James Evans - How CommandBar is using AI to help brands master user assistance!

I think the, the scary thing with hiring product managers early on is, my view is until you've got like violent levels of product market fit, uh, you, the people building, including the founders, need to be extremely close to the product end to end. And the worry with a PM hire early is that you're kind of outsourcing that responsibility. Like you're outsourcing the product owner. the person who's responsible for like figuring out what should be shipped when, prioritizing, doing user research. Like, that shit should not be outsourced early on. I think there are some examples of like great early product hires who've basically operated like, like an extension of the founder or like as a founder themselves. And so that can work. Those people are just really hard to find, and I think it's a lot easier to screw it up. So I think the I think there's asymmetric downside to bringing on a PM, say, in your first like 50, 40 people.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives, and yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers, and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for, for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, Move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different from every founder facing these crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse, worthless. If you find yourself here, or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. Do you hate popups? If yes, then you would make the best friends with my next guest. Most certainly I will for sure do because I fucking hate popups. You know, I just don't like it at all. Like I don't care about, you know, the upsells that people try to do, especially when I didn't get value. They just try to sell me something. So I hate popups, long story short. Today I have James Evans, CEO and co-founder of CommandBar. If you ask me what CommandBar is, this is what I will describe. As a product founder, imagine you need all-star features. For your product, where your users use your product seamlessly. That's what CommandBar does. From product tours to surveys to in-app help to changelog, these guys built everything for you and they use AI to accelerate this process. And I'm so— I was telling James before joining or hit record, I'm a big fan of the brand that these guys are producing, the content, the value. not just for product people, but just in general for startups and the ecosystem. So that's why I have to have James on the call. That's why I'm like, okay, let's bring him on the call. So James, welcome to the show. How are you feeling?

Feeling great. Feeling great to be in the presence of a fellow, uh, pop-up non-enthusiast.

There you go. So right off the bat, I, I, I have this, you know, I have to, have to ask this. What's the beef? What's the beef with You know, popups and the UX that generally like, you know, it hasn't been reinvented for long. And I'm sure CommandBar is helping founders reinvent that. So talk to me about that. Like, why do you hate it so much?

It's funny. No one, no one, I don't get asked that question a lot because I think usually when we talk about like, oh, you know, whether it's in a sales context or just like talking with other people in SaaS, like, oh, don't you hate those popup things? The answer is usually just like, oh my God. Yeah. I always just close that. But I think it's worth a good question. Like it's worth reflecting on why so many of us have that like intuitive negative muscle memory when we see something like invade the interface that we're using. For me, I think maybe just like to set the stage for why they're annoying. Like I think popups are actually doing a noble or have a noble intention. Um, and just so everyone's like on the same page, by popups, I'm talking about those things that, you know, when you open a product, like a SaaS product, something pops up that's like, oh, welcome. Like, here's what we've shipped since you missed. Or like, do you want to take a tour? Or like, would you want to scale up 1 to 10? Would you recommend us to one of your friends? Which is a hilarious question in a B2B context, by the way. Because it's like, who's that? B2B SaaS? Of course. Everyone wants that. Yeah. Crazy. Right.

Yeah,

but I think the job is noble, which is that products, software is pretty hard to use. Like we use so many tools today. And if you actually like stack, you know, whatever, pick a, pick a tool that people use these days, whether it's like CRM or issue tracker or whatever, compare it to what a tool like that looked like in 2002. Like the aesthetics have come a long way. There's more rounded corners and I think It's, you know, a nicer interface to use today than we were used to in 2002. But the actual like physics of how we interact with the software is basically the same. You know, it's like files, file, you know, dropdown menus. There's a lot of terminology we got to use when we learn a new product, help centers, like long documents you got to read. So I think popups are trying to do the job of like, um, helping users learn these interfaces and learn what's valuable in the interfaces. The problem in my view. Is that they're annoying. And the reason they're annoying is because they're usually not helpful because they're usually, they show up at inappropriate times. They're too generic, i.e., not personalized to what I'm trying to do in the product or what I've done in the past. And there's too many of them. They interrupt me too often. Mm-hmm. So I think I, like most internet users like you, are just, I just have this instinct when something pops up to close it. And so What we're trying to do with Canva is solve the same problem of like software should be way easier to use without the annoyance.

It's, yeah, it's absolutely, I think, again, I feel why people prefer using popups is because it, they want to try the user's attention. That's their fundamental intention, right? If you think about it, if you see a popup, that means that the other person is trying to grab, make it flashy, whatever it is, write catchy copy on it and big CTA that like, okay, I want to definitely tap on it. So it's about like attention, right? So what is that, in your opinion, CommandBar is doing different to help product founders grab their users' attention? that you think, okay, you know what, we are revolutionizing this, we're going way ahead of our time. Like just the way Steve Jobs, when they introduced iPhone, they were way ahead of time.

Oh, the Steve Jobs analogy. Yeah, I'll take it.

I have to.

Yeah, it's a very, yeah, it's the right question. Okay, you hate popups. So like, what are you doing better? I totally agree that popups are about grabbing attention. And I think that's largely the problem. So our approach, um, I'd say there's, uh, we're doing 2 things differently. Uh, first, our approach is much more intent-driven, user intent-driven, than it is attention-seeking. And so all that means is that we've got a bunch of, or 3, uh, in-product experiences that are designed not to guess what the user is trying to do or interested in, But allow the user to express a question or just say something they're interested in, in their own words. And then we, CommandBar, as part of our customers' products, can respond to that, react to that intent. So our most popular one is a, what we call a natural language user assistant that sits in our customers' products and that users can ask questions to or ask to do things on their behalf. And the way we kind of think about this is imagine if you're sitting at your home or in your office using a software tool and standing next to you is a human user assistant dispatched by the company, standing there non-creepily, like watching you use the software.

Right.

If you have a question, they know what you've done, they know what you're trying to do. They can answer in a personalized way. They can, you know, nudge you if you're going off track. So that's the first piece is starting with user intent. But the second piece is once you understand more about the user and their goals and, you know, what they're trying to do with the software, you know, how, how familiar they are with it, what features they're using, um, you can actually do things proactively to help the user in a non-annoying way. So in some sense, we're a very hypocritical company because we're like the anti-popups company. that has our own version. We will never call it a popup. We have a product called Nudges, which is similar to a popup in that it's proactive. Um, because you can't just always, you can always just wait for the user to put their hand up. Sometimes the user is going to be going off track or they'll appear confused and they won't yet have formulated like the question to ask Copilot.

Right.

But the key with our Nudge product, the way we think of it as being different from your kind of standard lazy popup is that you can show it at times when you think the user is going to care. So for example, we make available to our customers when they're creating a nudge, they can target a nudge. Say you're releasing a new feature.

Mm-hmm.

You can use a nudge to announce that new feature, but you can choose to only show it to users who've expressed an interest in that feature based on their interactions with Copilot or our other products that allow the user to ask questions. Say a user's asked a question about, let's say you're building a CRM and you've releasing like, I don't know, uh, automations tool, like a way to automate stuff when you create a new opportunity. Let's say you've had a subset of your users ask questions about Oh, how do I connect CRM tool to Zapier? And then you release this feature. So you can take those users who've expressed an interest in this type of thing by asking questions about it. And then you can only show the nudge to those users. So the end goal is that whenever you're showing a nudge to a user, it's actually relevant. Another example would be when a user is clicking around and, you know, it seems to be confused based on their in-product. Mm-hmm. behavior, show a nudge that says, hey, what are you trying to do? Which of these use cases is, is most relevant to you? Or just literally just a text box. Like, what are you trying to do? Um, the goal is to undo the muscle memory that users have so that when they see a CommandBar nudge, they think like, oh, this is a helpful thing that's going to be relevant to me because last few have been relevant to me. Not, this is like a generic thing that I should just close immediately.

That's very interesting. So in your previous answer, you mentioned about popups being generic, right? That's one of the things a lot of people wired to, if you know what I mean. Like when you see a popup, regardless of what the content inside of that popup is, we're all wired to like think about, you know what, it's so generic, let's actually like ignore it. Yeah. And it's also the other way, to put it in other words, you know, they leave an impression on the, on the people who are trying to, you know, bring that pop-up to us, which is they don't care because it's so generic, right? Oh, yeah. They didn't, they didn't give enough attention. So, so going back to your question, uh, going back to your answer with the latest thing, which is you are giving founders and product minds a way to be intentional. It's not always proactive. It's like you're, you're being reactive to the user. who is using your product. And speaking about that, it's really hard to rewire something. It's not that easy, right? True. So what are some challenges you face? Like, you know what, our users, like say for example, Product Hunt, they've used, they're using CommandBar and they're not seeing much results because they're wired to certain things. For example, like how are you helping companies like startups like Product Hunt help their customers rewire when it comes to psychology behavior-oriented things of product?

A lot of time it's just encouraging restraint, honestly, because I think you're totally right. Like we are fighting in some sense a tragedy of the commons coordination problem. My favorite, least favorite example of popups being done in a way that loses user trust Is when you open a product and you see 2 popups at the same time. Like, you know, there's people always talk about artifacts of like companies shipping their org chart. Like, that's a great example because you've got, maybe you're DIYing this, you're using a vendor. You've put this in the hands of multiple teams and they say, well, I have this tool to generate engagement. I might as well use it. And there's often no kind of coordinator who's thinking about the holistic user journey. And it's like, yo, no, we need to throttle this because we can't just bombard our users with popups. Um, so it's totally a problem. And yeah, like I was saying, one of the things we often do in situations where, um, we're in a product where users kind of aren't responding well to the proactive nudges is we say, you need to use them less. So an example of this is we track in our product this concept of a strike. Mm-hmm. So a strike is when a user quickly closes a popup. The threshold we use is 150 milliseconds. The idea is if a user's closing a popup or a nudge in the CommandBar context,

uh,

in less than 150 milliseconds, there's no way they found it valuable. You know, sometimes the user might not click the CTA in a nudge, but they'll still look at it and it'll still provide them some value if it's on the screen for a while. But if they quickly close it, it's kind of, it's like kind of a rage click. It's like, get this out of my face. Um, that happens. It's not like every nudge you ship is going to be super resonant to everyone you show it to. So that happens. It generates strikes. So there's a concept in CommandBar called Air Traffic Control, which is like our global rate limiting system that tries to solve that tragedy of the commons problem that I was talking about. And one of the things you can do applied globally to all your teams using CommandBar. is you can make it so that users who have more than 3 strikes in a certain window of time don't see any proactive nudges.

Hmm. I like that.

So the idea is it's not going to resonate for them. They're too annoyed. They don't like the form factor. They like to self-serve. They've been burned by popups in the past. Don't seek to further annoy them, win them over with an experience that actually responds to them. And one of the things that Copilot can do is it can generate a product tour or walkthrough in response to a user's question. The click-through rates on those are like 10x or more above the click-through rates on a proactively shown product tour, cuz there's no guesswork involved. You know, you're showing it to the user, to a user who's gonna care based on what they just asked.

I like that a lot. I think you are being very self-aware and you are making your customers, you know, or founders also an opportunity to become self-aware that you're not going to win everybody and it's okay, you know, and you have to find ways to win them over. Yeah, I think that's really, uh, fascinating to me because at the end of the day, all of us, we want users, users, users, users, users.

Totally.

How do we get users is something that we often doesn't pay attention to. And I think, you know, CommandBar is kind of like helping, uh, founders to like be more intentional. I think that's what the original answer of yours is. You want them to be very intentional when they approach their users.

Totally. And not just the user, you talked about attention in the past. I think a lot of people take user attention for granted. Like, I'm in the product, they're in the product, and, you know, I can do things like show them a bunch of popups when in reality, like, especially In like a PLG context where users have choice to use, you know, one product or another. Oftentimes you don't have the, have the, you can't take attention for granted because if you annoy a user, they, they assess that your product is hard to use. They're just going to bounce.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the same thing applies to like learning how a product works. It's, you know, people talk a lot about aha moment. It's true. Like if, if you're expecting the user to like hang out in your product and like learn all your terms. Okay, that may work for like a captive B2B tool that they have to use, but they're not going to enjoy using it. And I think we all know that like your end user, even if they're not the buyer, doesn't enjoy using the tool, like that spells trouble long term.

I, I, I think you should, you should talk a lot about product, and I want to cover a couple, couple of these just to like, you know, just so that we can cover most of the ground. So let's, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some of the things you did today, you launched something called, you know, Clip Pilot. Congrats on the launch. I love you bringing Clippy back in a way. So appreciate you for that. We all love Clippy, you know, but, you know, we all have our takes on it. And you've done ShipLock as kind of like a standalone product by itself because it has its own pricing, you know, and it's— Yeah. I love the ghostwriter for your changelog. That's meta. Nobody has— everybody wants to update their changelog, but nobody has time. I think people are going to throw money. I'm sure you might make some money out of it. So talk to me about these side projects. In a way, I treat them as side projects. They're not binded or, you know, kind of clubbed towards CommandBar. Yeah. But they have like these offerings. And it's, it's one of the trends that I admire and I often like suggest founders, and I've done that before as well. Talk to me about that type of marketing. Where did that, you know, where did that initiate for you? And what is, what is something that you're shipping, you know, in the future, if you want to like give us a sneak peek?

So it should be noted that we're recording this on April 1st. So ClipPilot is, uh, well, at least as of this recording, it's, it's, uh, It's a joke launch as opposed to something we're actually gonna launch, but it does speak to the fact that it's a joke.

Yeah. Is that a joke? Oh my God. Come on. I was actually like, you, you got me. There you go. Because

we do think of our product as like the second coming of Clippy though, like Clippy, but not annoying. I think like Clippy was really ahead of its time in terms of the idea of an in-product sentient, like semi-sentient user assistant that can like watch what you're doing and also respond to you. We just think like execution was annoying. And it turns out we have this great thing called large language model today that is really good at doing that. So there's like a, Flippy finally has a why now, you know?

Oh my God. Because I think I read the blog and I was like, Christina's pouring her heart explaining, bringing John Collision, Patrick Collision into the picture. I was like, oh my God, I think maybe they're kind of, they have a copilot, but this is a smaller version.

Yeah. Market speaking to us.

I'm like, now, now you got me. I think I have no idea. It's like an April 1st joke, maybe because I have a newborn and I'm like, too serious.

You either go full cringe or you try to be, you know, tongue in cheek. And so we went the latter.

Anyway, you got me, I think. But I still think the question is relevant because you have Shiplog, which is actually a product. That's not a full joke.

Shiplog is actually a product. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, I could talk for like minutes about how it's part of our like grand strategy to grand marketing strategy to like ship a lot and, you know, stay top of mind with our audience and build things. But honestly, Shiplog is just the product of someone on our team having a vision and executing on it. Lucas Howard on our team, who's super talented and has played a lot of roles for us, came up with this idea when he was figuring out how to kind of rehydrate our own Shiplog or changelog. So we'd had a changelog, but I think like a lot of companies, it had kind of ossified. Um, it doesn't get the same attention as like the blog and a changelog that's not being regularly updated and not being kind of well tended to is just really sad because it's like, you know, people go there, they see like half-assed updates. Like, you know, no one wants to see bug fixes and performance improvements. Uh, like that's the worst. Like, you know, a company is mailing it in when they're describing their releases as bug fixes and performance improvements. So we didn't want that.

Right.

And, um, we just wanted a tool to like make it really easy for us to keep our changelog up to date. Because we're shipping a lot of stuff. Um, that's the hard part. And like the last mile of product marketing is like just talking to your audience about what you're shipping. And so Lucas built this tool to solve his own problem of keeping our own changelog up to date. And so we just, we thought it was relevant to a lot of companies that use CommandBar. So we figured we'd just ship it. Nice.

I can't believe you got me, James. Come on.

Sorry. You know,

the tone was so serious.

I'll give you the, I'll give you the, uh, a piece of the grand marketing strategy, which is honestly, I just think a lot of B2B SaaS companies take themselves too seriously. Um, we honestly, uh, uh, I think toe the line between, we don't want to be too like goofy and irreverent because at the end of the day, like our customers, like there are many public companies that embed our product. in their product we're user-facing. So like, we are a very high-trust product. And I do think like, you don't want to be like the off-the-wall batshit crazy high-trust product. Like, that's stupid, right? So like,

right, right.

I do feel like the constraint, but I just feel like a lot of people or a lot of companies like, um, just trend towards that like B2B generic, you know, like everyone, you know, just like one of our one of our competitors who I won't name and shame, but their tagline, I'll probably butcher it, on their marketing site was something like drive exponential value through technology. And it's like, come on. Like,

you

know, what does that mean? That's like the B2B generic that I think we're trying to avoid. I'll shout out a startup that I feel like has done a really good job of this as they scale, which is Vanta. I think Vanta does an awesome job of having like a fun, alive brand while still being like high trust. They literally sell security products. So it's possible. And I think it can benefit you because it just makes you stand out because the baseline noise is very low.

No, it's, you know, I'm so glad you caught me because you got me because I think it's so hilarious. You know, it's, that's the fun part, right? That's the whole strategy. So you catch off guard, like people like, Wow, these guys are building something. Yeah, maybe I'll give one reason. Maybe I stumbled because I have a newborn. I haven't slept.

So you're an easy target.

Good in a while. I'm an easy target. So, you know, well, you won. I think I'll add one more brand that is doing incredible job in terms of not being serious, but actually kind of you know, having a character, Beehive.

Oh yeah.

These guys are phenomenal. They do this, uh, I think desk, uh, I think the founder Tyler, he has this whole newsletter or Straight from the Desk or whatever it is. It's amazing. He's like, uh, they have this flavor that they want to add, you know, to people's lives. So I think that's what you— one of the things I want to talk about is your marketing, your brand presence. you know, Command Blog. It's not B-L-O-G, you know, it's So Chic.

That's

one. Yeah, well, you know, and there are like some things that you do, you've done incredibly different. I would say the way you're launching, I saw that, you know, not just on what do you call like a hand, you know, hand soap bottle. It's like so different, right? Oh yeah. Like the branding is so different. So talk to me about like, where do you find inspiration for, you know, to come up these ideas from? Like, you know, do you have like certain references, certain startups that you look up to, or certain, you know, advertising folks that, you know what they're doing differently and you have to like follow their footsteps?

Again, a lot of it just comes from like a great human. Uh, so Josh on our team is just like a really talented designer and has a lot of cool ideas about how to portray our stuff in like a fun way. Um, but I think the, the, what we try to do, and I mean, it's a bit, it's all a bit tongue in cheek, but the idea behind our blog and our kind of non-standard B2B SaaS like vibe on the blog is, um, I think in the like sea of B2B SaaS marketing, product marketing, like software just comes across as kind of lame. And it's not lame. Like it's super powerful. And like people spend hours using this stuff every day to achieve things that like were unimaginable 30 years ago.

Absolutely.

And so the tagline of our blog is the art of software. And so we're just trying to make it cool or like do it justice. And, and, uh, that's how we got the idea. Josh, Josh came up with the idea for the the Vogue thing and we've just kind of run with it. We'll see how long we can run with it. But yeah, that's kind of the strategy or the philosophy behind it. But a lot of it is just letting Josh go. I love that.

Yeah, because I think so there's so much, like you said, I think there's so much human intention. It doesn't feel like you have to do or you have to write content for SEO purposes, right? Command bars content never felt like. So you've been repeating yourself as in B2B, B2B, B2B multiple times in the last 20 minutes. I have never felt command bars as a B2B company.

The ultimate

company because of the way you project, the way you project yourself. That's really important about brand, right? So that's what I really care about. You know how you portray yourself. to people like— I've never used CommandBar, by the way, so maybe in the future I will, you know.

I would change that.

But I want— that's, yeah, that's something that you're attracting, people like me who seek great products, right, and great startups. So you're kind of setting an example. So shout out to Josh, shout out to Christina, shout out to you guys. You're doing an amazing job. Phenomenal. You know, I love the dark mode, the aesthetics. Uh, it's so, so authentic. And right off, I think continuing that, uh, I want to ask a couple of questions about— so I found this post where I think Christina interviewed like a lot of founders about like, you know, having no PM policy. And you have no PM policy too. You have like a GM and a project manager.

For now.

And I think for now, yeah. I think this came— this I think this news, this kind of like philosophy came from Brian Chesky, Airbnb's, you know, founder in Figma's annual conference. He made a big ripple. Like he, he was kind of supporting designers and leaving product managers before. He's, it's kind of like got that vibe and he clarified all that in Lenny's podcast. I, you know, heard it. Yeah. People should hear it about. So talk to me about like no PM policy. Why, why is it working at CommandBar and why, what do you think that Other founders should do the same.

First of all, I love product managers, and I mean that very literally. My wife is a product manager. It's very, it's very watch, watch,

watch your words

carefully, James. It's very like in vogue to shit on product managers and the like. I think the standard trope is like, oh, what do PMs even do? They're like. You know, just adding like a management layer. They're like taking credit for the work of the people actually doing the work. I don't really, I don't really, I don't believe, I mean, I think that's the case in some like bad organizations, but I don't think that's like, I don't think that's what it means, like the platonic ideal of a PM. I think the scary thing with hiring product managers early on is My view is until you've got like violent levels of product market fit, the people building, including the founders, need to be extremely close to the product end to end. And the worry with a PM hire early is that you're kind of outsourcing that responsibility. Like you're outsourcing the product owner, the person who's responsible for like figuring out what should be shipped when, prioritizing, doing user research, like that shit should not be outsourced early on. I think there are some examples of like great early product hires who've basically operated like an extension of the founder or like as a founder themselves. And so that can work. Those people are just really hard to find and I think it's a lot easier to screw it up. So I think the, I think there's asymmetric downside to bringing on a PM, say, in your first like 50, 40 people. That said, we currently are actually thinking about bringing on a PM to lead a subset of our product mobile, which just brings its own set of challenges and like— Uh, I think there's a lot more work we could be doing to validate our product market fit and refine our product for that specific kind of subset of it, which feels like a great job for an awesome kind of founder-like PM to do. So it's not like a philosophical thing, like I hate PMs. It's more just like, I think a lot of startups feel like, oh, we've crossed a million of ARR or whatever, like we should hire a product manager. And I think that's just really scary until your PMF is like so strong that it can resist.

Hmm.

Founder being like 10% farther away from the actual usage. I

like that. Yeah, that's why I said no PM policy. You know, you don't, you don't hate, you just, you just silence at this moment. Another thing I found very interesting on, on, on the blog, uh, is this, you know, this phrase, interface infrastructure of the internet. And you want to change that. Do you want to talk about why do you so care about changing or making UX better for these companies? You know, why do you— why do you care about that? Like, there are a million aspects of it. You can build like different, different, you know, things. Why do you care about user experience? And this goes back to your, you know, popular blog post, which actually is the reason why we're having this conversation. Are you crazy? You talk about a lot of human assistance, right? Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me about that. You know, user assistance, not user experience. It's vague. It's still like, you know, still old school. Why do you care about that so much?

So I built a lot of, you know, web apps in my time. I used to use Dreamweaver back in the day. And something that has always just struck me as super odd is that there's so much of building software that requires you to rebuild stuff that exists in other products. And then I actually read a blog post. I had this, had this observation forever. I think anyone who builds like multiple web apps, uh, has this, feels this. And then I read this blog post, which kind of crystallized it all for me called The End of Web Design. It was written in like 2001 or something, 2000. Um, anyone who works in software should read it. And basically the premise is, I'm forgetting the name. I think it's like, uh, Jacob's Law or something. Mm-hmm. That, uh, premise is users spend most of their time in products that are not yours. So you should use the same interaction patterns that other products use because users are familiar with them. You shouldn't like rebuild stuff. Your product shouldn't look like super wonky. It shouldn't be like an art project. At the end of the day, users need to use it. It's like, should you build a car with like a super weird steering wheel? Shout out Elon and the yoke. Um, because users are used to the normal steering wheel and this just leads to inertia. That's why it's called the end of web design. Cause it's like, oh, we've already come up with all the interaction patterns. Cause we're just going to, we're kind of stuck with the ones we've got because of this reasoning. Um, And that means that you've got all these companies that are rolling their own versions of the same interface patterns. And that always struck me as very weird. Um, and sad because it means we're not like innovating in interaction patterns. Like we're sure as hell not at the pinnacle. Like I refuse to believe that the way web apps work today is like the globally optimal way. So one of the things that I think is really cool about CommandBar, and look, we're not trying to be like entire UX as a service. I think there's a lot of parts of software that should be. Um, homegrown. But I think there are pieces that we can peel off, like this, the Copilot interface, like I was talking about earlier, like the nudges that I was talking about earlier, this assistance layer on top of the underlying UI. And what I love about our company and why I think it's so fun to work here is we aggregate the scale of all of our customers. So we're kind of building like a pretty unique interface lab that reaches a ton of users, a ton of different types of users all over the world, different demographics, you know, B2C, B2B, HR software, dev tools. And we're able to work with our customers to run experiments to see what works best, like whether it's a trigger for a nudge or whether it's, you know, how to generate, uh, or how to launch a product tour. from a user's question in a way that encourages them to take it and that they actually get through. It's just a really fun lab-like environment. And we actually have the scale now to run experiments and, and kind of optimize. And that's just so cool because it's, it's, it's stepped towards, I think, solving this coordination problem of like, no, we can actually start to innovate because we have the scale, uh, beyond just like kind of your standard web app. So that's what I mean by like, I forgot the term I used. What is it? What was the interface? Design lab or research lab?

Like, reinvent is what I think the right word is because it talks about like reinventing the interface infrastructure of the internet, you know.

Yeah, yeah, interface. By interface infrastructure, I mean those layers that we're like peeling off, um, to handle for our customers. And then in those, we can run experiments to see what works best for users.

Interesting. I feel, again, I think it's such a big, humongous task that you're kind of like taking on. It's not simple because it's a lot about like behavioral things that comes into picture. Any specific challenges that you faced during building CommandBar in 3, 4 years of your time? What are some things that felt impossible? like to do, but you're still kind of using perseverance and, you know, patience to achieve it. Like, do you want to share some, some, you know, inside stories that, you know, people never heard of?

I'll say, I think the thing that, uh, has been consistent throughout is we didn't talk a lot about like the origin of CommandBar, but the 30-second version is we started off solving or trying to achieve all this stuff that we've been talking about with a specific interface. And that was a search interface. Um, and the idea was like, users can search for what they're trying to do and then the search bar can respond. We still have that product. It's called Spotlight. We've added other products since. Um, in adding other products, we decided instead of talking about ourselves as, as like, you know, originally we were just like the search interface company. Um, we started positioning ourselves as a successor to an existing category. The category is called digital adoption. So that's like the pop-up companies. Mm-hmm. And this was like a very, it was very unfamiliar for me because I always felt like, I think a lot of first-time founders that like, oh, if you're doing a startup, it has to be like super new and novel. Why would you start a startup to like innovate in digital adoption? Like, that sounds like, this is like a nauseating set of 3 words. But it ended up being a great decision for us because it helped us reach people who cared about our product and really simplified the way we describe ourselves. But it did lead to a bunch of challenges, which is when you are in a category of one, no one really has any expectations for what you need to, like the features you need to have or the way you need to operate. When we started competing in digital adoption, We heard, we just heard so many objections, like in the category of, oh, you don't have this feature, or we're trying to do things in X way. Can you enable us to do it? Like, like, like here's a Figma, like we want this, can you enable this? And that's challenging for us because our whole shtick is like a lot of the ways that you're trying to help users today are probably not optimal. Or, you know, we think we should, we have a certain perspective on how you should be helping your users in a way that's not annoying. And so there's this kind of constant yin and yang that we have between our customers have ideas or they've been doing something in a certain way and they want a vendor to help them achieve that. But we have our own opinions and sometimes customers will come to us and they'll be like, oh, we're trying to do this, you know, mega sequence of popups. And we're like, yo, I don't think we're a good fit for that. Or here's an idea we have how you could do it better. And sometimes that really resonates and people like the fact that we have an opinion that we're, you know, crowdsourcing from the rest of our customers. And sometimes people don't, um, and they have a really specific vision. And so I think this comes with the territory of like, if you're competing in the same category, you're going to be encountering a market which has existing expectations of how they think you should work. Um, and we've been, we have to kind of walk a tightrope there. Sometimes though, our customers come to us with an ask and it's like, oh my God, that's a great idea. We should totally build that. All of our customers would benefit. So there's a positive side to it as well. But, uh, yeah, it's definitely like when we were just doing the search bar. Mm-hmm. No one cared. Like, we, we could— we had the total free rein to build anything that we wanted because our customers, that's what they were buying. Whereas now they're comparing us to a bunch of other companies that do a bunch of things, a lot of which we don't do because we consider it outdated.

And I assume that you went to YC with the search interface company idea, right? Uh, and you kind of— in short, you basically pivoted and you learned from users. using your own gut, you pivoted and you now it's like more robust, more like, you know, more end-to-end solution type of a thing. How did you convince YC folks, uh, with the, with the search interface thing? I'm just curious because I, I, I ask this a lot of questions about founders who pivot and especially who go to YC. I think most of the founders who go to YC have one idea and they end up succeeding.

Totally. Yeah, there's like awesome success stories of wrecks. was like a pivot 3 weeks before Demo Day or something.

That's a, that's a different, I think, 360-degree pivot. Like, they're doing something now which is completely different from what they entered. So yeah, what was your conviction levels? You know, it's all about conviction about like certain problem and attacking that problem with the help of your team. Yeah, talk to me about that conviction journey, as you know, James Evans' conviction journey from the beginning.

Did you hear these crazy pivot stories? Like, I think Brex was working on like some augmented reality things. So like, you know, there's these crazy hard pivots, which I think are awesome and like should not be stigmatized at all. Like, that's great. There's obviously a ton of examples where that worked. In our case, that original product is still like a big part of our company. So like, you know, a lot of our customers will use Spotlight. So it's not like we— We still have the product and we still have the vision. Uh, and back in YC, we just, the origin story of CommandBar is that was the first thing we built, that search product. We built it as a feature for a different company we were, we were building and working on. And it worked so well that we just got super excited about it. And we applied to YC with nothing besides like, yo, we think this could become a new building block for the internet.

Right. Right.

And then the, the reason we started doing more is because we kept hearing people kept in the first kind of 18 months. After we started the company, um, all we were doing was selling what we now call Spotlight. Back then it was just like CommandBar. That was the product. Mm-hmm. Um, and people kept being like, oh, are you a replacement for, or substitute for these popups? And we were like, we don't care about the popups. We don't know. No perspective. Like, that's old school. We're new school. Yeah. They're kind of, they're both trying to do the same thing, but like, we just, we know nothing about popups basically. It was our take. Because we felt like we were building a new category. We I guess instinct when I heard that was like oh defensive like what do you mean like no we have nothing to do with that old school.

Yeah.

But

then we were like all of a sudden you're all of a sudden you're like Dennis Rodman. Let me let me be different.

All of a sudden we were like you know this the market is actually telling us something about what they want like instead of shying away from it we should be like yeah we are a substitute for this. And that's been honestly one of the greatest decisions because it's just made it so much easier for us to access people who care about our product. But yeah, I, because of the challenge I was sharing earlier, I do think like there's an element of purity in building a category of one thing because you can just like build a vision. The risk is that it becomes an art project and no one cares because you're not able to kind of intersect your view of how the world should work with how the world works today. So you're not able to kind of build to it because if no one uses your art project, then you're not going to see the— Yeah. the vision realized.

Talk to me about that. Let's expand a little bit about that concept, which is I think most people become— or most founders try to invent novel solutions rather than going after a market which is so established. Just give better experience. Don't reinvent the whole wheel, just make a better wheel. You know, that's what I, I kind of phrase it. Talk to me about that struggle. Like, there are some founders who are like passionate about reinventing the wheel. There are some founders who are offering better wheel.

Totally.

So what do you— what is your— yeah, what's your take? Like, you know, what do you suggest for founders to pick a path, you know, in terms of getting successful or doing the right thing ultimately?

I think like globally, like if I'm designing the entrepreneurial ecosystem, we need people in all those buckets across the spectrum from build towards a vision. We need the Palmer Luckys who is working on AR before anyone or VR before anyone else does. And we also need people like Parker Conrad who are innovating and very much within an existing category to build something better. I think my only contribution to the discourse is I think a lot of first-time founders, myself included, don't feel as if the category disruption, like improve on an existing category, is a viable option. Because I think for one, I think it feels like lower status. Like it's just less cool to be built like, oh, I'm, I didn't, I never described CommandBar as like, oh, we're a next generation digital adoption company. 'Cause like, I don't know, it just sounds like kind of lame. It's like, do you really wanna spend your life doing that? I do. Uh, because I think it's really cool, but that's not how I describe it. Um, and so I think a lot of founders start off by trying to build a totally new mousetrap because they feel like that's the cool thing to do. That's, they feel like that's what's gonna get them into YC. They don't know anyone who's doing the, like, the category disruption thing. Right. And then over time, what happens to, you know, people who kind of start to see success is that they, they realize what we did, which is like, no, actually you can achieve a lot more by attaching yourself to an existing category than like trying to drum up this new one out of thin air. Some people succeed at it and it's amazing when it works. So I think that's my only take is like, I think we need both. I think they're all great. But my, what I encourage first-time founders to do is like, do you see an opportunity? to do the category disruption style company. And if you're excited about that, like, just form a perspective on how your thing can be better and then go take it to market. And I think we would, if more people, more first-time founders did that, we would grow the GDP of startups because we would be connecting more great people with opportunity. I just think there's a bit of a lopsided distribution today in that spectrum.

Interesting take. I still think first-time founders should try to offer a better wheel instead of reinventing the wheel.

Yeah.

I mean, because I think there is an element of experience that's missing in the beginning, right? I think once you have that experience, you have that command, you have leverage, you have network, And a lot of things kind of add to your name, which will allow— I don't know. I think, like you said, it's like mixed views floating around. Let's talk about your founder mentality. In your journey building CommandBar as a first-time founder, what is something that you've kind of undershadowed, but you realize like, okay, you know what, this is something I need to double down on, uh, that you want to share with us?

I think this is a relatively like— I think other people have shared this take, but I really felt it viscerally, which is, um, technical founders dramatically underweight the value of sales. Um, especially in like, uh, these category disruption situations. I used to think like,

Mm-hmm.

People joke about like, oh, build and they will come. But like, I, I really think a lot of people do believe that, um, that if you build a better widget, like sales is about like booking the call, doing the demo, you know, it's, it's kind of like a, like a process management function. And that like could not be farther from the truth. Um, For founder-led sales, like I think I, you know, went through like a multi-year journey to become serviceable at founder-led sales. I went from like, you know, hopping into the demo as fast as possible and just being like really eager to like show off the cool thing I'd built to like, you know, learning how to ask open-ended questions and like trying to understand, okay, what initiatives does my thing map to? So I think my advice for first-time founders is like find Find a founder friend who has been through this, the founder-led journey, has gone from the build it and they will come mentality to like the, oh, sales is important as a skill mentality and have them coach you. I think it's hard to have anyone else do that coaching. Like, yeah, you could find like a sales mentor, but I think you really need like a founder who's been in your shoes to kind of appropriately frame to you like how important the work is. And that doesn't change, by the way, like when you hire a sales team, there's so much like artistry and science that goes into connecting the cool thing you've built with like people who can actually buy it. So I like my, my appreciation for sales has gone through the roof.

I think Steve Jobs, even like Naval Ravikant, you know, they all said this multiple times. If you build and you can sell, you're unstoppable. Uh, I think a lot, lot, lot, lot of founders come in that first category, which is building. They stumble upon like selling, you know, selling as a salesman. What I mean by that is not just selling as a, as a product builder.

Yeah.

In your opinion, like, you know, I think sales is really important, period. Like, you know, uh, because it's because of B2B, you need sales, or what do you think about sales, the role of sales in generally, like, you know, in, in startup lifecycle, when they should— when a founder should pay attention to it, uh, or bring into picture, like, okay, this is a serious pillar you need to, like, add a foundation to?

I think something that clicked for me with sales, and I think this is true of a lot of, like, younger, um, technical founders, is I used to feel like sales Like once I established that it was important, I felt like my objective in sales scenarios was make the other person feel like I'm really smart or make them really like me. And neither of these things are the objective, which is a bit counterintuitive. Like you're, you know, a high-performing young person and you wanna start a company. Yeah. Like, it feels like those 2 things are like very reasonable goals to optimize for. But they're not, they're just, it's, it's not the goal. The goal of a sales conversation is to get information that can help you assess whether the person you're talking to is a good fit for your product and then the best way to get them to use it. And often that can mean like asking a dumb open-ended question. Like I used to research the shit out of the people I would meet with and I would have the most thought, you know, well-crafted agenda that like referenced things they'd written and things their company had shipped. And a lot of those, in a lot of those scenarios, I would've been way better off just being like, hey, yeah, tell me what spoke to you about CommandBar. Or like, what are your priorities this quarter? That question requires no research. It make— does not make me look smart, but it gives the other person a chance to talk. And now I know a little bit about what they care about. Just like shitty example like that. I think I was very much like, you know, I have a question that's really a statement guy. Like I'd ask a question, but what I'm really trying to do is show you that I've done my research and like I'm a smart person. And that is not an effective sales strategy in most scenarios. So I think crossing that chasm of being like, this is a, this is a skill. This is not just like about, you know, interpersonal dynamics the way like sitting next to someone at a dinner party is. Right. It really started to click for me.

I think it's not about who is the better person in the room. It's about really being curious and understanding what they want. And you have, do you have the ability to offer them the solution? And figuring that out itself is sales. I never heard a founder define sales like that. Like that, you are the first person to define sales In a different way. So, I think you made an impression on me starting today because I'm not a sales guy. I hate sales. I don't know how to sell. But I kind of, you know, I have built this SaaS product which actually helped me saw the dynamics of, okay, you have to sell because there's no person to sell. Yeah. So,

no

one's going to do it for you.

Same as the same for—

So I think, I think this definition is different, you know, and asking, being dumb, being curious is actually an advantage, you know, in a, in a demo call.

It changes the objective function cuz you can leave a call being like, I would leave, I can't tell you the number of calls I left in like the first time at CommandBar where I was like, oh, that person loved me. I feel great. Like they said what I was working on was super smart. They like validated, you know, my ego. And then they never follow up. Right. Book, um, great book, unfortunate title called The Mom Test. Um, that talks about this, uh, great, awesome book. A lot of what I'm talking about is just from The Mom Test, but he talks about how you should avoid like compliments at all costs. 'Cause a compliment is really easy to give in a sales scenario. It's way, as the person being sold to, it's so much easier than being like, yeah, I'm interested in your product. I wanna pay you $50,000. Or like, yeah, let's do a trial. Compliment is free, so you should actually beware. You should be wary of compliments, and you can now leave. Now I sometimes leave a sales call that I join being like, "I don't think that person likes me." Like maybe I annoyed them a little bit by like continuing to ask questions or like stonewalling them or whatever, anti-selling me like, "Hey, I don't know if our product is a good fit for you," but we got what we needed, which is like information or there's a concrete next step, and that's the objective function, not like ooh. Am I going to be like friends with this person? Because, I mean, that's not what you're doing.

Get your shit right, man. That's what, you know, we need to tell ourselves, you know. I do have some other questions about content. You know, I think you have a podcast called Happy Paths and you do a lot of content experiments. Talk to me about like the content side of CommandBar. Why do you, why do you, why do you go above and beyond to deliver some of the content that you've written, especially like, you know, for startup advice? That's a separate column filled with, you know, founders' wealth. Yeah,

it doesn't seem like that relevant to our audience. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think the like cheesy answer is like, it's fun to have a blog that I can just, you know, we can just as a company post things that we find interesting, like project it to the world. I do think like. a take I have is that a lot of, like, it's shocking how much of being a founder, like, is still, like, tribal knowledge, like, not taught. And so I think people assume, like, oh, you raise millions of dollars, like, there's, like, then the playbook that you get handed that's like, here are all the things you need to do to, like, not fuck up your company. And that's not that. If that playbook exists, like, I would love if someone would point me to it because I have not had access To it. And so I do try to like take the things that I feel like were particularly opaque or, oh, if I'd learned, if only I'd learned this 2 years in or whatever, like the category positioning thing, like that's like, oh my God, I wish someone, and people probably did, but maybe I just didn't listen. Like it sat me down and been like, yo, you are trying to build a new category. That's like not a good idea. You should probably do this instead. So that's the type of stuff that I just personally like to see us. Publish. I think on the company strategy side, I think it's all just part of our desire to be perceived as like an alive company that has interesting takes on the space. I think the bar is like generally pretty low, but we try to, yeah, we just try to, you very kindly described us earlier as like a company that feels like would be fun to do business with. Like, that's totally the vibe. we're going for. So it's a combination of we have thoughts we want to put into the world. We want to have an alive vibe. And also, like, we do learn a lot, like going back to the research, the interface infrastructure lab topic, like we do learn a lot. And I think a lot of, there's a lot of bad user experience on the internet because best practices are locked away in like internal company wikis that never get published because people just, there's no incentive for companies to have to publish this stuff. We're in an interesting position where we like learn a lot about good UX across all of our customers. And so I try to like,

I

want us to not, uh, I want us to kind of fix that coordination problem by publishing it.

Right. One of the, one of the blog posts, first of all, you know, 100%, I think more, we need more startups like CommandBar do stuff like this. And some folks, they just think that this is cheesy. but it's actually real, right? Like you said, you know, everybody, uh, there's still, there's still a lot more to offer for founders. And, you know, I think going, going back to your point of, you know, there's still very limited knowledge that is available on the internet. It's 2024, by the way. It's not like we're in the '80s.

Totally.

There's so much. Yeah, so that's so cool. So appreciate you for doing that. And because one of the posts I found on on your blog post talks about Gherkin.

Yeah.

I'm a product manager before, and I used Gherkin to write user stories. I mean, like, I so freaking love the format. It's so natural. You're basically talking to your developer as if you're talking to a user, potential user, you know? And I was like, whoa, I never saw anybody talk about that. In a startup level, right? So I found it very fascinating and like, kind of like, you know, it gave me that vibes. You know, I used to use that. There's some relevance even though I never used CommandBar. Like, you know, it was like, okay, I can't, I know these guys. Like, that's the vibe you're trying to achieve. I think you've—

Again, I do want to shout out, like, I think a lot of like startup media is like founders talking about their like grand strategy and how it's like super smart. And like, I love our strategy, don't get me wrong, but like a lot of the good content is powered by excellent humans. Again, like human, uh, humans that like drive, drive the strategy and come up and shape it themselves. So Hugo, Christina, and Finn lead our content team and they just, they kick ass.

Love it. Love it. A couple more things, you know, we have to talk about AI. I think, you know, you being one of the AI companies, right? Uh, it's a pretty dumb question, but I think going back to you, dumb questions open up interesting topics. Uh, so talk about like, why do you, why do you think, why do you think, or where do you think AI is going to go next? And why do you think CommandBar should adapt more of, you know, the technology that's been evolving like literally day to day?

I think AI, I mean, AIs are big, like why now? Like you could ask why, you know, there's been, I, when I described earlier, like how interfaces haven't evolved that much. In the last 20 years, why should we fix it now versus 5 years ago versus 10 years ago? I think there's a few factors at play. We use more products now, user expectations are higher, but I think the big reason we're able to actually develop a solution is the recent developments in large language models. It makes it orders of magnitude more feasible to have personalized responses to user intent and behavior. Like, it's what powers our Copilot product and a bunch of other, a bunch of our other features. It allows us to get like that much closer to that human user assistant analogy. I think this is again, not like a unique consent, unique take, but I think there are probably like a handful of people in the world that have an informed perspective on the scaling hypothesis. And a lot of us just like don't really know what it, what, you know, how, how good is GPT-5 going to be and what features is that going to unlock and how much it's going to cost. Mm-hmm. What we're doing is so far, every 3 to 6 months, there's a big leap forward in capability and a big reduction in cost. And so we're trying to build with the assumption that that will continue to be ahead of the game. Something else that we do, like a good example of this is pricing. So we don't, a lot of people have like are kind of fussy about the fact that, you know, software has COGS now. Um, and we, you know, just have to price our products in a way that can account for the fact that a customer might spend a ton on AI through us. We, uh, don't do cost-plus pricing. We include it as part of our standard enterprise pricing. We take risk on the contracts. Partially because we think the, you know, arrow of progress is toward better and cheaper. So we're not, we're not trying to like concern ourselves with kind of in current costs. I think something else that we're trying to do, which is a bit unique to us, is, uh, it's actually— it's, it's really cool to be working on a product that has like at-scale usage of AI today. Like, we're embedded in a bunch of companies, a bunch of users are using our AI interface. Like, it's not theoretical, it's very concrete. Um, it also creates interesting opportunities for us to, um, take care of some of the like AI infrastructure things or That, you know, again, I talked about peeling off layers of interface infrastructure. And one of those layers is model orchestration. Like, I don't think our customers, uh, in most cases need to worry about what model is powering their user assistance experience. Today, we almost exclusively use OpenAI, but we're very, we're currently testing a bunch of other models. Like our expectation is there's— Mm-hmm. A lot to choose from in the future, different properties.

Right.

And so we are working on model orchestration to optimize for, you know, latency, the standard stuff, latency, accuracy, and cost so that our end users are getting the best experience. And that's not something I think like every company should have to worry about. I think it should be our job because we're, you know, doing it across a bunch of customers. So that's a, it's cool to like sit at that part of the AI ecosystem today where it's like we have the incentive to learn a lot about, you know, the intricacies of these models and test them against, you know, actual, actual, uh, actual end user data.

Love that answer. I think you, you, you give a damn about users, your users, your customers, you know, uh, and provide the best possible solutions, you know, using the technology.

I'm just grateful, man. Like, look, I didn't, you know, we didn't predict the LLM thing. We started the company before the, You know, before, I guess, I guess we started the company, it was maybe GPT-2 era. But like, from our perspective, this thing dropped from the sky. GPT-3 dropped from the sky and we were like, oh my God, like,

we should do it.

This is a huge part of our company now. Um, so tremendously grateful for everyone, uh, who caused that to drop from the sky.

It is, it is. It feels like we're, we're kind of shaping the future going back to the '80s, the way you know, semiconductors transform the future of computers. I think, you know, this is like a, like a big moment, and I'm trying to do the same what you're doing, like kind of being part of the ecosystem in one way or the other way. Uh, last question before we wrap up. I do ask this question to ambitious founders like yourself. What drives you as a founder day to day? Minute to minute, like hour to hour? What is something that keeps you on your toes?

I wish I had, like, a great story of struggle or some massive chip on my shoulder. Honestly, I'm just obsessed with fixing this coordination problem in software. I just think it annoys me that computers have become so powerful, yet Are a lot of the story a lot of users carry around in their heads about like computers and the software they have to use day to day is like, oh, so annoying. Like, ugh, gotta log into this piece of crap again. Like what? Like travel back 100 years and try to explain that scenario to someone like, oh my God. Yeah. We have these magical devices that can like do all this shit instantaneously, access the entirety of human knowledge. And oh my God, they're so annoying. Like what? Like it's just, it just annoys me. I think a lot of founders are, have like, you know, some sort of, have a tendency to become obsessed with problems. And this is just a problem that I think I've fallen into becoming obsessed with. And like the more time I spend here, the more I think there's like a better future that we can build like right now.

And

so that's. That's probably what drives me day to day. The other thing is that as the— it's such a joy to be able to work with other talented people who care as much about the problem as you do. Like, it is so motivating to go through our Slack and just be like, oh my God, all these people are spending their days like working on this thing that I care so much about and like have poured years into my life. And plan to continue to, you know, to work on. Like, it's just awesome. I describe it sometimes as like, the team is what gives the company gravity. Like, there are going to be days where you're like, oh shit, like, is our company real? We just lost the deal. We had a customer churn or whatever, some like calamity. And for me, the thing that like pulls me back to like, no, I just, I gotta stick with it is I just see all these other really talented people. who are working on it and believe the same things as I do. And so that's like, that's not a privilege you have at the early stage. The early stage, it's just you and a few people. Like you really got to have that fire yourself, but it is such an amazing feeling to have others tending to that fire.

I love that. I love that. I think at the end of the day, it's all about people. Users are people, team is people. You, we are all as you know humans. We're doing things.

Hack man. Like yeah, another very nice question is like why do this job instead of another one? It's like dude, this job is amazing. Like yeah, ability to build stuff that you think should exist with like awesome people. Super generic startup take, but like it's it's such a joy. Like it's yeah, it's the best.

I think we we should close on that note because I think that's the that's the best possible. Way to end this, James. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. You you you're building something special. I can sense that already, and I think it almost feels like you are leaving no other option for people like me to root for you. So we've

got

you. You're doing such an incredible. Yeah, I'm already like you know a fan. Everything love everything you're doing. And any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

No, thanks for having me. Thanks for the thoughtful mix of well-researched and open-ended questions. Very

masterfully done. I try, I try at least. But I do this for listeners. I think at the end of the day, this is value for people. We try to inspire them in one way or the other and learn, teach. And, you know, make them better in their startup journeys. That's all I care about. That's what I do the podcast, you know. So love, love bringing people like you and stay tuned, folks. You know, thanks for listening. Appreciate you for giving us your time and attention. More, more amazing founders are on the way to join the podcast. So stay tuned. Cheers.

Thanks for having me.