John Jahnke on Tackle.io’s Acquisition and the Future of Cloud Marketplaces | AWS re:Invent 2025

We're really happy to be back here with our, uh, coverage from a w the AWS Reinvent. You know, we did a bunch of them live streamed and, and some we saved for later. This is one of the save for later hope you enjoy it.

And, uh, cap it captures the spirit of and the excitement. That was this year's AWS re event. I want to introduce you to John Yanke.

io. Yep. That's not Ben.

I remembered it for more than a minute. I love it. That's my cognitive test.

But, um, anyway, John, first of all, welcome to Text Drunk tv. Thank you. Congratulations.

You guys had a little bit of an announcement here. Yeah. Here, uh, I mean, uh, AWS reinvents the Super Bowl for Tackle.

We help ISVs sell list, sell and scale through the cloud marketplaces. And, uh, we were acquired on Monday. So mixing our biggest event of the year with an acquisition was, uh, Doesn't get any better than that.

Quite the Way to start the week. Enjoy that moment. Yeah.

Enjoy it. You know what I just want to, for sake of legal clarity, let me be clear. They announced an acquisition or the intent to acquire the deal is not closed Yet.

That is correct, Yes. Right. So that, that's the way we should frame it and, and, uh, the acquiring company.

Yeah. So we were acquired by a company called App Direct. And App Direct is a company that powers marketplaces, right?

So they run 400 marketplaces all over the world. Many for, you know, large scale telcos, large scale ISVs, channel partners, distributors, even some manufacturers. And, you know, we work really closely with the Hyperscalers, AWS Azure and GCP, but we spend a lot of time talking to people who run marketplaces to understand what's next.

We exist to help software companies sell more, sell faster. So we're always trying to figure out how to help 'em do that. And absolutely how we discovered App Direct and started a partnership and that turned into this.

So we're really excited. Good for you guys. You know, I think most of, so our audience is a techie audience, John, and they're, they're familiar with marketplaces obviously, but you know, marketplaces, they're kind of the new mall, right?

Malls are zombie land. No one goes to physical malls anymore. Yeah.

Most of us don't, right. We don't go shopping as much as we used to, but when it comes to buying stuff online, marketplaces are, are where it's at. Right.

And us in the tech world, look, we got the Amazon, you mentioned the Google marketplace, the Microsoft Azure marketplace, the AWS marketplace. But if you look at any good software vendor worth their chops, who has a decent channel of, of an ecosystem Yeah. Plugins or whatever, they all have marketplaces.

Yeah. And, you know, I remember, I still remember what the heck, why would Apple want to do a phone? Right?

I remember those days, and I remember my friend said, it's not the phone dummy, it's the apps. Yeah. And it's the marketplace for the, the app store.

And really an app store is sort of like a marketplace as well. Yeah. When you think about Absolutely.

And so it, it really makes all this go around. Um, give us an idea. 'cause I'm sure there, I've got folks ISVs out here Yeah.

Who are saying, how's he gonna help me with my marketplace listings? Yeah. You know, without giving away family secrets.

Sure. Yeah. No, uh, my co-founder and CTO, he was the visionary behind tackle.

He was in the beta program for AWS marketplace. And, you know, as he was working through that process, he was like, this is hard. No one really wants to build software to sell software.

There we, there's something here. Uh, so we started to experiment with that, and one of our really early customers was New Relic, and they were like, Hey, we think this cloud marketplace thing really gonna be a way people buy our software. And, uh, we were able to help them list and start selling.

And back then, this is 2017, like, uh, that wasn't really commonplace. And so we had to work with them really to integrate that into their business process and finance team and rev ops team and revenue team. And that became our product backlog to start.

And, you know, since then the early days, like people were doing large enterprise private offers, which is like passing custom pricing in terms through the marketplace. But now people buy all kinds of software. It's not just cloud forward software, it's business applications, it's vertical applications, it's AI technology.

And we just continue to see like the proliferation of people wanting to list and sell, but more importantly, people buy in this new way. I love it, man. That's a great, it's great.

You know, so there's the onboarding mm-hmm. Of your listing on Old Marketplace. And I unfortunately had to do that a few times in my life.

And it is, it's a giant PIA so I gotta imagine you guys gotta be a, a godsend for, for companies who need to onboard, but then once you're onboarded, tackle doesn't end right at the onboarding. Yeah. You know, in some ways, and I don't mean to say the in a derogatory way, but it's almost like SEO for market placing too, right?

Yeah. It helps you get more than your share. I mean, there's really three pillars of what we do.

The first is, I mean, we process a billion dollars a month through these hyperscaler marketplaces. And over the years, that's allowed us to build a data model to analyze all of your target customers to determine which would be likely to buy through which of these channels. And once you know that you can engage in something called co-sell where you engage the cloud provider seller to say, Hey, what's our better together story?

How can we help each other? Yeah. Help this customer get the outcome they need.

And then marketplace operations of the last piece. And, you know, we do all that inside of tackle as well as inside of Salesforce, because this starts traditionally as a motion that's led by partners, partner teams who try to figure this out. But it really scales with revenue teams and some of the largest sellers in the world.

Companies like CrowdStrike have all of their reps understand how to take advantage of this cloud marketplace movement. And, you know, AWS especially has been pioneering a ton of capabilities and continuing to release new features. So it's a continuous delivery problem for us.

We stay really tight with their roadmap and deliver that on behalf of the Ice V community so they don't have to figure it out as we go. Absolutely. You know, I think back to when AWS started and the AWS marketplace started, and back then, you know, part of AWS's shtick, if you will, was we don't play favorites.

If you're approved as a partner, you get a listing in the marketplace and we'll let the market decide. Right? Yeah.

And you, you, you know, this was before, you know, other marketplaces were letting you buy, like, uh, advertised banners within the marketplace, or you could buy premium positioning, or you were in bold letters and everyone else was, you know, AWS back then was very, you know, proletariat, if you will. Mm-hmm. Everybody gets the same listing.

Yeah. And we'll see what's changed as you look back to those days, John, to now. Yeah.

What's it like to compete in the marketplace? I Mean, there's, there's a lot of listings in the marketplace, and there are a lot of listing listing types. There's SaaS products, there's container products, there's machine images, there's professional services.

You really have to understand what are you trying to put in the marketplace and what motion are you gonna drive. I think AI is causing even a further explosion in software types. Like existing companies have more products than ever before.

New AI companies are growing at a rapid pace. So there's a lot in there. And I do think you have to think about your marketing system to drive traffic and programs with these marketplaces, buyer behavior's changing, but a lot of people still don't go to AWS marketplace to look for something.

So it's like, how do you connect the dots between all of the marketing and selling that you do, and then make it make marketplace a part of that process? So I, I think that's a, like quantity of things. There's a lot more, you know, how you integrate it into both your marketing and sales process is a different thing.

And then just making sure that what you put there is what people wanna buy, and it's pricing is aligned and business model aligned to the way people would purchase. I, I agree with you. Have you ever had a company reach out to you and say, Hey, we need help.

We'd want to get on the AWS marketplace or any of the other marketplace you service, and you look at it and say, you know, I'd rather be your friend than you be mad at me. Yeah, because you just don't get the right, yeah. You don't have the right product for the Marketplace.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, like, uh, you have to have product market fit. That's probably the biggest thing.

If you don't have product market fit, putting your product in marketplace to figure out product market fits, maybe not the best idea. Once you have product market fit, then it's really that data analysis to understand who is your ideal customer? Are they buying in this way?

Do some analysis upfront. So we tend to start there with people to be like, okay, are your buyers there? Do they wanna show up this way?

And once you have a good understanding of that, then you launch with some confidence. And, you know, a lot of times we just work backwards from what are your goals? Like, what are your revenue goals?

If you're just trying to throw a shingle up and like, Hey, I'll, you know, do a throw it out there and see what happens. That's not usually the kind of company we work with. We tend to work with people who are like, no, this is strategic to me.

I have executive alignment. I want to go drive tens, hundreds of millions through these channel and I wanna make this the next big channel for our company. So that's where we tend to really focus.

Excellent. So Product market fit primary. Yeah.

Secondary, you have to have a better together story with the cloud, wherever you wanna list. If you don't have that, it's not really gonna work. And then third, make sure you have a plan to do it strategically.

So curiosity killed the ca cat, but I'm curious, as an entrepreneur, how do you, how do you get compensated for this? Yeah, we Have really two parts. We have a services business, which is, we do strategy advisory services for ISVs who are trying to figure this out.

Uh, and then we have a platform business. It's a SaaS subscription platform people can subscribe to and use, and we try to align to the usage that they're gonna put through. That's a, that volume of data, co-sell activity, transactions they're gonna put through.

But really just try to meet them where they are and allow them to grow with us. You can start really small, or enterprises do, you know, larger agreements with us in a multi-year basis if they see this as a big strategic component. Got it.

Excellent. Um, you probably don't know the answer to this, but when's the anticipated close on on this acquisition Soon? We said seven to to 10 days on Monday.

So We're very, you got two, you've got two private companies and you got board approvals, I'm assuming so Yeah, it happens quick. Yeah, some, so, and again, you may or may not want to tell us, but what, what's the plan for you, John? Post acquisition?

Uh, I mean, after ACT is a pre IPO company. Then I think the alignment of the products is really interesting. You know, how we can connect the dots with our customers and help them syndicate to more places and connect the dots with the clouds in that same motion.

So we're really excited to continue to pioneer. I think it's super early, like selling software's the most expensive part of every software company. Uh, and that's changing.

Uh, and people wanna do it better, wanna do it more efficiently, and we wanna continue to pioneer that our, my founders and I are really excited about that. You mentioned the AI word. Yeah.

Or I shouldn't have, Is it a word? Is it true initials, but what kind of impact is that having on your business? Yeah.

Um, we obviously the AI companies are changing a lot. Like, uh, they're challenging the clouds in ways, they're challenging buyers, changing buyer behaviors. I think more kind of line of business buyers initiate AI products than ever before.

So that's, there's change there. It's changing a lot of business models for our customers. So existing enterprise companies who now have these AI components, they're like, how do I price these things?

How do I meter these things? So we're seeing a lot of change there. We're seeing people try to apply unique agent based solutions to the problem.

Can I give agents to my reps or my partner people in order for them to operate more efficiently? So we launched an, uh, co-sell agent with Salesforce, a Dreamforce earlier this year that runs an agent force to make this whole partner selling motion more convenient so that we think the agent movement will continue. And, you know, how do you just get your reps to be as efficient as possible with these new AI solutions?

Excellent. I love it. io, but it's, it's not spelled like tackle, like football tackle.

It Is T-A-C-K-L-E. Oh, there is io. It's actually, we have a Cais fly as our logo, which really?

Yeah. So my co-founders are from Boise, Idaho. So the, the, the fly really connected with them.

Yeah. That it's big out there. Yeah.

Beautiful out there too. I thought you were gonna tell me being a Buffalo living in Orchid Park, it was a Buffalo Bills thing. It could be.

I mean, there's many uses for the tackle. We tackle the marketplaces, Right? It's a versatile word there.

Versatile, Right. Go bills. Absolutely.

Well, I'm a Steelers fan. I had a bad week last week. That was, that was a Yes.

That was a good second half. It was a good second half. You guys had a great second half.

Yeah. You now you're playing Cincy by, well, by the time people see this, you might have played since. Yeah, but he's, they got Joe Burrow's back, so who knows what'll Happen.

I know that was, you know, right. Anyway, John, that's all small potatoes. Awesome.

Congratulations. You know, thank you so much. I've done four or five startups and venture backed startups, and I sold some and some I did it.

But, uh, a mentor of mine once told, he always told me, actually, anytime you could get someone to reach into their pocket and write a check that you think fairly values the hard work and what you've built, it's the like best days of your life. Yeah. So It's a, it has been a tremendous journey and we look forward to it continuing.

Absolutely. All right. Hey, we're at AWS reinvent.

We have probably some more coming your way. Stay tuned. This is Alan Shemel for Textron tv.