What are typical use cases for Calixa and how do users integrate it with other tools, particularly CRMs?

I think it's a failure if that's how people use it. As you're getting going and building out your capabilities, you may have a smaller set of functionality, so that's how it is. But I think that's ultimately a failure.

There's a great tweet that I like from the CEO of Amplitude: basically, every product is fundamentally an analytics product. No one wants to think of it as an analytics product. It's really, fundamentally: what customer pain point are you solving or what workflows are you building on top of it?

This was one of the challenges of pitching Calixa originally. I was like, "Hey, you need the BI component, but you also need this workflow component and this automation component.” All these three things need to come together to be a very powerful platform, because you want to do as much as possible with one tool. You don't want to be jumping around.

You need to have analytic or BI-like capabilities, but they have to be easy to use and seamlessly integrated and have an opinionated view. I'd say BI is super flexible. I don't think we want to be super flexible. I want to be appropriately flexible but opinionated as to what customer teams and SaaS companies need.

I think that's an opportunity we have as we think about SaaS CRM. Building an opinionated view for SaaS companies is an opportunity for us, because CRMs today have to handle oil and gas companies as well as they handle a SaaS company. What if we just said, "Fuck, I don't care about oil and gas." Nothing wrong with them. It's just that we can do something very powerful if we focus on solving the problems of SaaS companies.