Oct. 17, 2022

How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation)

How to Pivot to Product Market Fit | Mike Murchison, Founder of Ada ($1B+ Valuation)

You've launched a startup. Your excitement turns to anxiety as it becomes clear things aren't working out. Some customers are buying but not nearly enough. They like your product, but they don't love it. You realize you don't have product-market fit and are unlikely to get it. You'll need to change things up. You'll need to pivot. It's a painful process, but pivots are more common than you think. The right pivot can take you from nothing to billion-dollar status. Many unicorns, including Sl...

You've launched a startup. Your excitement turns to anxiety as it becomes clear things aren't working out. Some customers are buying but not nearly enough. They like your product, but they don't love it.

You realize you don't have product-market fit and are unlikely to get it. You'll need to change things up. You'll need to pivot.

It's a painful process, but pivots are more common than you think. The right pivot can take you from nothing to billion-dollar status. Many unicorns, including Slack, Twitter and Ada, started off as completely different businesses. 

The key, of course, is to do it right. Mike and his co-founder spent a full year as customer service agents to feel their customers' pains. They solved those problems over time and a few years later raised at a $1.2B valuation. 

If you want to hear exactly how they did it, have a listen.

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

01:15 - Customer Support and User Growth

05:29 - Software is a Service

08:24 - Steps to Customer Success

11:51 - Moving on from Volley

16:45 - Commitment Vs Attachment

21:46 - Lessons Learned

28:11 - The Lean Startup

32:53 - Community Support

Mike (00:00):

We really fought the temptation to write a single line of code. That was really important. I think there's a lot of founders out there who think that – they measure progress in code. They assume that the way you make progress in the early days of the business is to build an MVP. I think core to our success was actually our rejection of that premise.

Pablo (00:18):

Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistrial, a seed-stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit. Today, we're talking about how to pivot with Mike, the co-founder and CEO of Ada, a no-code AI chatbot for customer experience teams. Ada is based in Toronto. They have 350 employees and have raised over $200 million. Mike, it's great to have you here today.

Mike (00:49):

Great to be here, Pablo.

Pablo (00:50):

Today you're the CEO of a billion-dollar company. You're one of Canada's hottest startups, but of course it didn't start out this way. I think a lot of people will be surprised to hear that Ada, Twitter or Slack, is actually the result of a massive pivot. About two years before Ada launched, I believe you'd started a company called Volley. So maybe let's start there. Can you tell us a bit about Volley? What was it? What was the thesis there?

Mike (01:15):

So Ada's story really began seven years ago with Volley, which was a completely different product going after a complete different opportunity. Volley was a social search engine. Our goal was to make it easy for people to help each other solve problems, specifically problems related to entrepreneurial opportunities people were were pursuing by helping them connect with relevant experts in their network or through their social network that had the skills to help. David and I built this product on iOS and on the web that was growing really quickly at one point, quickly out of the gate. We felt like we had lightning in a bottle. It was very exciting. We encountered this customer service problem pretty early on. The problem was how do we scale our customer service operations in line with our user growth?

Now this was a particularly challenging problem for us because everything that we'd ever built – David and I go way back building a bunch of different software together and everything we'd ever built that had been remotely valuable had come from a really tight feedback loop between our users and our product engineering teams. We knew our customers' names. We had a relationship with them, and I personally believe that great software bestows ownership on its customers. You feel as a customer like the software, the product is yours in the same way that you might have a feeling of ownership over your favorite restaurant or your favorite cafe. We use the word; it's my restaurant, my cafe, my gym. I've long been very interested in that level of ownership when it comes to software. That intimacy was really eroding as Volley got bigger. We went from treating our customers as people whose names we knew and whose lives we felt like we were somewhat a part of to treating them as numbers, to then treating them as numbers that we were trying to keep at bay.

Pablo (03:12):

To be clear, these are which types of customers? Are we talking business customers that you need to service, or are these consumers?

Mike (03:19):

It was all B2Cs. It's a B2C app, so these are all consumers, all not paying us. I should be clear, too. Customers might be a generous term; users at some point that we were hoping to figure out a way of monetizing..

Pablo (03:34):

I see. There was still a big customer success element to it, customer support element?

Mike (03:37):

There was. We wanted to make sure everyone was successful, especially in the early days of our app's growth. We really, really cared about the quality of the community and the quality of the engagement that our initial user base was experiencing. It was pretty sad to see us sort of pursue the conventional customer service playbook, which is essentially figure out how to talk to your customers less the bigger you get, and that's what we were pursuing. I mean, that was the playbook that we, like almost every other business in the world, was running. I'd say that that playbook was – when we saw that, I became pretty curious about why it was that we were investing in figuring out ways of talking to our customers less because it struck me that the bigger we got, the more valuable customer data would become to us.

In other words, this whole paradigm felt backwards. I became very curious about that, so picked up the phone and called as many VPs of customer experience as I could find. David and I interviewed a bunch of people and we asked them why is it that you're speaking to your customers less and not more as you're growing? Virtually everyone agreed with the premise that it was sort of backwards to be pursuing the strategy that they were, but they also echoed each other in saying that customer service is a cost center. This is how we are structured. This is how we've designed things. This is my job and while I know more about the customer than anyone else in the company, we can't afford to increase our level of interaction. That was really the understanding of that problem that became the – sort of laid the groundwork for it. It ended up becoming a pivot.

Pablo (05:29):

This is where the insight kind of really starts, right? I mean, I think to an extent, the reason is obvious why you want to minimize the amount of a customer interaction. It's more profitable. You could argue the other time thing too, which is the less, in a sense, customers are reaching out to you too much might mean that your product's not working well. You should just make the product more user-friendly. You obviously disagreed with that at least to a certain extent. What was your thinking? What was your reason for disagreeing with that in the first place and not just like everybody else, just saying that?

Mike (06:00):

It was a few reasons. One was just this deep belief that software is a service. We know this as people who work in the SaaS industry. The word service is a really important word. We don't tolerate an experience where – in the physical world where – we don't like to tolerate experiences where we paid for something and we don't get what we paid for. The service bar in the software world, I think we just had sort of visceral reaction how low that was, so maybe that was the first thing. The second thing was that I think that the world – the paradigm of talking to your customers less was really borne of an era where people really weren't making as many data-informed decisions. That might have been because a lot of this information wasn't digitized to begin with. If you're running a legacy contact center and you're doing millions of phone calls a day, and those are analog phone calls, very difficult to mine that data, extract insights and inform your decision-making. That's really where customer service was born. It's through the telephone.

However, in the digital era where we can actually start to make use of this information, you can do more with this. It becomes much more action, much more useful. I felt as though the technology was actually quite a bit ahead of the strategy, and that seemed like an opportunity for us in building Volley. Felt like we really should be – we knew our success had come from really rapid feedback loops between our users and our product teams. The question was if that works at a small scale, it should work at least as well at a big scale, maybe even better if we had more data. How do we figure out how to solve that problem? That was the question

Pablo (07:43):

I see. At first solving that problem was not so much about starting a new business venture. It was just about making Volley better, right?

Mike (07:50):

It was. I went through this really difficult period where it started to become clear that, hey, maybe this customer experience opportunity is a bigger one, a more difficult problem to solve than the one we were trying to solve with Volley. Yes, initially this was about a curiosity we had around solving a problem that we were experiencing as the leaders of Volley and not as a oh, this is a pivot opportunity, or this is a new business venture. It was about solving our own operational challenge.

Pablo (08:24):

So maybe let's walk through some of the steps, right? So you mentioned first you called a bunch of VPs in customer success and you validate the idea that they're thinking about it that way and that is the current paradigm. What do you start doing? What are the first few steps you start taking towards fixing customer success, at least within Volley at first?

Mike (08:45):

Yeah. So I think step one, and hopefully this is helpful for entrepreneurs in the audience who are thinking about perhaps in their own companies exploring a pivot themselves. For me what was most useful is we first confirmed there was a pattern, that the same problem was manifesting across industries. That was a very important learning. The way we knew that was pretty simple. I mean, picking up the phone call, you have a 10th phone call in a row. People are saying almost – they're almost using the exact same phrases when they're describing the problem and they're reacting to it the same way. You almost feel like an anthropologist. You just get to a point where you can predict what someone's going to say in response to one of your questions, so that was step one. 

Step two was really the commitment to understanding this problem at a much deeper level. For us, making that commitment meant going back to these VPs and asking if we could join their team as agents and seven of them said, yes. Our belief there was okay, we've identified there's this problem across industries. Now let's understand it more deeply. The way to understand it more deeply in our view was to experience the pain firsthand as manually as possible. We became customer service agents, and we were the frontline customer service reps for seven different companies.

Pablo (10:15):

That was you and your co-founder. As your CEO of a startup that's funded, you take some time to be an agent for another company?

Mike:

Yeah.

Pablo:

How much time are you devoting to this? How are you making that work?

Mike (10:27):

Well, I mean, there's a gradual transition between Volley and Ada, but we became full-time customer service agents. We were employed by seven different companies at one point all at the same time. We lived and breathed customer service for the better part of a year. I mean, this was an intense period, definitely one of the low lights of my entrepreneurial career. One of the pressures you face, as you know, as a founder is, especially in the early days, a lot of folks are asking you what you're doing. What is your job? What do you do? It's one thing to justify that, explain that when you have a couple hundred employees and you're financed. It's clear what your company – your company actually creates value. Much harder to do that in the earlier days. I'm someone who found it difficult to be in a situation where it was very difficult to explain what we were doing. The only people who really knew what we were doing were David and I, and we were just obsessed with learning. We were obsessed with learning how difficult and painful it can be to provide to-scale customer service from the ground up as a frontline employee. That was the second step.

Pablo (11:51):

Had you paused Volley at that point? I'm curious when you decided let's move to this thing and how that decision was made.

Mike (11:59):

I think this is the behind-the-scenes what's the real story. When I think about this story, I think of it as a immediate moment, immediate transition. There was Volley, and then there was the path to Ada. The reality is that there was a messy transition between the two, and there were moments where we were running both. There were moments where Volley was put into maintenance mode and was still operating. There was a period where we were fully into what became Ada, but we're fully doing customer service manually, but everyone thought that we were still working on Volley. It was a messy sort of gray period, but where our time was going pretty quickly shifted away from Volley towards doing manual customer support and and investing in trying to learn as much as possible through that experience.

Pablo (12:59):

Was it just the two of you? Did you have other employees? Did you have other stakeholders that you needed to tell them were not spending any more time on Volley? How did those discussions go?

Mike (13:08):

It's a great question. Boris and Angela from Version One Ventures led our precede rounds at the time. It was a $500,000 round into Volley. We were about two years into Volley and David and I look at each other one day and we go, we've just spent 15 hours doing customer service all day. We're not building Volley right now. We're off trying to figure something out. We've done this for long enough. It's clear that Volley isn't really working. There came a time where early in this transition where of course I needed to communicate to our investors that the original idea they invested in was not something that we were currently pursuing anymore. I distinctly remember going to tell Boris this, Boris Wertz who, by the way, is still on Ada's board today. He's seen the full journey, but at the time when we were Volley, I was so nervous as a founder about telling him our lead investor that we were – essentially had failed and are moving on to work on something new. We didn't know what that was yet. We haven't wrote a single line of code for this new thing. In fact, we're just doing customer service manually for a bunch of different companies. I was so nervous. I wrote out – I didn't trust myself to be able to convey what I wanted to convey just through memory. So I've printed out a speech that I wanted to read to Boris. We met up for lunch on Spadina. We sat down and Boris asks, “How are things going with Volley?” The waiter comes by before I can answer and says, “Do you want anything to order?” I said, no, and I take out my piece of paper.

I'm like, “Boris, if you don't mind, I just want to read this to you.” I start reading to him how we started in this journey to reimagine search. We learned a ton about scale, trying to learn a lot about user engagement, rapid feedback loops between product and engineering teams and customers. It wasn't working like we thought it would. The whole part of this speech was all about I totally understand if you want your money back. I'm so sorry to disappoint you. I get it if this is like no longer aligned with what your investment thesis is, whatever that means. I didn't know any better. Boris looks at the paper, pushes it to the side and says, “No problem. What are our ideas?” What are we going to do next? 

Pablo (15:49):

That's awesome. 

Mike:

I start talking to him about look, we're doing this customer service. We think there's something in this space. We think it's really important to understand the problem really intimately, really, really deeply. A couple minutes later, Boris was, “Okay, seems interesting. You should talk to So-an-so.” He made an introduction to someone who worked at Shopify because at the time, Shopify, of course, was scaling super quickly and had customer service problems. Sure enough, fast-forward, Ada is born. Shopify is a customer of Ada. We made it through a successful pivot, which I'm sure we'll get into more about how that actually happened in detail. The point is that for me, there was such a profound lesson there about what it really means to be founder-friendly as an investor, and how I think some of the most difficult challenges associated with entrepreneurship, namely changing your core idea and what your core pursue is your core identity.

They really do require a certain amount of breathing room and just support The last thing that would've been helpful in that situation would've been, are you sure you don't want to – are you sure you want to make this move. It would be to challenge the idea or force us to lean into what had originally pursued or to just bow out and not be supportive. That was a core moment in our company's history. It's a core reason why I'm so grateful to be partnered with Boris and Angela.

Pablo (17:27):

There's this concept of not giving up within entrepreneurship, and it is really important. Relentlessness is obviously an important trait, but at the same time, it's not necessarily the answer. I mean, sometimes you have to give up fully on an idea because it's not going to work and you're wasting your time. Sometimes you got to give something up to work on something else as you did with Volley and Ada. Was that a tough thing to go through? Did you feel at one point – you mentioned failure, but did you feel like it was sort of – was that a battle internally, like, oh, are we giving up on this? Should we just double down on Volley and just push harder and maybe growth will come?

Mike (17:59):

Absolutely. One of the things that Volley taught me about as a founder is really the difference between commitment and attachment. I learned that looking back on that experience that I was so attached to a particular vision for the future. That attachment, I think, really blinded me to the different ways that you can solve a problem. I really struggled with that transition as a result. I felt like a personal failure. I felt like as our CEO, I need to be the keeper of the vision and I need to be right. The reason people are investing is because of the clarity of this vision and where we're going. It's hard to understand the relationship between conviction, vision, success. I think those are really complicated concepts to understand the relationship between. What I learned based on that experience is that for me, I believe it's tremendously important to be committed but not attached. 

With Ada, I am so committed to forever elevating the quality of customer experience that we, as consumers, can expect from brands. I just believe that that experience bar is so fundamentally low right now, and that in the eyes of history it'll be laughable how low it was. I'm so committed to Ada being the company that forever elevates what we can expect from brands. I'm no longer an entrepreneur who's attached to how we get there. In fact, I think that what's been core to our success at Ada is a belief that you actually – there's so much value in not being attached. In fact, there's this openness. There's this excitement. There's this creativity that comes from being committed but not attached because you start to view the world differently and you start to be much more open to different solutions. That was really the lesson in the the psychology of what was going on for me when I thought about the transition from Volley to what became Ada.

Pablo (20:19):

Is there anything at any level that ties Volley and Ada together? You think about the Twitter story. It was always about sharing ideas, at least. It went from podcast to Twitter, whatever. Is there something like that here?

Mike (20:34):

Oh, absolutely. I mean, Volley was fundamentally about helping people. Volley was a – the way Volley worked was it was a community built on requests. You put a request out; I'm looking for help building a – refining my user onboarding experience. Does anyone know any product designers that are really skilled at B2B SaaS onboarding experience, whatever? Volley's job was to connect you with the best expert through your network who could help you with that, not that dissimilar from a customer service inquiry. It's was a B2C incarnation of what ended up being a B2B business for us but yeah, many similarities. I think they run deep. I mean, I've never worked on a B2B company, a B2B SaaS company before starting Ada. I think a lot of our successes come from a lot of conviction and expertise in building B2C software prior to Ada, and Volley is a good example of that. We just fundamentally believe in the craft of software, I would even say like a obsession with great customer experience. Great user experience has been a real asset that was definitely something that we carried from Volley.

Pablo (21:46):

As you spent 15 hours a day being agents, what were some of the things that you learned that you then decided to build a product around?

Mike (21:52):

I think the first thing, as we learned, we really fought the temptation to write a single line of code. That was really important. I think there's a lot of founders out there who think that they measure progress in code. They assume that the way you make progress in the early days of a business is to build an MVP. I think core to our success was actually a rejection of that premise. Our goal was actually to go as long as possible without building the MVP, without writing a single line of code. The reason for that is because we wanted to understand the manual processes that our software would eventually automate better than anyone else. One of the core beliefs there was this core belief that software is not inherently valuable. At a fundamental level, all software does is it replicates and scales some manual process that exists in the physical world. Our belief is the extent to which you can understand that manual process better than anyone else, or at least understand it incredibly well, puts you in a position to build software that is at truly excellent. That was the philosophy. That was informed by Volley. Then we just set out, as you put it, to learn. I think we learned three core things over the course of being agents. We learned that first of all, 30% or more of the inquiries we were responding to were repetitive and mundane. In some cases, it was upward of 80%, and that was surprising. It's like if you show up on day one to any new job and you expect that there's this onboarding period and takes some time for you to become productive and the useful colleague. In our experience, we were effective on day one. That's how basic so many of these inquiries were. 

Two, we learned that the software we were living in, the agent experience that we had, was far from ideal. It was super negative. No one was waking up out of bed in the morning going, I'm so excited to spend more time in this enterprise customer service software. It was a painful product experience. The third thing we learned is that everyone, all our colleagues, they wanted to talk to their customers like they talked to their friends, which meant – they just couldn't figure out why is it that I'm talking to this person on the phone and this person clearly who I'm talking to hasn't been on a phone call in like a week. They're not using their phone for phone calls. Why can't I message this person? Why can't I text them? It doesn't make any sense. Why don't we open up a messaging channel for a customer service? 

This we heard over and over again, and that idea was always rejected. It was rejected, remember, because of the conventional customer service paradigm, which is reduce customer contact. Messaging was thought of as likely increasing it. So that's what we learned. We became amongst the most productive agents on each one of these teams. We just work really hard is the simple way to say it. We saw the impact of that work. We saw that customers were less likely to leave. They liked our businesses more, which isn't exactly a novel insight. We all know this in the physical world. You have to wait for four hours for your Starbucks coffee, you're not going to go back to that location. 

Secondly, we learned that our colleagues liked their jobs more and were far less likely to leave when we were handling as many of the repetitive inquiries as possible. That was a big deal because we knew that attrition rates in contact centers are on average about 45% annually, meaning that in the enterprise, about half of all customer service agents will leave their jobs every year. That's how repetitive and mundane the role is. However, if you remove the repetitiveness of the job, what you're left with is something that's way more intellectually stimulating. It's way more challenging. It's much more conversational and consultative. Our colleagues end up loving their jobs way more. We were like, that's fascinating. People just loved working with us as a result. 

The third thing we witnessed was that the data that we were privy, to these customer conversations, they felt like a gold mine. They had sales opportunities in the product insights, strategic information. We felt like it was pretty clear that businesses, our colleagues, our bosses, VPs across the organization really should have been using this information to inform their decision-making. Instead, they didn't even know it existed. It was then, was once we'd essentially proven the value of the software before it existed, proved it manually. We still, to this day at Ada say do it manually first when you're solving a problem. It was then that we set out to build the software that replicated that manual behavior we had engaged in. The solution became – it appeared, right? It was so painful what we were going through that the software almost became medicine. It was like, take the pain away. We took an ML approach because we had access to so much data. Then we focused on making those ML techniques that we were developing as easy to use as possible because all our colleagues were non-technical. Those insights, which have been absolutely core to Ada's success, continue to be to this day. There's no way we would've realized those. Those are not insights that you glean intellectually. You need to live those things. You need to feel them emotionally. There there's no way that we would've had them had Ada been developed through this academic business model, canvas exercise. It had to be something that we lived and it's been core to the product that we've developed and the pillars it's still standing on.

Pablo (28:11):

I have to pull on this thread just because it's something I've seen a lot, which is – and we've talked about this in other episodes, but lean startup is useful, but it's gone to the point that when somebody has an idea today, the first thing they do is they build an MVP and they put it out. They get into this test and validate mode. What I've seen is that companies aren't doing enough of is before their startup mode, there's research mode. You got to spend time in that research mode where you're really not building, where you don't have a company; you don't have a startup. You have some sort of insights and ideas, and it's really more of a project. Sounds like that's exactly what you guys did for a long time when you were working as agents, is that you just stuck to research mode for a really long time until the things that you needed to build were no longer guesswork, right? It was like, you know if you build this feature, these companies are going to buy it because you've lived it.

Mike (29:09):

That's right. Now, two thoughts there. So one, I completely agree that lean, the philosophy of lean, I think has been misinterpreted in recent years. Lean is about learning as quickly as possible and sometimes, writing software is the fastest way to learn, but in my view it actually rarely is. It can be, but it rarely is. I think we've conflated progress. We've conflated developing an MVP with progress or rapid progress. Those are two very, very different things. 

As an aside, the lean is really – the founding father of lean is Steve Blank, who was Eric Reese's professor at Stanford who wrote this book called “The 12 Steps of the Epiphany.” Highly encourage everyone to read that book. That really is the precursor to what became the lean startup. The core takeaway from that book in my view is the importance of getting out of the building. That's the research phase. You don't find a product market fit by coding in your basement or by thinking up a solution. I think you find it by going out usually – the probability of finding, let's say, success is increased dramatically when you get out of the building. 

Pablo (30:37):

A lot of stars get out of the building by having 10 interviews where they try to sell people on their – and that's getting – that's not getting out of the building, I think is part of the point, right? Getting out of the building is getting as close to the customer's day-to-day, in your case, doing the job but getting as close to it as possible before you have some clear preconceptions about this is what I'm building and I hope people say yes when I try sell to them.

Mike (31:01):

Mm-hmm, and this is the difference, again, between commitment and attachment, right? If you're attached to how you think it's going to work, I think your ego gets in the way, but if you're committed to solving the problem, the way you run those interviews, you're actually looking for someone to say no to you. You're looking to create an iron, just say an airtight thesis that is that you can defend over and over again because you know it's right, and you're seeking the no. You crave it because again, you're committed and you're not attached. I think the other thing I was going to say is for us, at least that we knew this was going to work and we felt the pain. The solution seemed like it was sort of a peer because the pain, it was so acute. We didn't really know. We then tested it. The reason we knew Ada worked in the early days or was going to work is because we didn't get fired. We ran this software and our managers didn't care. They loved the fact that response times went down. They couldn't tell the difference between our responses and our software's responses. Our colleagues were happier.

Pablo (32:09):

You substituted yourself by software while still working as agents.

Mike (32:14):

That's right. It's a classic experiment. We held one variable fixed, we manipulated another, and we saw that the results were the same. We knew that the software was validated. I think that was a big moment for us. I think that the point being that the way that these tests manifest, I think they different in every context, but so long again as you're committed to solving the problem and not attached to how you get there, I think one's ability to identify different types of tests that are useful becomes a little bit easier.

Pablo (32:53):

You've validated the problem. You've gone in. You've really learned what it's like to be an agent. You've built software. You started to replace yourself. When do you package a software and sell it to your first customer?

Mike (33:05):

Well, that's a good question. Not long after that, then it became the next problem to solve is how do we get people to – how do we identify people who also have this problem and help them recognize that we can potentially solve it for them? That we did through initially I'd say two things. One was a lot of outreach to friends and friends of friends' companies. The other was through a lot of cold emailing and messaging iteration. On the former, this is where I think it's really important that our community support one another. I mean, this is, I think, a core reason that Ada was validated in the early days after this period we just talked about was because the founders of companies that we all know today, the Eva and Alan Lau from WattPad, the Kirk Simpsons from Wave, the Mike Katchens from WealthSimple, they all responded to our email and they said I'd be happy to introduce you to our head of customer service, and they gave us an at-bat. I's not that they gave us the deal, but they gave us the opportunity to get in front of the decision-makers within their companies. I think that we as startup founders in our community, startup founders and investors in our ecosystem, this is the role we need to play. It's a very simple decision that we can all make to support the future of the Canadian tech ecosystem. We need to give each other more at-bats. I think that was a huge – it was the learning from those that really informed the second thing, the messaging, which allowed us to acquire customers that we didn't have any connection to.

Pablo (34:53):

Love that. Maybe as a final question, you'd launched Volley before. You'd gotten some traction. You said it wasn't a complete failure, and now you'd launched Ada and gotten some traction. When did you know that Ada was the thing, that this was way different than what you had launched before, that this had really, really big potential?

Mike (35:10):

Well, it was a pretty big deal when we made a dollar of revenue. I had not generated a dollar in SaaS revenue in my entire career before Ada. One of my personal goals was literally make a dollar on the internet. That was one milestone. I was like, maybe this is going to work. If we can make $1, we can make 2. I think there was no singular moment where it became clear that Ada was going to continue to succeed or continue to grow. I don't know if I'll ever feel like there is. I feel like even now, I feel so excited to be in a position now as a co-founder of Ada where we're now in this privileged position where we can look long term and make investments long term and really build for the future that we really are committed to realizing.

I really do believe that the problems we're going to solve ahead will really dwarf what we've done so far. I don't think there's any singular moment where – maybe there will be in the future where we feel like hey, this is where we knew things all came together. I guess it's hard to say that. Maybe in a couple seasons from now, I'll have a different reflection on that when Nate is a little bit bigger and I'm thinking even further out, maybe.

Pablo (36:41):

Sounds good. Well, listen, Mike, we'll stop there. Really appreciate you sharing everything. Maybe just to quickly recap, you started Volley. You got some traction. You found this new, different problem around customer success. You dug in on it. You realized that it was way bigger than the original thing. You shifted over. You convinced your co-founder and other stakeholders to come along with you, and you really got in there. I think the research mode part was a huge piece of uncovering really important insights that led you to build the sort of features that were critical and that people reacted positively to. Now you've built a massive company that as you just said is only getting started. So really appreciate you sharing that with us today, Mike. I'm sure people are – founders are out there really going to appreciate all the details that you shared. It's great having you.

Mike (37:31):

Great to be here, Pablo. Thanks for having me.

Pablo (37:32):

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to see more content, check out pmf.show.