Is FOMO Holding You Back? – Natalie Nagele – MicroConf Growth 2017

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0:15so quick question how many of you are feeling like you're working on the exact right thing you need to be doing right now to grow your business a lot more hands than I expected see if this works when we started off when you started off you had a single idea things are much more simple back then you had a vision you focused all of your attention to get that to see it through right maybe by yourself or with a co-founder focused everything to just make it to make that product to get it to where it needs to go and you did because you're sitting here because now it's grow time and by

0:52the mostly lack of hands I can see that things are getting a lot more challenging and it's a lot it's a daily struggle to really know if you're working on the exact right things so before I get started I have to give you a little bit of a backstory we are a mom-and-pop shop I run the business with Chris was my husband he started at 16 years ago which definitely makes the senior citizens in the software industry I work with 25 of the most incredible people we are spread out across five different countries headquartered in Philadelphia and we have built three really amazing products and a fourth conveyors on the

1:29way Beanstalk will turn 10 years old this year so we've been building SAS software products for a really long time but today's story is really about postmark which as Rob said it's a transactional email service almost seven years old I think and what I want to talk about today is not maybe all of our successes but kind of something scary that happens when you start to grow a business and that's when you start hitting what I call like a growth Plateau so in 2014 we realized that postmarks growth rate actually took a pretty nice dive and as we started to project going forward we didn't really

2:07see a way out we really just saw a flat blind growth and that was really scary and we got out of it and so that's what I'll talk to you about today but so today I want to talk about fear of missing out I think as leader as you all know that focus is the most important thing that you need to be doing focus is everything everybody will tell you that without focus you die but what is it about focus that makes it so hard to find sometimes what is it that makes focus often so elusive when you start to grow your business you realize that you have a lot more options now you

2:48have tons of choices tons of opportunities tons of things that you can be doing now you have customers and you have to decide on whether or not you're going to implement the feature that they're asking for you have competition that is changing direction launching new features trying new marketing tactics and you start to look around and say is that's something I should be doing is that for me or maybe even a company that you started out with that starts hiring like crazy or gets VC and you look around and you think is that for me am I missing out on some really really important opportunity and

3:17so what happens naturally as you start to see all of these choices all of these opportunities to grow you start taking on too much and whether that's individually as a founder you start creating kind of a mess in your own head or you create chaos for your team disrupting them changing direction changing the mission and really really causing a lot of trouble because while growth is all about focus it's when you start growing that you start really being tempted to lose that focus constantly constantly and in 2014 if you would have asked me is Wilde bit focused I would have said yes of course we are

3:53so so focused we know exactly what we're doing but now in hindsight looking back we realized that we had a tremendous amount of work to do to really find that focus so today we're gonna talk about what I'm calling this like focus framework these three areas that if you find your way towards focusing them you'll be able to survive any kind of bump in the road any kind of plateau any kind of issue so what we did is we ended up focusing in three really important areas we started with focusing on ourselves as leaders as founders what it was it that we were supposed to do to

4:27grow the product we defined our company our business what what why does wild it exist and only then were we able to really define why postmark exists and what does postmarks mission so in those three ways we were able to kind of get out of the plateau so we'll talk about those a little bit today Chris and I are married right so the number one question that we always get is how on earth do you work with your spouse and not kill each other I would be doing it for a long time for 13 years and I think one of the things that works for us is that we're very lucky and that

5:02we have very opposite strengths Chris is super analytical he's much more technical than I am I have a great memory I bring a bigger picture to the table and so for a long time we felt like those competing pieces had to be present in every decision we always had to be involved together and absolutely everything and as you can imagine that didn't leave much room for thinking about growing a business we were so focused in the day-to-day and building a product and building a team and we really didn't stop to look around and see what was going on around us and the market was changing you know we've been

5:36building products for a long time and the competition grows exponentially and if you're not looking you start to really fall back and it was only through luck that we have a great friend who introduced us to an advisor someone who we hired to come on board to try to help us kind of figure ourselves out and after he sat her sat with us for a little bit heard our story first thing he said was we gotta figure out what the hell you to do every day what is your job here and so like any successful marriage counselor he created a very safe environment where we got to share

6:10what is it that we're good at individually what is it that we love to do individually and probably most critical what is it that the business needs us to do because while we all love to work and only that intersection between what we love to do and what we're really good at we all want to grow our products too so it's kind of important that you make sure that that intersects very closely with what the business requires of you right now so somewhere in that intersection in that little sweet spot of those three questions we made one of the most important changes to in wild its history

6:43and that was uncovering my role as CEO and curses role as CEO because now when I wake up every morning I know exactly what I have to do where focus I know that my job is to make sure that the team is happy that our culture is growing and it's strong Chris wakes up knowing that he has to make sure that we're building the best product we possibly can and together as cofounders right we still work on figuring out how we grow this business and what we want out of it but while that works started out to identify what it was that we were supposed to do what it did in addition

7:14was really uncover these gaps gaps that were created by either things that we really didn't do well or things that we hated to do or gaps that were created because now in our roles as CEO and CTO we really needed to focus our attention on certain things and we were not going to have the space to do other things that were really important for the business to grow and so for us that turned into a few really key roles realizing that I have to really focus on team and kind of business side of things I didn't have the time or I shouldn't be spending the time on really thinking

7:48like growth strategically from a marketing standpoint and that opened up the position for Garrett to join the company or was we knew postmarked needed to we have a big team on postmarked and it needed to have somebody driving the the strategy and the planning and all of that and Chris couldn't focus on that if he was going to be thinking more high-level strategically on the product we created we created a role for post market our very first product manager and we hired Rihanna and I think most interestingly we all probably sit here and hold on to things that we know really well as founders and they're like

8:21the last thing you delegate the last thing you let go of something that you're good at something that you love to do and so for us that was infrastructure and Chris always kind of he owned that piece and so he that was the intersection for him up between the good the what he loves to do and what he's really really good at but the business did not need him building servers and so through painful process we created this role of lead systems engineer and hired Alex and it's made a tremendous impact on his abilities ability to be able to think higher level on what the products need to do because

8:51if you think about your role when you start to grow your business as a founder as a leader you need to be focusing on the bigger picture you have to bring that bigger picture to the table you're taking in all these different inputs and you're bringing them and you're and your team guiding them forward so that means you have to start letting go and a lot of times that means you need to start hiring people to do things better than you if you can't trust them to do it better if you can't let go then you're probably not hiring very people and you probably need to find somebody

9:18else any moment you waste in the day-to-day and things that aren't into that in that sweet spot in that intersection of what business really needs from you it's time that you've wasted the time that you're not really focusing on growing your business given that I know we're in a lucky spot that we were able to fill those gaps of people and not everybody's able to do that I don't think it gives anybody here an excuse to not really understand spending the time to understand where their sweet spot is everybody needs to find what you know you work play to your strengths find what you're good at but

9:51also really identify the areas that the business needs you to focus on and then find those gaps and work like hell to fill those gaps whether with people with software with whatever you need to be doing but make sure you don't ignore the areas in your business that you need to be starting to fill you never want to end up stuck where you don't see the forest from the trees and for growth and even if you you know big picture you need to understand where you need to focus as a leader it starts to bleed into everything even the little things in your life like the books you read

10:22right so I have I'm sure a lot of you're like this I have a queue of books a mile long and everybody recommends something new and it's amazing but I can never keep up how do you decide what to read next you know do you how do you how do you find the book that you know is going to bring you a lot of value of some critical piece of advice but you have so many of them how do you know what should hit next you have to apply that same kind of understanding what is the business need from you as a leader right now and what what do you need to learn

10:49where is that wisdom that you need so in like simple examples when we were trying to figure out are we going to stay flat forever you know is that important for our company oh wait so we took some time and I read you know management books right if I turned the ship around I didn't read a marketing book or you know earlier this year we just we needed to sit down and figure out a strategy a marketing strategy for postmark and we all as a team read this book traction we didn't read about management and that's not to say that you know both of those books at different times couldn't have

11:17driven but brought value ideas we could have moved in different directions but at the end we wouldn't have been moving in the direction we needed to for the product to grow now you have to apply all of that focus to yourself in everything not just the big strategic decisions but in all of that stuff to know where your sweet spot is of what you need to be doing as a leader so hopefully you'll define what your job is and then now the next natural progression is to really define what it is you want out of your business and here I want to be clear I speak of business like capital B this is

11:52not your product there's a big difference between growing your business and growing your product your business is you your co-founders your team and your product is what enables your business to exist and when you're thinking about growth it's really important that you separate those two there's too many businesses run for a product to grow and not for a business to grow and that'll get you into a lot of trouble in the time we run wild but together Chris and I have talked a bunch about what it is that we want wild it to be but we never really took the time to sit down and write it down what is wild

12:23them why does it exist so when we were standing on this this ledge and seeing that post mark wasn't growing the way it needed to be and we realized we had a ton of there's a hundred ways you can grow a product and probably a lot of them would work but how do you decide which one is right for you do we hire a huge sales team because it's working for other four other teams right we started looking around and people were hiring big sales teams we have a hike we can have a high cost of acquisition so we could do that is that for us or our

12:54competition maybe is supporting products and building features that we aren't doing should we do that how do you decide what it is that you need to do to grow your products if you haven't decided what your business is supposed to be and that's when we realize that before we could move forward with figuring out how to grow postmark we had to define wild but first so we started asking ourselves a lot of questions how big of a company do we want do we want to work 60 hours a week or is our goal to work three days a week do I want to know everybody on my team their spouses

13:27names or kids names or am i totally cool with amazing management they can handle some of that for me and I only manage a smaller group it's an answering a lot of these questions that we started to define what while that was supposed to be we knew we wanted to stay close to our team and we wanted to grow sustainably slowly which meant not hiring a giant sales team because that's going to be count very counter to what whilebut was supposed to be so you all have to answer some set of these questions you have to define what it is that your business is meant to be and I'm not

14:01judging your answers don't have to match mine because we build businesses offer very very personal reasons it's when you're the only wrong answers when you're just honest with yourself if you don't answer those questions honestly and you don't really honestly define what it is you want your business to be when you hit a bump in the road when you have to make a really important decision you're gonna make that decision based on a fear fear of making the wrong call fear of opera fear missing an opportunity you're not going to make the call based on an informed decision of how you have chosen to run your business

14:32and if you can define that and you should then my biggest suggestion is to create a support system around you that advisor that I was telling you about earlier has brought tremendous value to Chris and I he comes every two months we pay him for his time he's got a very different background he's exited several times so he brings a lot of really challenging dialogue to the table we talk about all kinds of things that challenge Chris's our decisions our answers to what we want while but to be asked why do you run four products why don't you just sell them all focus on one or what's your exit strategy you

15:08know things that we would naturally not have in conversation but as we keep talking through them and we keep answering them in the same way we build a confidence that yes we are building a business that we want a business that we're proud of a business that will you know will smile about in 10 15 years and if you can get an advisor you should also get a great group of friends who run similar businesses to you this is why conferences like this exist right we've found tremendous support in a group of friends whose businesses are some quite significantly bigger than ours we hang out together we go on

15:41retreats together they poke holes and all of our ideas they you know we compare marketing strategies we spend a lot of time with people who have been there and people who are in the trenches and they know what's going on and we compare ideas and again it helps you kind of solidify your position your decision and the type of business you want to run and when you run a business for as long as we have you get this question all the time like how come you haven't raised money how come you know VC and I think it's important to be clear you know I know a lot of us are

16:14very determined to bootstrap but venture capital inherently is not bad as not evil right and a lot of companies have used it successfully to escalate growth to very positive outcomes the problem is that you start to think about that a lot of times before you've defined what type of company you want to run and so it's when you start thinking about VC before you've defined what it is that you want out of your business that you start really running into and stumbling through and you start seeing people make some really bad decisions so over the years when we've had venture capital calm and at you know and we've had calls

16:48or whatever like we've always kind of done this exercise Chris and I that I think is really valuable you sit down by yourself with your co-founders with whoever's helping you on your business and individually write down how you would spend a million dollars right now and you can't buy a nice car as much as I'd love to you have to take a million dollars you have to figure out how you're going to make that million dollars make you - or depending on your term sheet maybe ten but you got to figure out how what are you gonna do how are you gonna make a million dollars

17:16work for you and every time we've done this exercise we've never been able to come up with that answer maybe that's us we have been building product for a long time and I've never seen a feature turn into a hockey stick so I could never justify beefing up my product team to grow right I don't know how to do that and our sales and marketing strategy has never been something that's really formulaic where I could say like dollar and two dollars out it's still kind of what wishy-washy and you know and so for us it never made sense and if the same thing happens to you and if you go through that exercise

17:48and do it often you might uncover places where you do want to kind of build up maybe one or two more people or maybe cool marketing thing here or there but if you get to the same place where you can't find a way that you can guarantee to make two million dollars it's probably not not for you because you're sitting here today because you decided to run a business because you wanted to define what type of business you wanted to run and racecar driving they teach you that you pilot a car you pilot it by looking where you want to go if you start looking at a tree or you look at a wall

18:21or you look at where you came from you will end up driving into that tree or into that wall and in business it's no different if you spend the time writing down really defining what it is that you want out of your business you will end up going in that direction and when you hit a bump in the road whether it's like us when you hit a plateau or whether somebody the acquisition offers whatever you will be so confident in your decisions that you won't make a choice based on fear you'll make a decision based on the type of business that you've chosen actively to run so if

18:58you've defined your business I think only after that moment can you start to think okay how am I going to grow my products we have built products because we were solving pains Beanstalk started 10 years ago almost because at managing SVN repositories was a pain and nobody wanted to do it and so we said I we can solve a problem we started postmarked because Beanstalk was sending so many emails and we had zero visibility into where they were going we you know we'd have a support request or customers would email us and say hey I invited my client and they never got the email I had no idea did they misspell it did it

19:35bounce did they mark it as spam we had no idea so we built postmark with a pain to solve right and you know we kind of knew we had to focus the product and we always felt like we had a pretty decent focus and for postmark when we launched it we knew we were going to our niche our focus was going to be we were the only transactional we were the only provider that was going to focus on transactional email we had run an email marketing product in a previous life that we shut down and so we knew we didn't want anyone marketing we knew that transactional email needed to be

20:03treated differently from marketing emails so we knew okay that's going to be our niche we're gonna be the only one that just does transactional you know we built a really great product and it worked for us for a while you know growing customers loved that NPS scores through the roof everything was great but when we kind of hit this plateau right when we realize like you don't really know where we're going with this we started to really look internally to see like art what is it what's going on and as I mentioned earlier we started looking at around us at other companies what is everybody doing and one of the scariest moments

20:35because we realized we weren't as focused as we needed to be was when we started to look at our competition and realizing that marketing emails these stuff that we were not allowing to be sent there postmark was helping all of these companies grow and grow rapidly and so we were leaving a ton of money on the table and that was really scary and so the question came up like do we start do we start sending marketing emails even though we knew internally that like that was our niche that was how we grew in the first place how can we just let that go the only thing we know how to do

21:05at that point before he made any scary decisions was he started talking to customers and we started to try to understand why was our MPs score so high why do customers love the products so much and we quickly realized that we weren't actually selling a feature we were selling a an infrastructure product that was all about reliability and performance our customers are apps who rely on that email to get to the inbox as fast as humanly possible email is a core part of their business and that's why they continue to pick postmark over and over again so we were a more expensive product and everybody will

21:42tell you in this room charge more that's like everybody's favorite thing charge more charge more charge more well the problem with charging more is you have to have a better product which ok we had a really we have a better product you also kind of have to sell it like that right you can't just say like charge more I promise it's gonna be better and what we've started to realize is we were talking to customers we weren't selling it like that we weren't really clear on why customers were choosing us over our competition that was less expensive and so like the light bulb went off and we

22:10said you know what we just have to sell it better we have to repackage we have to focus all of our energy on sharing on showing this value proposition to potential customers and that's what we did we the whole team our single objective for an entire year was being the fastest to the inbox and that changed everything for us it dictated product development we spent time redesigning our status page and instead of having a simple status page up down you know we said okay well if we're the most reliable and the fastest then we got to show it so we posted live stats if not only whether or not we were

22:46getting to the inbox but also how fast we got to the inbox nobody did that we started taking Sprint's to just work on infrastructure stuff backend service of things our customers didn't see which is risky but we knew that if we focused all of our development all of our marketing all of our communication to being the fastest to this promise that we had been making then we would be certainly delivering on this value that we're going to then start to sell and in 2016 a big shift happened in the market one of our major competitors made a big decision made big strategic decision and a lot of business started moving around

23:26a lot of clients started moving around and we started winning a lot of new business everything was up visits was up signups conversions everything and we've been able to kind of maintain that as you can see over time and when we started to evaluate you know like when a market shift happens you don't really control that so you start to get really nervous like is it us or is it just the market changes we started to really evaluate it and realize the only reason we were building winning business was not because the market changed you don't automatically start getting a ton of new customers we started to win business

23:57because we had spent that time zeroing in on that focus of why postmark was the best product for our tête are our ideal customers so when people were switching around and trying to find new providers and they came to postmarks landing page it said something drastically different than everybody else we didn't talk about marketing features we didn't talk about templates what do you talk about us that we talked about being the fastest most reliable most performant email service provider that existed and we backed it up with data and we continued to win these bets or when these deals and as you can see now and it worked and last

24:31year we did like 45% growth and I think this year we're targeting 55% growth which is tremendous I can't handle any more than that that'll that'll destroy everything I worked and the coolest thing about when you focus your products value prop your mission you really just keep focusing it is even your customers start talking the way you want them to be we started seeing tweets and conversations from customers saying things like use postmark when your email matters when you care about email it you can only use postmark or send your crappy email that you don't care about through a cheaper provider but the good stuffs and the good stuff their postmark

25:07you know it like worked there's something so exciting about being able to like grow of it grow change something like that change direction really focus we spend it you're focusing on this and to see it actually turned into something really spectacular and it's pretty exciting so I I come here today with a framework I don't have any growth hacking tips for you guys I think we're gonna get more into that over the next two days but I come here with something that I think will sustain you for a long time if you just always remember that you have to continue to focus in these three places

25:42anytime you get lost anytime you stumble as a leader as a founder you will always be just there would be things vying for your attention and you have to constantly constantly bring yourself back to what is it that I need to be doing right now what am I good at play to your strengths but what does the business need for me and then figure out where those gaps are don't let those gaps stay open for a long time because you will see that you will start veering off course and it's in those gaps a lot of times that are the the ways in which you start to grow your business and

26:15where you start to really making that forward progress that one slow slow step in front of the other and then make sure that you constantly define that business and it it gets change changes right keep asking yourself those questions but define it so you know that you're doing it for the right reasons define what you want to be building so that in five years and ten years you're proud of where you're caught you've come if that means you'd stay close to your team or you don't those that the answers don't really matter just make sure you know that you're honest with yourself on why you're in this for the first place it's

26:47okay to want to flip a business but just become you know don't pretend that you're trying to do something else and only then when you've really honestly defined why your business exists can you then spend the time to focus on okay now how am I going to grow this product because the options are endless there's not going to be one answer don't follow what you read on the Internet we all build software products but for very different audiences and you can't forget that your audience is different we joke around that that group of friends that we hang out with very often they you know we all puts off we

27:23all been in business for at least 10 years and we were on a retreat a little bit ago and everybody's doubling down or tripling down on content it's working and it's a Content content higher content people three pieces a week Chris and I are sitting there like I just don't want that right now it doesn't mean that content won't work for us but we decided instead of content we're actually here we're our entire marketing strategy this year is conferences and making personal connections I don't know if it'll work in my field but at least I've defined who I want whilebut to be in that marketing strategy for growing

27:57postmark fits into that definition of what we want out of a business and so there's a million options read that book traction it's great I'll walk through 19 different options and some of them a lot of them will work but defining the one that works for you because it fits your business and if it's what you want to be doing is will you're where you'll get excited you don't want to grow a product doing things that somebody else told you to do you want to grow product because it feels good and it's right and it makes you proud of the way in which you kind of you made your money you grew

28:27your business so with that thank you guys

28:39yeah I was just wondering you mentioned you did all this work on improving infrastructure and reliability and performance and then the market shifted around and I was just wondering how that picture would have looked if the mark if that competitor hadn't left the market and what did you did you have a strategy in place if that hadn't happened or how you would have handled that I think we would so we've maintained like a very positive trend on everything signups visits all of that stuff so I think the theory is that it would have been a slower ramp up so I mean basically when mandrill made a big change it was I

29:17mean it was a free-for-all right and so one of the big things is like you you injected the market with a bunch of new people shopping around that weren't normally be shopping around right so they come out like that market continues to grow but it was just the kind of like a ramp like this and then I kind of slowed down and then I kept going like that so I think it would have continued it just probably would have been a slower direction because like I severy time a new person came to the site they had such a different message on the landing page and so like they

29:44self-identified that that was the product for them I just think it would have been a slower we wouldn't have had like that like a big shift in kind of early 2016 it would have just like flattened out a little bit I'm coming for you Charles

30:06so you talked a little bit about building the business you want and in particular finding the people who didn't who could fill roles that didn't put you in that sweet spot that you match up in and there are definitely areas like that in my business but I'm not sure that I'm in a position to hire for all of those positions so how do you prioritize which one you build and how long do you keep doing the things that aren't in the sweet spot before you decide okay I can actually afford to and afford the time to Train somebody to fill that position I think it I mean I I don't know your

30:42business but I would imagine there's probably ones that are glaringly really important and ones that aren't and you know whether you you're gonna stay in them right I'm sure there's things that are our speeds but now that in a year I'm gonna tell you that I can't do that anymore you know like as the business kind of evolves that's a constantly shifting thing but I would I would say the way we've always done it is we've maybe not in a less formal way always looked at like what's the priority for growing it right now and so if that's marketing for example maybe it's just part-time maybe it's finding a I mean

31:12there's maybe it's software I don't know it depends on like what that piece is but if you're doing some finance stuff and it's not taking up a ton of your time keep doing it you know don't let go hire a CFO right now but if it's when it starts to really take up too much of your time I would start start suggesting like start moving that out and however you can get creative

31:39hi hi have you measured so once you put the information about you being the fastest to the inbox on your landing page have you measured how many customers kept asking for more templates and other things on top of you being the fastest measured now and or like have you have you tracked I've informally probably yeah but I mean consistently the that's a secondary thing to okay this is a priority for me and then oh by the way do you have you know a templating system or whatever but again because we focus on transactional only we actually can skirt a lot of that stuff because we don't do marketing so I

32:28got nobody asked for a be testing and things like that so we were able to really focus our feature set on being the most performant the most reliable we don't have to worry about some of that other stuff you know hi so I feel like running one business and growing them is tough enough how do you manage for and how do you stay focus and all of them oh no focus your team on all four of them are you plan to it cuz Garrett really wanted this to be part of my talk well not easily so I think our products have all evolved over time and

33:02started in various phases so they all have different kind of needs or the kids right like they all have different requirements and their ages we for the last five or six years have created dedicated teams to each one so the plan is really like Amazon runs multiple runs multiple products right like or anybody we try to find those teams that are dedicated have a single priority single objective and they kind of work in in kind of autonomous groups and then they have their own goals their own missions and then Kirsten some of the kind of leadership team we focus on kind of making sure that they're moving in the

33:36right direction but it's not without its challenges for sure but they have different phases you know postmarks like a really active growth phase we're building a new product so that's you know it's totally different beast and so I think that helps a lot if we had all four in the exact same state being and all needed the exact same thing I think we would never be able to succeed in that hi so you one of the things you're one of the things I mentioned was alright one of the things yet mentioned was that your your you had to ask whether why the customer is buying your premium product so how did

34:10you go about figuring that out and what was like you mentioned that obviously you did some things but how did you figure out what to do so sorry say that again premium so you like you said that you are charging more than others and you went to like why was a customer buying your product and you you said that you you went through that discovery phase and then repositioned your product in some way and invested it in it so what was that process like so we are pricing hasn't changed over the years like we weren't the most expensive when we launched and then as you know

34:46the race of the big vc-backed companies kind of race to the bottom like pricing got much cheaper and we always said like in order to maintain the business that we went around I don't want to run a product that's that cheap I would need too big of a company to be profitable so we were always looking at pricing and always very conscious of the fact that were more expensive and that's a very scary place to be in but as long as the product prompt delivered on the promises that we were making customers will continue to buy so we when we started talking to customers and trying to

35:14understand and potential customers trying to understand what why was they were looking at postmark pricing never came up so that was kind of how we knew that like the value we were delivering they weren't worried about we're not like cost prohibitive we're just a little bit more expensive so the conversation about pricing actually never comes up in conversations or very rarely comes up in conversations so we knew that pricing wasn't the area we had to focus on we had to focus on making sure we continue to market and sell the product as a premier like the the best service for those types of customers who are willing to pay for it so I can

35:49struggle with coming up with you know the thought experience experiments of like defining what kind of business I want and what kind of product I want so were you able to leverage your existing team you know not just your husband but your entire team were you able to like use them to sort of help you through those mental experiments yes we're a very close team like especially strategically we all work together we also build products for developers or for for our web apps so like our team is our audience a lot more than maybe sometimes Chris or our audience so we do a lot of the strategic thinking together and you

36:28know it's an all group effort success is involved everybody's involved to really think through and say like what is it that makes us you know the product that it is and then we kind of work through all of that together as a team that answer your question do we have any other questions for Natalie I think we have time for maybe one more I'm just wondering if you talked a bit about the new product you guys are coming out with specifically the product but the process around coming up with it deciding to actually go forward I'm sure a lot of us in this room have one product and then

37:03for that we'd like to learn so Beanstalk turning 10 this year and so conveyor is actually our next iteration on Beanstalk we sat down a couple years ago when you know we compete against really really big companies we always have for some reason that's just always been what we did and so maybe three or four years ago we sat down and talked about like the neck what Beanstalk is supposed to be like how do we keep going I mean you're competing against github and bitbucket and get lab it's very basically like features you know like you're just build more features and so we didn't really want to be in that business and so that

37:42wasn't bringing us a tremendous amount of excitement on the team like there wasn't this energy like she's build more features like a build ci but you know build stuff and so we said like what if we were to build Beanstalk today in ten years is a long time so if we were to build a product today what would it look like and we all were in agreement that it would not look like Beanstalk like we wanted to be able to start fresh because we have hundreds of thousands of users you can't just like flip the switch and turns into something completely different especially when it works so

38:08well for our existing customer base so we kind of decided that like to do it in a way that we're proud to do our customers proud we needed to start over and we needed a freshly and so we started completely rethinking from everything it's not a web app it's actually a Mac client or a Mac app with a web app piece because we really just wanted to say like how do we forget everything we know well not everything we know if you get everything we built and take everything that we know and how would we improve that process for development teams for our tech arc our customer and that's

38:41kind of how we got to it and it's been two and a half years don't build a mac app if you haven't done it before it's really hard yeah I think we actually have time for one more there's another question

39:05hey Natalie we actually our use of your customer sorry we'll use of your product at first mark for quite some time I was interested you said that part of your process about figuring out who you what post Mart does was you went and talked to your customers but you didn't talk to you didn't talk to me but but my serious question though is that like I'm probably like one of the silent majority of your customer base what what process did you go through to actually talk to those customers very rudimentary just started talking people um this the support team actually one of the the most transformative conversations happen

39:44not with a customer Chris and I were at a conference four years ago I guess and we're having a conversation with somebody who was using a competitor and he was talking about all the pain he was feeling a huge product they were selling mp3s of like other I forget the name of the app but and they were selling like music video music videos and music downloads of like big famous musicians and they would have like all this trouble with the emails not arriving and what that was generate for them is like tons of support I mean you have to think they probably the thing with transactional email is like if I bought

40:20a license and it didn't show up when I clicked on the Gmail tab like I'm emailing support right I'm not sitting around waiting two minutes four minutes for it I assume something broken I'm emailing support and so this we were talking to this founder and he was telling us his whole story is like I pay anything in the world to just know that those emails because it's critical to my business are getting where they need to go I remember Chris and I walked like the two and a half miles back and said I think a cab because I thought there's something there right and then so then

40:47we started validating that and talking to customers we were MPs music NPS scores he's delighted started seeing a lot of that stuff and so it started to kind of really formulate I can't say we use very formal processes at all while but it's just not really been our thing thanks again Natalie thank you [Applause] you