Building Startups

Ahmed Cheema: Coming up on the Branding Deep Dive podcast.

Richard White: I think about this, like, how, like, how big of a pain point are we solving? And how frequently does that pain point happen? Right. Maybe I really hate buying Christmas gifts and it's a huge pain point for you to help me, help me solve my, like, Christmas gift buying problem.

But that only happens once a year. So, like, multiply those two things together. Mediocre kind of pain point. I'm not going to really tell my friends about it. It doesn't happen enough. But it's like something happens to you every business day and it's kind of painful. Great.

Ahmed Cheema: This is Ahmed Cheema and welcome to the Branding Deep Dive podcast. If you're new here, this is a podcast where we have in depth discussions with founders, marketers, and brand strategists on how to build a brand that people love. Today we're talking to Richard White. Richard is the founder and CEO of Fathom.

Video, a free app that records, transcribes, and highlights your calls so you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes. Fathom was a part of Y Combinator's Winter 21 batch, is one of only 50 Zoom app launch partners, and is one of a small handful of companies Zoom has invested in directly via their Zoom apps fund.

Prior to Fathom, Richard founded UserVoice, one of the leading platforms and technology companies from startups to the Fortune 500. Use for managing customer feedback and making strategic product decisions. UserVoice was notable for being the company that originally invented the feedback tab shown on the side of millions of websites around the world today.

Richard previously worked on Kiko, a company in the first batch of Y Combinator with Justin Kahn and Emmett Shear, who subsequently went on to found Twitch. Richard is passionate about designing intuitive productivity tools with delightful user experiences. In this episode, we dive deep into how to properly code email, the benefits of working at a startup, When to monetize your startup, how to get and implement product feedback, the benefits of going through Y Combinator and much, much more.

If you're looking to build a startup, this episode is a must listen. Now here's Richard.

For the audience that may not be familiar with who you are and fathom, can you give them a brief introduction?

Richard White: Sure. So my quick background, I'm an engineer turned designer turned a serial entrepreneur. I worked in a company in the first batch of Y Combinator, which is a very famous kind of seed incubator.

I worked with the guys that went on to do Twitch. So I'm like the answer to a trivia question, who worked with these guys? Famous. And then I started a company called user voice, user voices. Probably most famous for if you're seeing a little feedback tabs inside of websites, we kind of pioneered that, ran that company for 10, 12 years multibillion dollars of revenue.

And then two years ago during the pandemic started fathom and fathom was basically a reaction to being on a lot of zoom calls and I am, as I like to say, I'm kind of single threaded my girlfriend does as well. If you, if I'm writing, I can't talk. And if I'm talking, I can't write. And so it was very painful to like have a bunch of zoom calls and trying Take notes and talk to customers at the same time.

And fathom was going to reaction to that. Like, let's build, let's build a meeting assistant that can join every call, record the call, transcribe the call, do it fast. So you get that stuff as soon as the call ends and then give you a fun little interface where whenever you hear something important, you just click a button.

And we'll basically like highlight that part of the call in the post call summary. And so, yeah, we've been starting for two years. It's completely free product based on built for people on zoom calls and it's just been a fun ride.

Ahmed Cheema: Yeah. I'm not on that many zoom calls, but I did see the demo. It seems so cool.

I was just thinking like, if I could have something like that for my podcast, it would save me a lot of work on the, on the backend. I want to start at the beginning here. You mentioned you worked. With Justin Kahn and you didn't mention him by name, but the guys that started Twitch I, I want to ask you is how did you get that job at that first startup?

Like, I think a lot of people that may be listening or myself, I'll just say, like, I don't know how to actually go about if I want, like, I always wanted to work at a startup. How do I actually go about you know, making these connections and. I put myself out there in front of the right people.

Richard White: Well, it's funny.

I, so I grew up in North Carolina and I, I tried to go to startups as like a teenager and in college. And I constantly kind of struggled to like find people to do a startup with me. Like if people didn't want to do that, they wanted to go like work at a normal company. And and I remember one day I was at my normal company job and I had been talking to a colleague like, Oh, I want to really build this thing.

And he kind of, you know, Send me a link. It's like, Oh, there's a TechCrunch article. Someone built the thing you wanted to build. And I was like, kind of like, you know, I was kind of sad for a minute. I was like, Oh, bummer. Like I wanted to do that. And then I started playing around with the product and I was like, Oh, wow.

This is like technically very capable, but my gosh, the design of this is really bad. And so I like reached out to the founders. I found, I don't know how I found their email address, but I like reached out to them. It was like, this product is technically, I kind of like complimented them. Like products are very technically amazing.

And then I was like, but it's designed like crap, like can't find any features. It's very confusing, blah, blah. And then I offered to help. I was like, I'd be happy to, you know, I fancy myself a designer, right. And I want to help you with this sort of thing. And. I, I think they told me kind of in a sea of, they were getting a lot of positive emails.

Mine kind of stood out because that's the only one being like, your thing could be better. Like it's actually not that good. And it was, you know, kind of a long email and to their credit, they like, we'll buy back or like. Okay. Yeah. Tell us how. And like we started kind of working together and that's kind of how it happened, right?

At some point they were like, oh, this is a better design for our product. Yeah. Do you wanna come work with us? And you know, signed said, sure, I'd love to. So that's how it kind of got started. Cold email. Yep.

Ahmed Cheema: Was that a tough decision to leave your normal job to go work at a startup

Richard White: for you? It's a good question.

So long ago, I, I don't think so. 'cause I think I. Always knew I wanted to do a startup thing. And like, I was pretty passionate about working on this thing. And I feel like it felt like an opportunity. I think one of the reasons you go work at a startup is to go do something. You're not really qualified to do in this case.

I was an engineer. I wasn't really qualified to be a product designer, but it's what I wanted to do. And so I was like, Oh, here's an opportunity to build a thing. I want to build, solve a problem I want to solve and do a role that I want to do, even though most people probably wouldn't pay me to do it. So yeah, I mean, I don't think it was that hard.

I think my, at that point in my life, my cost, my overhead was pretty low. And which is good because my salary was even lower, how much do I get paid? And I was like, I'm gonna pay whatever you're getting paid wrong answer answer because they were paying themselves like nothing. But but no, I think, you know, obviously in retrospect, it's paid for itself in other ways or it's maybe too over, but yeah, a lot of the best experiences in my, or one of the big, I think, turns in my career have always actually come from.

Like cold emails to people.

Ahmed Cheema: Do you have any principles or best practices for writing good cold emails that actually get read and respond, responded to?

Richard White: I mean, it's interesting. I get a lot of cold emails, but like 98 percent of them are just like, clearly not just written to me. Everyone's so focused on like, I got to get scale, I got to get this in 30 people's inboxes.

You can tell the email that was only written to you, right? And it's not the sales hack thing of like, Oh, you know, line one, say something, you know, with their, with their name in it, line two, say something that shows you've read their LinkedIn. No, no. Like the whole email needs to read like, this is a thing I like want to reach out to you.

There's something exciting here. Right. Thank So there's probably this like, it's this happy medium. I remember many, many years ago being on dating apps. And I remember at, before I went on dating apps, I was asking my female friends, like, what are the messages that you get looked like? And I like, they showed me.

And then what I saw was like, a lot of guys who send this girl's messages are like one line, Hey, you're cute. That's it. Right. Like, Oh, Hey. And then other guys would send these like warm piece level, like, you know, five paragraph essay of why they should go on a date with them. And so I always found a while to like strike something in the middle of that kind of, it's like not so, so short that it's, and not so long.

And I think same thing applies to cold emails. It's kind of like 80 minutes where you want something that shows like, This is a specific email to you, but also isn't so big that like I feel overwhelmed to try to respond to it, right? That's the thing. I occasionally get those two or just wall of text and I'm like, I can do it.

It also subtly implies that like you have too much time on your hands to, to write this. Like it like has this like subtle signaling about the power dynamic, which I think is not very positive for you. But you keep it short, right? Like, Oh, this thing's super cool. Time can be better. I can help you.

Let me know. Right. Like yeah. Now,

Ahmed Cheema: you mentioned one of the reasons to actually go out and work at a startup is to you know, try something that you normally wouldn't get paid to do or be allowed to do. Are there any... You're unqualified for. Yeah. Yeah. Or not, not qualified for. Right. Now when it comes to like our audience, I think a lot of people are probably in the traditional job route.

Are there any other like... Benefits or like when you talk to people that are considering you know, making the leap and going, joining a startup, I'm sure you probably have people that want to work for you that are kind of on the fence. Like, how do you, what are the benefits of working at a startup besides that you know, getting to do stuff you're not qualified for?

Richard White: I mean, I think it's optimizing for growth and warming. Right. Like that's, that's, that's what getting to do things you're not qualified for is all about. Right. And I think, so that's one thing, right? It's like, I, there's a period in my life where I would do freelancing and then do startups and freelancing.

And I felt like generally freelancing, I was like cashing out of what I already knew. I wasn't learning a lot, not usually as taking what I'd learned at the startup. And then like, great, I can take these learnings and apply them to you for an hourly rate. Right. But the way I was reasonably able to charge on a 50 an hour hourly rate back in the day or whatever it was.

because I did the startup work at like well below market that like built up my like knowledge base internally. Right. So I think that's one of the benefits. I think, you know, the other big benefit is, and this is where it gets tricky. If you can find the right startup at the right stage, there's usually also other.

ambitious, smart people working there. And like finding those people is probably it's the most valuable thing, right? Like, you know, I'm still friends with Justin and Emmett to this day. They're fantastic people. They're super ambitious, super smart. And they really enrich my life. And that happened because I went to go work at the startup.

That would have not have probably happened. You know, you can meet folks at non startups too, but I just think if you, if you care about entrepreneurship or the, the hardest thing is going to be fine is going to be to find your tribe of other people that are like. That kind of ambitious because it's not the default.

And so that's why people always are like struggling to find co founders. Right. Cause it's like hard to find other people that want to do this. If you go work at a couple of early stage startups, they're generally filled with it's, you know, everyone there has that bias, right? So getting things, you, you know, learning things at a faster rate than you would otherwise, because you're about to fail faster than you would anywhere, anywhere else, right?

Or large companies are designed to not let things fail, which means. By nature, you don't really get to learn as much as you can as a startup, where things are failing all the time, right and getting and building your network. And so that's why I think early in your career, it's way more valuable to join a startup than it is later in your career in some ways, right?

Because those relationships and that learning, it's, you almost want to front load that. And then you can kind of like, it pays out over time as opposed to like, You know, a normal corporate job for 15 years and then switching to startups. Well, not to mention, you're like, overhead is now higher, but like mm-hmm.

You don't get the fruits of that annuity for as long as if you started earlier. Hmm.

Ahmed Cheema: That, that's a really good way to put it. I wanna transition into user voice. So you started at, you were helping out with design at the first startup with Emmett and Justin, and then, You started user voice on your own.

How did, can you walk us through how you came up with the idea? And then really what I want to dive into here is like, like how you actually got the word out and got people to start using your product. I think that's one of the big black boxes nowadays. So,

Richard White: yeah, it's interesting. I think all the startups I've worked on, I think for the most part, I have one thing in common, which is like.

I was solving a problem. I was intimately familiar with already that I had. And so like, yeah, you heard me talk about Fathom. At UserVoice I had this problem of like, I'm running a lot of Zoom calls. I hate taking notes. Those notes also don't translate well into sharing my experience with the team. Hence Fathom.

At Chicco, which is the company Justin and Emmett, And I worked on, we, our problem was we had a lot of 5, 000 daily active users, and we, I spend a lot of time as a designer reading through all their feedback emails, trying to figure out what we should build next. And just being overwhelmed by this and spending hours a day trying to figure out like, what are people frustrated about?

And user voice was kind of reaction to like, Oh, here's like a crowd way to crowdsource the organization of our feedback so that we can show up and just see, Oh, here's the top 10 things we want. And here's who wants them. And so in a lot of ways, I've generally focused on building solutions. The problem I've had in my previous business roles.

But I think your question is a great one that people don't ask enough. And frankly, I probably didn't ask enough at, at, at user voice in the early days, which is like, what's our go to market? How like we can solve this problem. How are we getting this in the hands of enough people? That user voice, it started off with, I just showed it to my friends who are also building companies and also had this like product feedback problem.

And, and then I actually brought someone onto the team whose sole job was to just go talk to other people building soft, like founders of other basically software companies on. Then on Twitter and in person and be like, convince them, Hey, you should use our free product, right? Get on your website. And then we kind of naturally stumbled into a product where user voices like this, almost like think of it as like this suggestion box you set up on your website and all the users of your, like, so we'd sign up company a, all the users of company a would see it.

And then some percentage of the users also had their own company. And then they would be like, Oh, I want that thing on my, so there's like this natural kind of virality to it. Same things happen with Fathom, right? Where it's like we, except for this time, I kind of went into this company knowing we need to have a solution for how we're going to get our first thousand users and how to first get our first 10, 000 users, right?

And. You know, I almost now won't start a company unless I know how to answer that question. Because increasingly there's just not a lot of options would do that. You know, it's

Ahmed Cheema: interesting what I had. Parthian, he mentioned something very similar where he, he mentioned that nowadays code is actually becoming a commodity more and more.

And really what, what differentiates you is your distribution strategy and your ability to. Get distribution. And so can you walk us through how, like how you're thinking? I mean, you mentioned you're thinking has changed, but like, how do you actually think through getting that first thousand users?

Like if you had to start another company today what are the channels that you generally think through? Or like, I guess maybe we can get more specifically into fathom. And like, how did you think through that? And where did you focus your energies

Richard White: there? Yeah. I mean, I think there are There are, I think when you're just starting out, you think of like marketing and customer acquisition.

It's kind of like this open ended question. When actually, once you get some experience, you realize it's a multiple choice question. It's actually a single choice question, right? So for example, what you typically do is you go look at a company, go look at like, let's go look at Airbnb and you look at what they're doing for marketing acquire customers.

You go, okay, we need a blog. We need a podcast. We need some ads. We need that because they do all the things, right? They do every marketing channel possible. And then you start trying to copy that. The problem is almost every startup when it started, you only had like one channel, right? It was like, you know, Zynga had basically the Facebook apps, right?

If you remember back in the day, you had like all these, like back in the, like the SEO days, you had like SEO was driving like eHow and like all these different wiki type things, right? Like what happens is, you know, these kinds of marketing channels open up and for a period of time. They are undervalued and then, and then at some point they become completely saturated.

And once it completely saturated, you can't win. Right? So for example, I would argue like ads at this point are rapidly approaching that are pretty much have already approached that in almost every market. Right? So you can't, you can't win. You can't just build a B2B product and then say, I'm going to buy ads against it at scale unless you have something completely new or completely new vertical that are not.

But it's really hard, right? So you kind of, again, you look for like a Northwest passage or you need to look for products that like lend themselves to word of mouth, because that's the one thing that actually has been amplified over the last 10 years, right? Word of mouth is now on steroids, right? There's a, there's this weird period where if you go back, I think 30, 40 years, word of mouth was really strong.

And then you had all of these top down things, right? Like television ads, newspaper ads, you had all this advertising stuff kind of was able to like, like it didn't matter whether you had word of mouth, you just bought, you just spend your way into customer acquisition. Right. And then all those channels got to, got to be about the same price actually turns out recently, like the cost of sending a letter to someone's inbox, a mailbox, like physical mailbox, it's like the same as.

Running a newspaper ad is the same as buying a Google ad, right? Like, Oh, wow. It basically reaches equilibrium. And so you have to, in this new market, like now social media, you leave kind of, like I said, amplified the original thing, which everyone used, which is word of mouth. And now word of mouth is relevant again.

And so you have all of these companies early, especially coming in this market, all this company's refocused on word of mouth. And we knew for fathom going in that there's going to be a strong word of mouth component to it. Because it solves this personal, very personal problem, and that you, and you run into this problem all the time, right?

If you're, if you're someone who's using Zoom, you're not using it once a week. You're using it every day, multiple times a day. So if we can help you with a thing that I think about this, like how, like how big of a pain point I'm solving and how frequently does that pain point happen, right? Maybe I really hate buying Christmas gifts and it's a huge pain point for you.

Help me, help me solve my like Christmas gift buying problem. But that only happens once a year. So like multiply those two things together, mediocre kind of pain point. I'm not going to really tell my friends about it, it doesn't happen enough, but it's like something happens to you every business day and it's kind of painful.

Great. That alone is that. And then we also knew that the way the app was going to function is it's going to bring this like, you know, note taker person, like it's basically a bot onto the call to record it. And that's going to necessitate you saying, Hey, I'm going to record this call with this cool tool I've got.

Naturally, I'm going to end up telling you about it. And you're naturally going to get like a after call summary about it. And then you're like, after enough exposure to that thing, you're going to try it yourself. And that's, so that's what we started with. And then early in the journey of came, the news came out that zoom was launching his new marketplace.

So new marketplaces are also these kind of like, you know, Hayley's Comet type events, right? Like you can count on the number on like two hands, the number of marketplaces launched by large companies in the last 10 years, right? It's not a lot and marketplace opportunities are rare. If you can get on the ground for the usually good, because usually the first, the first people get the signups and then usually the thing gets sorted by which apps have been getting used the most.

And like, it's like. You know, first mover advantage, right? The rich get richer sort of thing. And so we kind of got really lucky in that zoom just happened to announce this marketplace at the same time. And so we combined, you guys had no idea what was happening though. We had no idea what's happening.

We're starting the company. We had a completely different go to market process, which is going to be like. Really low and slow. You know, we're going to do some outbound, do some like unscalable things to get to like a hundred people, a thousand people. And then we're confident that the engine would kick in and the virality would kick in.

And it just so happened, we were able to go get involved in the zoom platform, which also was a cold email to zoom. We weren't originally involved in this platform. I found the right person and cold emailed them and got into being a launch partner for this platform. And then, so then we had like this really nice.

You know, not repeatable, but we're, you know, organic stream and then we married that with our, our virality and it's, you know, really taken off. So anyway, so it's a long answer to say like, there's not a lot of channel. Like I think you, you could start more from like what channels exist today that are oversaturated in any given market.

Cause for the most part, how about an email server saturated, right? Like ads are oversaturated. You can't buy a LinkedIn ad. You gotta, you gotta come up with some way that you're going to get to users. At the scale you'd get to now, again, if you've got an enterprise product, you've got a product that you're going to charge six figures for, well, gosh, you don't need that much of a channel because you don't, you know, for us, we're trying to reach millions and millions of people that are on zoom calls.

So like we need a big channel. But you just need to find a channel that's big enough to support your ASP.

Ahmed Cheema: Now One of the things I, I had in my notes here is that so Kiko was part of YC user voice was not my correct correct, and then now fathom is again part of a YC. So I'm really curious to see why you decided to go back the YC route.

It seems like you already have the network. You already have the connections. You already been through the curriculum. I'd assume what value does YC provide for you as someone as a who's a seasoned? Operator basically.

Richard White: Yeah, it's interesting. So with Kiko, I was actually an employee. So I came in like right after the, like the YC curriculum officially had ended, but it, but it is true that I think for many years, people just assumed I went through YC because I knew everyone in that like cohort, right.

I just like, you know, from the first batch just knowing so many folks. And so it was an interesting decision for Fathom. It was easy for user voice because this is when user voice was starting. It was when YC was bi coastal. It used to be California and Boston. And I would have had to move back to Boston, which I just came from to like go through YC.

I was like, Boston's terrible. I'm not going back there. It's cold. It's not terrible. People are lovely. It's just cold, too cold for me. For user, for Fathom, I think it's, I look at Fathom as like a speed run of a, of a video game called Startups. Right. Or it's like, you know, I feel like your second time through, you know, it's like playing Minecraft, right?

Playing Minecraft the first time, you don't know what you're doing and you kind of spend an hour trying to figure out, let's punch a tree to get wood an hour into your second Minecraft experience, right? Or like you play 10 years later, it's like within like an hour, you've got a castle and like a moat and all this sort of stuff.

Right. And I feel like Fathom was a speed run of like, let's do all this sort of things. Let's do what's highly parallelized and do it really fast. And one of those things, YC, it's just kind of like a. It, it, it does, it makes things faster. It makes fundraising faster. Right? Like, could we have raised money with yc?

Certainly, right. Could we, we've done the company with yc. Yes. Were we faster because we went through yc? Yes. Hmm. Was it because of the curriculum? Not as much. 'cause like, I, you're like, I've done this long, long enough that like, that curriculum was more like 1 0 1, 2 0 1 level to me. But it was the social accreditation, the social proof, right?

So it's helped with fundraising. It's a little bit of hiring, right? Like in a world where there's tons of competition, be able to say, Oh, I want to work at a YC company. That's blah, blah. And then one of the biggest X factors, like I think it's very important to have a group of peers that are like in the arena at the same time you are because a lot of these tactics, like a lot of these go to market tactics.

Are changing by the time you read about some marketing tactic in a book or a blog, it's over. It doesn't work anymore for the most part, right? Unless you're in some like niche blog, right? And so it's cool to be able to converse with people or meet people that are in adjacent verticals, right? Not by competition.

But executing, you know, there's enough companies in batch, you'll find a handful of them. If you search them out that you have the same kind of ASP, the same good market motion, whatnot, and you can kind of compare notes. And that's super, super valuable because a lot of the stuff on the edge is clandestine knowledge.

It's not, again, in a book or in a blog post. So I, I. That, you know, I think you could probably value YC just on the like hiring and fundraising like accelerant. But I think the, the unknown X factor is just kind of like the, like, ah, you get Intel on like what tools to use and what tactics not to try and who's doing what sort of thing faster than you would otherwise.

Ahmed Cheema: Let me ask you this. So Fathom is a free product. And I guess my question is. What's your, what's the plan for Fathom to generate revenue? What does that look like?

Richard White: I was right because we got to generate revenue now. It's brave new world. Can't just give things away forever for free anymore. Yeah, and this is another thing where like we had, we did something a little bit unique.

I think a lot of companies start off charging from day one and we knew we didn't want to do that because we wanted it. It's, it's tough to do growth and monetization at the same time. You can't attend. You tend to then do both kind of crappily, right? And then you end up with a low grow, low monetization company.

You're like, well, now can't fundraise on it and whatnot. So I tend, I, you know, for us, we really want to focus on what's proved. We can get like really good growth, user growth for free, right? This is all word of mouth and this one, I'm paying, you know, no marketing spend that alone, that building, that engine is probably one of the highest risk things we can do.

We can build that engine. We have some hypotheses of like how we can make money off that engine. We first need to prove we can build that engine. So we can't build that engine. Then monetizing that engine. Isn't that interesting? Right. It's like, Oh, we never proved how to really get growth. So even if I can do a decent job monetization, it's never going to grow that fast.

Right. So like figure out like, what's the key part and the key part was that engine. And then we always had this, this thesis that we can at some point charge like a manager and a team as opposed to the individuals. We'll get individuals to sign up. That's who's going to, it's going to be a salesperson, a CS person, a founder, they're going to start using it.

And then at some point we'll see two people at the company, three people at the company. And then we're going to reach out to someone and say, Hey, you should, it seems like you're liking this. We have another version of our product, which is for teams. You should roll this out to all of them. And that's kind of how we would think about it.

So it sounds

Ahmed Cheema: like you're saying that if you're in the startup world, it's a good idea to just focus on growth rather than focus on monetizing. And is I guess like. If you don't have the

Richard White: product you're doing, right? Like I think for our product, it was important, right? So for certain products, like it's, you know, they're B2B companies.

So like you need to prove early on how much you're willing to pay for the thing. And that's like one of the key things to figure out. How much we were willing to pay for our thing is kind of somewhat bounded. Like we, we weren't as worried that people wouldn't be able to pay for this. There were comps in the market.

There are other companies in the market that were doing things, interesting things with them. Call recording, whatnot, granted for specific niches like sales, but it kind of anchored what we could charge for it. And like, we didn't get a pushback and people say like, you know, would you eventually pay 30 bucks a month for this sort of thing?

So for us, it was the, we need to go figure out gross. Cause we're almost just like prosumer products. Right. That was a big part of our go to market story. I think for a lot of folks that go to market story, it gets proven by the revenue, right? It's like, Oh, right. Yeah. Let's make sure we can close it.

For us, it was different. And we look much more like a consumer company because of that. But I do think there's this thing where I do sometimes see companies try to do both at the same time. And I'm like, you know, a lot of B2B companies, they probably should do at the same time. But if, if you're not pure B2B or you have the strong freemium model, I don't know, both, both UserVoice and Fathom, I did like first year or so the company was completely free and it just removes this barrier to adoption, which allows you to focus on like, I can't give the thing away.

Then I know I can't sell it. Right. Like and anyways, it just, Getting pricing right is hard, right? And like with user voice, we were going to launch pricing on day one and we pulled it out the 11th hour. Cause I was like, I just don't know enough what people will charge. And I don't want to try to answer two questions at the same time.

You know, can this be valuable to you? And also guess what, how valuable it is, right? I think it's also easy to charge, which the thing becomes more established, right? It's like, I don't want to pay money for the thing. It's free. And she got started and might go out of business tomorrow. Like it just, I don't know.

So yeah, I'm a big fan of like Delay monetization, make sure you have the growth first, but if you have the right business model for that,

Ahmed Cheema: it sounds like you're saying that if you don't have, like, if you're in the consumer space and you don't have the growth and it's harder to fundraise,

Richard White: right? Yeah.

Yeah. Like, yeah, you're never going to. If you because again, you're the scale of users, you mentioned you get to so large if you don't know, like, you're not going to be able to cold email your way into that, that number of folks. Right? So

Ahmed Cheema: I want to shift gears a little bit. I know. So you have engineering background and also design background, then I would say.

What we can call product background here, building products and shipping them. I want to ask you how, like you think through, especially, you know, as someone who was the founder of user voice, how do you think through You know, product roadmaps and actually taking feedback and making changes to your product based on the feedback you're getting optimizing.

Like how does at your level, what are you thinking through? How do you guide your teams on a, this is, these are, you know, the data points we need to be collecting, especially in the startup space where you may not have that many data points. You don't, you don't know as much of what people want.

And a lot of it may just be you know, conversations you're having with people. So how do you know what to put emphasis on what not to and that kind of thing?

Richard White: Yeah. And I think this is where the product discipline is as much art as it is science, especially at the early days. Right. And I tend to like the framework of, well, so on remapping at an early stage, you know, I don't think we have more than.

A month of a roadmap, right? Oh, really? We have vague notions on like two months. We have some big thematic. I've got some big thematic sense, right? So for example, when I started the company, I said, Hey, look, we're going to first focus on a great single player experience. Right. And, and because that's how we build the engine, we have to milk something that's an awesome product experience.

People will want to tell their friends about once we feel like we've really nailed that. You know, what's a milestone for that going to look like, right? What's it going to look like? High retention rates, high virality, like decent growth, right? And then we'll go into phase two. And phase two will look like, oh, now we're going to work on it at the team level.

How do we make a great team experience collaboration? We see, and then we've got a third level, but I'm not gonna tell you what the third level is, but you know, so, and those are, those are almost like year long kind of themes, right? So they're like, mm, I see. And I think you get a lot of that guidance, like, you know, thematic roadmaps of like, here's the problem we're gonna solve.

Here's the, the metrics we're gonna move. Right. The, obviously at the team now we're in phase two at Teams. The metrics we're looking at are like, Cost acquisition, ASP, all the revenue type stuff, right? You know, customer insurance, stuff like that. And then inside each one of those phases, I've got, you know, probably three months worth of projects, but I only ever like put like a month worth of them.

Like, ah, here's kind of what we're doing next, right? You know, and a lot of that is. The earlier you are, the more it's guided by like your own internal intuition, intuition. I think before I started the company, I like interviewed like a, you know, a hundred users of one of our, you know, one of our, one of the existing market competitors and, you know, interviewed, I think probably equal number of people that were prospects, prospective users.

And Oh, by the way, again, remember I'm also the target user. Right? Like I'm a founder on a bunch of zoom calls. So that's the like product management hack is like, if you are the target user and you can be reasonably objective about what things you hate running into, what problems are mixed shortcuts, all this stuff where I think product feedback at our scale now becomes really valuable is more in the like rough edges.

Where I tend to, there's a framework that the folks at Alaskan came up with. It's called rough and basically said, take all of your feedback and put it into either as a reliability focused usability focused or functionality focused and whatever is the highest number is what you should be focused on.

Right. So, and generally you generally work in order though, is like you work on like, okay. We want to get rid of any reliability issues. That was kind of what we do with that one. Aggressively go after bugs, make sure we, if there are any issues, we message users before they even notice they happened.

Aggressive about reliability because again, it's kind of a real time system. And then we focus a lot on making sure things are super usable. I think this is where people get lost. Fixing bugs seems kind of table stakes. Building out a lot of features feels table stakes. Making those features work really well.

Tends to be the part where I see generally the point of opportunity. So we keep track of all these little usability issues and where my team flags one to me, I kind of, you know, weigh in on like, yep, that's these boat issue, put it on the list. And if they don't, or I'm like, oh, that's a bug or, oh, that's a, that's actually, they want a feature, put it on, on the feature board on our, on our user voice.

Obviously we keep track of all features and integration requests and stuff like that. And then I have this big, long list of all these usability issues. And as we're building out things on the roadmap, I just happened to be like, Oh, people are working in this area of the product. Let's go grab all the usability issues for that area of the product and kind of fix them while we're in there.

Right. Because I know from being an engineer, what you hate as an engineer is switching back before between different parts of the app. Like, like it's almost like, think about it. And engineers, like I load, I get into a piece of the app and I load all of that into memory into my head. And now I understand this area of the app.

And so if you ask me to unload it, to go look at another area of that map, you pay this cost of like, Oh, I've got to go like learn about this other area. So while I'm in the headspace of an area and I understand it because it takes a little while to understand it. Grants can solve all the roadmap items and any existing usability issues.

So yeah, so we have a pretty tight pipeline on that to get feedback from users.

Ahmed Cheema: Now, when, when you initially said that I started laughing a little bit because we're at work right now, we're going through our roadmap. And so the way we're doing it is where we plan on for the whole year is like how many resources are going to be applied to each thing.

And I think one, I think there's two things. I think like one of the things at a startup, you have the It's more like fail fast and, you know, just fix quickly mentality rather than kind of, you know, think too much about everything. And maybe you don't necessarily have all the data to, you know, support all the decisions anyway at the start.

And the other piece is like, I've tried a few things on the side myself. I mean, nothing like picked off yet, but like, What I found is when I'm starting out, things are just not as clear for me personally, like, I just don't know where to be focusing on. And like, the more I do, the more it gets clear. And so I want to just for you, I mean, you've, you've built, you know, multiple successful businesses.

So is that kind of the same for you where like you know, when you're first starting out, Or like, I guess, Fathom, you already had built, you know, UserVoice, so when you were building out Fathom, did you have more of a clear idea of what the product would look like in the end state, or was it, was it a little bit fuzzy, and you came together as you were building it out?

Richard White: It was less fuzzy than with UserVoice, but it's still fuzzy. I mean, I think the, the thing I focus more on now, I think that was more my, some of my carnal sins from earlier in my career, were, there's a framework called jobs to be done. And this shorthand version is like, think about the problem you're solving.

Make sure you solve the problem end to end, rather than just building a feature that solves one part along that journey, right? So for example, for Fathom one first thing we built out is like, Oh, we record the call. We transcribe it. We like highlight it. Like you can develop this like really nice summary, you know, like copy and paste it properly.

Google doc. No, it's a decent product. But then we wouldn't talk to sales people and realize, Oh no, like the job to be done is not that the job to be done is the job is not done. Sorry. Until I get that information in my CRM as a salesperson, my job, like the meeting didn't happen unless I logged in my CRM and I put in my meeting notes.

So we had done 90 percent of the work, but we didn't do the last step, which was like, get it to your CRM. You started, there's an air gap. You had to do that yourself. And once we built out our CRM sink and like, Now you just click a few buttons and pat them in like. Boom. Like we do, we do everything like that.

That is, we, we accomplished an entire job now, not 90 percent of it. And the difference between accomplishing 90 percent of a job, 100 percent of the job is everything, right? Like massive increase in user retention. So, you know, like, you know, we tend to think of these things as like, I'm gonna pick off some part of it, but at the end of the day, it's binary, right?

You either got 200 percent or you didn't. Right. And I think early in my career, I made the mistake of like, I was solving three jobs to be done that a user was hiring the product to do, if you will. And I was getting like a 70 percent done on three different axes of attack. Right. And much better to like focus down and be like, and again, this is also why having that simplification of like, we're only focusing on single player experience.

That gave us the blinders to say, anything comes in about like people using this as a team. We don't care. We're not going to work on it, right? It's not what our focus right now. Great. We're focusing down what users want. And then within that, here's three or four things we're trying to solve for. Let's go get really good at this one.

Okay. Now that this one's really good, let's get really good at this one. Instead of like, Oh, okay. We're going to give, you know, if you, it's like, you're doing a, like a RPG game and like you go all the way down one talent tree before you build up the next one. Right. Don't kind of like, you're not like a half mage, half warrior, half priest, right?

Like you, you're a mage or you're a priest. Right. And so. I think that's, that strategy has served me very well. And, and you can almost always ask the question of like, what would the user do from here? Right? Well, where would they go after this? Right? And just keep asking yourself that question and tell the answers like, Oh no, they're done.

Oh, okay, great. Like now, you know, you've reached the end of that job you've done, right? And the question was, where do these notes go next? Oh, that goes here. Great. Now where do they go? Oh, now they're basically done. Great. We're done. We can go on to the next thing. Yeah, no,

Ahmed Cheema: that's that's really good way to look at it.

I want to close with, of course, I'll give you a chance to let everyone know how to sign up for fathom. And you know, if they want to follow you or your journey, that kind of thing, but before we get into that Any advice you have for new entrepreneurs or people that are looking to start a startup?

Like, what do you, what do you tell them? Especially now that we're looking at you know, like a recession, hard economic times, that kind of thing. What's your advice for people that are looking at this path?

Richard White: I, you know, I think the, the things that have always served me the best of my career, where I joined up with other people, where I found ways to like include people into my thing.

Right. Where I felt like I got the lowest ROI in my career is where I just tried to like dogmatically go it alone on something because I wrote Belige in something. So it's like a, you know, I think people sometimes get. Overly passionate about their early stage idea, it's not as valuable as you think, right?

And if you can't convince people to join you on it, that's definitely not that valuable, right? This is why a lot of these, a lot of, you know, you know, YC and everyone says like, oh, we're looking for, we prefer non single founders. We prefer people of co founders. Well, the reason it's because like, You know, do you convince someone else who's reasonably smart to do this thing with you?

It's not like, can't be that stupid of an idea, right? And so I, I just think being a joiner and also like sometimes while you're probably didn't be like, Oh, this thing's really interesting. Like I did, right. Rather than hearing about Kiko I don't want to go build a competitor to Kiko. I was like, I always try to join Kiko, they're already working on the thing I want to work on.

And so I think a lot of us, I've talked to folks, like, I think a lot of us grew up in areas where we were the most entrepreneurial person we knew, right? Oh, that's who I was. Right. And so then I early on, like, even around my career, sort of thinking like, ah, no one else, I'm just always have to go it alone.

Right. And I immediately start. And thankfully I had this opportunity to shift that mindset early in my career. And I think it was very valuable. I think also down markets are. A great time to be doing startups, right? Because your opportunity cost is going to get lower because they're like big company payouts are going to be not there.

Right. It was harder than it was the years because you're giving up on a fang job and all the options that come with it sort of thing. Well, now, you know, like those aren't as plentiful sort of thing. So and it tends to wash out all of the, I mean, frankly, I look back to 10 years ago. Right. I just moved back to San Francisco and I think San Francisco is having a renaissance right now because all of the like late stage employees have left, right?

Like the growth PM maneuver isn't working, isn't living here anymore. They moved to Austin or wherever. And this town is back to being like very focused on like early stage entrepreneurs. And I think in general, it's also having more like the people that are working on things or working on because they like really like working on them.

They like the problem space, not because they're in startup land. With a shovel on the shoulder because they heard there's gold here sort of thing. Right. And so it's just going to clear out, it's going to clear out the noise. It's going to make it easier to hire once you do hit that vein of gold and you're like, we're onto something.

I told my team, I was like, yeah, I kind of, some ways we wish we had raised our series a last year in the, like, you know, in the, yeah. And back in 2021 in the hubbub of all the craziness, that'd been nice. But we couldn't, if that market stayed that way, it'd be really hard to deploy that capital in any meaningful way.

You couldn't hire anyone. Like people who were raising tens of millions of dollars still couldn't hire any engineers because everyone else is raising tens of millions of dollars. Right. And so you know, I, I think opportunities happen when there's asymmetry and there wasn't a lot of asymmetry last year.

So in the last couple of years, so I think it's a

Ahmed Cheema: good time. I'm so I'm from Michigan originally. And I like, I have the same kind of experience where everything I've tried is like at a certain point, the people that I'm trying it with, they just get bored of it or they, they're like, Oh no, I need to focus on something else now.

It's just like so frustrating. So I know I appreciate that advice.

Richard White: Yeah. I mean, I thought at some point I was like, I almost kind of gave up on appreciation. It's like, Oh no, I seem to be the only kids with this. And then I was, I found my tribe at like YC and it was like, Oh no, there's other people that love playing this video game too.

Right. So I think some folks will get this and like that sort of thing with exhausting and I'm like. No, it's like the most fun. Look at all the levers you get to pull here, right? Like, oh, but you can fail. Yeah, I know. It wouldn't be any fun of a game if you couldn't fail at it. Yeah,

Ahmed Cheema: and then for the people that are interested in Fathom and also you, do you post on social media?

Richard White: I'm only on LinkedIn. So if you find me on LinkedIn, feel free to message me. I try to wade through all of my inbound recruiter spam about once a week to respond back to people. Yeah. And if you want to check out Fathom, it's just fathom. video. And you can just sign up for free and download the app.

Cool. Thank you so much, Richard. Thank you Ahmed.

Ahmed Cheema: Now, as always, I have my key takeaways from this episode, but before we get into that, I want to share a clip from our discussion with Parthi Loganathan.

Richard White: And if you think about, like, traditional companies, non software companies, that's where a lot of their spend is. It's like marketing. Coca Cola, Pepsi, they're spending on marketing because, I don't know, like, their products are almost commoditized. Anybody can make soda. And the same thing is happening, slowly happening, to software.

There's a trillion marketing SaaS companies out there. How do you stand out?

Ahmed Cheema: If you enjoyed this discussion with Richard, I'm sure you'll also enjoy the episode with Parthi. Parthi has also been through Y Combinator. Check it out wherever you're listening to this podcast. It is episode number 33. Now here are my key takeaways. Number one, when you write cold emails, write directly to one person at a time.

If it reads like a bulk message, it will go straight to trash. And number two, make sure you're solving your customer's problem end to end and not just that one part along the journey. For Fathom, this meant that the job wasn't done until the notes from the Zoom meeting. And that is all for this episode.

If you enjoyed this discussion, the easiest way to help out is to leave a review and share with a friend. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next episode.