# The Developer CEO – Peter Coppinger – MicroConf 2016

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTK96WakJZA
Duration: 49 min
Language: English
Words: 9304
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/gTK96WakJZA

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[0:00] [Music] [Music] everyone I'm not a public speaker I'm a developer so forgive me if I struggle true that's right I'd like to start expose by saying thank you to the guys Rob Mike and sander for running an amazing conference really appreciate it keep it up and I love the podcast as well so keep it up guys thank you very much and thanks for the opportunity to be here so hey you're probably thinking am I just here because I have we sponsored hopefully not so for those you don't normally don't know me my name is Peter Coppinger I'm the co-founder and CEO of tmart.com I also go bloody nickname

[0:47] topper and like many Irish people I can't pronounce my ages so if I say tree I'm actually talking about a number right for those of you who've never heard of us we make a suite of products to help you run your business the first product is timur projects helps you do all your tasks in project management the second product is team work desk we release the last year it's spore test product it's going really well for us and the third product is team or chat which does chat um our products are now being used in very proud say by over 370 thousand companies all around the world

[1:25] including some of the biggest names in the world and I'm very very proud to say that we're now doing over 12 million in annual sales so what's this talk about I'm not up here to pitch you order products but you should probably use their products right and I'm not up here to brag in any way because we have a long way to go in fact I'm here to do just the opposite because I have a bit of a confession I am a terrible terrible CEO and I'm a terrible CEO because I freaking love programming absolutely program love programming it's in my DNA and my co-founder is also a programmer

[2:14] and the problem is the two of us have concentrated on product and features almost exclusively to the detriment of else in the business and looking back now we made just about every mistake in the book and I'm hoping that today that I can share our story and all the mistakes we made along the way and hopefully that will resonate with some of you and you can avoid making the same mistakes we did and you will get 10 12 million much faster than we did so the story is broken up into three phases there's a there's a pre-launch when we were a consultancy and then there's growing to 1 million Mr or and then

[2:52] there's kind of the third phase where I suddenly realized that I actually need to be the CEO you can't be just a programmer when you get to 10 million and scale and read a lot of process problems so part one is what I like to call the hamster years and you'll see why in a mouse so back in 1999 when the blink tag was cool right myself and a body Cormack started a web development agency called digital crew and we thought that 3000 for a website was insane and that we could churn out four websites a week and a we would be millionaires right so it turns out you

[3:30] can't and we didn't and it took us a long time to realize this right so fast forwards seven years ish and we were like this hamster we were like working hard and getting nowhere right and we were also completely broke and we had a really good reputation and we were working 60 plus hours a week and we just we just couldn't figure it out right one day Cormack guy who started with me turned around and he said I can't do this anymore I'm heading to Australia and then my other co-founder who would start who would joined us a year later he was the only other guy I'd met who

[4:06] also had a similar level programming the two of us were left running the business and I remember saying to Dan it was a 2006 I remember saying it and I look let's give just 12 more months try and turn it around and if something doesn't give let's just pack this in all right I'll just share with you two little side stories we actually did try something called CF tag store comm where we sold software components to developers and the huge problem with this is number one developers are miserable they don't want to pay for anything right and the second problem is it's the market was just tiny we were selling

[4:40] cold fusion software components that tiny little market and we spent four years kind of struggling on this I think it made a hundred thousand so the key lesson here is target a big market another thing we tried we made a software for a local college inner city and with their they encouraged us to turn it into a product they told us there's a huge market here and for years I hauled my ass all over Europe trying to sell enterprise software and what I learned is building enterprise software sucks and selling it sucks even more so that business is still there but I personally got out of it really happy to

[5:11] be out of that space so it was 2007 January 2007 and we'd said were given at 12 more months so I took a good hard look at the business and I realized with two major problems the first one was what that we simply weren't making enough money and the second problem is that we were completely disorganized so with nothing to lose we just January 2007 we had we had a lot of business right we were doing a lot of work we just doubled our prices just instantly instead of charging a hundred our we were like two hundred an hour double lower prices and the other thing

[5:44] is we started charging for all the feature creep and extras and here's the shocking thing nobody complained and suddenly our consultancy was actually making money so I highly encourage anyone here consultancy if you're tipping away just experiment try doubling your prices and see what happens and totally avoid future creep so we solved one problem the next problem was that we were disorganized right so we had a whiteboard in the coronary office and that's how that was our project management we decided that isn't a very good project management system right so we looked at we've heard of a few online project management systems and I know everybody says this

[6:20] story right we really did make Timur calm to scratch your own itch I know everybody says that but it's actually true so here's what happened we tried every project management app out there and they all sucked right so we went with the market leader so at least there the market leader there must be something in there and after using it for a couple of weeks we were like dude this is terrible you can't even put like the big thing for me was you couldn't put a due date on a task and you also couldn't attach a file to a task we were like how is this so popular this

[6:52] is really really terrible you just could not use this to run your business there's some tasses don't need to be done for a month some tests don't need to be done for two months and they're all just listed together it was pretty terrible so that wasn't destroyed abroad comes back the straw that broke the camel's back was that I emailed their sport and I said guys if and when my GB considering releasing you know jus dates on tasks and here's the thing the response I got back was so Curt and dismissive that it really pissed me off I was going to war so I turned up for

[7:27] coffee the following Monday myself my co-founder meet for coffee every morning and I said Ted because we all we call each other Ted for some reason I don't how this happened I said he's done I said I've been thinking you know we could make a much much better product here there's a huge gap in the market and you know we could we could actually maybe treat our customers with a bit of respect listen to what they have to say and here's the funny thing he said Ted I've been thinking the exact same thing so that's part one suppose key takeaways here are [Music] consultancy sucks right I just start

[8:12] your product as soon as you can if you're arguing saying consultant so you try doubling your prices it worked for us next thing I can't see that don't target a smaller market that's obvious don't sell software components to developers that's my own personal feeling right consultancy where sucks and it's no fun to build or sell and treat your customers with respect I think every business could like this is pretty obvious or I treat your customers respect and listen to their suggestions we would never have gone to war if they'd other guys had done that sometimes you got to go with your gut right that's part 1 part 2 if you build

[8:51] it they will come right so we were still running our consultancy and we wanted we had this idea and we wanted to get the product off the ground four weeks later we hadn't done a single line of code we had done no design it going nowhere because we were just too busy with the consultancy work so we eventually decided that the only way it is going to get off the ground is if we dedicate one day a week Friday's to working exclusively on teamwork projects and it was the best decision we ever made so no matter how much pressure was on how much the clients were screaming

[9:19] for stuff to be done we just said no and we we look after ourselves we worked on our product every Friday and that decision worked really well for us I'd recommend any way any of you here who are kind of have an idea and are thinking about it I'd recommend you go with that approach just one day a week we often worked all weekend on it as well and every opportunity we got and slowly over a couple of months the product came together so how do we design the product right we did everything you could possibly do wrong first thing we did we opened our code

[9:51] editor now we said new project we just started hacking right we did absolutely everything you could possibly do wrong we didn't sketch on paper we didn't design it we didn't I think the only thing that saved us is at this point in our consultancy we probably built 50 to 100 web apps for other people right so we kind of we had that experience behind us and I suppose also we knew exactly what we wanted so I would recommend that you definitely definitely definitely do not do this a product could have been much stronger how do we actually you know design this when we did design our

[10:25] second and third project we actually know did it right we mocked it out in paper we use balsamiq mockups we put it all together then we did the final screens and kind of only then we started coding so yeah please learn from my mistakes one thing we did write though is we dog food or product pre-launch for about two months every single day and that's you know we all the little annoying little issues in the product things are coming up too slow Texas too crappy we kind of filed away all those rough edges and that's something we still do today we are probably the biggest users of our suite

[10:57] of products or at least one of the biggest users and what's something annoys the [ __ ] out of us we just dive into the code and we fix it right so I highly recommend that one thing we actually do right now when it came time to picking a domain name pre-launch could it be bloody worse than teamwork p.m. dotnet holy [ __ ] this kind of shows how much we knew about marketing right so we knew we wanted to call the product teamwork we had it we'd had a previous kind of thing called teamwork CMS that we built I know it just evolved but we tried to get

[11:32] teamwork on turns out the guy wanted 20 million on first so like more on that later so we went to Timur p.m. in hindsight we should have just bought get Timur calm which I just checked yesterday and I think it's actually available so so yeah we were pretty terrible I know when it came time to launch the product we also did absolutely everything wrong so after months of hard work October 4th 2007 we we hadn't built we hadn't put up a launch web page with pre-launch web page we hadn't taken emails we hadn't consulted any potential customers we hadn't generated any PR we didn't send a

[12:14] single email about the product after five or six months of hard work 8 o'clock Thursday October 4th was seven nine push the button the website went live it was the worst product launch in history and looking back now that why did we make no effort to get publicity for the product and I think it's cuz the two of us are developers and we always had this kind of mindset that the products not quite there you know didn't have a couple of features we wanted it wasn't quite as polished as we would like and looking back now that was an absolutely huge mistake because the product did the job right and it was

[12:47] better than a lot of our competitors but we just didn't feel it was where we wanted it to be so please don't make that mistake get PR for your product and launch it right so yeah Monday morning rolled around we just launched the product and we had to face back into the surgery reveal work so again we just kept going Monday to Friday working on our product and working on everything else but our product and Thursday is affrighted sorry working exclusively on teamwork comm so let's talk about marketing as you can probably guess we didn't zero marketing so we had the silly kind of mindset looking back now

[13:24] that if you build it they will come that if we add just one more feature that feature is going to be a magical feature that is going to get us loads and loads of business complete lunacy looking back the best product doesn't necessarily win right now we were looking in a way because in the project management space people will try every other product out there and because with a couple of strong features like recurring tasks task templates and advanced privacy we did get a little bit of traction but we were pretty terrible so so please market your product from day one Robb's talked in barcelona last year where he talked

[14:02] about positioning really resonated with me so he talked about how important it is to position your product right to stand out in the marketplace especially especially a saturated market place like project management right so if you looked at our messaging back two slides ago it was like project management made easy holy [ __ ] that is just terrible right because if you use words like easy was full-featured most powerful these are all [ __ ] words that mean nothing to the customer you got to find some way to position yourself in the market and looking back now if I could do it again we definitely put a lot more effort into

[14:40] this we probably still have a bit of work to do on our current positioning so please don't make that mistake so it wasn't all bad we did three things right we both great product we treated every single customer like an honored guest and we really listened to their suggestions and sometimes we would just blow them away they did hit us with a really good suggestion and we'd be like oh we never thought oh that's really good and we'd you know crank it out in two hours and we would just blow them away all right we've got a customer for life dinner right and there was a

[15:12] marketing we did some tiny little bit of stuff right we set up a referral scheme which again is all just programming right and that was the other thing we did a newsletter monthly newsletter oh yeah and we made an importer from our biggest competitor and those things in the long term worked out really well right so we weren't completely terrible just 99.9% so yeah there we were 2007 launched the product in our first month despite doing no marketing and being listed only in the bowels of Google on page 84 or something right somehow we magically got three customers no idea how and we made 181 dollars in

[15:58] the first month and he imagined after six months of work that's pretty depressing right so you imagine how much more depressing it was a year later so after like 18 months of work we made a grand total of hurt was about $13,000 after 18 months work but we kind of consider this our side project this is our pizza money project every bit of money we kind of enjoy working out we needed this product to run our consultancy anyway so we never really stopped to think about maybe we should abandon this idea it slowly started a good interaction year - we got 100,000 it took us three years to get to the

[16:36] magic number 30,000 mr are so really really slow growth but as we got there I suppose we started working two days a week in the product tree days a week in the product four days a week in the product and eventually we got to have what we consider our magic number 30,000 mr or was the number we decided we needed to be able to fire or consultancy and that will give us like enough money to pay the wages that a couple of staff that we had to pay for the office and have a nice healthy Buffalo right and to go all in on this so three years in we

[17:09] finally got the 30 mm mm or or and we needed to get rid of this bloody consultancy that was just like a noose around her neck so we went looking for a buyer and the price we had to buy our existing client book because we had we had a really good reputation digital crew was a couple a really good reputation in ER in Cork Ireland we found another consultancy and we said would you take this business office they said yes how much you know they're willing to pay a bit of money for it we said it's free just please don't drop the ball just look after our clients cuz

[17:39] we built up a we'd built up a good reputation and we built up a lot of trust with these guys so we handed the entire book of clients over these guys and that actually worked really well so then we had the shackles of consultancy freed and we were able to double down a product just a little side note here just a little slight note on self-funding we never even stopped to consider that taking money was an option it was just not something that was gonna invoke back then it wasn't as popular and I suppose being in the south of Ireland we were just like caught off

[18:11] from investment in all of us just never occurred to us I also feel that okay there's just probably one out of 100 companies probably should take money but in my personal opinion I I hate it when I see developers looking for you know two hundred thousand to get the product off the ground dude just work in McDonald's and work on your product at nighttime here's the thing it has never in the history of mankind right being cheaper to make software so when we've bought her for a server like dedicated server it cost those twenty three thousand dollars plus hosting and now it is you can get that

[18:49] exact same server for $100 a month with Amazon right and that brings me to another little site store I got to tell you about so we were starting to get a bit of traction in the company now we you know we're doing three hundred thousand a year and we're doubling down and this and the products getting better and better we're still doing no marketing but I got to tell you about Hell night August 2012 I was just about to turn in for tonight I was a programming late again about one o'clock and I reloaded teamwork and holy [ __ ] nothing was coming up right the wall

[19:22] ting was down and that since the panic kind of settles in and I was freaking out I was like holy [ __ ] so like we were hosting with a huge company over here on the East Coast that I won't mention but uh I'm panicking I'm calling her Account Representative there he's not answering his phone I'm calling the company switchboard they're not answering the phone I'm emailing them there's no answers meanwhile tweets and emails are flooding in I am shooting myself I'm close to tears I can't get you to my co-founder I sit there for eight hours I hit the refresh button maybe a thousand times

[19:57] over the next eight hours right and it was just a horrible experience so lesson learned they're highly highly highly recommend that you go with someone like Amazon Web Services right over the next two months we've out in the morning came back online never again and we packed everything up over two months and we slowly moved at all over Amazon we've it's been a great decision for us some other mistakes we did is looking back now because we were just heads down working on code all the time we suddenly realized when then holy [ __ ] we're trying to do too much for too few people and we had the money in the bank we just

[20:30] weren't using it right so we suddenly realized that hiring had become our single biggest problem we the only way we hired was we would randomly accidentally meet somebody and if they were a good fit we'd say did you want to come on board we didn't even put up a jobs page we were just terrible we did everything wrong right so please think about hiring early and I suppose as we got bigger as well we didn't hire a hit were so we're at 63 people now we only hired a hedge or person last year so looking back if any of you when you could get to that stage maybe think

[21:00] about hiring an HR person 35 people 40 people mark not a mistake we made is we didn't have a marketing team until maybe three years ago and looking back now that was just a completely terrible terrible decision how many of you heard of teamwork comm three years ago I see like ten hands and there you go just we were building an amazing product that I'm very proud of people were just accidentally stumbling on us and we just weren't shouting about it or getting the word out there was this terrible decision to come back another mistake we made is we didn't build a sales team until six months ago

[21:36] it's just a myth back there is the head of our sales team and in six months the difference Emmet and his team have made that a company is monumental so after this conference were actually going up to meet a huge enterprise customer in LA and I just I have no excuse for not doing this apart from again I wasn't being the CEO I had my head down code for far too long so please learn from our mistakes so yeah we kept writing the long slow SAS run to death until we finally hit eighty nine thousand dollars a month recurring in December 2011 fifteen months after we

[22:14] launched eMERCOM or team rpm not net I should say so the key takeaways here I suppose are look make the time if you're thinking about it and you keep putting it off just make the time to start your product there is never a better time to start your product than today alright start with the research and design at the code the launch it right we did everything wrong learn from us positioning you got a stand out be different in your market you got to fire your day job and go all-in as soon as possible and eat your own dog food right that's essential use your own product every day I know that

[22:52] won't work for everyone but if you possibly can use your own product every day AWS hosting for the win and continuous marketing from day one and yes you do need a sales team I know there's a lot of kind of taught in this industry at the particle cell itself I think I've learned the hard way that no there's a lot of benefit to having sales team as soon as you got something tangible to sell right so that's part two and the next part I can tell you about kind of the evolution of the company and about my personal evolution is growing up as a CEO so we had a

[23:27] hockey stick event which is you know dream so we're riding a long slow SAS ramp at that and can anyone guess what the hockey stick event to us no we were team we're p.m. dotnet remember and now we're team were calm so acquiring team work become completely turned the company around for us which is interesting in itself right here's the story what happened so back when we launched the company when we were pre-launch I reached out to the guy you own team are calm and I got this pretty pretty crass reply back right so hello I've never heard of your organization so I was surprised to receive your inquiry I

[24:10] haven't offered to sell this main name so there is no asking price but currently huh we currently used this domain and our continued use is anticipated that's complete [ __ ] right he was just squatting on the name purely is a generic term I feel the value of just a main name is comparable with these reported transactions alright so I click the link holy [ __ ] sex comment 413 million injured calm went for 16 million so this guy was probably looking for like between 6 and 20 million 40 more calm right so we just kind of heard that that was back when we lost we just kind of

[24:43] forgot about it was a pipe dream so try it again following year got just just one line reply back we already talked away so one night him in the bar and my girlfriend goes to the toilet and she's taking too long and I'm thinking I'm just thinking God love teamwork calm I'm a few points in so I I just shot the guy in emails again saying uh would you sell it for a hundred thousand and you can see his reply back here which is a same lowball offer no tanks right I was like screw this guy so I hit him again you know so please make me a counteroffer

[25:22] and I think this guy must be in a bar summer as well cuz he just shot me back straight away must be after a few drinks I'd consider 675 thousand and that might sound like a lot of money but I actually nearly wet myself with excitement I was like this guy is [ __ ] up right so uh see ya is like [ __ ] so I say I immediately accepted the offer right so I I sent to the next day I sent him to see email I said I got you know he might change his mind I got be careful of my wording but I pretended we the board

[26:00] alright pretended we were organized I was like yeah we were so we accept your offer it's a final offer or whatever hoping that he won't you know try and play hardball and after accepting his offer den I went to my co-founder and I said hey what you think about buying team calm he was like no [ __ ] way dude that's like every I said look he'll sell it for 600 75 thousand he was like that's every penny we have in the bank he's like how about we go by to Austin Martin's and said he's like it's a [ __ ] domain name right so I didn't

[26:36] gave him what I call my Martin Luther King speech I'm like we only live once I don't look back when were 80 years old and regret not doing this and he was like [ __ ] it all right go on let's do this I said I did it yesterday so here's the thing didn't make a difference did it make a difference yeah yeah boom can you see that yep that's in the wrong place yeah that's one three pointing at a January 2014 how did this happen when we launched a domain name right we literally had the hockey stick events we could see the year later that he had

[27:32] paid for itself in one year and since then we've been kind of a rocket right so we've also had a really strong product with terrible terrible marketing and now we finally had not only a good domain name but I suppose it gave us kind of brand identity and it allowed people to kind of like have that instant credibility and Trust so yeah that's why I recommend go out and buy a domain name for six hundred ninety five thousand the next part of story I just don't talk a little bit about me personally you can see all the mistakes we made or because we just had our heads down programming

[28:05] and like had I actually stopped be the CEO every now and again I probably we probably would have got to 12 million revenue a lot earlier I think so let me tell you a little kind of embarrassing story just two two years ago I headed off to New York for six months and I worked night and day on our new product and yeah six months later we had a new product and we the sexy new engine future products but when I looked up from the code as I holy [ __ ] our company's a mess right back in Ireland we were now up the link 45 people our

[28:41] culture was completely undefined we'd all these process problems nobody in the company could tell you what her vision was it was just there was so much going we were doing well but there was so much going wrong and I kind of was why is the composer such a basket case I can realize holy [ __ ] it's my job I'm not doing my job right that's the problem and it's my job to establish to help to establish the culture to put the processes in place set the vision for the company is this like Eureka a lightbulb moment so I've kind of been trying the iving I still do a lot of

[29:14] programming right if I'm totally honest Jake and I know I need to do less and kind of lead set a vision for the company but I have made steps to try and fix some of the issues in the company and we've come a long way I think in two years the first thing we had to do was have regular meetings everybody hates meetings right but if I could just recommend that you have four meetings a year four times a year get out of the office go somewhere different and just identify your top five problems in the company and what you're going to do to fix them that is it that's the one set

[29:46] of meetings you need and if we had done that earlier we will realize that we we need HR person that we have hiring problems we don't have a jobs website our marketing is terrible we don't have a jobs sales team and we would have fixed all this much much sooner if we just done that one simple thing so please again learn from my mistakes set in division so when we had our first quarterly off-site meeting I very nervously shared my vision with my co-founders about where I would like to see us take the company and once I got buy-in from them like that that first meeting was actually really awkward

[30:21] because we've never done this kind of off-site thing before we kind of felt like this is what proper companies do here we work on a pretending to be like a proper company so I nervously shared my vision with guys and once we got there by and I suppose I realize it's my job to keep reiterating the vision of the company to everybody and staff at every chance we get we've this huge vision for we're taking the company like 2020 as you can see here next thing tried fixing was sculpting our culture so as I said it was a bit of a mess week this kind of

[30:52] like developers versus everyone else kind of culture had slightly crept in and I think that's cuz myself and Dan are developers and maybe we would discipline pedis a little bit but uh you know we said about over the next two years we've done a lot with would happiness officer in place and we've done a lot to kind of fix that just like nights out simple little things like intercompany manual we have a page don't be a dick right and these these things actually do help Joe number one rule don't argue over Instant Messenger right we've learned the hard way next thing you fixed is the process

[31:28] problems in company so just silly little things like now that we weren't 15 people in the same little location that we were spread out around the world and over two floors and cork just communication became an issue so for example the marketing team and the sport team did not necessarily know what the product team guys were working on and they were like we kind of want to have input on the features that the guys are working on so it's it's pretty easy once you realize that you need process to put these processes in place so a very simple fix is that the market head of marketing the head of sport and head of

[32:00] each product they just meet for half an hour every month and they talk about what features we should work on next very simple next thing is kind of I think what helped will held me back from being a good CEO for years is that I kind of thought that the CEO needs to have all the answers right I taught like I'm not really CEO long enough I'm not sure how to fix this not sure or to fix that that's just being very answer to you right and I think I've kind of realized that the CEO doesn't have to have all the answers that's kind of a huge realization for me

[32:32] and trusting others and letting go because I'm a programmer Dan's a programmer and we've traditionally done every last thing in the company ourselves it's been very hard for us to relinquish the reins to other people especially you know we might think we will do a better job we just have to learn to trust others and leave go and I'm sure that'll be very hard for a lot of people in this room finally just something that we've experimented with in the company this year in January we switched to being an open book management company which means all our figures are laid bare to all our employees every single in the deploy you

[33:05] can see exactly how much revenue you were earning it's a bit of a ballsy move and it wasn't unlikely but it kind of complements the great game of business which if you haven't heard of it it's a system for running your company where you encourage every employee to think like an owner and in exchange you give them part of the success so we set targets for the year and if we hit those targets every employee in the company has the potential to double or triple their wages which is huge right so it's a you can check it out at the great game of business comm I bumped it a guy

[33:40] bumped into a guy in Boston last year who told me about it it blew my mind I highly recommend you check it out it's a huge experiment for us not sure if it'll work yet but my gut says it will so the key takeaways again be the CEO boy your domain name for $75,000 better hold quarterly meetings set the vision establish your culture you know culture is gonna happen in your company whether you like it or not you can choose to let it evolve or you can choose to define your culture I highly recommend you choose the latter establish processes you don't have to have all the answers

[34:15] and trust others and let go right and try the great game business it'll work for you and last slide I'll leave you with this because I love this phrase and it's kind of always found is inspiring even though I'm sure you all heard it before but these are good they can't ignore you thank you for your time

[34:40] so you know des Trina talked about this point that you can start small with a simple message you obviously didn't start that way but this question is about looking back if you could have gone that route considering that you were building a project management tool you did spend six months building it could you have gone the other way that people talk about like we did it over a weekend we build something and set it out but people would you have been able to sell that you know a project management tool ourselves nice there are some expectations right a base set of features without which our and consider

[35:20] one so do you think that lean approach would have worked for you looking back so I think what sorry that lean approach would have worked for you looking back if you could have built something really small you were talking about maybe just attaching documents to tasks if you could just release something like that and build from that would you have been able to follow that same route of success hey that's an interesting question and our first version I would argue was pretty lean it probably wasn't six months it was probably like we built the first version two months and then we used it ourselves we were first customer

[35:55] I suppose could we release something leaner yes we could have and we probably should have right but we didn't because I suppose we were looking at the other guys out there and we knew we wanted to to surpass them and that was our goal you probably should have released something leaner and simpler we just did everything wrong right that's it anyone else back here you mentioned that there was a time when you realized that you needed a sales team and there was no way around it where am I looking thank you all right what was going on at that time that kind of clued you into

[36:33] that being a necessity and then what if the implementation look like the sales team yeah okay there was a day he wouldn't Disney emailed us and they said we've been using your product and stealth for a couple of years and we love it I really holy [ __ ] and they're like can we have an Enterprise version I think that was a pretty good clue that we needed a sales team it has been something we talked about a long time it's just that we were too busy again building product we always knew we needed a sales team so we get a ridiculous amount of trials and we need

[37:07] to do a better job of converting them people just get stuck we should have we just should have done at three years our last think suppose the answer is we just knew in our gut we need it I think I'll answer for like a smaller company we started getting one two three emails a week saying hey can you give me a call I'd love to see a quick demo that was I mean not it wasn't Disney but it was people very noticeable people wanting to have a lot of demos hi good talk I'm Jonathan I want to ask quickly you mentioned that the team were calm really

[37:39] helped accelerate growth did I notice that in your website you have dozens of integrations with other services did that help as well the growth or retention of your customers absolutely definitely did help every single integration equals X amount to new customers a month they've been uterus and that's the suppose that's a developer hack something we were able to do concentrating and being a developer we just we always just listen to our customers so we started getting emails saying do you guys integrate with harvest and we're like what the hell is harvest we check it out it's pretty cool we just hacked in the integration so we

[38:13] just kept responding to our customers listening to their feedback and yeah the integrations definitely definitely helped you've stepped up as a CEO but have you developed an executive team to support you yeah kind of we still have a long way to go all right I'm still doing too much programming and I'll try and do less yes we have I have a CFO and Dan is my CTO or not no we don't really have a good as active team to be totally honest we still have a long way to go you mentioned the hockey stick growth after the purchase of a domain name and we had a similar story but it didn't it

[38:56] wasn't the same effect obviously but I was how do you know that that was actually what caused it as opposed to just you pay more attention as a CEO and doing things like that like the culmination of things but actually the growth um because I didn't really stop up as a CEO for another two years another year maybe at least anyway you know I mean we we didn't really add any major features on you know we just kept solid working away that was the only major event that I would have actually attribute to it's you think it's just better SEO or beam what would we started

[39:30] getting people is it I think it's the credibility we started getting people writing more articles about us I think it's kind of demote effect works as well you know imagine two guys in the bar and one guy says we use teamwork PM net it's awesome the other guy is never gonna remember that right so is that kind of word-of-mouth effect as well it's just a really strong brand yes so you're a really big success and you've got a really great story and you're saying that all these things were mistakes but could it be that they were the right thing to do that this was your strength

[40:04] of just putting your head down and coding and and doing what you knew best I think having two co-founders who are both technical did to help us create a really strong product right so from that point of view yes but genuinely if I could talk to the younger me I would slap myself around and I would say you need to constantly be concentrating this stuff earlier I am convinced that we would have got to 12 million a year two years three years ago so you talked about not having unique positioning in the beginning what's the unique positioning that you guys have settled on and how did you get there

[40:42] I was hoping nobody would ask me that's right didn't I tell you guys we sit we're still not great right so we kind of do this thing about all about we're all about high performance high performance teams run on teamwork because we're now a suite of products and I was like what you know how do you position yourself when you're a suite of products we have this huge ambition that we're going to make a suite of products to run every last part of your company so you can you can kind of guess where we're going we've got three big parts of it the beautiful thing is they all

[41:09] integrate together it's really strong we still struggle to get that messaging across if anyone here has any good ideas shoot me an email after please Peter teamwork comm so just move maybe a similar question but you know they say like what goddess here won't get us there maybe from a product standpoint but positioning in sales and strategy what do you think will change and your marketing plan or sales plan going forward from here to get you to that hundred billion dollar number I have no idea I thought that's our marketing guys back there what's going to change it and we definitely we have this really strong thing in that or

[41:50] three products actually all talk to each other and this is something that nobody else is doing I think we really need to push that messaging more Enterprise is becoming big for us we need to kind of push that a bit more and another I don't know good answer for you well we're just going to keep experimenting right we're just gonna keep trying things experimenting I actually meant to say in the talk Gail if you haven't seen it Gail Goodman's video the you know the long slow SAS ramp of that is just mind-blowing right those guys are doing 330 million a year now and they just kept trying things and

[42:20] experimenting and we're just gonna we're gonna follow that batter I really enjoyed the talk I was just wondering you've been and precising the fact that you think you've done a lot of mistakes do you think if you had fixed those mistakes while running your consultancy you would have been you know as successful as with the product because 12 million is not that of a insane number for very successful consultancy so I'm just wondering if you if you would have you know succeeded that way at least if you think you would have yeah I think we definitely could have grown our consultancy to be a hundred person consultancy and done some great

[42:55] stuff right but here's the thing consultancy doesn't make you money while you sleep right then the money is in products I don't want to run a hundred person consultancy that's not fun for me maybe that's fun for someone else yeah you know we did projects for clients where they wanted rate on Monday they wanted blue on Friday and it's just torture right I just do not want to be in the consultancy business making shrink-wrap software is a beautiful thing you know people who want to buy it that's fine you mentioned that you let culture kind of grow organically until a set point when you decided that you had

[43:32] to take control and do something and said it what was that point in what did you do to to kind of guide the company culture so I think it was the point when I I finished working in team earth desk in New York and it was time to go home and when I went home I suddenly realized holy [ __ ] there's 50 people in the company and they're all looking to me for direction and then there was just a lot of pain people coming to me with different problems saying that they don't know what the product team is working on or even there are say our

[43:58] hiring process there was like who has the final decision can we hire people from Russia will we pay for visas there was all these decisions that we'd never stopped to think about so we eat the fix process I think definitely the the developers versus everyone else culture was pretty apparent I think I think that non developers were pretty pissed off at all the porks maybe the developers were getting and stuff and and I just had people kind of write thing to me it just became really obvious that we had to fix this yep so you love to code your co-founder loves to code did you at any

[44:33] point consider staying in that role and bringing on a CEO instead of assuming that role [ __ ] that was the other question I did not want yeah people have asked me done the bar as well it's not something I I would say no to forever I know campaign monitor I was talking to their CEO in Dublin last year and he's not one of the co-founders the co-founders love coding and they're just you know hacking on that and doing what they love and it may work it may be something we do in the future here's the thing finding that that's CEO who's gonna have your passion your energy is

[45:08] really really hard if I did find somebody I would definitely consider it but also I think they I think the vision and the leadership needs to come from one the founders right that's where we have time for a couple more questions if there are any the one way in the back all right give me a second if I had a joke ready I would tell one now so the guy who had the teamwork dot-com domain he was apparently like a total dick and so I'm curious like during the sales process was he still a dick through all that stuff like how did that go actually no when we were prepared to

[45:56] give him six hundred seventy five thousand he was quite nice no I don't blame the guy I mean I tink thing was just his job right I think they dared are these guys cyber squatters they're sitting on a couple of thousands of my names he was just waiting he is probably waiting for Microsoft or someone to snap it up I think yeah we got lucky there but he was pretty nice to deal with once he knew we were kind of serious to be honest

[46:31] could you talk a little bit more about the great game of business what that will look like and why you were motivated to actually placed a big bet on that right the great game in business so I bumped into this guy in Boston a hub so a conference last year and he told me about he he took over a company implemented great game business totally turned around I should check it out so I did a bit of researcher of Christmas and what I found blew my mind you can check it out a great game in business comm it's kind of traditionally been for more manufacturing companies but I think it

[47:04] could apply to any company so it's just about being fully transparent with your numbers making every employee feel like they're an owner and already so we rolled this out in January it was a bit of a shock to all our staff holy [ __ ] they can now see all the figures they you know they have now its powers in their hands that doubled their own wages we don't have to like grind on them all the time and what I've seen is we've seen like say the teamwork chat team who just all they care about is making an amazing product suddenly these guys are now talking more to the marketing team

[47:35] and they're like how can we help you so the overall company will do better so we've had this great collaboration suddenly start happening between all the different environment another part of the great game is that you put up a metrics dashboard in the company that everybody can see and for every department in the company you pick the one true metric that really matters so we've done that and everybody in the company can see how how well or poor that every other department and the company is going my gut says it's going to really work for us already what I've seen so far has worked really well

[48:04] another part of the great game in business is that you play these mini games where every team kind of sets a game for themselves so it might be like why don't we try and increase signups set a mark and he might say all right we're gonna try and increase our conversion rate by five percent over the next two weeks and if we hit this then they give themselves a reward and depends at these some games are bigger than others right so the reward might be as simple as let's go to lunch or if it's a bigger target more ambitious target they might decide all right we're

[48:34] gonna take a day off and we're gonna go to the beach if we hit this target and it's working really well for us now we don't have all the answers as people are like the game you know we're kind of working hard anyway how does this improve it we're still figuring stuff out but so far I feel really good [Applause] you

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