Building AI-enabled products: Lessons from Tines Co-founder Tom Kinsella

0:00Some of the most high profile startups in Ireland, so the likes of Intercom or Stripe or Wayflyer or a whole lot of others. Intercom, the founding team, they had another startup. They founded Stripe. That was their second startup. Wayflare was Aiden's second startup. It's the same with Bobby from Mana. It's the same with Pat from Sisu. But not only that, it's the companies now that have exited, built that experience and that muscle of expanding, of building leadership teams, of building recruitment teams, of building massive customer support and customer success teams. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, of the podcast by SaaS.com.

0:40Here, we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that. They share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path for securing investment, and more. Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your wellbeing, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry. I'm your host, Alex Dima, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success.

1:10This special interview from the center stage at SaaS Stock Europe 2025, Onya Malloy, Startups Account Manager at AWS Interviews, Thomas Kinsella, co-founder and CCO at Tynes. In it, they discuss the successes, trade-offs, and lessons that come with building AI-enabled products. Enjoy the show. Thank you, Stephen, so much for the introduction. Thomas, I might just get you to recap quickly in terms of who you are and what Tynes do, and we can go into it from there. Yeah, thanks so much. It's a real pleasure to be here. It's a real honour to be on stage. Yeah, I'm Thomas. I'm one of the founders of Tynes.

1:47Tynes is a VC-backed business-to-business software company. We're an intelligent workflow platform, so we allow businesses of every size, from small startups all the way up to the Fortune 10, to power their most important workflows. So we combine AI, automation and integration to drive real business value across our customers. And yeah, we're Irish and we've got hundreds of people all across the globe. Perfect. We're going to keep this kind of fairly punchy, just given the time that we have. And the goal really is to understand how Irish companies are developing, positioning and selling sort of world class and world leading AI products.

2:25So I suppose in terms of setting the scene for where you guys are at now, just kind of give a little bit of context back from that VC back piece. Any kind of key product launches or when people are thinking about how they apply Tynes, what are kind of the critical problems you're solving? Yeah, I think like everybody else, like AI has transformed the way Tynes works and transformed the way like businesses work. So as a workflow automation platform or an intelligent automation platform, we for the last like seven or eight years, we've allowed businesses to automate their repetitive manual tasks.

2:57and suddenly AI came in and like changed how people are able to do business and the good news is that like AI is able to do pretty much anything it's a little bit scary and there's a lot of people that will be like yeah okay but you know what should I use AI for and that's the question that we've tried to ask and tried to answer and that everybody in the room should be trying to answer like what is it best at and the way we think about it is that there's really prior to AI, like two different ways of doing things, like human beings doing things or pure code doing things. So those like deterministic workflows, human beings, exceptionally good at strategy, like good at judgment, good at understanding business decisions, code, scalable, fast, reliable will happen the same way or do the same thing every single time.

3:42AI and like agents, so giving an LLM access to tools, it kind of provides a combination of um yeah both of those but it's not necessarily the best at judgment and it's not necessarily the best at like certainly scale it costs a lot of money and it won't necessarily do the same thing every single time so you have to decide like hey what is it good for and when we're thinking about it in our product and when people should be are thinking about it in their products it's about understanding like yeah where to plug it in and rather than thinking about it as a product thinking about it's another tool in that trio of the types of workloads that you can uh that you can use so So in Tynes, yeah, we've built it to allow you to leverage all three and increasingly the products of the future.

4:21They're not going to be like Salesforce, but AI. It'll be, you know, a product with AI where it's appropriate. And I know in terms of the Tynes context, obviously there's pieces that it can just do autonomously end to end in terms of connecting either via an API integration or whatever the case may be. But for people who are maybe a little bit earlier in their AI journey, how do you determine where AI can be an accelerant versus a gimmick or just overhyped? Yeah, totally. So it's exactly that. It's understanding what it's best for. So if you examine the type of process that you're trying to help with and the value that you're trying to solve, if you're value-based selling, understand what is the exact process.

4:57If it needs to be, so we've a framework, which is creativity, scale, and safety. So if it needs to be creative, AI or a human being, you shouldn't be using code for that. if it needs to be like fast and scalable, you probably shouldn't be using a human being. You should be using code or AI. If it needs to be safe and you need to happen the exact same way every single time, then you should be like using code. You should not be using like a human being or you should not be using AI. So when you're thinking about it, it's about like understanding a framework for understanding what AI is best at. And there's fortunately tons and tons of business challenges and tons and tons of ways, like customer service is a brilliant example.

5:38marketing is a really good example like tons of processes like but doesn't have to be exactly right there's tolerable like guardrails or there's like toleration of error but if you're preparing a business like proposal yeah maybe that's okay if you're onboarding a customer and you know doing kyc checks you definitely shouldn't be using ai for that it's too uh it's too risky so it's understanding the process and understanding what ai is good at we're obviously seeing a lot about ai in the news every single day. And we're also seeing some of the, let's say, mistakes is maybe a good analogy, but I'm hesitant to use that word on this stage.

6:12But some of the instances where maybe it was oversold, let's say. I can think of one in particular that has been quite a sort of a bit of a snafu, even right up to a federal level. In terms of selling then into large legacy incumbents, which are still SaaS products or maybe quite conservative when it comes to data, privacy, security, how do you go about sort of pitching a product like Tynes when it's unfamiliar territory? Yeah, I think the very first question is to understand whether you should be pitching a product to those legacy... I'm not sure any company would like to be called a legacy company, but to large organizations, is understanding what their risk tolerance is and how fast, how forward-thinking they are.

6:49And if you should be, you should always be selling to your ideal customer profile. And the process of selling to a Bank of America is going to be absolutely a nightmare compared to selling to a Drata or an Auth0 or something like that outside who are a lot more, I suppose, cloud-first, tech-forward, tech-savvy. Having said that, if you are trying to approach, and we do have tons of those large enterprises, it's about bringing them a little bit along the journey. First of all, AI is scary to everybody. AI doesn't have to be scary. So we use Bedrock. That's an AWS tool. But it means that we can make claims with AI to say, look, there's no training, there's no logging, there's no storage, your data stays in region, it's tenant bound, it's scoped just to you.

7:35And all of a sudden their compliance team are like, oh, okay, that sounds a little bit more reasonable. Realize that you're selling the same way that you're selling another tool or another product. You should be selling based on value. So you should never be saying, hey, I'm going to sell you AI. You should be doing your standard sales process. So you should be understanding the pain, understanding the decision process, understanding what they actually want to buy, what the criteria are, and building your relationships with those stakeholders and then the third part there is still a little bit of uh there is still a little bit of like there's no there's a lot of excitement about ai but there's an expectation that it's going to work like magic so realistically you're going to have to do a little bit more work uh under the uh under the hood uh to make it feel like totally seamless so that when they get it they do get that delight that you got the first time you used chat gpt you like wow this is incredible they should still feel that but you're going to have to do some of the work.

8:26So that might involve saying, hey, we're going to do the implementation, we're going to do the migration, we're going to do a ton of professional services to make sure that this is successful for you and that you feel that this is actually going to give you value. Because ultimately, yeah, you want them to land and you want them to expand. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that land and expand piece? We obviously heard from the previous speaker about building these sort of monuments. And it's almost sort of what you guys have done internally within your customers, obviously starting that kind of cyberspace, but now looking across other business functions.

8:56How have you kind of gone about that in practice and what can people maybe take from those learnings? Yeah, totally. So the good news is there's a lot of frameworks out there for that. So if you're around, there's like the bow tie method is pretty much typically what we use, which is thinking about the land as just the start of your relationship with that customer, beginning with like awareness, decision-making process, and then expanding. But the most important part is like understanding that if you want to expand, And if you want to like get into some other parts of the organization, it has to begin with value.

9:28So you have to work so hard to make sure every single customer is a champion and every single customer is a success. And that could be just by making your product like 10x better. Or it could be by making sure that your support team are fantastic. Or it could be by saying, actually, you know what, we're going to run a full onboarding process with a project manager who's going to understand your goals. with the ultimate aim of like with times the ultimate aim of saying okay the first team that we land in that's just the tip of the iceberg and if you're landing in a you know a large organization frequently you can have you know a good land but realistically the expansion opportunities are enormous and you want to you want to tap into that the other part that's that's the first part just like just in general just make your customers wildly successful they'll be your advocates and they'll share it.

10:19The second part is when you're building your product, try to just think about the TAM from the very start. So that total addressable market. So we started out in cybersecurity and maybe there's like in cybersecurity automation, $2 billion in spend. In enterprise workflow automation, there's like hundreds of billions of dollars in spend every single year. So if I decide to like pigeonhole myself a little bit too much in cybersecurity automation. I can do very well, but I'm never going to expand in those enterprises and I'm never going to hit those million dollar, multi-million dollar deals. So yeah, from the very start, we became a secure platform.

10:59We had that foundation, but we also knew that actually when we're building, don't build too specifically. Make sure your product, if that is your goal, make sure that your product can fulfill the needs for those other teams so that when you do get that opportunity, they have a good feeling about it, that other teams trust it and they can grow with you. Do you mind if we just kind of double click on that little bit and just how do you actually turn a customer into a champion, particularly when you're working with maybe teams that are a little bit more privacy conscious, you know, a little bit more conservative, they're thinking very rigorous around their compliance because you're starting in cyber.

11:35So how do you get somebody who works in cyber to champion a product like Times publicly and happily and freely, ideally. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So like I spent 10 years working in cybersecurity before starting times. The job is hard. Like genuinely, you've got like too much work. You've got alerts coming in from like thousands of different, well, thousands of different alerts from probably a dozen different tools. There's, yeah, like not enough staff. I don't know any organization that says, hey, we've got enough staff. But there's also that sense that something bad is going to happen. and inevitably something will.

12:11You will get compromised or you will have a large incident. For us, it was about then, like those people, when you're a goalkeeper, that's kind of the job of a lot of cybersecurity teams. Your job is to defend. You don't really get a lot of credit. Nobody is like, oh man, very rarely,

12:35sometimes goalkeepers get a lot of credit, but very rarely is it like, hey, they absolutely won the match. So as a result, when a cybersecurity team can come in and say, check this out, I've just automated this entire process and I've just freed up a whole load of time, that's a win. And that's a win that those analysts and those managers and the chief information security officer can brag about. And if they're able to say, look, hey, here's the tool that I'm using and this is an innovative process that I've brought in, that allows them to get promoted. That allows them to celebrate. and that's not something they uh they get to do a lot that like giving them also like working you know understanding their problems and helping them do it but giving them the ability to brag about their job if you're able to do that like that's a surefire way for that person like sharing your uh yeah sharing your product and telling telling people what a joy it is and the other part was that like with times we allow people to automate but we also allow people to like to share so they you can share a service with other teams.

13:36And there's a lot of, like in a security incident, for example, you might be like locking the accounts of 20 or 50 people. That's relatively easy to do. But a lot of the IT team will just be like, whoa, hold on a second. How did you lock those like 50 accounts? And we'll be like, or the customer will be like, well, we use Tynes. And then the IT team are going to be like, well, how do I do that? How do I get my hands on that tool? It takes me like an hour to offboard every single employee. Can I just do it in 10 seconds? It's like, of course you can. So that natural use of the product, it has massively accelerated and massively helped us with that land and expand motion.

14:14Can you talk to us maybe about some of the challenges then? Because it sounds like from the outside, it's easy to look at a company like Tyne's and just see this sort of rocket ship growth. Obviously, you guys have made a strategic decision to co-headquarter Ireland-US. Can you talk to us a little bit about that global expansion, what that looks like, and maybe some of the trade-offs you've made along the way? Yeah, absolutely. there's lots I think if it wasn't for COVID we probably would be completely headquartered in the US but yeah a little over 80 % of our customers are the US and more of our revenue is from the US or from North America so it's definitely a trade off to stay here but building a software company in Ireland that's part of the reason we started Tynes so that we could build a company that employs and has the ambition that we have um i think a mistake that startups always make or certainly i don't want to generalize i've made a lot of times is believing that uh like if you build it they will come do something build something great and you're going to be like wildly successful it's never about that it's always about getting like one percent better every single day and uh like improving but as a result like when we i suppose at the start when we didn't have uh some great advisors and some great uh great leaders we made one or two decisions to like be a little bit more tentative so we like dipped our toes into into decisions so good example of a challenge like we uh some of our earliest customers were um yeah the likes of like canva in australia and we like made them like incredibly successful uh and yeah we had a couple more customers out there we had a small team in the US we had a small team in Europe and we were like okay it seems like the next uh the next step is to expand to Australia but in we hired two or three uh two or three sales people and that was good but we actually weren't like wildly successful because when you're expanding and you're growing you actually have to invest so you have to invest in like a marketing team a partnerships team a like field team a business development team and then you also have to develop like invest in a customer success team so that when you're telling customers like a large bank we're going to be able to support you their question is how many people do you have and you say three like it doesn't sound like you're going to be able to support me so we yeah we we we made some i think yeah we made some uh we made some mistakes i suppose uh and yeah we definitely uh we've definitely learned from those but it's it's about yeah there's lots of trade-offs but it's about like making sure that if you're making those uh making those big decisions that you're you are actually like believing in yourself and you're backing it up correctly.

16:51I think that piece of one kind of coming back to the belief, I know we were talking about it earlier, just this idea of sort of the transformation that we've seen in Ireland over the last couple of years and this elevation of ambition. Also, obviously, we're seeing, you know, deeper ticket sizes when it comes to investment and things like that, and really kind of Ireland punching above its weight. How excited are you about the Irish tech landscape when you look at it now? Yeah, incredibly excited. It's amazing. And I think there's a few things. First thing I'll say is that if you're a startup, don't let any, I've heard the word success used a whole lot of times, don't let anybody else define your success.

17:23Literally just starting a company is like, that's incredible and you should be massively proud of yourself for doing that. And if you start chasing the VC's version of success, you'll always be chasing the next round or the next exit. And that's, yeah, it can be worth it, but don't let a VC or another founder or anybody else tell you that you're successful. um having said that the ambition of some people right now it's like really incredible to see people are they're not satisfied in saying you know hey i just want to yeah i wanted to like do this i want to like expand to america i want to expand here if i want to land these massive enterprise clients but the other part about it is like five years ago or 10 years ago we had some people with that ambition but we didn't have that experience and we didn't have that um yeah people that had done it a couple of times so if you look at uh if you look at the like some of the most um high profile startups in ireland so the likes of like yeah intercom or stripe or uh wayflyer or um yeah like a whole load about a whole load of others like intercom like uh that that team the founding team they had another startup they founded stripe that was their second startup uh wayflare was aiden's second startup it's the same with bobby from mana it's the same with pat from sisu like but not only that it's the companies now that have exited uh there's companies that have built that experience and that muscle of expanding of building leadership teams of building like recruitment teams of building like massive customer support and customer success teams what that means is that you know now when you're saying hey should i expand to australia people be like no don't not yet or they'll be saying hey should you you know like what's the process to like expand to the us or what's the process to sell to a large enterprise there's now teams in ireland that have done that and it's amazing to see that those executives like go on and start finding their own companies and they won't fall into the same mistakes that we've made they'll like learn from those and they'll grow and hopefully some Yeah, Tynes founders or Tynes folks will leave and found their own companies as hard as it will be to see them leave.

19:34But it's amazing to see the ambition of some of them. And I suppose that, yeah, the confidence they have that they're going to be able to take that next step. Yeah, I know it's fascinating whenever you do a little bit of stalking, let's say, on LinkedIn, just to see where people have kind of bounced around. I'm conscious that we're at time. So just, I suppose, a very last piece for yourselves. What's next with Tynes? Yeah, it's an incredibly exciting time. We just saw OpenAI release their own workflow builder, and we believe we're the leader in workflows. So it's an amazing time to be a workflow platform.

20:07We're hiring like crazy. We just in the last three months landed our three largest deals in the company's history. We're hoping to almost double revenue this year, double revenue next year, and expand enormously. I'd love to say, hey, here's the 20 features that are coming out. there's loads of features that were coming out, but realistically, it's just about, yeah, it's strapping in and strapping and executing, but it's a really exciting time to be in town. And we're hiring like crazy as well, so come join us. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Thomas. Thank you for your time. Thanks for listening to the SaaS Revolution Show.

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