Everything Alex Hoff said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hoff: A $100M enterprise customer distracts businesses and dictates product roadmaps
“Having a customer that spends a hundred million dollars with you. I may be rounding up a little bit in the story, but it kind of sucks. It's great. It's great for the business, but it's actually really distracting in the sense that they control your roadmap, v…”
Hoff: Small businesses have no business managing their own IT infrastructure
“What we realized is SMB had no business doing their own IT. They were cheap. They were hiring people. They were undervaluing the concepts of IT, the risk associated with IT, like, and just doing a bad job.”
Hoff: Left the office at 5 PM every day while building Auvik
“So there was like not a day that I didn't leave the office at five PM. This is when we still worked in an office. I was home every day, no matter what, unless I was on the road for a trade show.”
Hoff: Public companies struggle to fund zero-to-one J-curve investments
“It's hard to make a substantial J curve and affect your rule of 40 when you're public. It's just a different beast.”
Hoff: Highly configurable software is a product manager's excuse for ignorance
“If you don't like it, just configure it and like, just figure it out later. Because that's like a product manager's excuse to not understanding the customer use case.”
Hoff: Auvik's initial launch generated 10,000 trials but only one conversion
“We brought on Jackie Murphy and a awesome team of people to run demand gen and marketing and probably 10,000 trials later, we had like one conversion”
Hoff: Auvik scaled from $1K MRR in 2015 to $1M in 2018
“One K MRR was April, 2015. 10 K was August, 2015. A hundred K was June 3020 16. And then a million MRR was November. What looks like 2018.”
Hoff: Strict working time limits force founders to delegate and prioritize
“And that discipline actually allows you to learn how to delegate and learn how to let go of things and prioritize because there's only a finite number of hours in the day that you can focus on your job.”
Hoff: Co-founder Mark Moran covered his living expenses to launch Auvik
“He's like, what do you need? I was like, what do you mean? It's like, well, like not what you want. Like, what do you need to keep going on this adventure? I was like, well, I gotta pay groceries and pay my mortgage. He's like, I'll cover that.”
Hoff: Auvik took over three years from founding to land first customer
“Late 2011, we found, we founded the company, got going. 2013, we raised capital, so we now have a strong thesis of what we're gonna go execute on. We didn't get our first customer until early 2015, so a long time.”
PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER