Ep 176: Nick McEvily
A Practical Playbook for finding Product-Market Fit: Real & False indicators & Steps you should follow with Mark Cuban-backed founder of one of America's fastest growing software companies
Nick McEvily is a seasoned entrepreneur and product strategist with a track record that speaks volumes. Backed by Mark Cuban and with over $40 million in venture funding, Nick has developed multiple top 5 ranked apps in the App Store and played a pivotal role in scaling one of his companies to become the #2 fastest growing software company in North America in 2023, according to Deloitte. With a deep expertise in finding and maintaining product-market fit, Nick’s insights on human-centered design, product obsession, and scaling businesses are invaluable to any aspiring entrepreneur.
On this episode we talk about:
Defining and Achieving Product-Market Fit
How to Recognize False Indicators of Success
Strategies for Listening to Users
Balancing Data and Intuition in Product Development
Maintaining Product-Market Fit Over Time
Fostering a Culture of Experimentation and Risk-taking
Resources referenced in the episode:
Superhuman Product Market Fit framework - https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/
Jobs to be done framework - https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-customer-needs-c883cbf61c90
We are on YouTube and Linkedin as well
Watch select full-length episodes on our YouTube channel > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP6ueaLnjS-CQfrMCm2EoTA
Connect with us on Linkedin > https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursuit-of-scrappiness/
Read the full episode transcript below
Uldis (00:02.264)
Hello, hello, hello, listeners. Welcome to another episode of the Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast. Whether you're building a business, running a team, or just starting out in your career, we are here to bring you scrappy and actionable insights to help you become more productive. My name is Uldis Teraudkalns and my co -host is Janis Zeps.
Nick McEvily (00:05.508)
it.
Janis (00:24.426)
Hey everyone.
Uldis (00:26.67)
Before we start, reminder, click that follow button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and on YouTube now. Helps more than you know. In exchange for that, you will get more than 170 episodes of Ageless Wisdom, Scrappy Tactics and just cool stuff that you can use or not use depending on what you want to do. But definitely entertaining and valuable lessons from other founders to help you build. Plenty to explore.
and be the first one to know when we come out every Tuesday morning European time. So, great news for the video lovers. You can now also see full length episodes on YouTube. So go on the pursuit of scrappiness on YouTube and see full episodes and also some good clips for those of you who like shorter form content. About today's topic. There are a couple of major
cornerstones of a business that are forever relevant to any founder. Three that come to mind immediately for me is people, product and sales. So you will hear and have heard that we keep coming back to these topics with quite high frequency. And today we want to do a deep dive into the product. And for that we have invited a very cool guest, Nick McEvily.
Serial entrepreneur, product leader and advisor to multiple founders on product and strategy. Heinrich.
Nick McEvily (02:04.513)
Hey gents, good to be here. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to talking more about product.
Uldis (02:10.446)
Yeah, so Nick is a seasoned entrepreneur, product strategist with a track record that speaks volumes. Backed by Mark Cuban and raised over $40 million in venture funding. Nick has developed multiple top ranked apps and played a pivotal role in scaling companies. And one of his companies even became the second fastest growing company in North America in 2023.
Check me if that's correct data, but yeah, that's what we found. today we really want to talk about product, about design, about how to get ahead with the things that you're building. So let's jump into it immediately. with the holy grail of product, the PMF, Product Market Fit, how do you find it for yourself?
and how does a startup know when they've achieved it.
Nick McEvily (03:12.48)
I'm glad we're even just talking about it. I know PMF has been talked about and thrown around as an acronym here, another startup acronym. For the last few years, it's become much more popular, but I think it's still nebulous. I have a talk that's called WTF is PMF, because I'm not sure, I'm not sure a lot of people know and like a famous court justice in the United States,
You know it when you see it. They referred to that when they were making a judgment on pornography. And I think product market fit is the same. You kind of know it, you feel it, you see it. But before then, you want it so bad, it's easy to delude yourself that you have it. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about some of those indicators and how to make sure that it's real product market fit and not kind of a false sense of it.
Uldis (04:06.976)
Okay, so where does it start? What kind of thought process you would go through to understand where you are in this journey?
Nick McEvily (04:18.135)
I think it all comes down to stage and startup.
But universally, it's good to put yourself in a position where you don't, you think you don't have product market fit to prove that you're, you're not right, to prove yourself wrong instead of trying to prove yourself right. I think there's an inherent bias that founders will have, a dogmatism, a delusion that is healthy in moderation, but without a little bit of moderation and without data checking it and without other people's opinions.
I think people can breeze past a very important stage in the process. definitely a stage based seed, series A, a lot of series A startups think that product market fit because they've raised a lot of money. But that's a false, I think it's a false indicator. It's really about growth rate and adoption. So if you have folks that are organically sharing, Paul Graham has spoken about this as one of the leading indicators of product market fit. But if you need to,
hire more staff to accommodate your sales and customer support. your customers are speaking about your product to other people, that's huge. I remember building a game maybe seven, eight years ago when Vine was really popular. We made an animated game called Celebrity Street Fight off of the MTV show Celebrity Deathmatch. I don't know if you guys remember that 10, 20 years ago.
Uldis (05:46.2)
Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, loved it.
Nick McEvily (05:48.9)
Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, a couple of Vine stars, YouTube stars are in there, PewDiePie. And we had a definite product market fit with that product. It scaled. We got, I think, 300 ,000 downloads in the first weekend. We were using influencer marketing. And people were recording videos on YouTube how to play the game. was like within the first few days, instructional videos how to play it. So we knew that was product market fit, but it wasn't quite enough because we hadn't...
spent enough time in the revenue testing process. So we released the game, tried to getting it out and tried getting it out as fast as possible. And we didn't have the revenue model to back it up. so where product market fit might be something that you're striving for and you can have, right? People will be sharing your product. If you, if you're not iterating on your revenue model or way of actually making money, product market fit doesn't really matter. So there are two things in tandem. Like you were saying, this, the profit.
and product and people all need to kind of come together and be overlapping. And hopefully today I'll talk a little bit about the different processes that we can go through to ensure that there's good product market fit. I think you guys already had a guest on, the founder of Superhuman, talking about this. His article on first round review is like a Bible verse for me and would definitely recommend that read to any of your listeners.
Janis (07:03.082)
Yeah.
Janis (07:14.175)
Actually, when you mentioned like this situation when like customers are happy, they're sharing, they're using, but the revenue is an issue, question about product we all know, Twitter or X, do they have product market fit? I mean, we all know it, are they making money? Like what's your assessment?
Nick McEvily (07:34.193)
man, that's hard. I am not a fan of the politics of the platform right now and have moved to threads officially.
Janis (07:45.357)
But they were not making money also before,
Uldis (07:46.23)
But do you like it there as well?
Nick McEvily (07:49.686)
Yeah, they had, I think, one of the pillars of market fit, is usership. And that would be the place to go to when there was a real world activity that you wanted immediate. Like they changed the landscape in terms of publishing and news. And then maybe didn't continue to evolve. And that's one of the exercises I feel like we can talk about a little bit today is product market fit is not something that you find, it's something you do.
And so you need to constantly be doing it. And there are a few people that are involved in that process and the team over, over time. certainly product managers, if your company is big enough, certainly product designers, if you're, if you're able to, include them and the CEO and leadership team as well. Definitely. cause this all comes from the top of this mindset and culture of product market fit comes from the top and comes down. So.
One of the things that maybe Twitter hasn't been doing is, one of the things that Twitter hasn't been doing is probably continuing to talk to their users and behave like a startup. once you grow to certain size and you're publicly listed and all this, then you're not publicly listed. I think you have a tendency to get, to believe that you have that success. And so what I would recommend if, if, I don't know if anyone, you know, Elon's listening here, or any of the Twitter folks.
Janis (08:47.424)
So like,
Nick McEvily (09:16.556)
or X folks, but I think they have a really big vision for where the platform is going to go. Right. think, you know, you've heard, you know, I must talk about the, the, the everything app, similar to the, the, the app in China remind me of the name. WeChat. Yes. The WeChat. I was going to say, what's that? and in order to get there, you need to find places to start.
Janis (09:34.878)
We chat probably.
Uldis (09:34.967)
We chat.
Nick McEvily (09:44.804)
to start with payment? you going to start with health and all the data, personal data and identification? Where are you going to start with that whole process and grow it? I'd be interested to know where the X team is spending their time testing this with audience adoption. I imagine it's probably a difficult thing to crack because they have this legacy brand that they need to get over as well.
Janis (10:09.697)
Yeah, it just came to my mind. Actually, not just the ex -iteration, but the Twitter, old one came to my mind because they were brought up a lot of times, examples like Facebook swimming in money at ad revenue, Google swimming in cash at revenue, Apple obviously also cash for different sources, and Twitter was always this one that...
Uldis (10:10.199)
Indeed.
Janis (10:32.361)
Everybody knows about it, it's valuable. If they need money, they can probably raise, but how to make it profitable, it's kind of, I think the question that Mr. Musk has taken now on himself, let's see how he does. About false indicate.
Uldis (10:48.288)
is just the FPFM, the free product market fit which can be a slippery slope and lead you down to a path of no profitability if you get too excited about FPFM.
Janis (11:09.391)
False indicators though, you could easily understand that Twitter's management or whatever back in the day said like, look, we're the most popular platform in the world, we have product market fit. What other false indicators you think companies should be aware of saying like, well, something is working, so we might be good, but actually maybe not.
Nick McEvily (11:31.55)
growth rate is great. All these things are good indicators, right? That, that maybe that you don't have like a strong product market fit, but you have, you put yourself in a laboratory where you can do experiments with your users because you have them. So I don't want to frown on X or Twitter or anyone else who has thousands of users or millions of users. That's a good thing. Ultimately, what we want to do is use that resource to your advantage and do it well. think a lot of people just don't.
gather information from their user base very well in a statistical way or in a reliable way. So that's what I would recommend is using the audience. Like if you have millions of users like X does and they're obsessed with the product, then that's an eager audience to be asking their opinions on things. so questions you could ask similar to the superhuman article is, what would you miss? What feature would you miss?
if we took it away, it's the most essential thing for you on this platform. And then playing to those strengths and kind of amplifying those things. Oftentimes those are the differentiators for your product versus what's out in the competitive landscape. Like Google and Facebook don't have the Intel and resources that X or Twitter used to have. I'm just gonna call it Twitter from now on, because that's what it is in my mind. Fuck X, excuse me.
So use those resources and if you have a user base that's reliable, listen to them. And I'd love to talk a little bit about a couple of steps that you can take to listen to your audience well. You mind if I run through a few of those? Cool.
Uldis (13:14.946)
Yeah, go for it.
Nick McEvily (13:17.988)
The first is qualifying your user. have to make sure that you're finding the right person to talk to, someone who's representing the opinions of the group or cohort or audience that you're looking to pursue. So there's oftentimes like a list of five or 10 criteria in that persona. That terms, I'm sure really familiar to the audience. So defining the right persona, there could be five, 10 personas that are within your audience.
depending on how granular you're getting, their attitudes, beliefs, behaviors are all essential for you to analyze. And so you need to be really careful about choosing those before you go out and ask people for their opinions. Cause you don't want to be asking for one opinion from 20 people who are representing that opinion differently. You want to try to be asking folks that all espouse or could have the same opinion, similar opinions, and that you can find
on these platforms, right? Demographic material is really helpful these days and it's more accessible to us than it ever has been. saying you want someone of a certain age that's soft, desires, behaviors can really be reflected in a broad range of ages. So I focus more on attitudes and behaviors. So people that go to a certain news site, people that
will follow a certain person. Those are a little bit more effective these days given the platforms that we have that we're collecting data and intelligence on. So make sure you're identifying the right user. Once you've identified that user, try to talk to a few of those folks in more of casual conversation so you can develop your script. You don't wanna just start from a script. If time is of the essence, write the script, start interviewing obviously, but if you have a little bit of leeway, talk to those folks.
Be open. I'm looking to learn a little bit about this and looking to learn about that. So you can develop your script and you want to be really consistent with the five to 20 questions that you're asking during an interview. And most of the time I'm going to be talking about interviews because those are the most important in my opinion to do right. You can do a survey. Survey methodology I think is a little bit more clear cut. There's a lot of resources out there on how to create good surveys, changing questions, changing order of answers.
Nick McEvily (15:41.154)
very similar in terms of its backbone to interviewing. But a script is essential. You want to be asking the same questions to all of the people that you're talking to. You don't want to just ask one or two questions to some people and then another two or three, because then your data is skewed and you're not getting something that's consistent over time. I'd recommend speaking to at least six to eight of those folks. There's a great article from Nielsen Norman that talks about how there's a law of diminishing returns.
If you interview more than six
Nick McEvily (16:23.876)
And once you have that group of six folks on, I think it's important to synthesize that data well. So you found the right people. I'm sorry, one second.
Nick McEvily (16:54.144)
so once you found the group of six folks that you want to talk to, you've identified their core characteristics that are consistent between each of them. You've written your script, you're asking the same questions in the script to each of the folks. You're recording those conversations. You're writing those down. One of the things that I like to do, and this is something that I really urge all of our listeners and all the founders that I advise is to take that interview and put it into Post -it notes, each anecdote.
on its own Post -it notes so that you can cluster map them in terms of similarities. Use Miro, FigJam, whatever your tool is, whiteboarding tool, write those anecdotes down onto the Post -it notes. One of the frameworks that I like to use is the jobs to be done forces diagram. So it pushes, pulls habits and anxieties in the four quadrants and each of those has a different color of Post -it notes. So when you cluster them, you can identify the source.
or the sentiment behind the insight. And after you've cluster mapped them and found their affinities, it's amazing how quickly the insights start to appear. let's say you're doing some research on travel app and you're cluster mapping and realize that most people like to get recommendations before they go. And then within that cluster map, you realize that most people like to get recommendations from their friends. Now you've got a feature that you can try to start building out some marketing language that you can start building out the best
recommendations from friends. How do you gather recommendations from friends? Are we building this on a platform that's more of chat focused? So it's playing into the social components versus something that's of an independent app or another platform. So these types of insights go have direct relationships to product development, design, roadmap stuff, but also to sales and marketing, even hiring.
So good product market fit habits are feeders into the rest of the company. And I would urge leadership to start entertaining that as an engine that you have running in the background because it fuels so much of the business.
Uldis (19:03.854)
Is there some kind of critical mass that you would like to see to take it as a general opinion of your customers? You can have five interviews, each interview somebody says something different, so you cannot go five different ways. How do you consolidate and how do you determine that, okay, yeah, this is what the majority of users would really appreciate?
Nick McEvily (19:29.634)
Yeah, you're looking for a common denominator for sure between all of the interviewees. And if you're not hearing that, then that's a red flag for you that either you weren't asking the right question, the question wasn't being consistent between all of the interviews, or you're talking to a persona that is representing a very broad set of things. So that's a red flag. Go back to the drawing board.
There are, there are going to be moments where maybe one or two of your six to eight interviewees say something and you think it's gold. And this is where the magic kind of happens, where you have to blend your intuition with what the data is saying and albeit qualitative information. but that's where you as a founder or a designer or product manager get to put on a strategic hat and make a really big decision. Do we want to follow?
the one or two things that these people said, or just focus on the more common denominator. The product, if you only focus on common denominators, the product can kind of have a tendency to fall into a, I don't know what the right word would be, maybe like a vanilla type of product, something that pleases a broad group of people, even though you've found your persona and you want to be really focused on pleasing a broad group of them.
But if you're always focusing on common denominators, you're not finding things that are really radical or different. And that's, that's our job as startup founders and people that run startups and build startups is to find something that's a little radical, a little out of the ordinary. And so when you're doing these interviews, while you're focusing on the common denominator, absolutely keep an eye out for things that you think are wild or like, wow, that's, that's really brilliant.
I think maybe we should do another round of interviews focused on that specific thing. Maybe we build a prototype specifically for this angle and you can, have chills right now. Just like if you find that thing and you keep digging behind it and you find more to be fueling the product vision, there's a lot that, that, that research can, can provide. And I think those, those kinds of small glimmers of insight.
Nick McEvily (21:49.203)
that come from your users can be the thing that really propels the business into its next iteration.
Janis (21:57.461)
And good that you mentioned also that, you know, this is sign almost if you're too vanilla, too safe. It's almost like startups kind of need to take those risks. That's the role, right? That's why they are risky companies. if there would be like safe bets, kind of safe bets are taken by big companies. have much bigger resources. Exactly. So if you're feeling like you end up with something like this, then maybe it's a good sign of back to the drawing board.
Nick McEvily (22:13.047)
Yeah.
Nick McEvily (22:17.954)
larger corporations.
Nick McEvily (22:27.02)
Absolutely. think the magic, the intuition, the wild thought, you know, a friend of mine and I talk about, you know, be a little bit more cowboy in the U S you know, it's like you're out in the, the, you know, there's, you know, bad history there, but like you're out in the wilderness and you know, you have to kind of fend for yourself and, and, and take things into your own hands and be a little bit wild. So,
Yeah, I would recommend a dose of that. And I'd say that if you have a consistent backbone of data and insight and stable design and product strategy, add a dash of that wildness, make some big leaps, take some big risks. And if you're on the other side of that coin, you're the type of leader product strategist who's only doing big things and taking really big risks all the time. creates a lot of instability for the rest of the team.
So I think you need to add in some backbone of data so that the two combined will lead to really sound strategy, defensible strategy moving forward.
Uldis (23:38.914)
What about after, well, as you say, don't search, you do product market fit, but what would you say are the key things to make sure that the company doesn't lose its way, doesn't lose its product market fit and how to have it in your company DNA to constantly strive for product market fit?
Janis (24:05.098)
It's like you were saying this, there was this quote, the cliche quote that, what is it? Like success is not a destination, it's a journey. It's almost what you were saying about product marketing. It sounds like that, it's not a destination, it's a journey. So yeah.
Nick McEvily (24:05.293)
I think...
Nick McEvily (24:19.765)
Absolutely, let's get shirts made. I love that.
Janis (24:23.062)
Exactly.
Nick McEvily (24:26.7)
It appears in small things that happen on a weekly basis within your company. So if you're having executive meetings and product meetings and no one is asking the question, where's that insight coming from? Or did we test that? I think that's a really strong, easy red flag that you guys, that that team has not built in product market fit or testing mindset in the business. If you can openly say, we should test that.
And everybody's like, yeah, great, great, great, great. And you look at the product manager and he or she is like, okay, I'll write that down. And they go off and start testing something the next day or that week. I think you have a great culture of product market fit and that, the idea or mentality of eternally looking for it and keeping it. If you're a larger company that has traction, you have a large user base, you have business, the market will undoubtedly shift during the time that you're
your company is alive. And so it's really important for us to maintain that product market fit. And one of the ways of doing that is by talking to the users that are using our product the most. They might need some incentive to share their opinions with you. Be careful not to bias their opinions with that incentive. But ultimately, you want to be collecting data from your strongest users and use that as the seed
and try to find some branches off of that. if you have something that's really strong, find an orbit of features or problems that are orbiting that thing that's really strong. And that'll make it a little bit easier for your founder or for your customers, your early adopters, to kind of move up the branch. I don't know why I'm using this plant analogy, but.
to make this step to the next piece of the product that you're looking to promote. And then testing that within a safe environment and watching data. So you can do that through prototypes, in interview settings, you can do it through A -B testing, a limited release of a particular feature to a small cohort and use data to watch its uptake there. But always talk to people because what I've noticed
Nick McEvily (26:49.429)
No matter how great the analytics platform is, and I know there are a lot of great analytics platforms out there, they miss a lot of qualitative stuff that's, that's innately human. And there are humans at the end of this, at the other side of the screen or the product that you're releasing. And if you're not talking to them, or if it's been weeks or months since you've spoken to them, that's another red flag. I think it's really important to be imparting the human -ness over the data. It's a, it's a constant combination of these two things.
Uldis (27:19.464)
I guess the big challenge is to collect and store and analyze all that information in somewhat manageable fashion. just notes and opinions and things like that. I saw somewhere an interesting idea that I think it was...
Mr. Selfridge from the founder of Selfridges who historically said that the customer is always right. And I saw somewhere on X or wherever is that what he meant was that the customer is right in his opinion of what he likes and his taste. But that doesn't mean that you are to become his servant. And I felt like it also touches an important part of building the product.
We just spoke for 10 minutes at least about how important it is to keep...
your customers ear, your users ear, you need to be talking to them, but at some point you also need to stand for yourself and make those product decisions. So how do you balance this kind of customer is always right versus actually we are building a product here and we need to stand by our values and our vision of what we're building.
Nick McEvily (28:45.131)
Yeah, I would say it's an overlap of the two things. It's an end diagram. You need to, as a company and as a leadership team, understand who you are, what is the common goal and vision for your company. But that needs to overlap with what the customers are saying. That's where product market fit exists when those two things have something in common.
Building what a customer asks for is not a good idea. Literal translation is known as a fallacy in the human centered design and product research world. You don't just take what they say as gospel and write that down. That's not your insight. You have to read between the lines. You have to understand what they meant by what they said.
And that's where the witchcraft and the, the, the, magic, think kind of exists in this, in this game. and what we were talking about before as well, adding that dash of wild and risk. if you're, if you're being too safe with your product decisions and moving too incrementally, and this happens, I think a lot with especially early stage companies, preceded seed stage who are, members of the same churches as me, which is consumer insight.
You know, let me listen to what the audience is saying. If you listen to directly and you only build with what they're asking for, you miss a lot of opportunity there. So that's where I would add in that big risk. you don't have to take big ideas don't need to automatically dismantle.
the product roadmap and the strategy, can test that big idea in a small arena and in a small way that insulates it from the damage or ripple effect that it could have on the product, brand recognition, user numbers, et cetera. So that's what I would recommend is if you're going to take big risks, which I recommend you should do it in a way that is insulated and is in a controlled environment.
Nick McEvily (30:56.941)
so that you're not damaging the public perception of your company or the more important metrics in terms of revenue and usership.
Janis (31:09.086)
I think it's one of the biggest struggles for every product manager to kind of...
take into account the inputs, also not to, you you cannot design a product by committee and by consensus and like 10 people around the table, everybody have their thing. It can become really bad if also stakeholders start to jump in and with strong opinions and like, you know, classical thing that CEO, I downloaded this app the other night. I like this feature, you know, should we copy it and stuff like that.
Maybe it goes back also, you mentioned job to be done framework, which has been immensely useful also for me in the past where you, a good example is this, know, customers don't want to buy a drill, they want a hole in the wall and that's the thing they want to do. So you need to kind of, if you go beyond that and like you said, you don't take the literal advice, but you, yeah, you kind of try to extract from that. But it's a constant.
I think what I'm saying is what you're advising is that yeah, it will be always there. You can't achieve it and then move on to other things. Somebody needs to work on it, somebody needs to be responsible for it, somebody needs to talk to people all the time.
Nick McEvily (32:25.122)
Yeah, it's like a safe cracker and the safe code is always changing. That's what I think a good product manager is. They're listening to the safe, know, they have their ear to the, I don't even know if that's really how you can crack a safe, but I'm imagining that they're listening to the gears click and fall into place in this safe and then it changes.
Janis (32:32.032)
Yeah.
Janis (32:42.354)
Yeah, yeah.
Uldis (32:43.203)
You
Nick McEvily (32:56.003)
It's a constant effort. It's a riddle. It's a puzzle. And that's what makes it so fun. think that's why product managers love to do what they do. And people who are on the more strategic side, especially designers, they get to hear something and then think and interpret what does that really mean? What can I build or design here to test my assumption? What code can I put in so that this safe opens?
Janis (33:19.509)
Hmm.
Nick McEvily (33:23.619)
So it's product or it's a constant effort that at least one person
Janis (33:28.565)
crappy tips how to crack a safe, at least now we have to explore in more detail, very practical these days, know, inflation is out of control, people looking for ways to earn more. And we cover it actually more like this internal like prism where you deal with your customers, with your challenge, and then there are also external factors that might come in like think how many products had great market fit, but then AI came in and somebody else just had a better one.
Nick McEvily (33:32.29)
That's a good episode. That's a good episode.
Nick McEvily (33:55.469)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Janis (33:57.416)
You know, we all used to, a lot of people used Nokia back then. Perfect product, great brand, great thing. And then, you know, iPhone came out and they were completely taken back. Yeah, it's that angle as well.
Nick McEvily (34:13.622)
And I'm going to say something probably sacrilegious to all of our listeners, but I think it's also okay for the natural life cycle of a product to come to an end. You can't always evolve and pivot out of it. Sometimes you just get beat and then you just choose a different game or you choose a different sector to work in and that's okay. I think there's a beautiful cyclicality in entrepreneurship.
that a lot of people try to ignore and try to elongate and prolong as much as possible. And I think that sometimes you just, and especially with, with humans at the, at the center of it, a founder or CEO can be exhausting mentally to be climbing up this hill and then get another boulder thrown at you and climb, climb, climb, and another boulder comes in. So the morale starts to suffer. I've seen this time and time again, you know, with, with founders as well. And
They feel bad about giving up or not giving up, just, you know, putting down their supplies and, you know, heading home. Like that's okay too. And when we talk about product market fit, we talk about pivoting. I want founders to also feel comfortable with leaving the game or, you know, extrapolating themselves and extracting themselves. I think that that's totally fine. And especially for mental health these days.
something that might be the right move for you.
Uldis (35:44.921)
Yeah, I think people are so emotionally invested and psychologically invested in their products and in the companies they build that maybe we even have forgotten that things have expiration date or nothing is eternal, right? So that is a good point. And obviously the great companies, they start and...
kill products and evolve and you know Apple remains doesn't matter if it builds Macintosh or it builds iPhone
Nick McEvily (36:17.867)
Exactly.
Janis (36:22.5)
or Netflix, the best pivot ever, from mailed DVDs.
Uldis (36:24.71)
That is... yeah. You could see it in a different way. It's not a streaming success story. It's a failed DVD delivery story. It's like a tragedy that this product failed.
Nick McEvily (36:37.665)
Right. But it evolved with the market, evolved with technology. And that was, I think that was the external factor that really affected the growth trajectory of Netflix and its vision. And so yeah, you've got market attitudes and in the case of Netflix and in the case of a lot of B2B SaaS startups, AI technology can just come in and
completely dismantle what you were about to do. And in those moments, you have to get back to the original muscle of let's go back, talk to people. Okay, people are scared of AI. They don't want to use it. makes them nervous, especially in healthcare, there's privacy concerns. And so you have to find the right market that's interested in adopting that. And right now it seems like it's more in private companies and larger companies, but not too large because it's a security risk.
so there's, there's a lot of things that you need to go out and learn about when that tech shifts. And what's beautiful about that learning opportunity is all of the insights that you gain about this brand new technology you can use in a new company, a separate project you can use as an investor. You can use as, as an entrepreneur and a product strategist within your own company. It doesn't necessarily mean that your product needs to shift and go into AI or it needs to get on.
streaming, you know, whatever the whatever the technology is, but certainly going out and learning about it very quickly puts you ahead of the game undoubtedly. So it's up to you how you choose to use that insight. But if you sit and fear and or you hire it out, you ask a consultant to come in and tell you about this. I think a lot of the earned insight and wisdom that would come from exploring it yourself is lost. And that's unfortunate.
Uldis (38:32.099)
Yeah, it's a good point you mentioned about this hiring consultant. Hey, I heard that there is this AI thing happening. Let's hire KPMG to evaluate how can AI improve our business. What's our AI strategy, right?
Nick McEvily (38:45.195)
What's our AI strategy?
Janis (38:48.886)
300 slide deck everybody's happy
Uldis (38:53.463)
No offense to KPMG, great company.
Nick McEvily (38:54.347)
But you don't have really clear tactics maybe, there's, yeah, maybe you have a hundred tactics to go after, which is so overwhelming that you don't know which one to start with. And all along, you're missing the prism and the filter of your mind as the leader and the strategist in this company who's got, you know, years or lots of, lots of time to filter the insight through. So if I was a CEO and I was, and I already am kind of doing
lot of research in the AI space. Get out of your seat, get out from behind your computer, dive into your computer, whatever, however you learn, and learn about yourself, go out and talk to some people. And I think that's a lot of leaders, product managers and above. Don't talk to the customers. The C suite oftentimes doesn't talk to the customer. And they outsource that to junior folks. And I think that's one of the worst decisions you can make because you're distancing yourself from the insights, you're distancing yourself from
the relationship and the person, maybe you're watching the videos of the recordings of the interviews and that's, that's good. That's best practice if you're really time crunched, but being able to get out there and taking ownership of it is essential because when you're asking the questions and turns out one of those questions was bad or it's not getting you the right insights, you can go and change that question. can accept responsibility for having the wrong question, but when you outsource it to someone else, most of the CEOs will be like, you know,
You didn't ask the right question. We're not doing research anymore or you don't know how to do research, right? Or all of these, these reactions that distance them from the results. And in fact, it's their responsibility at the end of the day. So what I would recommend if you're a C -suite executive or someone who's high up in a company, I would recommend today, tomorrow, email with your customers, get on the phone, do whatever you can to, to interact with them and invite them in.
to offer their thoughts and listen intently, listen genuinely, listen with curiosity. Don't be going in with this sales mentality or this mentality that you need to correct their perspective. Go into this conversation like you're a therapist, you know, or a family member or a friend who's just looking to understand their perspective. I think that's something that can really change.
Nick McEvily (41:17.003)
the trajectory of a company and especially the culture because that trickles down when you see a CEO or a CTO talking to their customer, you know that you should be doing the same thing or join them on the call and respect that approach. It can change a company's success likelihood tremendously.
Uldis (41:39.885)
conclude, we spoke about the importance of talking to people, we spoke about the to the users, we spoke about the importance of taking risks, calculated risks, bold moves and we spoke about all the time being in this mode of testing new ideas and basically improving the product. Is there anything else when you if you would build a
product culture in the company, is there anything else missing in that mix that we haven't yet covered for that secret formula?
Nick McEvily (42:21.112)
Maybe it's a little bit of humility and grace. So if someone suggests an idea and they go out and they prototype it and it comes back that no one really wants it, that's good. You have a good culture. Maybe that was a failed experiment, but you have the culture of experimentation. That person has initiative. That person isn't afraid of suggesting new ideas.
to leadership and has the autonomy to go out and test them. So those are all success factors in my mind. And that sense of humility and grace starts at the top. Because if you're the type of leader that's scolding people for doing things wrong, you're micromanaging, you're not giving them autonomy to go out and explore new business concepts, you're literally bottlenecking the business. And it will evolve as fast as you do as a person instead of as an organization, as a group of people.
So I think it's more of a mindset shift that I would also add to the mix here.
Uldis (43:19.797)
I think that is a wonderful way how to conclude this conversation.
Dear founders, CEOs, be mindful of your approach, be mindful of your mindfulness and openness to experimentation and ability for your team. And I think that is great what you just said. If you have this tight control, the company growth is limited to your personal growth. Let's focus on those company and organizational growths. Thank you very much, Nick.
Janis (43:52.107)
And call your customers. And call your customers today. It's almost like this reminder. Call your parents today. Call your customers as well. Call a customer.
Uldis (43:57.672)
Call a customer today.
Nick McEvily (43:58.017)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Nick McEvily (44:03.35)
Amen. It was a pleasure, Yannis. Thank you, guys.
Uldis (44:04.417)
Alright guys.
Janis (44:07.827)
Awesome.
Uldis (44:08.513)
Yeah, and to the listeners, call your customer and tune in next Tuesday for the next episode. Click that subscribe button on all the platforms and get immersed into the world of scrappiness. Thank you guys. Bye.
Janis (44:22.592)
Thank you, bye.
Please note that the transcript text is AI-generated. We apologize for any potential errors or inaccuracies. Thank you for your understanding.
