Claire Butler: evaluation

Transcript context

…Cool. Okay. Let's move to the next one, which I think is building with your customers. That one, I know you talked to Show, he talked a lot about this, this idea of customer obsession and of building with your customers. And it also goes back to that whole decision that we talked about earlier, about when to come out of stealth. You can only build so much with your customers when you're in stealth, because you don't have that many that know about you. But especially, even in the early days when we only had a couple people, we really did listen. And back to also what you were saying earlier about those steps to product market fit, get one person to use it. That's really what we were focused on, especially in the very, very early days. I remember the first one, I think I've told this story before, but was that we had Coda. They were our first user and they were based in Palo Alto. Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them, and they were the first ones. Their designer, Jeremy, was like, "Yes, we'll take this on full-time." And I remember, we were both like, "What? Really? You will?" That was the first person who said yes to us, and so we were so excited. This was a huge milestone. We went to Oren's Hummus in Palo Alto on the way back to the office to bring some back for the team to celebrate. We were just so stoked. And then we got back to the office, and I think Dylan gets a text from Jeremy being like, "Oh, yeah. I tried to share this with Philippe, my engineer, and he can't get the file to open, so I guess he can't use it." And we're like, "What is it? What happened? We finally got someone." And I remember Dylan was like, "Everybody drop everything. We have to fix this." And after some looking at the servers and things, they were like, "Nothing's wrong," and then they realized it was a problem with Philippe's MacBook. Evan [inaudible 00:39:08] had a car, so Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Philippe just to get them to use the product. So anyway, get them to stick around. That's the first one. But the building with people, the way that we did that was largely through just each person. We really cared and listened to their feedback, especially when there were only a few people. One way we did that was, I remember we implemented Intercom back in the early days, and there were so few users and so few of us that everybody was on Intercom all day too. And so we'd get a chat and I would jump in sometimes. Dylan would jump in, an engineer would jump in. And he'd open up a chat with people and they'd actually debug the product with us live. They'd be like, "I have this bug," and this engineer would be like, "Let me QA it right now." And so that was one example. We all did support back in that day, and the engineers would talk to users directly, get their feedback, and then go immediately fix things like bugs. And so those are just examples of in the early days, what that looks like, and that just scales a lot over time as you're growing and you're talking to more people. o immediately fix things like bugs. And so those are just examples of in the early days, what that looks like, and that just scales a lot over time as you're growing and you're talking to more people. That advocate ended up helping us a ton when they came on board, because some of this stuff, I mean, none of this stuff scales. Your engineers can't do support forever. In the early days, that becomes really important. But when we brought that advocate in, their whole job was talking to users, getting them to try to use the product, but then taking their feedback back when it wasn't something that wasn't working. That helped us scale a lot, so that became really essential, and then telling people, "Oh, we fixed this." It made them feel more ownership of the tool too, being like, "Oh, yeah. I asked them to do this. They did it." That's just another way where you just build a strong relationship with people, because they feel very invested in your journey with you.…

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