Tanguy Crusson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. How long was that period before it got out of this ugly baby phase for you? When did people start to get like, "Oh wow, this might work"? Honestly, we had something dogfooding within two months, in the hands of the first lighthouse user within five months. We iterated on the alpha for maybe six months. We then entered a beta that lasted close to a year. So I think at every step of the way people could see us going somewhere, and I think initially they judged, not the outcome. They judged the team a lot more than the outcome. So there's all this talk of founder market fit and I think really that's what you need to be teasing out, which is, is it the right thing, going after the right problems? Then if they can answer yes in ways that you haven't thought about asking consistently week over week, it's enough. I think that's where we were up until the stage where we were able to give something to customers, but the first lighthouse user was five months in. So it didn't even matter whether it looked good or not because people could see, "Okay, that's what ... Oh, there's something there," right? So I'm not sure if there's one precise moment where it happened. However, there was this one moment where we were like, "Okay, that's it. We're ready to go GA." One of the founders, Mike went, "No, you're not. That thing is ugly. I do not want to look at it. It needs to level up with the rest of the Atlassian design standards. Our customers have expectations from us on that front. Your stuff is functional, but it's way too early." So we went and fixed it. Took us two, three months and then we were okay to go. But yeah, no, because we had point A, because we had this expectation set that it would take a while to get there and because we were able to show progress every week, we basically didn't really feel that moment where we don't know what to do with this because it's too early. This design improvement phase, what I'm visualizing is you're this pirate that is invited to a nice dinner and you have to start cleaning up. You have to start looking good and become inter-society. It makes a lot of sense. Also, what you're describing makes me think again of this concept of, it's your job to keep the flame alive and help it spread within the organization. So you have this idea and you're just like, keep momentum going, keep the flame growing by sharing constant updates, sharing progress, make it very easy to consume with little snippets and videos. So there's a lot of great advice here. So timeline-wise, interestingly what I'm hearing is it basically took a year from idea to alpha, something like that. Is that roughly right?…

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