00:07:21 · Bar Winkler, Sebastian Johnson
[00:07:21] S1: There is. Oh, interesting. [00:07:23] S0: And is it something you talk about the transparency of financials? Do you almost have like a leaderboard? Are you like tracking different office sales, pipeline? Is it like that? [00:07:31] S1: It's not very far from it, but that's not different than any you know, go to market organization, right? [00:07:39] S0: Yeah, of course, right? I mean, to market, who works in sales is going to be competitive by the very nature, right? It's going be a go getter who wants to win. [00:07:46] S1: I do think that there is a lot of deniability and like, let's say there's a, it's very easy to create excuses that like your market is slower than another, etcetera. But then it's so great to have like a leader in a relatively slow market suddenly close a huge deal super fast, you're like, well, there you go. It was for excuse. [00:08:05] S0: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's amazing. And, you know, when you look at the companies that you're targeting in different markets, is there a different type of buyer? Are you seeing different speeds within different markets or industries in adoption? What does that look like?
00:08:17 · Bar Winkler
[00:08:17] S1: I think some markets have a tendency to move faster than others. That's of course true. But you know what? I found this very interesting. Ultimately, it's about the leader of the customer's company. So let's say if you have a CEO, we sell top down, right? We work with a lot of personas in the organization, but ultimately the decision to partner with a company like Wonderful, like with an agentic platform that is obviously like a pivotal moment in any customers. Let's say at least in the following decade, I don't think there's going to be a much bigger decision. Like who's going to be your main agentic platform? It ultimately comes down to how bullish the CEO of the company is on AI and how fast they want to move. And that usually drives a decision if they want to work with a startup like Wonderful, or to wait for one of the incumbents to come up with an equal solution or a close to solution. What I do find is that usually all it takes is one or two brave CEOs. Then the rest usually tend to follow. Because it's like everything in business is like a question of fear of missing out and fear of looking stupid, right? So if you have a very high fear of missing out and very low fear of looking stupid, then it's easy to do business. So the FOMO is obviously very high when your competitor is using an amazing agentic platform to actually save money or improve service. That's, I usually tell my leaders, focus on closing one, two lighthouse logos in your region, and I trust that from there it will be a lot simpler.
00:10:06 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:10:06] S0: Got it. Okay. Yeah. Once you once you get the first couple over the line, then I guess word word will get out, and it'll be easier to to win the next ones once you've got some key logos to... On the board as well. When you look to kind of launch into a new market, how much of your products are you localizing and what does that look like?
00:10:26 · Bar Winkler
[00:10:26] S1: So we localize the pipeline. So Wonderful is essentially again, it's a platform with a million screens and enterprise features and capabilities. That doesn't really get localized. What gets localized is the pipeline, which is all the models that have an input and output. So for example, our voice pipeline is very different in South And North Italy, let alone Italy and France, right? Yeah. So it's a lot more nuanced than you would think. So we invest quite heavily in it. The good thing is that most of the work is done by the local teams working with our HQ benchmarking team. So we have a team that does benchmarking for different models. For example, what's the best background noise cancellation service for a given country? We have a team whose entire job is to find the answer to this question and a medium other. And then most of the work comes down to what voice sounds the best, what models works the best, like pricing, etcetera, etcetera. That's a lot of the customization. But I think most of the actual customization is on the customer's level and not on the country level. Like part of the reason why being on the ground in a country is important is being close to the customers in this country and being able to go to their offices and spend the time needed to actually connect to their twenty year old telephony systems or to their custom built ERP or CRM, or even to bypass psychological barriers that they may have about what's the right cloud configuration setup to go live. It's part of the reason why we hire full teams on the ground and not just sellers. You ultimately need to pass a lot of different stakeholders. Some are very business, some are very technical. But in all, you have an advantage if you're on the ground, right? If you're local, if you're able to speak the same language, if they know that you're serious about their market and not treating it like a tier two market, it's a big statement, right? We have have 15 people in Athens now serving the Greek market. That's all they do. Right? Yeah. Of course we're serious about Greece, right? We literally put our money where our mouth is. Right? So the same goes in hopefully 30 or 40 more countries in 2026.
00:12:55 · Sebastian Johnson, Bar Winkler
[00:12:55] S0: Wow. 30 or 40 more in 2026. That's amazing. [00:12:59] S1: That's what I hope to do. Yeah. [00:13:01] S0: And it seems like you're not going to The US. Is that right? Or not yet? [00:13:06] S1: We're not going to The US at the moment. No. [00:13:08] S0: Is that just because you feel like the other markets are underserved relative to The US? [00:13:13] S1: The US is a market that is going to force most companies to be verticalized, And we don't want to be a vertical solution. Like we want to be a horizontal solution. We want to support enterprises across industries. And we feel like The US is a market that if we decide to go there, it would, and maybe rightly so, it would pull the focus of me, my co founder, my management and the company. It's just an endless huge market. And suddenly I'm going to find myself in 20 multimillion dollar deals, all of which are highly competitive because it's The US. And then I might lose the opportunity to be the best in class solution in 25 other markets. And combined those 25 other markets are probably a bigger AI transformation opportunity than whatever portion I'm going to grab in The US market. That's my logic. [00:14:05] S0: And hearing you say that makes total sense. And, you know, do you have a vision at some point to get into The US or do you think actually like- [00:14:12] S1: Yeah, it's not a principle decision, like it, we have, it's not really, we're not religious about it, it's just a matter of like energy efficiency, what's the most efficient thing for us to do with our time and resources, right?
00:14:12 · Bar Winkler, Sebastian Johnson
[00:14:12] S1: Yeah, it's not a principle decision, like it, we have, it's not really, we're not religious about it, it's just a matter of like energy efficiency, what's the most efficient thing for us to do with our time and resources, right? [00:14:26] S0: And right now it is 35 countries next year. Hopefully, although... That's amazing. I also read that you were hoping to be at 10,000,000 ARR by the end of this year. Anything that you can share on that? Like how are you progressing? How are you tracking any targets in 2026?