Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q And then more, again, of the backstory here, pre-acquisition, did you bootstrap the company or raise? And if you raise, how much?
A Yeah. So we raised 2.1 million, uh, in an initial seed round. And then we did YC, um, after they rejected us the first time, but we got Gary Tan on board and he was just terrific investor and kind of, um, rallied, rallied lots of people. So his fund initialized, he's a YC partner and kind of brought us back into YC at that point. Um, and we're able to use those relationships to get our first kind of growth stage customers. We got Instacart and we got DoorDash and some other customers, uh, using us. Uh, really like feed us those use cases, um, and help us to grow in the right direction to stay ahead of competitors in the space based on what growth stage companies needed. And that became our vertical is what do growth teams need? Uh, we were the lightest tool. We were the most powerful event based tool. We could do AB testing. We could do cross channel and those growth marketers, they became our bread and butter, um, and really kind of directed our product for us.
AI assessment note: “we raised 2.1 million, uh, in an initial seed round.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Yeah. Now let's what people do. Yeah. Let's, let's keep talking pre May, 2017. So before any acquisition, just to make your story easier there in terms of paint, like business model, was this a typical SAS model?
A Yeah, it was a SAS model. I think when we started out, we didn't quite know where's, where are people going to find the value? So when you're, you're figuring out pricing, you're figuring out business, you kind of, where's the value coming from? That's always an open question is what is the pricing unit? What are we going to, where do people derive value from this product? And I think, you know, we kind of felt around a little bit and a lot of other products were using list size. So we're using how many contacts do you have? And for us, our big innovation was it's messaged users. So how many people are actually getting messages and it doesn't matter to us how many messages or what channels. So we'll take the number of messages off the table. We'll take your list size off the table. It's just about how many people are you actually engaging with and what are they doing because of the messages. So that was our subscription model.
AI assessment note: “Yeah, it was a SAS model. I think when we started out”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Got it. Okay. I mean, so, I mean, we're talking like, well, at the, at lower numbers, like Well, I don't know if they're low numbers, but you're not doing a hundred million a year, but I mean, you're able to weigh more than double year over a year pretty easily, right?
A Yes. Yes, definitely. And, and, and, uh, you know, one thing that I learned from YC is that, uh, if you can pick a, the whole mantra is, is kind of, you can grow some metric that's very important to the business, 10% week over week, then you know, you're, you're, you're having some success. And so they would just kind of pick a metric and And then they will rake you over the coals every week and say, how are you doing on that metric? And that's a, that's a lesson we absorbed and we were able to kind of keep, keep doing and saying, okay, what is it that we're growing? Um, and that, that led to our, to our acceleration and growth.
AI assessment note: “Yes. Yes, definitely. And, and, and, uh, you know, one thing that I learned”
Answered produced feed
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.55
Q That's great. Um, interesting. And can you give me a general sense of size? I mean, are we talking people on average paying 10 bucks a month or a thousand a month or a hundred per month?
A Yeah. When we started off, you know, we wanted to make a self-service product, which is actually one of the reasons we ended up Zendesk is that they have that in their DNA too. Uh, it's really hard to do. So we have an API integration and everybody, of course, wants to start off no salespeople. We'll just build it like Atlassian. We don't need any salespeople. And, you know, eventually we realized that the API integration is a big hurdle. So you need to help people over that hurdle. Um, and at first it was cheap. And so we were, we were self-serve and then we realized over time we need to be more sales assisted. And now we're actually trying to move it back towards self-serve. So we're trying to lower the price point. That's always been our, uh, Dream is that we can get this product out there and we can give it to everyone at different levels of sophistication. But we started off, you know, and you were paying, I think when we started off, we launched, it was under a hundred bucks a month for our first couple of customers. And now, you know, it's, it's definitely risen to at least a few hundred dollars a month for, for most businesses that are using us. And some of them are paying us much more than that.
AI assessment note: “now, you know, it's, it's definitely risen to at least a few hundred dollars”
