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

@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!

@dom_rodwell We don't have an explicit process today to generate ideas. So it's fairly unstructured. Ideas come in the midst of customer research, and either sit in our brains, in notes from discussions, or in documents about future features or learnings from research. This isn't scalable, but it works really well for us at this stage. Eventually all the ideas are translated into a feature prioritization spreadsheet which includes engineering estimates, and then prioritized based on difficulty to build vs. the business reasons for building them. As for how I apply learnings from my different interests and activities to ideas at work, I don't do anything explicit here. I've been lucky to have interests and a career that taught me how to spot patterns quickly, how to process tons of data and come to conclusions, and to be creative. So all those things are naturally at play for me while coming up with ideas for Nira.

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.

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 !

@5harath Hi Sharath! Thanks for having me :) "1. From a mental state, how did you take the pivot?" I was so very excited! We had found an opportunity that was even larger than the initial document search opportunity. And we were having so much interest from IT teams, so it was clear signal that people would buy our product. But then, enter in the doubt. I was worried - were we wrong? Would we regret focusing on document access control and stopping our work on document search? The doubt was quickly demolished by logic. We dove right in to understanding the rationale for changing directions, and why the new direction was way more appealing than the old. FOMO can pop up, but it's easy to get rid of, too. "2. What advice you give for founders who are still in PMF phase and also thinking about pivoting?" My advice to founders who are thinking about pivoting is to be absolutely sure about the pivot. Ask yourself all the questions - the hard ones included. Are you sure it's the right direction? Is your hunch backed by data and customer insights? Can you build the product you want to build? Will people buy it? Why are you dropping the other thing you were working on before? Why are you pivoting in the first place? Is it for the right reasons? Inquiry should help you get to the right answer - document what you learn and make sure you're being real and unbiased. And of course, make sure you've talked to customers and done your research.