Founder Stories: Zylo, a SaaS Management Platform

Zylo CEO Eric Christopher discusses the importance of brand in becoming a category leader.

Transcription
Zylo's an enterprise SaaS management platform where we help businesses manage all of their software subscriptions. It's growing excessively each and every day.

When I was a VP of Sales, I was managing tons of subscriptions. And so having a tool to be able to manage it, we never had anything. So I thought there'd be an opportunity to build something. I was sort of to the point where if I was going to start something on my own, I needed a great system of people around me. Got a lot of people together because some folks here were thinking about it at High Alpha and we got together and spun up this idea and I got so excited about it. I left a really great opportunity that I was with as a VP of Sales to start a business.

So we didn't really know we were building a new category until we kind of walked out and asked customers, "What do you guys do to manage SaaS?" They're like, "We don't do anything." "How big is that problem?" And they're like, "I don't know." And so the big question was how big was that problem? And I think once we got into it and saw how big it was, and no one had the capabilities or any tool set, we knew we were building a category. What was great about High Alpha is we sort of had a little bit of a proprietary strategy. It was ours. We had our network of investors and we had a plan. And so when we snapped together a seed round in a matter of a month, other CEOs that I know are fundraising their seed run around almost perpetually for six months or a year. And that's really hard given you're trying to run a business. So that was one moment where I thought, "Okay, I made the right decision here."

When I think about the studio services you have world-class design. Our logo, our brand that we're today stands apart from everyone by a long shot. So that was really a big deal. People are critical. We had HR. We had someone to help with our people strategy early on, helping with recruiting, helping with job requirements, all those sorts of things. So it's more than back office, right? It's more than just an outsourced vendor. It was actually a lot of strategic stuff. High Alpha establishing that early best-in-class and foundational element. I don't think we'd be where we are without it.