I’m Marie, my startup just pivoted and rebranded, AMA 🔥

Hi Matthew! Absolutely, we took tons of qualitative data (about competitors, the market, features, sales discovery calls, user tests and surveys) and made it quantitative (by counting it all and assigning values to each item) to make sure we were solving the right problem. We didn't have usage when we first started to work on our new product, so the only inputs we had were external.

@sindhushivaprasad Hi Sindhu! What lessons have I learnt about shaping company culture and handling team collaboration, especially in a remote company? Shaping company culture at the earliest stages is reliant on knowing what's important to you as a founder. For my co-founder and I, customer obsession is incredibly important, and we make sure to bring people onto the team who share a similar mindset. Early on in the life of our company, I had wanted to rush and create company values since I was used to always having them from my pre-startup days, thinking that they would help instill the culture. But in reality we had to learn what our company values were (you can see where we landed at https://nira.com/careers/). Also a key learning is that you should make sure to hire folks that align with the types of people you want in your company. For example, being detail oriented is super important to us, so we do our best to make sure someone is detail oriented during the interview process. I think that all of these points are valid for companies, whether remote or not. Specific to remote, having a daily updates channel where everyone shares what they are working on is helpful in adding transparency. And making sure that things get repeated - during meetings, over Slack, in documents. Communication can be a big challenge for remote teams, so being as clear as possible helps. You can find more tips on overcoming communication challenges here: https://nira.com/remote-work-tip... On the topic of burnout, I personally think that if you're in the flow and happy, it's OK to work a bunch and be creative. Sometimes I just can't help myself, and find that I'm working late nights, not sleeping much, and having tons of fun! This used to happen to me with creative writing too, and not just with work. As long as you know yourself, and when to stop, I think this can be totally fine. For me personally, I can't do that for more than 3-4 days or else I start to get too tired. So I learned that I need a day after work binges to get some extra sleep. There can also be an unhealthy side to this. When you're not happily working and in the flow, but instead grinding through tasks and wishing you were getting rest. I've struggled a bit with this in the past, especially when I was a consultant and working insane hours, weekends and holidays. At the time, focusing on what I was learning and getting out of the job was good enough for me. But eventually I did end up leaving to do something I was more passionate about. One way we manage this in a remote setting is, we let people set their own hours. We have some folks who prefer to have time during their days to do personal life stuff, and then they like to crank out their work later in the day and evening. We also watch for signs of burnout and do our best to help people through it. On my end, I've been working to do a better job of disconnecting when I'm not working so that I can really fill myself up with my personal life - which is much easier said than done. And thank you for the congratulations about our rebrand/new product and launch of Nira! I really appreciate it!

@marie_prokopets Thanks for sharing, Marie! It's really interesting that you tried to shape culture from your values, rather than forcefully build it in a rush. I think most people fail to understand that culture is a sum of habits. Trying to build habits using your values and then turning that into company culture (as you did, from what I understand) is a slower but much more sustainable approach. Asking teammates what their preferred working hours are is also something I'm fully on board with. We do that at Pause (https://getpause.com) — some of us (ahem, me) like to keep strict hours because work-life balance runs out the window otherwise. To add to your valid points about burnout, I also believe that it's an individual problem, sure enough, but it can be dealt with through systems that cater to individuals. It's why we built burnout alerts into our time-off management tool, and use them in tandem with other emotional wellbeing signals — we're able to shift the focus from recovering from burnout to preventing it from the start. It'll be a wonderful day for the world when we're all able to get into the flow at our own pace without running too fast or too slow! Thanks once again for your detailed insights 🙌

@badshahekram I never really think about how long to run a business. What I think about is: Have we earned the right to solve problems for our customers? I believe the answer is yes, we have, and we will continue to earn that right for many, many years to come.

@marie_prokopets Well wishes for you.

Hi @hnshah! Surprising to see you here. 😹 What a question, too! "What's the #1 piece of advice that you wish that you could have given your younger self before you took your first job out of college?" My first job was actually after my graduate degree 2 years post college. I would have told myself then (and I'm sure you would argue that I could tell myself this same thing today) to be more sure of myself. Even though I didn't have the experience or the specific knowledge. Being sure of myself would have helped propel me forward faster. I would have asked for more money sooner, have been more confident and likely been promoted faster, have taken bigger risks and spoken up more. What would you tell your younger self right out of college? 🙃

@marie_prokopets thanks for indulging my question. I'd tell myself to learn how to ask other people to help you.

@jaskiran_kaur Hi Jaskiran! At different points of my career, I've had different motivations. At my worst (and in my youth), my motivation was to prove people who doubted me wrong. I hit significant milestones numerous times using this approach. But it didn't fill me up and it wasn't an extremely positive motivating force. At my best - and that's where I've been at for probably a decade now - I am motivated by learning. Even mistakes and roadblocks can help motivate me, because I inevitably learn as I move through them. Things can be challenging when you're building a product and a business from the ground up. You will have doubts. You will have moments when you question what you're doing. You will have moments of extreme joy and excitement. The best way to continue forward is to have a curious mindset and continue to learn through it all. I am personally also highly motivated by forward motion. Finishing a big new feature. Getting to a milestone. And especially in solving customer problems. Plus exercising my creativity drives me forward too. And of course, I'm also motivated by sharing what I've learned. Like in this AMA :) I'm happy to help others learn from my wins, mistakes and misadventures.

@marie_prokopets Thank you so much Marie, this is insightful and motivating for me.

Hi Avinash, we use customer development to address these sorts of challenges at Nira. This video explains the basics of the process:

@marie_prokopets Thanks!

@reddy2go I love this question, thanks so much for asking it! Comedy can be a bridge between people in any organization, regardless of size or type. Comedy isn't something to purposely bring in to an organization, though. It shouldn't be forced. If you are funny, let it out at work. If you don't gravitate to comedy, then there's no need to find awkward jokes to tell. The idea is to be your authentic self, at work and in all areas of your life. I firmly believe that people should be themselves at work, or else they'll slowly become dissatisfied, leave for another job, and generally experience less happiness than they should. This was a struggle I had for years. I so wanted to be my authentic self at work. But for some reason I felt that if I let my weirdness out - my eccentricities, way of dressing outside of work, and humor - I would be shunned, skipped over for promotions, and looked down upon. This was of course as far from the truth as one could possibly get. Once I let my true self out at work, I excelled even more. This included my sense of humor (which I let out within reason, since it can be a bit raunchy), my love of writing, and dressing more like myself. The more I was myself, the closer grew to the people I worked with - in part because of our shared sense of humor. As for comedy in the remote work world, there are plenty of filters to add to your Zoom meetings that can help with that :)

Hi @joel_hansen1! I'll be honest... I don’t keep an eye on any specific brands or communities. The work I do at Nira takes up a ton of my time and energy. And I have a co-founder in Hiten who keeps up with more things than most people I know, so he usually directs me to what I should look at. I like to stay super focused on our customers and internal company needs. New ideas come from our customer research, and we're able to keep track of trends that way too since often we hear about competitors from our customers.

Hey @christopher_ogden1 ! The tradeoff you typically make with opinionated design is that you give users fewer choices and less control, so they do what you think is “good” for them. In our case at Nira, we actually do both and consider the fact that there is a time and place for both during product development. In fact, if you don’t think like this you’ll inevitably end up building the wrong thing. As an example, we built the first version of our document access product in a way that was not quite as opinionated as it is today. The reason is that by doing that, we were able to discover where we should be opinionated and where we don’t need to be. With early features if your goal is to ship and learn, a non-opinionated version can be extremely valuable to unlock your next set of learnings.

Hi @chris_muth ! Early on, Hiten and I didn't divide that much because we were building the foundation of the business. Later, we ended up dividing who owned what by category, like Sales, Marketing, Product, Legal/Compliance, etc. And just because one of us owns something, it doesn't mean we won't collaborate on some of the tasks. The framework we use is simply, who is Batman and who is Robin on a given segment or set of tasks. And we also allow the responsibility splits to change over time as the organization grows. For example, Hiten might own one set of tasks, but as we scale and hire people it may move over to me. We also make sure to play on our innate skills and our knowledge base. For example, I am super detail oriented and have a lot of experience working on contracts and with lawyers, so I end up owning all things legal and compliance related.

Thanks @marie_prokopets !