#3: "Eat this, not that: Taste-testing your own product" đ± and other ideas
James Gill's advice on being your product's power user, Natalie Nagele's lens on efficient, scalable hustling for founders, and Alex Packham's on the do's and don'ts of fundraising.
Hi there,
Welcome to the third edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, select pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, youâll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of GoSquaredâs co-founder James Gill, Wildbitâs co-founder Natalie Nagele, and ContentCalâs founder Alex Packham.
But before we dive into it, Chris Ronzio, founder and CEO of Trainual will be joining us for a founders-only AMA on Relay, tomorrow. He will be bringing his insightful, serial-founder lens to address questions on growing without traditional funding in the early days, making paid marketing work, productizing a service business, and what makes/breaks business processes, among other things. Reply to this email for an invite! âïž
All yours now!
#1. James Gill, co-founder and CEO of GoSquared, recounts the benefits and challenges of being obsessive users of oneâs own product.Â
A few key benefits weâve seen from using our own product
We are a very product-focused team â we all have a desire to build a great product, so everyone â whether theyâre a developer, owning marketing, or in operations, everyone has an opinion on how the product can be made mieux. This is exciting and creates a bubbling melting pot of ideas.
We catch many tiny details about the user experience internally that we know customers may never care about to the point where they would tell us. We know about these issues only because we use the product obsessively.
We feel the frustration of customers when the platform canât do something that we also want it to do â everyone wins when we deliver on those needs.
We can often bring features to life that customers have not asked for, but we know we want. We can often deliver features to customers without them asking, because we understand their cases so well, by doing them ourselves, so it can often feel like weâre reading our customersâ minds.
A few challenges that come from using our own product
Itâs not all roses and rainbows though â as Iâm sure anyone who uses their own product will know â you can sometimes risk prioritizing features that you yourself want, over other improvements that can impact more customers. We try to avoid this by thoroughly researching the impact of product changes before committing to them.
Sometimes we are trying to perform an action with the platform that, gasp, we havenât built yet. We havenât built everything on our roadmap yet! So, for example, we may want to run a report that doesnât exist in the GoSquared Analytics product (yet). This is really frustrating because it means either: we find an alternative tool to do something we believe should be possible in GoSquared, or we must delay completing that task until we build that functionality. Itâs often an opportunity to see what other products are doing, to learn from them, and to fold that back into our own platform over time.
A note from Rajaraman:Â
When we are busy building products, one important signal in particular rightly stakes a claim on our bandwidth: what our customers are asking for. And that makes perfect sense! But as James observes here, consciously creating space to build out context on the problem, the market, and the customers, is the only way to interpret what to build next and what will add the most value (sometimes, features that nobody has requested). If you can do so, using oneâs own product, too, helps inform this context; especially when a team has developed the discipline to see themselves as true external customers.
#2. Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit (the makers behind Postmark and Beanstalk), having been at it for almost two decades, reflects on and implores fellow founders to revisit the ever-divisive idea of âhustle.âÂ
These businesses weâre building have cycles when they need us to hustle, and when they can afford for us to live a more peaceful existence. Even in a stable, successful business like ours, we have times where we have to give up more of our time away from work to get something out, to get ourselves out of a jam, or to support our team in the work that theyâre doing. Just like when you have to jump in and help a grown kid, sometimes the business needs more from you. But the badge of honor is not on working long hours, itâs instead accepting that youâre available when itâs necessary, but fighting for those times to be exceptions and not rules.
I want new entrepreneurs to not feel guilty or wrong for working hard at something they are crazy passionate about. Your business will pull you in and occupy your every brain cell. You will be excited about it, worried about it, passionate about it. Channel that towards getting to a better place. Find the important things to work on. Remember to find time for your health, mental, and physical. Make some friends with founders who have been there before and see the other side. Maybe they can suggest a workaround or just trigger a gentle reminder to get outside. But donât feel guilty about it. Weâve all been there and are only so dogmatic because weâve seen the other side.
#3. Alex Packham, founder, and CEO of ContentCal shares an early fundraising mistake and urges founders to do the necessary homework.Â
Understand the world of funding before you go into it. There are a few mistakes that I made with raising capital for ContentCal, majorly because I didnât know the world of finance well enough. To begin with, I didnât know how different types of capital work and what I should look for in an investor, something that most first-time founders struggle with. I later realized that doing the homework and getting comfortable with how the VC world operates is really important.
For example, we raised our seed of 2.8 million pounds over 4 years, but if we were to do that again, we would try to raise as much of it in one or two rounds, because we now know that raising the same amount through multiple rounds takes a lot longer.
So take the time to read about different types of funding and how they work, understand the different stages, and the doâs and donâts of raising capital. Partnering with the wrong people or giving away too much of your business in equity can work out to be bad decisions in the long run.
It can be helpful to check out the SaaStr blog and follow VCs like Andrew Chen who openly publish what theyâre looking for in portfolio businesses along with observations from their existing portfolios.
Hope you enjoyed reading this edition of The Baton. We have a question for you: Whatâs the one piece of advice that has helped you make/think through an important decision as a founder? Tell us all about it and weâd love to feature it in an upcoming edition! đ
Until next time,
Astha and Akash