The Exchanges

Q Do you think most software startups should strongly consider executing on this idea? Or there's like a set of parameters that should be true in the company for this to be kind of the globally optimal strategy?

A I think it's the latter for sure. So, I mean, I, the, I think the flip side of this is sort of the PLG motion where docs solve all problems and community solves all problems. And assuming that your ACV can support it, I strongly believe that it's optimal for a software company to have a very, very high touch support model. And the reason I say that is I'm combining ACV with margin here. There needs to be a level of dollars per customer that you can get out that you can actually reasonably support it. So like if you're spending 50% of revenue on support, of course, that is not going to be a sustainable business model. And so like if your users are 10 dollar monthly seats or something like that, you just, you can't talk to all of them. So like community has to solve that problem. I think at like a 25 K ACV, 90% margin software business. So like a classic sort of like high end SMB, low end, mid market sales. Everyone can afford this. And you need to understand sort of like, who am I talking to about what? So like, are you helping people navigate docs? Are you actually working on sort of more value add services? It's not signing up to be unscalable. The caveat that I would make here is that we had KPIs in support, which is like, how often could we drive someone to a doc to resolve a problem? And we, that was like literally a metric that we followed where we'd look at our Zendesk ti…

AI assessment note: “I think it's the latter for sure.”

Q How was it even possible? For that number of quarters?

A I mean, we just had a, we had a sales process that worked through a spreadsheet really effectively. Like, we did a really good job of understating our sales pipeline and what needed to get created. So our close weights are incredibly consistent through the life of the business, and we were able to generate meetings really effectively for the life of the business. And so, like, the biggest thing that you can do is understand where your business comes from. Like, we, we closed 30% of our business intracorder. Which means that they were leads generated inter quarter. The 70% was generated pre quarter. And like, I think 40% of it came from the previous quarter and 30% of it came from the three quarters previous. And so like at a certain level, we just really had a very tight understanding of what sales pipeline looked like. And then we just did a good job of, you know, getting through trials, understanding close rates and things like that. And I think to some level it was, you know, like we managed pipeline really effectively. I think we had a very, very good understanding. I did not appreciate at the time That like management through a spreadsheet was not how every business ran either. So, um, I, I now appreciate the difficulty a little bit more.

AI assessment note: “we had a sales process that worked through a spreadsheet really effectively.”

Q Colin, as you were getting ramped just before you continue on. Yeah. How did you spend the time with the customers? Was there anything you did that was particularly useful or it was just kind of more open-ended? What do you think of Looker? What are the rough spots? Those types of things.

A I mean, I wish to say I had like, I, I probably got a script slowly where you'd go in and you talk about the problems that were focused on. So it'd be like a soft roadmap, but really it was just like a, Hey, can you show me how you're using the product? And it wasn't sort of like show me superficially. It was, we really tried to actually get into the things that they liked and disliked about the product and sort of what was interesting, who was using it. Um, I, I mean, I wasn't in product at the time, but I sort of now in retrospect, appreciate it as sort of like Customer discovery from current customers. It was just really understanding, like, is it good? And do customers like it sort of superficially, but they're using it wrong? Or are they actually using the product like the way that we intend it? It just sort of helped us get an understanding of sort of was the product actually transformational and interesting for companies? Or was it just like another data product that we were selling really effectively or something like that? So, I mean, I was, I was trying to take feature requests and things like that, because I, I think That gets people talking like people that live in the product all day, love to talk about the things that could be better or worse. And I feel like if you actually listen in a very engaged way, they'll tell you even more. So almost like getting feature r…

AI assessment note: “really it was just like a, Hey, can you show me how you're using”

Q What have you figured out about either becoming a PM or hiring excellent PMs that maybe is a little bit counterintuitive or kind of part of the way that you see the world?

A Yeah, I mean, my most unpopular point of view here is like, I don't think PM is a craft at all, which is probably evident from my previous answers about, you know, the process. Like, I think a PM is literally the intersection of caring a lot and then having some domain expertise. So I loved PMs at Looker that were sales engineers that just had like really deep product knowledge, because I think that you can't replace an intuition for sort of like the customer conversation with the analytics. And, and that's, this is just my point of view personally, but I, uh, kind of jokingly say like, I don't like listening to customers. And I only say that because like, I really like listening to customers, but through my own context, like I want to hear what they're saying, but then I don't want to listen to what they're saying. I want to apply it to like my point of view on what they're saying. And I think it's really hard to be an effective PM if you cannot build that point of view. And so to me, the intersection is like a real obsession in the product area that you have. And I guess it's just a real obsession because it's like, it's the combination of the extreme interest and then just wanting to do it. Because like, I do think that you're responsible for plugging all the gaps in everything that's happening in the building process. Like you're not writing the code, but you're, you're res…

AI assessment note: “my most unpopular point of view here is like, I don't think PM is a craft”

Q And do you think that things worked because of, or in spite of, or somewhere else? Is that way of building product, what you're taking with you to Omni because you believe it's really important to build sort of a really phenomenal product and or company?

A I think so. Like, I really do think that there's, I can't believe I'm saying these things, but like I didn't say qua to like building product, you know, where if you really try to get super analytical about Like resource allocation or things like that, you end up with the sort of like, you end up with booking.com, which is like a great product if you're, you know, click rate optimizing it, but you don't end up with something like strategically interesting. And I think at some level, like you need to, you need to make big strategic bets, but a lot of these things are at the margin. Like we're not going to pick up the entire engineering team and move them into enterprise. We're going to like start allocating resources on bigger problems that companies have, and then we're going to slowly allocate more and more resources. And so I, I really do feel like a lot of these decisions are sort of at the margin, and then you just need to lean into what the customer is telling you and sort of how it's received and whether it's doing what it needs to do. So like an example of this is Looker didn't, Looker was always about embedding the product. So you could pick up a dashboard and go drop it into Salesforce or something like that. We were always a little bit afraid of launching an embedded product for customers to embed. So delivering reporting for customers, customers. And I think, ah, I t…

AI assessment note: “I think so. Like, I really do think that there's”

Q surface area that was built. And I think that you coming into this company, there's so much product that you could build. I mean, you, you probably have a five to seven or 10 year roadmap kind of roughly outlined in your head. And so how did that map to at what point you were building something that was ready for an early customer to use and in what order?

A We've sort of tested this in multiple layers. So first we tested the messaging, like product messaging fit or whatever, if there's a word for that. And we, we kind of got that on day zero. We started talking about these problems. And again, like we have the advantage of we're just sort of building the product for ourselves. Like we're really building the product for me at some level. So the messaging wasn't the hard part. I think the thing that's been kind of crazy for me that in retrospect was obvious, but I, I think I wasn't expecting as much when I started Is I think that literally in the past year, I've done probably 500 demos, like literally more than one a day, maybe like some days, probably like three or four. And I do think that the most valuable way to understand whether the product is doing enough and sort of what people actually want is just to talk to more people and have like a real meaningful conversation. So I think our takeaway was that people wanted the totality of the vision that we have. But like, there is a, there is a small version of the totality, which is like this idea of the SQL runner and Tableau for Viz plus Looker. And so sort of like, okay, what is the smallest possible version of that that we could release that someone could actually live in all day and have as a BI tool?

AI assessment note: “what is the smallest possible version of that that we could release”