Misfit Founders
Misfit Founders
Building a Successful Saas company: What Makes a Great Idea for a Start-Up? Founder of Candu
Join me as I sit down with Jonathan, the founder of SaaS company Candu, which creates high quality 'no code' users experiences for B2B product-led software companies.
Pooling our joint experience in this field, we break down the intricacies of what it takes to build a successful SaaS business, from how to know if you've hit on a great idea, to the best retention and conversion strategies, and the process of getting funding.
We discuss the significance of crystallising a company's vision, and reveal why launching a B2B start-up is often a smoother route than launching B2C.
Building a company from the ground up is no small feat, and this episode shares heartfelt reflections on the rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship. We discuss coping with big challenges, and how to heal your team and move on when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will.
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I think running a company a new company is. There's something very sexy about it, but when you get into it, really what it means is that you have an unbelievably large amount of stress about things you don't get to control, and that is actually quite challenging.
Speaker 2:All that said, if you decided you wanted to do it. What is the most un-sixie or the least-sixie thing about starting something like Conn?
Speaker 1:The problem with being a founder is that you have to do every job possible for a startup, including things that you're not good at, that you don't enjoy and that you think are intolerable, and they still have to get done. Really important thing with a founder is figuring out your vision right. How should the world work? How do you want it to work? Too often we get stuck thinking that that's like the way to build stuff. Better way to think about it is like what is the status quo today for your customers and why is that intolerable? And if the status quo today is not intolerable, do you have your offices or the place that you're staying?
Speaker 2:You said it's odd to come into the office, so I suppose you're working from home. No, actually we're right down on Old Street, so we're at a co-working space called Runway East Like a five-minute bike away.
Speaker 1:Okay, Runway East. I don't think I've heard about that, but I've also been away from London for more than a year.
Speaker 2:I've been to London for a couple of years and I've been to London for a couple of years. I've been away from London for what now? Since 2019, actually. So I don't know the co-working space anymore that much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what do they say? Like, if you have a favorite restaurant in London, enjoy it while you can, because it'll be gone soon. I think the same might be true of Runway, of co-working spaces.
Speaker 2:Very true. Do you enjoy London and UK more than the USes?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm from the US and I feel like there's a level of comfort that comes from being in your home turf. But yeah, I mean obviously I love London, otherwise I wouldn't be here.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, Jonathan, we know each other for a couple of years. We've had a couple of conversations about Can-Do. It would be great to get a quick intro of who you are and what does your business do.
Speaker 1:Great. So I'm a co-founder of Can-Do. I'm the part that can't code out of our no-code duo, and Can-Do helps product and growth teams build user experiences that look like they're coded but actually aren't. And really the inspiration came from actually building a website with Wix and being like oh, this is so easy to do. You can just drag a button onto the canvas. Why can't we do this in enterprise applications? And I think, especially for product managers who want to be able to move faster and actually kind of optimize the experience, this is a really easy way to kind of introduce no-code into an enterprise grade application.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool and concise description. Now, in that description, you talk very broadly about the no-code product that you own. Now, being very honest, last time we discussed and engaged around your product was also kind of when I've lost a bit track of Can-Do. I mean, I'm to blame, but it's been a wild ride to grow and exit a business in the last few years. I'm sure when we last spoke, which was when do you remember when was that? I think it was 2021 or I think 2021, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:You're focused quite a lot on the onboarding and I think that's a really good experience in applications. Is that still the case or did you diversify from there?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So really what Can-Do is it's a way to build new designs that you can inject into a product and they can be in line part of the experience, like an empty state or an onboarding survey or as an overlay, like a hotspot or kind of an announcement. But really kind of our vision is that the front end of a product, anywhere where you have content in the experience. We think that should be managed by the non-technical team members. We think it's crazy that developers are coding buttons. We think they have better things to do with their time.
Speaker 1:All of that said, where the market is today is that you tend to use no-code applications or no-code tools for really specific use cases, and the number one use case is onboarding, News or onboarding. It's kind of the perfect place for no-code because it's super iterative. You're constantly tinkering with it to improve it and you're always optimizing it. So if you are building it with a developer, it's actually quite frustrating to send them a ticket and saying, hey, do you mind recoding this thing that I've already asked you to code four times? Right, it's just a really good opportunity for using a tool that has an editor capability. All of that said, we like to say come for the onboarding stay, for everything else.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah, I mean, it's a really good hook, and the one thing that I've noticed at least with one with our company and with our customers' teams is that you tend to be able to call it up-purchase right, in a sense, where if you're using a platform and you're using it for a very specific and really good reason and you're happy with it, rather than going and purchasing and adopting a different platform which we all know that it's a bit of a headache when it comes to, you know, purchase funnels and things like that, I would personally rather use the same brand if they offer additional functionality, additional features and so on.
Speaker 2:I think that's one of the things that Atlassium done really well, right with all their products and so on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we'll see how they incorporate Lume into that experience as well.
Speaker 1:That might be a true cross-sell, a whole new platform.
Speaker 1:But no, I think if you think about, like, who does PLG, product-led growth, really well, it's companies that have solved a really narrow, specific use case and then they kind of expand into new functionality in a way. That kind of layers in really cleanly so it feels like it's still one experience, but you're adding more and more stuff that the user can buy more of. And so actually a lot of what we think about it at CanDo is how do we make it feel really seamless to come in for one use case and then start to layer up. You know, in our case it's like you know, maybe you come in because you want an onboarding checklist, but then we're like well, you're probably going to want an onboarding survey and you're probably going to want some announcement banners and maybe you'll want some empty states too. Right, how do we kind of have you come in for one thing, make the experience feel really specific, just for that one thing, and then, as soon as you've activated, then how do we kind of give you the next best product?
Speaker 2:And CrossSales King.
Speaker 1:CrossSales King. If you want to have great net dollar retention, the best way to do it is first of all, to have a great intro product but then to create demand within your own user base for the stuff that you have. So a lot of times we think about. Oh, you know, we need to have an enterprise sales motion and that's really important to help guide and structure users. But honestly, the best thing you can do, I think, if you want to have great net dollar retention, is to have your own user base start to ask for new stuff that you sell right, and the way that you do that is by advertising all these new use cases, products and features within the user experience in a way that looks and feels like it's part of the experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly that's what you do great with CanDo. Jonathan, I'm curious of your background. Basically, how did you got to be passionate about product led growth and also building a platform like CanDo?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny, I hate salespeople and now I'm a salesperson.
Speaker 1:No, I'm just kidding, no, I mean my background came in from I always worked on kind of the revenue side of SaaS products, doing, you know, marking, automation, like I don't know, all these different like backend functions.
Speaker 1:And then when I got to product, I was like, oh, I have so many good ideas for I make the experience better, but as someone who can't really code, I'm kind of kind of useless, let's be honest. And when you're a product manager, you have, I don't know, probably 100 ideas, probably 10 good ideas and you probably have scope for maybe one. And what I really want to shift, I guess, is this idea that by making it really cheap to try out a new experience, you can actually try many, many more things and start to really iterate and tinker with the experience to really improve it. And I think this is probably the number one difference between I call like an enterprise sales led organization, where you kind of build one thing at a time based on someone's, based on requirements, to a product led organization where you're constantly rebuilding the same thing to make it better and better. And that's a really, really big difference in terms of how you think about iteration on kind of the same kind of core use cases?
Speaker 2:Right, and what are some of the customer profiles that are the most common for CanDo nowadays?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny, we took a really long time to find our like core persona because I had all these harebrained ideas that ended up not being right when we first started. I really wanted to work with customer teams, because one thing you can make with CanDo are customer portals. I thought, oh, this is a great idea. Right, you can design some content for an enterprise account. It can have all their own content. It's really really good and that is a use case for CanDo.
Speaker 1:But we kind of made a kind of a core error, I would say, which is that if you are working on a customer team, you're actually not creating the experience.
Speaker 1:It's not your job, right?
Speaker 1:Your job is to engage with your customers via conversation, via email, via chat, and what we actually found was that the core use case for CanDo was to help product growth teams really product managers do their job, which is building a better, optimized product.
Speaker 1:Just do it faster because they can do it themselves without really using their engineering team, and which is really counterintuitive, actually, because it's selling to customers that can already do everything that we can do and we say you got it. You can do this all with your development team, but you can also do it not yourself and just do it faster. And so I think a big learning for us was actually this kind of emerging persona, which is this product growth manager, whose job it is to kind of improve activation rate, to improve conversion rate, to increase adoption rate. Those are kind of our core, core, core, how you would say, buyers, and they tend to be at kind of, I would say, fast growing scale up startups that are becoming multi-product and they probably have, you know, thousands of users and they've really gotten into the place of how do we really optimize and smooth out this experience?
Speaker 2:I think it's an interesting dynamic because and I want to hear your thoughts on this specific aspect of it People can get really easily bugged by other teams touching their work or the area that they consider or they officially own like a product development team, with engineering, with product owner and so on versus having some which builds the core product and so on and having someone like a product growth team or individual come in and start implementing on their own because they're empowered. Now, all of these snippets. Have you seen any of that friction and how do usually teams go about it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love this question. I think it's funny. There's no area of the product that's more political than the nav bar I've found. Oh yes, I've been there. You know, as soon as you hit, let's say, seven items, someone's going to say someone on the design side will say it's getting too complicated, let's remove some stuff. And then all of a sudden you're going to have some functional PM step up or some GMs. We're going to say but what about my blank, what about my feature set?
Speaker 1:And I think that that's a very common experience that every company kind of goes through. As you kind of expand because you have this expansion, this contraction right you expand, you build more use cases, more types of users come to your product and then you contract back down to kind of clarify what kind of use cases create the most value. And I think this is a challenge that every SaaS company goes in, especially as they start to attract new types of users into the application. As soon as you kind of get past your kind of core, core, core, what's it called, your core, like in bounds, I mean, let me tell you, as soon as you open up paid, for example you're going to end up with a lot of users who are very unsophisticated, and you're going to need a different experience for them. That's super, super common. What you actually asked about, though, was how do you kind of have and implement a product growth squad in a way that doesn't ruffle everyone's feathers?
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And that's actually a very good question. I think that when I think about a really high performing growth squad, I think that they have product managers who kind of who have a clear metric to improve. Maybe it's activation rate and, by the way, agreeing on what the activation rate is is a really key part of that and maybe it's also conversion rate. So they're really thinking about kind of where in the funnel they play and they also are embedded within the product organization. And occasionally we see growth teams that are actually rolling up underneath marketing.
Speaker 1:But I would say, if you're past the registration link or past registration, it's really helpful if you roll up underneath product so that you can be kind of embedded within that organization and you still have this kind of almost commercial sensibility in terms of what you're trying to achieve. And then I think the most important thing is probably to make sure the organization understands that there is value in optimizations, because there are some leaders and some people in engineering who will say we're going to solve all of our problems by building better functionality, more features, and while that's true, there does come a time when it becomes really important to simplify, to clarify and to really distill down kind of what are those key moments throughout the journey and then really start to optimize around those experiences. So I think having embedding within product, having a clear mandate to improve specific activation points, and then also having the organization as a whole believe that that is important, I think those are all really good ways to kind of set up that team for success.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think there's probably less likelihood of friction if all of it is vocalized upfront.
Speaker 2:Like this is what we're going to try to achieve here, and let's set up a process where we, as much as possible, try to harmoniously work with each other. And again, because I'm coming from a technical background, I used to be a software engineer, I worked in product teams and I know how precious we are about the everything from the code to the user experience, to how the various features and modules integrate with each other, and so on. So I think as long as you lay down the ground in your vocal and communicate on what you're trying to achieve, you're less likely to piss off people in other teams, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's actually two other kind of aspects of this when working with engineering teams and engineering leadership. I think one of them is to really frame it as you want to get your team out of the content game. So I think a lot of times engineering spends a lot of time improving experiences, be that there's so many micro-optimizations that make a difference, unfortunately. A simple example is changing a CTA on an empty state from buy now to upgrade now. That is not a good project for an engineering team to be working on, but it's really effective for driving more people to actually convert on that button.
Speaker 2:It's very boring.
Speaker 1:It's the worst work imaginable, in part because often you'll have 10 ideas of which only three will work and only one will work well. So having someone redo the same thing for different segments, for different copies, it's just such unsexy work I can't even begin to describe. So I think helping them understand that it's really valuable, but there's probably a better use of your time. I think that's an important part of it as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. Apart from the change it, change it back, change it to this the work that I've received in my lifespan as an engineer. There's also your backlog of tasks, and the first 10 are these small text alterations in this. Oh man, it's not the day at the office, so I feel that maybe there's some positioning there for Can do in that sense as well, from an engineering perspective, which is don't bore your engineers with all of this work, do it yourself.
Speaker 1:It's funny. I feel like there's this impulse to build which is actually super valuable to harness, especially for a new engineer coming in who's feeling great, who's like I can do this in two minutes, and that is great. We want to harness that. But I think figuring out which problems you should be solving is even more important. Right, because ultimately, as an engineer, your talents are fungible. You can do anything, you can solve any problem. We, as a no-code provider, can maybe do one tenth of what you can do, but it does mean that we can free you up to work on the harder things that a software tool can't do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the other thing that I wanted to ask, that was a curiosity, and I'm talking about your product, and this is a founders related podcast will dig into your past and your dark thoughts and so on in a bit, but do you see a lot of use cases and customers using CanDo to create widgets in internal apps as well?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great question. So we really focus on customer facing applications is probably our number one and I'd say the most common use cases for us are around activation, other things like onboarding, surveys into getting started, components, personalization so changing the experience out for different user groups, for example, maybe the technical versus non technical audience, and then thinking about conversion, kind of what some of the stuff we already talked about, as well as kind of feature adoption. So I say those are kind of the major, I'd say, buckets of things that we focus on. That said, at the end of the day, all we're doing is helping you make components. You can do whatever you want with them. If you want to build an internal application, go ahead. The SDK zero is to play around with.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, because I know it's probably a silly question, but you know I'm thinking I've seen so many internal bespoke built products that could have should have had additional features and improvements and functionality. And you know some of the you know AB experience for this, this employee and that employee and those features were never built because it was a temporary project from for the you know customer facing developer or product team. They never had time for it again. So I know that was something that I thought that would have been super useful at one point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think I think you brought up another interesting point, which is when and how do you introduce AB testing kind of into your software development cycle? And I think a lot of times we use the word AB testing but we don't really think about what the use cases are. If we're being a little bit more honest, most experimentation in product really what we mean is I want to have a kill switch in case I built in that doesn't work.
Speaker 2:I got some.
Speaker 1:Of that actually means but what AB test should be is hey, we built something, we think it's a really good idea and we want to basically see it versus a control, to see if it actually improves things, and to do that you kind of need, at least I would say, like 3000 users kind of playing with it. For in most cases unless it's a truly amazing improvement, and so in most cases, it fits better with, I'd say, your marketing site, your traffic or kind of well trafficked pages within your product. So there's, it doesn't always work to run an AB test, but actually I think moving that methodology in product is a really, really good way to kind of it's a really good muscle to build within your experience.
Speaker 2:I must admit I used it in the private.
Speaker 1:And there's nothing wrong with that, like the, kill switch so many times before.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hey, the kill switch is very important. It creates for you as an engineering lead. It lets you go to bed at 3am, which I think is a very, very valuable use case.
Speaker 2:If you don't mind me asking how old are you, jonathan?
Speaker 1:I'm 34.
Speaker 2:34. How long have you been running Condu?
Speaker 1:I started five years ago.
Speaker 2:Five years ago. Okay, and is this your first business, or did you run other businesses before?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is my first venture backed business I've run. I co-founded a nonprofit which is still running, which is great, called Wayout, which is a US nonprofit that helps basically move, basically runs fundraisers in blue states and then uses it to fund LGBTQ community centers in red states. So that was actually kind of my first foray into actually building an organization. And then I also worked briefly on a number of other startup ideas, one of which was a programmable thermostat, a little bit before Nest. I don't have a manufacturing background, so I wasn't the right person to work on that, which is fine, right, but we gave it a shot.
Speaker 2:And what are some of your other ideas that didn't really make it.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. So I actually love this question, which is like what is the right startup for a founder to found? And I think probably the best thing that I've learned cycling through many ideas, and there was a period in my life when I knew I wanted to start a company and I thought I'd try to think of a startup idea every day. By the way, if you do it that way, you end up with a lot of things related to your personal interests, so things like travel, podcasting, food those are kind of the things that tend to pop up, but I think the easiest and probably best way to start a company is to think about in your work life what would you buy, what would you be a buyer for, what could I write a check for? And I think that that's probably a much simpler way to kind of come up with an idea that's actually commercially viable.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, at the end of the day, the B2B market is a lot more profitable. I would say, a lot less ruthless, in a sense as well, because you are right, I think like I have a lot of friends that started companies or want to start companies, and the first thing that comes, like you said, is you know, I enjoyed this thing and usually it's a hobby or something in their personal life and that automatically means B2C.
Speaker 2:And if I would to give anyone like an aspiring founder advice would be start B2B. If you're in a professional kind of career and path so far and you've had several roles and so on, you're ready in that world. You kind of know how things work and you can craft your path in a sense and it is. You know it does have its own downsides per se, but I think it's a lot more of a tangible market for a new founder than going B2C, unless you really want that rough and raw experience of going into something and you know potentially failing, which is completely okay, right, like I failed so many startup ideas before getting into one which was a B2B that actually worked. But if you're on a bit of a smoother ride, I think B2B is the path to go. I don't know if you agree with that or if you think otherwise.
Speaker 1:No, sorry. Yes, I completely agree with that overview, I think. First of all, starting a company is just a crazy idea in general. The cards are stacked against you, don't do it. If you don't have that bug that says I'm going to start a company. There's way better ways to spend your time, I think.
Speaker 2:But if you do have the itch, and way better ways to, kind of like outpour your creativity and if that's the only reason that you're doing it. There are other avenues as well that might not be that intense and stressful.
Speaker 1:I completely agree.
Speaker 1:I think running a company, a new company, is there's something very sexy about it, but when you get into it, really what it means is that you have an unbelievably large amount of stress about things you don't get to control, and that is actually quite challenging and, I think, something that I think every founder has to work through, including myself.
Speaker 1:How do you manage this incalculable challenge of trying to make something out of nothing? All of that said, if you decided you wanted to do it, then I think it makes a lot of sense to think about what's the simplest path to get there, and I really think the product, founder, market fit combinations are really important. So the best way to have a business is for someone to buy something that you've made, and the simplest way to do that is for you to find buyers of a product, and if you are a buyer of that product and you can find people like you who would want to buy the thing that you have, that helps it a lot, because it means it's more like that. Someone will actually pay you for it, which, ultimately, is what we're all here for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I liked what you said just now about a lot of people getting to the entrepreneurship and starting a business journey because it seems sexy and you start it and you realize that it's not that. And, to be honest, misfit Founders is a podcast to show you how unsexy owning a company is. That's my mission with this. So if you haven't gone through the journey yet, I'll show you that it's not that sexy and all you know, having discussions with a lot of founders that have been through things. So, as a segue into that, what is the most unsexy or the least sexy thing about starting something like Hound?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love this question.
Speaker 1:So the problem with being a founder is that you have to do every job possible for a startup, including things that you're not good at, that you don't enjoy and that you think are intolerable, and they still have to get done.
Speaker 1:So there's going to be something that will push you as a person beyond what you're good at, naturally, and what you like to do and what you're motivated by, and unfortunately, it still needs to get done. Maybe that's paying taxes, maybe that's incorporating, maybe that's giving employees off, maybe that is going to a trade show, like there's going to be some aspect of your job which, for you personally, sucks and still needs to happen. And I think that's what's kind of not that well understood, because when you're working for someone or when you're building something or doing a creative endeavor, fundamentally you're doing kind of what you're passionate about and doing it well, and kind of getting rewarded for that work. The problem with founding a company is that there's just so many arenas that you have to play in that there's bound to be something that you legitimately hate and still need to do.
Speaker 2:And what are some of those things that you legitimately hate, Whatever you want to tell me. Okay, I'm not going to push the buttons of people in your team or who knows investors or things like that.
Speaker 1:I think all the things I mentioned are quite fair, For example, including going to fairs and stuff. You know it's funny. I really find that I this thing I actually quite enjoy. I'm relatively extroverted. I think that's helpful. Do I like sending outbound LinkedIn messages? No, that's not my favorite use of time. That drains me. Having conversations with people is actually something I quite enjoy, so that has a duality to it. Conversely, reading legal documents is something I'm really bad at. I still need to do it.
Speaker 2:And there's no one who's good at reading legal documents. If you, let us do it, that's a great question.
Speaker 1:I think there are curious people who are also well trained in that arena, who are good at it. I just happen to not be one of them.
Speaker 2:I have to be right because I had a partner like a collaboration partner, so we had an agreement sent by someone, by a third party, and I'm like oh man, I need to read this agreement. Then he goes like I've already read it. That can tell me exactly what happens. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I will say this is another really good reason why, if you do have a co-founder, it's quite nice to pick someone who has a different, complementary skill set to you.
Speaker 1:So I'm non-technical and we have a technical product, so obviously I have a co-founder who can code and is an amazing engineer, in addition to many great qualities.
Speaker 1:But I think a lot of people end up working for that or like them initially and maybe have too similar of a skill set. And I think the problem with that combo punch is that you both try to basically fill the same roles and we're kind of attracted to people that are like us, but that's actually not really what you need for a co-founding pair. We need someone that you really trust and you can kind of fill in the spaces that you don't fill in, and vice versa. And so I think that's actually a big error that I see with kind of people who are like oh, who should I co-found a business with or who should be on the initial team, and they pick people who are like them or have very similar skill sets and motivations, and I think that that's a little bit of an error because ultimately what we're trying to do is kind of create a again there's just too many arenas to play in, so pick someone who likes the things that you don't like to do.
Speaker 2:I have a funny story about this. It's a very specific thing where, in my early days of advising and mentoring founders, I kept on saying this to early founders people that wanted to start a business or were struggling as a solo founder and wanted to get a co-founder and I kept on telling them well, think of people that you've worked really well with, think of people that you're compatible with and you feel like you would have a really good relationship work-wise, and find those people to avoid potentially working with people that you're not compatible with and there's a lot of friction and so on. So I said that so many times that at one point, someone came back and said oh, I think, bureau, thank you so much for this advice. I I found the perfect co-founder and it was a Copycat of them. There was a clone of theirs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with a skill set as well, right. And that's when I realized, actually, I need to give more context to this, because the last thing you want is to have someone that's identical. Well, unless you have the resources to Substitute for the lack of the skills that the two of you have. So if I bought a marketing and really good at I don't know inbound, or you're really good at digital Marketing or something like that, make sure that you also hire for the rest of the marketing and also for the rest of your business operations and and departments and so on. But yeah, I've learned the hard way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think I think deciding who you found a company with if that's the path you go down is so hard you're making. You're making a decision to date and then marry basically someone with whom you probably haven't worked that deeply with yet, and I think finding someone who is seems like you feels like a good fit. But actually you really want that compliment and I think, ultimately, what you really want to do is to build trust that they can do the things that you can't do and that you can do, and that they trust you to do the things that they can't do. And that's actually the really hard part is how do I trust you with something that I'm not an expert in right? That's the real value of having a co-founder and with your co-founder.
Speaker 2:How did you found them or to go go around finding them, and how did you figure out that they're the one because you've been together for five years? It's a happy marriage, so far, at least on paper indeed, indeed, I think, and again, we've had our.
Speaker 1:We've had our ups and downs, we've had disagreements and we've worked through them. So my co-founder is Miquela. He's an amazing engineer and also, I think, really grown into a leader over time. That's been really, really exciting to see.
Speaker 1:Originally, I found him through a program here in London called entrepreneur first. So what was that matching program? I knew I wanted to start a software company, and he was the only one on my program who had successfully built a Software application on his own, and so I was like, oh, this is such an easy decision. You know, there's only one person in this program who I trust, based on what I can, based on their work product. Unfortunately, he also wanted to be CEO, and so I had to then, basically, you have a little tussle with him to basically say, hey, I just don't have the skill set to be CTO, I don't know what to tell you, I just can't do it.
Speaker 1:And what's funny is actually, over time, our roles have kind of Flipped back and forth, and so currently he actually does a lot of the initial things that I used to do. He manages a lot of the people on the team. He manages the finance and legal, in addition to kind of running engineer position, and we have kind of found our you know, our niches are kind of our, the areas that we kind of do the best in, as we found more and more Amazing team members to kind of fill in kind of those core functions. So I've been, I would say I've been quite lucky in Finding someone, but at the end of the day, you know, you take the best information that you have. In my case it was Look at their work product and to be impressed by it and to say I want to work with that type of person.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say it's a fully risky approach, quasi, because on one side, just looking at their product and saying you know it, awesome output, yeah, kind of like detracts all of the other traits that make you and him a harmonious Relationship type of founders, because you've not really seen how he is as a person Now you work and so on, but on the other side, I also feel that sometimes your output of work reflects the type of person that you are as well.
Speaker 2:So if you have a certain type of care for this type of this aspect of your business or your product, the way you communicate your product or your project can also have a really strong signal of the type of person that you are.
Speaker 1:So it's not 100% gray, black and white, I would say yeah, and I think I think this is why this dating period is so important. You need to have a period when you're working together, when you're going through that really difficult phase which is trying to figure out which there's. Actually there's two fundamentally difficult problem, two really really hard parts of starting a business. One is finding the right problem what's the thing we really want to solve and the second one is finding the right solution to that problem. And I think that kind of validation, customer discovery phase is very, very difficult to To work through because you have so many wrong assumptions that you're gonna need to Understand, learn, debate and then decide on the very little data. And so I think that's a really good period to kind of Work with someone to kind of see how do they deal with really high amounts of uncertainty as you kind of work through finding kind of what is our, what do we, what do we have conviction in, and then what are we gonna ultimately build?
Speaker 2:and how? What would you suggest normally that period of time to be?
Speaker 1:Whoo, I mean, that's a very good question. I think that there are some amazing Startups that just hit the ground and have the hockey stick. They know what they're doing. They figure it out. It took us probably a full year to figure out, kind of, what was the actual product, and then it probably took us an additional year To actually build that product. So we really weren't ready to go to market for a full two years, which is, again, you know, maybe it's longer than most. But I think that I do think that, being that period of time I'm working through stuff validating what we've learned, kind of figuring out what we really fundamentally believed in, was actually probably the most important part of the journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know there's so much opinion on this out in the world, you know, from people that say, well, you know, stop trying to prefer perfect your MVP and just launch it, launch it. But then there's also there's also the other side, which is, you know, make sure you have the proposition that you envision, in a sense like, and and start with something that Will not fail right or not have a high probability of failure.
Speaker 2:Because here's an example of From my own experience, of Launching something and almost failing. Because you know MVP is is king and you have to do have fast MVP's like Nicky and I started Jigsaw with that attitude, as in Make the bare minimum and launch it to the market. We've done, of course, we've done some customer research and figure out what was missing from the market and so on. We spent we didn't spend that little of over that, it was eight months of development, but it was for us it was like the bare minimum that we've done. We almost shut down six months later Because we started thinking this is a stupid idea.
Speaker 2:What a challenging six months that must have been yeah, and, and the way we got out of it was snapped out of it was by us going back to the drawing board and looking at and digging deeper.
Speaker 2:So basically, we could have saved ourselves a lot of headache and upset by using those three, four extra months that the product was running and us Figuring out and and improving the things to to make our customers have that aha moment. Yeah, and do it. Continue to do it then and not have this bare Six months period where we weren't getting customers. We're getting bombed. We're getting, yeah, not so positive reviews about the product, yep, and so I think it's. I wouldn't say I'm on one Side of the fence or the other, but you just have to feel it in a sense.
Speaker 1:I think that this is such a mind fuck. Sorry to for the language, but I think you can swear.
Speaker 1:But this is so Real. Right, when you have launched something and you have two ideas in your head at the same time. One is that what you're building, you have conviction it's the right thing, that's why you're doing it, that's why you're investing all of this effort to build a prototype, which is really really hard to do and at the same time, you're like I'm not sure if this is right. I just don't know if I'm getting the validation from the market that it's real. And I think that that phase about being Uncertain and also certain is really really, really difficult to manage. And what I guess I would say is that the More you can do to find smaller points of validation, the better.
Speaker 1:So, for example, if you're building a B2B SaaS product that's my world I would really recommend not saying let's get some customers that's a hard thing to get, that'll pay us. I would instead say what is the minimum viable product that somebody will install on a sandbox? Right, it's not quite production, it's just a sandbox. How do we reduce the, the bar to see if we can get someone to first do that and then, once we get that done, then we can say okay, what does it need to happen to get onto production. Right, what's the step? To kind of get there and kind of by reducing the rungs on the ladder, you can kind of more easily pull up and say, hey, are we on the right track or not? I do think that this period, though, I'll, I you know, warning in advance, this is tough yeah it is.
Speaker 2:You know, and you have people out there that have the blueprint, because we thought we had the blueprint of building a product that people want as well. It's like, well, duh, make research, get some some feedback, get some beta testers get feedback and this and that, but that's not a silver bullet, like until you put dollar, yeah, backing on the solution that you're using and that you're giving feedback. You're never gonna give. Have the same feedback.
Speaker 1:You know, as you would do that if you know it's just a test group 100%, 100% and that's why I think the that's why, by the way, installing a, put on a sandbox and production, they're not actual dollars but their effort involved in actually getting it done, dollars or effort yet, yeah, and I think it's. I think it's a little bit of a smaller bar, but it still has that Requirement that the person you're talking to it can't just be the conversation right there, but they're trying to help you. It has to be them putting their neck out a little bit. Maybe they're talking to their team, maybe they're actually installing your SDK, I mean, whatever is that that flavor for you?
Speaker 1:But until a User has, or a potential user has, put in some, some chips on the table, their feedback is kind of useless. It just doesn't really matter, it's not real. I do think if you haven't run the mom test, it's a great place to start. It's a really quick read, you'll get through it in, you know 30 minutes. But I do think this whole concept of Early users wanting to help you and therefore telling you stuff that is they think is a good idea, but it's not actually relevant for solving their specific hair on fire problem and I hate that expression hair on fire problem but it is unfortunately true. You gotta discount it, you just gotta let it go.
Speaker 2:The mom test. I so disclaimer I have not read it because by the time I've heard of that book I was out of product customer discovery. Yeah, yeah, I was customer discovery and product. I Think Every single person that told me about the book is like super. Yeah, I really changed my perspective on you. Know how to do this thing, which is a product build a product that has a hundred percent customer of experience and stuff totally, I think.
Speaker 1:Um my the favorite lesson I have for those who haven't read it, and again, it's a very short read, so go ahead and get on Amazon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nikki, oh, it's like, it's not like it's not lying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, fortunately, most business books Overwrite because they're like we got a fill 200 pages. This one doesn't have that fear, which is great. But I think the most important question you can ask I design partner or a potential user is tell me about your current process today. How does it actually work today to do x job? Because I think too often we're like, oh, if you had this product, how would you use it? And unfortunately that puts people in the future, it puts them into the possibility, and then people just lie and make stuff up because they want to be helpful or they want to feel creative or they want to feel, you know, interesting. But really what you want to know is okay, last Tuesday you had to do x. Just walk me through how you did that, because then you'll uncover the truth about how things actually work.
Speaker 2:It's the same like if you would you compare it to something similar is Testing and basically finding bugs in your, in your product. Yeah, there's one thing. Intentionally Testing is one thing. In just using the product on a daily basis and in ways that only you as the user can, yeah, in using it as finding bugs like that. So there's never, you're never gonna be able to cover for the entire spectrum of what you're looking to to get as information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I will say QA is probably not one of the strongest, not one of our best things. I would say as a company we're much more in the let's ship something and see how it hits. And we are as we mature over time, as we have a more mature product. We've slowly come back around that. So I think again, this is one of those classic, you know, expanding, contracting things right as you kind of the rules of engagement change with the maturity of your customers, of the maturity of your business, and I think the tools that you use we're going to be different depending on kind of where you are in that journey. And I will say for an early founder, the closer you can get to the actual workflow that someone's, the closer you get to someone's current present, the better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the closer you get to someone's present, the better If they're living in the future with you.
Speaker 1:If you're like, I have this amazing vision, here's how the world should work. And they're like yeah, we believe in that too. You're probably off track.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, and basically saying also solve problems for today's challenges.
Speaker 1:Today? Yeah, yeah, I do think that a really important thing with a founder is figuring out your vision right. How should the world work? How do you want it to work when someone uses your product or as part of the little cult that you've created around your company? But I think too often we get stuck thinking that that's like the way to build stuff. I think a better way to think about it is like what is the status quo today for your customers and why is that intolerable? And if the status quo today is not intolerable, then you're probably working on the wrong problem, which is getting back to what makes a great business idea. It's something that solves for the problem that exists today. That is actually incredibly irritating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, to be honest, I've been to SaaS talk and some of the other fairs of SaaS businesses and you do have some of those. You sit and say, okay, so what does your company solve? What problems do you solve? We relieve you of this headache. I'm almost sad they're thinking is that a bad idea? Never known. I had that headache and I don't think I want to know again because I don't think I care about it. Yeah, so that's not a good start.
Speaker 1:No, and it's always funny when I hear something like that, they're like, oh, I'm like, oh, how did you get there? And you're like, oh, this amazing new technology came out, or here's a trend that I've heard about. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. This is not how we solve problems. We start from the actual problem, not by hearing about a trend or hearing about a what's it called like a new.
Speaker 1:I think this is particularly true for some of the new AI startups that are coming out, where I think that we're getting actually, let's be more clear. This was most clear to me in crypto not solving core and core problems. But I do think that spending more time thinking about the problem that you're solving is very, very, very helpful when trying to actually create a viable business, and I would say that if you are not confident in the problem that you're solving, I would actually rather have you literally just copy a business that works somewhere else in the world than I would have you create a new idea, because you're not doing the real work of finding a real problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very true, and that's fundamentally that's what worked for us as well, because I've we've never reinvented any wheels at Jixxo, but we are solving burning problems in the project management space. Others tackled as well and solved in a way or another, but we're doing it in a specific way and customers wanted to solve that problem in a specific way. So, even that you don't have to have a very unique idea, as long as you you have a product that solves a problem, a very needed solution, you have a very needed solution and also you do it in a way that appeals to people better than maybe your competitors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think I think in this case, actually this is another really good point, which is solving for one versus solving for the masses. Yes, find a really small group to solve for and make sure you solve that problem really well for even one person. Hopefully there's more of them out there and that's why I think actually thinking about what you would actually want to buy as a great is a great kind of starting or jumping off point, but really getting concrete for a very niche group, because then you'll find more people that will come to you afterward. But I think a mistake that I certainly made, and I think I see a lot of other founders making, is trying to solve for, oh, solving for, like TAM, right, what is your total addressable market?
Speaker 1:I think that question is my least favorite question in the world of venture-backed startups because what it leads you down is a path of solving for sort of well, for like a ton of people and then not having a great business. I would say if I could delete one question from every investor's or every investor conversation, it's like what's your TAM? Honestly, who cares? Solve one really niche problem and then there might be more people that you can add to that over time. But I think often we get confused wanting to go after a big market go after a tiny market.
Speaker 2:Find a niche as an active investor, I can tell you that I roll my eyes every single time someone comes with a presentation and says the TAM is 500 billion and this and that I'm like I don't really care. But the thing is that I've talked to a lot of OG investors as well. They see that as a very important factor to determine the potential of the business. And in my mind, surely there's a different way for you to understand the actual raw potential of that business, of growing business and doing business and getting revenue and so on. Tam again, like you said, maybe there's ways where we can talk a bit more about our specific customer base, the sizes, the sales opportunities that you have in there, rather than talking about a growth of the entire market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is a complicated, I'm oversimplifying, but I would say the way I like to think about it is imagine that your business is like a string of dominoes that you've lined up and your job as a founder is to hit that first domino over and to get a small group of users who are really interested, which will then trigger the next domino to fall, to trigger the next domino to fall.
Speaker 1:If you think about the entire board as a whole, you're not going to be solving the problem for that first domino and I think actually you'll do yourself a disservice because you actually won't set up the game correctly Once you're in it. Once you figured out kind of your first micro market to solve for, you'll find your next customer is like you're smart, you'll see where the pull is and you'll kind of go in that direction. That said, of course there are some businesses that are constrained based on a certain regulation in a certain place or there's other constraints in the business that make them not really venture backable. But if you're building a software company, chances are it's probably going to be a venture backable business if it's a really good business for the first domino.
Speaker 2:So you talked about how your co-founders role has evolved. I'm also interested in how your role has evolved over these five years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great question. So my job has really become focused on. The thing that I'm really good at is getting someone excited about an idea. To be honest, that's what I love to do. I love to kind of show, to understand where a person's coming from and then explain how their world can be different and help them get excited about it. So I've really shifted to really being kind of an external party to my own team. I do sales, I do marketing, I do investor relations kind of that more traditional external facing role.
Speaker 1:What I thought I was good at before starting this company I thought I was good at organization. I thought I was good at people management. I thought I was good at all of these other things that you know being having analytical mind. That I thought I learned in consulting but it turns out actually is not my core way that I had value to the business. So I think for me, kind of distilling down what am I really good at and how do I create value I think that's been really helpful.
Speaker 1:And then also just looking around and saying you know again, we talked about this a couple of times, but a startup has so many different things you got to work on. Do you have the capability set within your organization to handle it? And what gives you, what motivates you, what gives you joy? Where do you have those internal feedback loops? Because it is a marathon, it's not a sprint, and so thinking about kind of, what do you enjoy most? And if it's not paperwork, then by all means, you know, find someone who's good at that and bring them into the organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's also interesting how that changed for you. So just untangling that a bit. So when we, when you mentioned the people management and organization and so on, was there anything specific along these five years that you realize you know what I'm not actually enjoying that? What was it more I'm actually enjoying this way more? This pales in comparison to, like people management and Oregon things. That pales in comparison to this other thing which is, you know, when you said kind of like helping people with painting the picture of how you can improve, how people can improve, be it a product and so on, I immediately thought of, for some reason, customer success. But you may mention marketing, sales and all of these things, yeah, and customer sales as well yeah, so what was that shift?
Speaker 2:like what?
Speaker 1:caused it. Oh, this is the internal mechanics of working in a startup. No, I think so. I've had certainly had this experience working at an early stage company, where what's the story of Odysseus? Right, he has this ship and it's got a bunch of different planks on it, and by the time he sails around the entire world, every plank on the ship is different, right, and it's a whole new ship as honey gets back. And the question is is that still the same ship or is that a different ship?
Speaker 1:I found that, when it comes to hiring and recruiting talent, that's very likely going to happen, right?
Speaker 1:You're going to have a lot of turnover in an early stage company. A lot of people coming in maybe have a very specific skill set for one phase, or maybe they are really good at one thing, and it turns out that as you learn more about what your business actually needs, that might not be a perfect match anymore, for whatever reason, and I think that that's been certainly true of us that we've had people come in, spend a couple of years doing something well and then something changes in the market. Maybe we sell to a new consumer. In our case, our product has become more technical over time, and so I think that that's been a big shift for us in terms of who do we hire and retain and what do they work on. And, as it turns out, my co-founder and a couple of other leaders in my team are really good at this, and this is not the thing that I'm best at, which is finding someone's identifying what someone's motivation is and then making them as successful as possible within a really fast-changing and uncertain environment.
Speaker 1:And so I've been like you know what? I can recognize talent when I see it, and I will let these other great people that work on my team kind of run that show.
Speaker 2:That's very humble of you, because so many of us cling to certain things, because you know you have that. Well, I know how to do it, I can do it and never let go to certain things, although you know it's clear there in front of us that that person can do it way better, and so on. So that is good, for it's a good trait to have recognizing when you're less of a.
Speaker 1:Well, sometimes it's very obvious, but actually I think the key idea here is not just noticing when you're not as good at something, but actually the really hard part is realizing when you are really good at something and you still need to give it away. I think that's the really hard one Like. A simple example is like I care a lot about what our marketing side looks like. You know that matters a lot to me. Should I be the one working in Webflow or coming up with the messaging?
Speaker 2:I actually know Probably not.
Speaker 1:Probably not anymore, and so I think, learning how to let go of things that you really believe in and that you care a lot about but don't have the energy and time for anymore, and starting to trust other people to manage it, I think that's I mean, that's certainly been my personal journey, and I think that's probably true for a lot of founders, because ultimately, everything that we work on, we're going to give away.
Speaker 2:I also, like I was thinking about. I liked your metaphor of and about the ship right, so as it starts from the port, by the time it reaches the end of its journey, it's a different ship because it changed a lot of the whatever, I don't even know a single component in the ship. I thought terrible. But what I wanted to say is it's probably also important on how you reach the final destination, final port. Are you going to reach it as a pirate ship, as a conquistador ship or like Malaysia, whatever. How is that?
Speaker 1:I think those are all very similar ships, but I get your point. I get your point, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:What's the current size of your team at?
Speaker 1:15.
Speaker 2:15. Okay.
Speaker 1:And that's you've Plus or minus a number of great contractors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Right, and did you grew that steadily over the five years, or did you have a period where you had more employees?
Speaker 1:Oh no, of course not. We raised a big seed round at it for a while. We were closer to 30, and then we scaled back to the right to like right, size it basically, and then we've been slowly adding people since then.
Speaker 2:Okay, and you had a seed round. Have you raised since then?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean I think I've done a number of different types of rounds, everything from we did a pre-seed round, a seed bridge, did a couple of angel rounds, so there's been a couple of different flavors throughout the experience. I'd say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've also noticed bridges, like if you'd tell me a bridge round a couple of years ago I'd be like, well, a what, what? Yeah, but they're very popular nowadays. I'm looking from the investor perspective because I've seen so many companies coming back to bridge or to extend or whatnot, so that's quite popular. I think the whole investment realm is getting a lot more accessible and companies feel to me that have the tools to know what they're doing when they're getting funded.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean things like when we started out, it would be very uncommon to use a debt instrument, for example, to amplify a round, whereas now that's quite common. I do think that the reason that the bridge round is becoming more popular is very simple, which is just that interest rates are higher and so some of the valuations that were earlier don't make quite as much sense as they do today. And I do think that there's been a big shift in, I guess, two things. One I think it used to be that doing a bridge round meant your business was dying, which is not true, and then I think separately. I think a lot of companies like ours really are, like you know, actually growth is great, but I would actually rather have a capital efficient business that's profitable, Right. I think that's been a big shift, also in terms of what we believe is kind of most valuable as founders.
Speaker 2:We, as in you, your co-founder, and I just want to know where you stand with that. Are you? Is the aim to build a profitable, sustainable business? Are you looking at IPO? Are you looking at a potentially strategic acquisition and stuff? What would be your perfect future?
Speaker 1:Our perfect future stay. I think I'm going to live right now in the present, which is that we're on the path to our profitability. It's very meaningful to me, which is something that I'm very excited about. Getting there, of course, has not been easiest. Like I said, we've scaled the team up and down, so I wouldn't say it's been a perfectly clean process.
Speaker 1:I will also say when I started this company, I really wasn't thinking about it, in part because at that point you're burning so much money to build a product that's not really top of mind. But there's something very how do you say? Seductive about having a company that operates and serves itself, because at that point you have optionality. You can decide do I take in more investment and hire a larger sales team? Do I want to find a strategic partner and become part of a larger business? What is the path that I choose to go down? The time pressure and the clock is off. I think that having a backstop of oh, we make money from our customers paying us for stuff to me is a very exciting prospect.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what you said. You're not there, you're going to get there, we are going to get there. Give me a call, tell me how it feels, because I've never been to it.
Speaker 1:Oh, the magic of tech, you know.
Speaker 2:With Jigsaw we've had a seed round. We started hiring and then we wanted to amplify and hire more and do things faster. We got another round and by the time we got acquired we didn't became profitable. We were on the path to. We got acquired in December last year and by summer this year we should have been profitable. I don't know the feelings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got to say again there are so many ways to slice the cat, which is a terrible expression but there's so many ways to slice the cat.
Speaker 1:Whatever you do, that's not a good idea. There are so many ways to slice the pie, skin the cat. There we go. There's two different flavors there. I guess both are terrible. Anyway, both are terrible, but I think Uber was what has been profitable for one quarter in its life. I think there's many ways to build a business. I will say, though, when you are deciding what kind of business you want to grow, deciding really early on do we take venture money or not is really important to think through, because, ultimately, when you take venture money, what you're saying is I want to have a 10X return for my investors and therefore it needs to reach a certain level of growth, and I think that you need to know what game you're playing, and I think that that makes a really, really big difference in terms of the expectations on your business and also the capital you have to make a really big bet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, expectation is a big one, capital is a big one, although that I feel that I don't know about you, but the expectation part is more. It's a bigger thing for me than the capital part, because you are getting into a kind of like a wedding with shareholders that have certain expectations or requirements. There's certain pressures even if there are no pressures. If you're that type of person, there are pressures and for us it's always been, even though we had really amazing investors and so on. It's still back in my mind I don't want to disappoint our early angel investor.
Speaker 2:I want to make sure that if we do an exit that is super profitable for them as well and all of this stuff. We were at a kind of like inflection point at one point and then, inflection point at one point After growing steadily.
Speaker 2:we're looking at it as either we're going to become part of a bigger team and do all of that, or start series A and so on and just go bigger, and I think we got a bit put off around the pressures of getting series like starting to deal with VC companies and so on. There's nothing wrong with that. There's companies, there's businesses. That makes a lot of sense. There are founders that are really good in that environment. I think Nikki and I kind of figured out that, at least at this stage in our careers, that that wasn't what we wanted to go for and subject ourselves to that intensity. So that's why we kind of decided it wasn't the only reason, but it was one of the reasons why we decided finding a better home for our team and for ourselves is the right approach.
Speaker 1:And I think that that I think having it's very easy to get tunnel vision, I think, especially when you start to take on investment, to hire the team, to kind of build up that kind of build that world, I think it's very easy to say, okay, therefore, this is what we need to do. But again, there are many ways to have to be an entrepreneur. There's many ways to have a successful business and I'm very blessed that we have an amazing investors. I am super lucky to work with the investors that we have. Two Sigma Ventures and Angular have been some of the best partners I could possibly imagine, and there's been many other great ones along the way.
Speaker 1:But ultimately, I'm building this business for my team and for me, and so we're looking to kind of create and of course we're trying to create a commercial value. That's what the purpose of having a company is, in addition to changing the world. But I think you do need to decide with kind of the co-founding team what you want because, like you said, those pressures exist. That is just built into the system. That is how it works, and so I think it's hard not to Given that you're on a boat that's on a very fast moving stream, it's important to pull your head up and say, hey, where are we actually trying to go?
Speaker 2:And what was when you started your journey into funding, right into getting seed rounds and stuff? What did you find as the hardest part of all of that?
Speaker 1:What was the hardest part about getting funding? Yeah, yeah, what was the hardest part about getting funding? I think for us the hardest part was that we skipped the angel round and went straight for the institutional round. So we decided to raise a million dollars off the bat, just as a pre-seed, and I think because we hadn't gone through the initial Some of the earlier phases about working with angels, doing family and friends around, having some early customers. We were kind of pitching off of a Figma file and a deck, and I think that that created a couple more challenges for us.
Speaker 1:And as soon as we found, I think the thing that unlocked it for us was when I just could feel in my bones that I believed in what we were building, which was that I believed that non-technical people like me should be able to build the front end of applications, and I was like that's how the world's going to be and I could paint the picture of how it should work, even though at the time and even today it's still a little bit of a wait. Really, is that how it should work? And I think that that as soon as I got conviction, then it was much, much, much easier to do the seed, pre-seed and then to actually do the $5 million seed. That followed quite quickly, but having that conviction because I'd missed those validation steps at the beginning, I think that's what actually was the most challenging for us.
Speaker 2:It's been a roller coaster in that sense, when we started just pitching at the beginning because we're so, and we started pitching quite quick because we were thinking, oh, should we check? And we've done some test pitches in the early days where the product we didn't really knew what we were doing and where we were heading and it just felt. It felt like no one and the line of questioning that we were getting and this again this was like angel investment, it was friends and family and so on People felt instantly that we weren't really sure where we're heading, because the line of questioning immediately starts going into drilling about your confidence and your ability to do this. That came after we were making $5,000 MRR, because we were a lot more confident that we have $5,000 worth of customers that actually believe in this.
Speaker 1:How good does that first $5,000 feel coming at you right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you enter the, especially if you're not pre-money anymore consider than your generating revenue and you've proven the concept right and there's value in your product. Not only that, but after a while it becomes second nature to position your product when you're having conversations with people.
Speaker 1:I think that the key thing that I really want to draw out of what you just said is when you feel it in your bones what you're doing makes sense and when you're consistently pitching the same thing and you're getting that same kind of reaction, that's when you know that.
Speaker 1:Okay, I already take it to prime time, because I think, in reality, we're all just kind of guessing about how the world should be. And when an investor meets with you, yes, they're thinking about the market. Yes, they're thinking about the product. Yes, they're thinking about yada, yada, yada, but really what they're drafting off of is your belief right? Because they're not the ones actually doing the work, they're not the ones changing the world, right, they're enabling you. And so when they find a founder that they, who shares a belief that they have and is changing the world in that way, that's what they really are looking for. And so I think that that $5,000 for you, the reason that $5,000 was not important was because of the money, which is, of course, great, but it's because it gave you that feeling that then other people could then resonate with.
Speaker 2:And the experience of the failed pitching and the very rough feedback that we got really helped with that. And I want to highlight something here because I don't want people to think that you should only go get it, in a sense, when you're extremely confident, because you're never going to get it. Because if you don't go through the fuckups of and the failures of failing pitching, failing positioning, your product failing your first sale attempts and so on.
Speaker 2:You're never going to do it and fundamentally, yes, it is good. It makes you feel a lot more confident if you have achievements in your backpack, for example, misfit founders and me starting this podcast. I think the reason why I'm able to do this and talk quite relaxed and have these conversations with a ton of founders is because, in a way, I've exited a company. I feel confident.
Speaker 1:You've done it, you've had that life experience.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, but the whole purpose is I failed so many times before. I also had a lot of failures in terms of content and trying to teach others, and so on.
Speaker 2:One because I wasn't very confident with what I was saying and what I was doing, but two, I was at the beginning of my journey, of course. Yeah, and ultimately that's the one thing that I want to do with Misfit founders is also like you have to start, and if you get some examples of failure and people talking honestly about their journey, maybe that will incentivize you to give it a try. But from the outside it might seem like well, bureau started, he got an exit, he got his peace in a sense, and now he's a confident, exited founder and he's doing a podcast and he looked how chatty he is and so on. But it's not the first time I'm running a podcast and it's not the first time I'm trying to do content of this sort and so on. I've had my share of trying and so on. Yes, now, because I had that failure experience and because I have the validation back-back on my back, I can do this a lot better. But without trying, you're never going to succeed, in a sense, and we're so biased by.
Speaker 1:It's so easy to look at someone's success and say, oh, they just figured it out or it just clicked for them. But I think what you don't see is you don't see all of the other things that didn't work along the way. And, again, the only time that you know when you really have conviction is when you have felt what it felt like not to have it and you can feel that shift in. Oh wait, this is working and maybe we don't have everything figured out, but this little piece is a little fire that started. That I believe in and I think that that, see, I don't want to give the impression that you shouldn't be pitching and figuring your stuff out. That's the only way to do it. I'm just saying that there will be a shift when you start to get those moments of validation, when that first $5,000 hits the bank account, when you say, oh, okay, there's something here, let's build on that.
Speaker 1:And I think one other thing I do like about this framework is I think a lot of times we think about I need to fix this, I need to fix that, I need to fix that. I think actually, as a founder, your number one thing to do is to figure out what is working and then do more of that. And I think that that's really hard to understand, because it's very easy to be like a completist to say, oh, I haven't done this, or this could work, or that market might be good, or this product could be great. But maybe throw that all away and say what's the everything you're working on, what feels like it's working, and then how do we do more of that? Thank, you.
Speaker 2:You've had a moment there where you just smiled quite a lot when I said about our first $5,000. When did that came for you, and was it a big moment for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny For us, it was our. For me, that moment was, you know. So we did a lot of like micro launches. We did, like you know, first working with design partners and then we had you know, it's funny, actually one of the first people I ever did a design partner with partnership with.
Speaker 1:She became a customer last week, five years later she became a customer at writercom a really, really amazing enterprise, ai company and I was laughing at that because you know we were doing probably a user interview a day, trying to like learn more about how to build our product, and we did that for probably a year before we really got into people actually buying our services. And you know, I gotta say it really does feel amazing when you get a little stripe notification that someone's deposited money in your account. There's really nothing like it and it's you know, again.
Speaker 1:it's a long journey. There's a lot of checkpoints along the way, but when you get paid, it feels good.
Speaker 2:Yes, it sure does. I used to have Slack notifications. That's the Slack integration. It's just like this person just purchased a license for 10 users 20 users and at the beginning I was like 10 users, oh, that's nice. And then I realized I want to see the amount there. So I put this means this much per month, yeah, yeah. So you've obviously been through a significant journey so far with CanDo. I'm sure you had moments where you felt like it was challenging, that you doubted yourself, your capabilities or even you know what you were doing. Are you okay to talk about some of that?
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm happy to. I'm happy to. One of the worst experiences that I had was we got one of our. I used to work for LaunchDarkly, a really great enterprise software company that does feature management and we they move this on a production and we crash their application.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you Well, you crashed LaunchDarkly's application.
Speaker 1:Not for all users, but for some, yeah, and that's.
Speaker 2:I feel that you should have some sort of badge or something like that, because a company like LaunchDarkly.
Speaker 1:It's really hard to do, you know, and I gotta say so, we are an enterprise embedded software application. What we do, our pride and joy, is that we help you build user experiences. The reason that you shouldn't use us is because it's risky. What happens if, it, you know, you're adding a third party into an application? And we did it at probably at one of the most important, I guess, prospects that we could have, which is a place that I used to work right, and we did it in a way that was catastrophically terrible, in that we did what we promised we would never do, which is to actually, you know, make the experience not just bad but to turn it off right.
Speaker 1:And that was a real moment when I was like, oh my God, do I have the right product? Do I have the right team? Should I shut the thing down? And that was a real soul searching moment for us. And we actually ended up re-architecting the entire SDK. Of course, we basically took four months off of that commercial development of any kind to actually make sure that we build something that's reliable and scalable and works in all these different types of environments. And you know, as a commercial person, you're kind of twiddling your thumbs for a long time while you go through this big re-architecture, and so it was both a really difficult experience when it first happened, and then there was a long tale about me not really doing that much as a commercial partner because I had to wait until we were scalable and could actually deliver what we promised, and that must amplify the event, in a sense right, because not only that you feel like you've massively failed this customer, but you have a period where you can't really touch anything yourself. And.
Speaker 2:I suppose that amplifies the just in general, the feeling of failure, because I've been there as well.
Speaker 1:It gets even worse when you are like I don't know if I, my team, had worked on it and I couldn't really touch it, and you have to say, okay, like we failed as a team. But I like there's also that trust breakdown as well, which is again something that we've worked through and we've, you know, have learned a lot from. But like, yeah, that was a really hard period to work through as a team.
Speaker 2:How did you, how did you yield from that? Right Like.
Speaker 2:I'm asking because I battle my own demons and this one, the failure part, is a really big one Every single time. We had didn't happen that many times times to have the our entire application shut down or crash or things like that, but it happened a couple of times and we had to go into the war room and but it was such a such an intense and stressful period for me that I feel that I had a couple of occasions where it just basically affected me and I beat myself up quite, quite, quite a lot. And I'm always interested in hearing from others that you know kind of like, find it very difficult and to go through these periods on how, how do you heal, how do you get out of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I mean for us. One thing that was really helpful for me was to really like get into the detail about what happened and then really trying to understand how do we re architect what we built so that it will never happen again?
Speaker 1:And as a non technical person. I mean, am I adding that much value to the, the product direction? Like not really. Let's be honest, I think I needed to understand exactly what had happened at every different level so that I could feel it's like a rebuild, that confidence of my team again. And I think one other thing that was quite helpful for me was my co-founder is a really big believer in retros and we take them really seriously and we spend a lot of time thinking about exactly, you know, laying out the timeline for how things failed, figuring out the exact moment of failure, and I think that kind of like that process is actually quite helpful for kind of, I guess, reinstalling trust and then separately, you know what, like shit happens.
Speaker 1:You know, like if you think that you're going to launch a software product that's not going to crash at some point, you are crazy. Like that is just not how it works. And I think having a little bit of not being so what's it called? It's a fragility, I think to thinking that it will work out exactly as you want it to all the time, and I think letting that go and being like you know what. Yes, we made a mistake. Yes, we're going to learn from it, but at the end of the day, we got to brush ourselves off and keep going.
Speaker 2:That's a big part of the journey too, yeah, However, when you're in the moment and the heat of it, that's the last thing that you could say to yourself is shit happens.
Speaker 2:It takes a while, isn't it? It takes a while. You do feel that after a while you heal from it. If you're very constructive, like you said, run retrospectives, fix it, work as a team in getting better in certain things, I feel that that helps massively heal things. And you also look at it as you know shit happens. It's part of the journey, it's part of the learning, it's part of becoming a better version of yourself, a better version of your service that you offer, and so on.
Speaker 1:Man when you're in the heat of it, it's bad. Yeah, it's bad, and that's part of the journey is feeling those bad emotions and letting them wash over you and then putting them in a little box and saying you know what, if I'm going to learn something from this? But I'm not going to let this, I'm not going to let this derail the entire ship. You know yeah.
Speaker 2:So what's coming for you? What's the? I know you mentioned that you live in the moment with Kandu and so on, but what would you like more of in your professional day to day?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that we've kind of figured out. We've kind of figured out what we're really good at as a company, which is helping you deliver these really rapid how do you say Improvements to your product experience. And also there's two like aha moments for us. One of them is actually building something and then hitting inject and seeing it appear on the screen. Like I got to say, there's something magical about that experience. And there's a new magical moment that we've actually discovered, which is when you set up your little component as really like an AB test kind of what we talked about, starting to see the stats come in and learning immediately hey, did this little thing that I made make a difference or not? And so I think that's been really fun to kind of have.
Speaker 1:As a new how do you say as a new part of the journey is kind of seeing that moment of clarity for people who are non technical, being able to actually have that experience. And so for me, I'd say, figuring out how to make it simpler and simpler for more and more types of people to have those little magical moments, for me is very, very exciting. I'm not sure that fully answer your question on where the company's direction is going, but those two things just kind of what the what stands out to me is like oh, we had something that we thought was valuable and we found something else which is great. I'll take that answer.
Speaker 2:Okay, great, is there? So, before we close there, anything that you have any curiosity about myself, my path, have any questions. I know that we've been in each other's networks for quite a bit and we shared a couple of conversations before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one thing I always think about is you know, I know what my little version of the world looks like, based on kind of the path that I've been on. But now you've sat in the other seat and now you've kind of seen all these different stories. I guess what stood out to you is like what's a way that you didn't build your startup, that you're like, oh, actually it's really interesting to me and like this is something that I'm hearing. And I guess what stood out to you is like different from your own kind of experience as a founder.
Speaker 2:That's a really good question, I think, is being a bit more mature about my business.
Speaker 2:I feel that with Jekso, I've done a lot of the things that I wanted to do, rather than the things that I should have done and needed to be done, and I think that's one of the things where I see because I'm on the other seat right now I'm also an investor, I'm an advisor, a mentor a couple of startups, so I talk to a lot of startups and a lot of early companies and I see them coming in with times, such good energy around.
Speaker 2:I'll do what I need to do, right, you know, help me segment, section out the various needs and initiatives that I need to put together and I'll do it. It doesn't matter if there's something that I really love or I don't. You know, because we were talking about that earlier, I've kind of carved my path with Jekso to do a lot more of the things that I really enjoyed at times, at a determinant of certain areas of the business going as they were supposed to and, you know, seeing a lot of the young entrepreneurs today and people that are getting into the business world being a lot more leveled in that sense and saying you know it is a passion, but it's also a job, so I'll do the stuff that I need to do.
Speaker 2:That's one thing that I would probably do different next time. I would focus on those things, although you know I say that. But today, here I am doing the stuff that I'm passionate about. Totally, totally.
Speaker 1:I mean, it makes so much sense to me, I think, especially because transitioning from you know being in the working world to being a founder, so much of your ego is kind of built into this job that you've created for yourself and I think that like the maturity to say, at the end of the day, it is still a job you know, and that there is mortal life. You know, I think that it's easy to get sucked into that vacuum. At least that's my experience.
Speaker 2:And I think, with the media and the internet today, we glorify these false narratives of what it means to be a founder and to have a business. And you go in it like I did as well so many times before going in it thinking, well, I have this shallow understanding of what it means to build a business and I like that, so I'm going to go into it and do exactly that. And then you realize there's more to it and there's a lot of parts that you're not going to enjoy, and one of two things happen Either one you get spooked and decide that's not for me.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to be a founder. Going back to my nine to five, and if you're perfectly deep down inside, fine with that, then that's perfectly fine. It means you're driving in the nine to five a lot better, but if you don't, that's a bit sad right.
Speaker 2:Because if you still want to do something and be an entrepreneur and be a founder, have it. Work with your own team, craft your own path. In that sense it's a bit sad that all of a sudden you back down because you realize the reality of it. But then there's also people like me which weasel themselves into doing the things that they love and try to chuck a bit of the stuff that you know as soon as I dip my toe into. I don't like that.
Speaker 1:That's too cold, so can someone else do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I do like that. As soon as you've, kind of as soon as you've done it once, you realize that like you get to make up the rules of your own game, you know, to an extent, like you don't need to live in the matrix, as it were. You know, I think that that's something that I'm very grateful for and something that I'm glad that I've gotten to step into, is this mindset of oh wait, the world is, it is what it is, and I get to make my own way through it. You know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think that is much more clear to me now that I've, you know, been a founder. It's been much more clear that that's actually how the real world works.
Speaker 2:So yeah, we'll see what's next. I think it's the reason why I'm not complacent in the fact that all the next based on something the same and I'm going to do the things that, only the things that I love and hand over other bits is. I think it builds, in a sense, it builds character. It helps develop you as a professional of having the experience of, in those moments where it's right you treat your business as a job right.
Speaker 2:And you do the things that you have to do, even though they're might be painful for you, you do them. At the end of the day, that experience will help you craft a better journey for your business in the future, yeah Well but Awesome. Thank you so much. Three questions to close it off. Flash questions. Let's do it. Number one what is a quote that you live?
Speaker 1:by? What is a quote that I live by? Yes, oh wow, a quote that I live by. This too shall pass. This too shall pass.
Speaker 2:Okay, we were talking about earlier Okay, that fits right in to that narrative A book that changed or had an impact onto your life, be it personal or private life. Yeah, I said again personal or private life. You mean personal or professional, personal or professional.
Speaker 1:I have three books for offer One we've already talked about, which is the mom test. If you're a new entrepreneur, by all means please pick it up and just devour it. The second one is a little bit of a flex. I read Robert Carrow's biography of Bob Moses, which I would really recommend if you want to learn about a builder on a grand scale. That's like probably the most interesting biography I've ever read. And then, separately, I just finished Demon Copperhead and just love the language. It was just so beautiful and meaningful and it really got shine a light on what is a huge problem in the US, which is the opioid crisis. In a way, that was like just a beautiful story to read.
Speaker 2:So this has been so, so much around opioids and so much content recently as well. Yeah, you got three, four, one then. And the last question is a good habit that you advocate for.
Speaker 1:I am such a big believer in sleep and I have found that I am so much happier I don't get sick if I get eight hours of sleep, and if that means that I get to work later because I was up for some reason, then that's fine. I think I was a little bit too precious around thinking that I could burn the candle at both ends having a fun social life and working really, really hard at work and, as it turns out, I really need eight hours of sleep. I would say that for me is very important.
Speaker 2:You're barking at the wrong tree. Went to bed at 1am last night and woke up at 4 to drive to London.
Speaker 1:Well, you know what? So that's what you need to do, you know, and that's okay too. I need to get better at that.
Speaker 2:Kudos to you. Thank you so much for joining Pleasure talking to you, Like always. We should keep in touch. We should catch up a bit more often. I think so too.
