High-Impact B2B Product Strategy, Integrations, and Exits With a 2X Founder Billion Dollar Tech

“There is no more complex strategy game in the world that I know of than building companies,” says Michael Zuerchner, CEO and Co-Founder of Prismatic. He would know. At age 19, he started a software company whose product integrated 600 tasks to be used in all aspects of law enforcement, such as jail door systems to alarm systems for putting dots on maps when 911 calls were made. It started as a summer job getting his hometown’s law office records software up to date, and then he and a friend bootstrapped that software into a fully-fledged business. It became unsustainable once they scaled. After leaving the company, the two started Prismatic to solve the problems they encountered in the first place.
Michael explains that integration platforms have been historically focused on integrating the things the company uses together, taking all the things that are in their ecosystem and making the data flow well among them. Prismatic offers a complete iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, solution for your whole organization to make everything run more smoothly and at optimum potential. 
In this episode, Michael discusses the unique challenges of running a sophomore company and the problem with overestimating your experience and underestimating the variables of starting a company. 
Quotes:

“At the end of the day you’re going to have to do what is going to serve your target market the best. (4:32-4:37 | Michael)
“We’re all obviously end users of B2B software in some form or fashion, and wouldn’t we all like it if there was just one end-all answer that was the magic solution and we didn’t have to deal with all of this? If that could exist that would be amazing. I think the hard thing, of course, is building that one true thing that meets the demand of enough of the market.” (9:21-9:40 | Michael)
“I don’t know very many people who were successful who didn’t love the game so much that they wanted to go right back into it.” (16:30-16:39 | Michael)
“For all the people that are out there grinding right now, the beach is not all it’s cracked up to be, just sitting around doing nothing. It’s nice to have freedom, one hundred percent. However, go do nothing for a month; it gets tiring really quickly.” (17:14-17:34 | Brendan)
“There is a fundamentally different problem if you are a sophomore company. I don’t need to integrate together the things that I use—or maybe I do, but that’s a separate thing. I need to connect the product I sell to the other products my costumers use.” (19:52-20:07 | Michael)
One of the challenges in our market, and something that I think we do well, is doing a good job for both of those personals. I think we have a solution that speaks very well to product folks and the problems they have, and a product that’s very friendly to developers without turning off the rest of the organization. And I think that’s a fine line to walk.” (32:28-32:50 | Michael) 



Connect with Brendan Dell:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendandell/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendanDell
Instagram: @thebrendandell
TikTok: @brendandell39

Buy a copy of Brendan’s Book, The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780578210926 
Connect with Michael Zuercher:
Website: http://prismatic.io/
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-zuercher/

Check out Michael Zuercher’s recommended books:

• No Man’s Land: Where Growing Companies Fail by Doug Tatum: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781591842491


Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumbert: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781119723660

• The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Growing More Profitably  by Thomas Nagle and Reed Holden: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-strategy-and-tactics-of-pricing-a-guide-to-growing-more-profitably_thomas-t-nagle/272437/?resultid=b8ecc8a1-c660-4d32-8904-d6ccb162d545#edition=19