Karri Saarinen: recommendation

Transcript context

…Wow, okay. I thought it was a lot longer. That is so interesting. Okay. What a team you've got over there. Okay. And then this survey piece is really interesting. I've heard a little bit about this story. So essentially you launched it on Twitter. You had kind of a following. Your founders had a bit of a following, so I think that helped build up the initial wait list. But what you did there wasn't just like, hey, go sign up for a wait list and you just add email addresses. It's a survey asking them what tools they use, whether it's GitHub or something else, and then also the size of the company and their interest. And that helped you basically prioritize who to go after and who to onboard. Is that right? Yeah. And the reason we did it, because we know that we didn't support everything and what I said before and the focus is we want to also be focused on let's just build a version that can work for some people or some companies. We don't have to try to address everyone in the world in the first months of the business. And even before, after that. So it was very selective process. And I think we were fortunate that we were able to get people sign up on a wait list and I think after a month or so we had maybe 4,000 people on the wait list. And then we had this internal... I think initially it was just a very manual process, but eventually we built this invite tool that we could just send invites. But in the beginning, I would go read the actual surveys in a spreadsheet, then I copied the email, and then I emailed them the invite link from my personal email. And then I would just email them after a few days or a week and it's like, "Hey, what do you think?" And the reason we... And so we would invite only like... In the beginning, we maybe invited like 10 people a week. And eventually we increased those amounts. But the reason we did it that way was that we thought that if you just invite everyone at once or a lot of people at once, all of those people are going to probably hit the same problems in this kind of software that is very early stage. So I don't know. They hit the same bug or the same problem in the software. So then they will all send us feedback like, hey, there's this problem. And then we felt like it was a wasted effort. So we would just do these cohorts. Let's invite these people and then they say, hey, this is a problem. This doesn't work, or something. Then we go fix that. Then after we fix that, we invite the next cohort of people. Then they say, well, there's this thing that is needed or this doesn't work, then we fix that. So for that year, we did these cohorts and then always get the feedback from the cohort saying this is wrong or this doesn't work, and then we'll fix that. So eventually, I think it was much more... I think an effective way of doing the initial development than just inviting or letting everyone to use the product right at the beginning. There's so many interesting lessons from this. I wanted to ask how you got your first 10 customers. And what I'm hearing essentially was from this wait list, you launched it on Twitter, people signed up, you picked people to let onboard, you worked with them over the course of a year to make it what they needed, and then eventually you started charging.…

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