Chris Savage
speaker
668 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2017
last heard Dec 2024
Chris Savage’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
On the money side, you basically figure out that in the early days, we're making decisions. Sometimes decisions scare you. You're like, oh man, this really needs to work. And so you feel this commitment to the decision and the product or whatever it is you're doing. Turns out you still want that feeling. You crave that feeling. I think that's really important. Yeah, the business gets bigger.
So those types of decisions are bigger. And the risks you're taking might feel somewhat similar to the early days. Not the same. It's not life or death. the way it is early days often, but it is often the difference between growth or not. And so you start to search for that feeling, get comfortable with that feeling.
I think the other thing is when you're in it, it's very hard to know if you're doing the right stuff. But if you do it long enough, you end up training your intuition. Brendan and I like to say we had instincts. that turn to conviction through failure. So we'd have an instinct on the ways we make decisions on things we put in the product, on how we decide to launch products, on almost anything.
And then when we'd go against our instinct and it wouldn't work, go, ah... Even though it was the first time I was doing it, my instinct was actually right. So now it's moved from instinct to like, I have conviction, like this is the way.
And I think that there's going to be a lot of things like that in your business where you need to hold the line on a hard decision where you don't have data or results for a long time. Often the most valuable things, they don't happen quickly. They take a long time. And so having conviction to stick with your approach is really, really, really important in those cases.
And in the early days, it's trial by fire. And so often you have to do that. When you get bigger, you often don't have to. You have more options. And that actually creates more choice. And that can be a problem because you can lose focus or not take things as far as you should.
Hiring is classic mistake zone for this.
Yeah, the way that we do this now is we're trying to be really clear about our strategy, our mission and vision, where we're going, who our target customer is. And then we have a big list of assumptions that we're constantly testing. And we're making plans based on the assumptions. And as we make investments, we say, are these assumptions working or not?
And there's a constant learning element in the business. And then what we do is I found actually what you want is the right structure. So you want to give people the right structure and ownership so that they can actually work creatively to solve the problems that they're working on. And so for us today, what that looks like is we have OKRs. We have like a three-year goal.
And then we have OKRs for the year that ladder into that three-year goal. And they basically are all customer problems. And so we don't presume to know the solution in most cases. Every once in a while, we'll know it. But usually we say we don't know what the solution is. We just know it's a really important problem to solve. And so then what you want is a team that can stay on that problem.
And what I've learned over and over again is if you get a group of smart people, you get the right balance of a team, they're creative, they plan, they're thoughtful, they learn really quickly, then basically what you need to do is get it out of their way as much as possible and say, the most important thing is for you to ship consistently.
And so we encourage everyone on our teams to try to be absolutely shipping constantly. Product teams ship every two weeks. Go-to-market teams are responding to that. So every day there's new things going live in the product, every single day.
And we don't necessarily know which of the things are going to be the biggest or the most impactful, but we do know the customer problems we're trying to solve. And those stay the same as we constantly ship through different solutions. And so really it's about...
speed and the way you get the speed is by creating enough structure and ownership so that the teams know, hey, I have freedom in this lane. And then what we praise is fast shipping.
It's also just this basic assumption of like, we don't know all the answers. So if you don't know all the answers, like let's say you're 50% right, 50% wrong when you make decisions. Okay. If you launch one thing a year, that could be bad. You might have a year where your thing just, your one thing sucks.
So instead, if you could break into smaller pieces, then maybe you can actually ship much faster. You waste less time. The speed of learning goes up and ultimately the pace of improvement is much faster because It actually took us a long time to figure this out of how to do this at scale. And now it's crazy. It's unbelievable.
If you were to look in our Slack and see what's happening, every single day, there's new things go out the door. Tons and tons and tons of new things are working incredibly well. And when I go back to what input drives this output, it is shipping customer value every two weeks.
There's been a lot. So the first hard moment I think about when you say that, after we raised money, we had 10 paying customers. We had this amazing forecast. I was pretty sure that in two or three months, we're going to be profitable. And then we didn't close a single deal for like four months. And that was hard. That was painful.
Right at the last second before we raised the money, we were working on this one bigger deal. It was like $10,000 a year. And we closed it. It's like, ah, this is going to be what every deal is like. They're all going to be like $10,000 a year. So then that summer, we just raised the money. We had all these new investors like, oh, let's look at you all. And we're like, yeah, we're going enterprise.
We're going to do $10,000 a year deals. And so that's what we tried to sell that summer and basically couldn't close a single one. And the guy who joined us to help with sales, I remember vividly October of that year, he's on the phone with somebody. He's like, okay, yes, you're going to do it. Fantastic. That's amazing. I'll send over the order form right now. Click.
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