, we can just transact through the customer’s Mac a agreement, which is a huge deal for us also. Um, and just to get a little bit more visibility through there, like at the moment, you know, the majority of the relationships we’ve had are either direct customer to customer or orchestrate to part to partner.

Um, but we’re really interested to see what we can do. And again. On the Microsoft side, ’cause we’re a partner also, you know, the Microsoft sales folks really want you to transact through the Azure marketplace. There’s a ton of advantages there also, uh, uh, for us. Um, so even financially for us it makes a lot of sense because there’s a whole bunch of incentives.

Um, you know, what Microsoft keeps is super low for a marketplace. I think it’s like 2.9 or three. Percent, which is super low to be honest with you, because if we were gonna bill out through Stripe or a Chargebee, they take 2.9% off the top anyway, right? And then you need to pay for an additional sub subscription.

So for us, it’s kind of early days, but definitely the, the driver of that is through the Pegasus program. Start transacting through them, through, through the marketplace. Allow Microsoft reps to be able to, you know, decrement customers Mac agreements through that, through that as well. And then the other thing is just how many bonuses you can get transacting, whether it’s, you know, money back from Microsoft, additional Azure, uh, credits, um, or, you know, marketing incentives as, as, as well.

Jeremy Balius: Congratulations on all that movement. It’s. Onwards and upwards from what it sounds like and, and, and really exciting to, to watch that play out. I’ve got one more question for you. I’m really keen for your advice, uh, to founders, to leaders who are looking, uh, to launch into the Microsoft community.

What’s something that you’ve learned that would add immediate value for leaders to think about as they’re growing a service in the ecosystem?

Michal Pisarek: I think Microsoft is a really unique space. So if it’s a service, I guess it’s a little bit different. Jeremy, if it’s something like an ISV product, yeah. If you’re gonna build on top of Microsoft and Microsoft 3, 6, 5 in in particular, you have to understand that it’s this constant race and you’re being pulled in multiple different directions.

You’re being pulled in what Microsoft is doing and what they want you to do. You’re being pulled in what customers are doing as well, and then your vision for the actual product. So you really need to have a good understanding of customer needs. Where Microsoft is and where Microsoft is heading, because otherwise, if you don’t, and we’ve seen this before, which with other startups, you’re just gonna build stuff that either Microsoft has already or Microsoft is gonna build within the next six to 12 months.

So really understanding the, the, the space really understanding, um, you know, where Microsoft is going and what Microsoft is building and from a product standpoint, you. It’s not about competing with Microsoft. Like you would be crazy to do that, right? And if you go to market and say, Hey, we’ve got this solution, it does it better than Microsoft.

The way that Microsoft does it is. Is crap. You’re just not gonna get anywhere. You’re not gonna get anywhere with partners. You’re not gonna get anywhere with Microsoft in, in, in particular. And maybe with customers it might resonate short term, but I don’t think long term it’s, it’s going to work. You really need to have the story of.

How can we build on top of the Microsoft 3 6 5 platform and provide additional capabilities to help customers get more value out of Microsoft 3 6 5. So the first tip I would have is if you’re going down this route, particularly as you know, an ISV offering. Really understand where Microsoft is, where Microsoft is going, and those pain points.

Also, the other thing, and we did this terribly, by the way, Jeremy, so I’m no expert in in this. We didn’t have any real relationship with Microsoft over the past four years. I know that sounds terrible, but we just didn’t. Right. We didn’t have time. Um, you know, we didn’t have a partner development manager.

We didn’t have anything in the Azure Mark marketplace. We did things like CO for, for, for instance. The only thing, the only reason we did that so we can get the solution des designation, like we didn’t go through all of the mechanics. We’ve started to do that in the last six months and I really wish that we did that earlier.

Mm-hmm. Because ultimately. You know, you might think that Microsoft is all about selling Microsoft stuff. But what they’re really after is how can we make this process of, at the moment deploying copilot easier for our customers? So really working with Microsoft, understanding what Microsoft is, is, is doing again, with kind of working with those sales reps and so forth, is something that’s really, really, I, uh, really, really important.

It’s something that we are learning at the moment to, to do. Again, the Pegasus program has been great, great, great for that, but ultimately. You know, if you can help sales reps be successful and customers be, be successful, that Microsoft relationship can really drive a huge amount of business your way.

Because I think within Microsoft in in particular, the different roles talk. If you get a win with a customer early on, you can get a huge amount of business there. But. I’ll just caution you. It’s a really tough nut to crack, right. Because every ISB and there’s hundreds of them in Microsoft and even outside, is trying to talk to these reps.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Michal Pisarek: Uh, and that, that they’re trying to get this time. So it can be really, really difficult.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. I’ve seen that juggle a lot of vying for attention. This has been so valuable. I am sure there’s so much that listeners are gonna take away from this. Appreciate all the openness and candor and telling your story and, um, and providing some helpful tips and tricks.

Thanks for coming on the show, Michael.

Michal Pisarek: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jeremy.