02: Doing Investor Updates the Right Way with Mike Preuss of Visible

This is Dan Hightower with Product Market Misfits talking about the exploding market of startups building solutions for other startups. And an amazing company in this space was founded by Mike Pruess at Visible.vc, which helps founders raise capital, update investors, and engage their team from one single platform. I am super excited to have Mike on the show today. Before we get started, I want to mention an incredible organization that I love, Girls Who Code. Girls Who Code is here to change the face of tech. The international nonprofit runs virtual computer science programming for girls of all ages. Visit girlshocode.com to learn more and to access their free online and offline coding activities, or follow them on social media @girlshocode on all channels. I also want to briefly thank Christian Anderson, partner at High Alpha, and Harry Hurst, founder and CEO of Pipe.com, for their great questions to ask Mike. Hey Mike, how are we today?

Man, Dan, thanks for having me. Really excited to, to be on the podcast. I'm doing great, all things considered. You know, a lot going on in the world, no real complaints on my side, so excited to chat today.

Yeah, here comes Q4. All of a sudden and got that cold air burn in my lungs today from, from like a 2-mile run. So here's fall. So yeah, before we dig into how awesome you are and Visible is, I'd love to hear how you got to where you are today. And especially just as an icebreaker, what's the absolute biggest mistake you've made so far? Could be product growth, fundraising, anything.

Yeah, that's a good question. Probably a loaded one. I've made— I've certainly made quite a few mistakes. I think like the overarching theme though, past all of my mistakes I've made, this might be a cop-out answer, but when I look at like all the different mistakes Vizible has made over the past 6 years of the business, for me it kind of comes down to just not trusting my gut and trusting it fast enough. I think that's the one piece of advice I always give to other founders as well is kind of listen to your your gut and what does your gut say and act on it faster and try to act on it faster each time. So that could be having to let someone go, make a tough decision. When, for me, I guess, you know, early on, one of the things that Visible did when we originally launched the business was start by selling to investors. And early on, kind of in that journey of selling the product for investors and to investors, I was like, man, really think we should probably sell this to founders and talk to a lot of people around the table and mentors and stuck with the investor path probably for too long. And so I guess my short answer is, yeah, just not trusting my gut fast enough is probably my biggest mistake, but also biggest learning I've had so far as being a founder of a business.

So you started off thinking that Visible would be a tool licensed by investors that they would use They would like their portfolio.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. So when we first started the business, the idea was a modern kind of portfolio management tool for investors. So a lot of this, like many SaaS apps, right, is being handled in SaaS spreadsheets. There's no source of truth for anything. It's just information in all these different disparate places. Like email, PowerPoint, text messages, phone calls. And so we said, hey, let's build a tool for investors. And then, you know, founders would be able to use it and provide updates to those investors and KPIs and their cap table and all these different things. So we did a lot, like the original kind of product did do a lot or promised to do a lot. And I think we just did nothing great, right? We had all these different experiences in the app and none of them solved a problem well enough to be kind of warrant like success. And so we just were, a mile wide and an inch deep on a lot of feature set and functionality, paired with just a challenging market to sell into. And so I think it was just, we kind of wavered for a little bit in terms of the initial business.

Yeah. So when you got started, backing up like briefly here, you saw this pain, no source of truth, I heard a number of others that I'm sure you could shed some light on. How did you go from that moment to We're going to start a company called Visible, like right there, how'd you make the decision?

Yeah, so I was at a company called Formspring. I think you mentioned in the intro there, and towards the end of that, I was fortunate in that I got to wear a lot of different hats and was looking to do my next thing and worked with— did some like investor slides and board reporting. And so I kind of saw some of that from inside, from the founder perspective. But I was actually approached by a group called High Alpha. This kind of predates High Alpha, this is 2014. High Alpha launched in 2015. High Alpha is a B2B enterprise SaaS venture fund, but also a studio located in Indianapolis. So I started it with Christian Anderson, who you mentioned, and Mike Fitzgerald. Yeah. Kind of, this is like the prototype for High Alpha. So High Alpha didn't even exist yet. They said, hey, we have this idea of building this venture studio. It's really never been done before. So we kind of built the prototype and I remember looking at the first kind of HTML prototype of like, you could load it up in a web browser. It was like all dummy data hardcoded on the backend, but like the app on the frontend. I was sitting on a plane, just landed in San Francisco, and a good friend of mine, Max Yoder, sent me a text. He said, hey, check this out. What do you think about this? He was starting a company about a year before me called Lessonly with the same, with the same team. And said, hey, they need someone to come run this. So Visible, kind of when we started the business, I was brought in to run it and help kind of spin up the, the, the business of Visible with the High Alpha team. So it was kind of a weird scenario in which it wasn't like my baby or this desire or passion that I had. It certainly is now today, fast forward. Yeah. But when I started, I was kind of brought in from the outside to come and help start it in a full-time capacity.

Okay, so this is unique. Can you talk about being launched out of a venture studio?

Absolutely.

Is it like a traditional— like, do you have to talk them into investing after you've been a part of the venture studio, or does that just come with it? It may be unique to High Alpha, but—

Yeah, I'm happy to share my experience and talk a little bit about the High Alpha model, or at least I know. So HighLevel launched in, I believe, April of 2015. Very different than, than when we built Visible and Lessly, just for some context. So when we were starting Visible, it was kind of like a nights and weekends moonlit project from a lot of us that were starting it. Like, we would all throw in some time or resources, like, hey, I have a designer, we can, you know, do a couple mockups today, or I have some spare engineering time and we can build, you know, the billing experience or what have you. But for the kind of first year, it was all of us Putting a little bit of time at Monday, you know, we'd have a call with everyone and say, hey, here's what we think we can do this week or where we could chip in. And then that's kind of how we started, right? That then had enough conviction in the high office team, enough conviction around the success they had with a company called Sixer, which has now been acquired by Terminus. Lessonly has raised quite a bit of funding and is a huge business in general. A company called Octave was acquired by Conga. They've had a lot of conviction around these businesses they started. kind of this ragtag capacity to actually create a venture studio and raise capital for it. So very different. Like, it was just kind of me in my apartment in San Francisco, and that was kind of it. 2015, the High Alpha launch with a proper studio, and that experience is awesome. It's way different. They provide design resources, financial resources, and both in terms of like finance people, but also every single capital gets where every single company gets capital onto the balance sheet, recruiting, design, partners, fundraising help. And so I think we took a lot of the experiences we had early on and that helped inform the studio. And then in terms of your question around pitching, the studio is interesting. I don't think there is a right answer or a common trait amongst all of the studio companies. Some of them are conjured up in what's called Sprint Week, where those folks, everyone at High Alpha, outside people come in and guest, And they break into teams of 5, 6, 7 teams, work for a week and decide like, hey, here are the businesses we think could be really interesting. And that goal of the week is to kind of come up with a prototype of that business and the pitch for it. Sometimes those are outside founders that are coming in and saying, hey, I wanna start this business in this studio with you. Or sometimes those are internal ideas, ideas from external stakeholders, maybe a big corporate or enterprise person. So I don't think there is a right answer there, But if you are kind of a founder with an idea, then yeah, I think it is kind of like getting a traditional investment in the sense that you're pitching Y Combinator, like, hey, I would love to be part of your Sprint Week program and potentially turn this into a business with you.

Okay. So it sounds like you get access to a ton of input, support, and that probably leads to a ton of insights, especially around like early product and how it might fit into a market. You mentioned earlier that originally you were targeting investors. I'm curious if like all that studio input was formative as you switched gears to targeting startups as your customer.

Yeah, I think for, for us, it was— we're kind of like red-headed stepchild of HighAlpha in a way, in a good way. I think we would all, we would all say that in a sense that we kind of started before the studio, and it kind of rolled our equity and everything into the studio. But in terms of the decision to pivot, I think it was, we know we're not serving any of these customers great, and customers are certainly churning. These are venture funds at the time. We're hearing from people that there's a ton of pushback, whether that's on price or product or just getting an end user adopted. I think one of the big hurdles early on with the original Visible was we were selling to a venture fund who is price sensitive, being pitched all of the time, whether that's for investment or time or what have you. So you had to create a lot of signal just to get into that person or that investor and, you know, price sensitive. So we kind of looked at that and said— Oh, and the other thing is, sorry, around the kind of price sensitivity is, you know, you would sell an investor and then you would have to have all of their portfolio companies adopt and and use Visible as well, even if the tool was free. And that's sometimes that's even harder. Yeah. And so we said, why don't we just start with the founder first and foremost and see if we can build a really valuable experience for them? We're going to remove all of these degrees of separation. We can probably build a bigger business, do things a little bit faster, and then come back to, to the investor product at some point. So actually this year we did, we think we learned from the first go-around and what's old is new. And we relaunched our product for investors. And it's been selling incredibly well. We haven't had anyone leave. We haven't lost any customers from that product yet. It's very different than like the first iteration of Vizable. So I think it's a lot of the learnings we've had and the fact that we kind of built everything now with the founder in mind. So we're always thinking founder first and foremost, like I said. So I think we've learned hopefully and kind of pivoted our way back to again the investor product.

Okay, that's super interesting. So I guess you hear out there that selling products like software to other startups is this growth hack because all the startups out there is like super hungry, they move fast, they make decisions, they've got some money to play with, they'll try things. Did you find that to be true? Is that part of like the, the benefit of selling to startups, or is that just

I do subscribe to that, right? I think startups are usually on the bleeding edge of things. And for us, you know, if they're willing to try a product, they are willing to buy a product online, you know, trust credit card checkout. I mean, it's kind of funny to think pre-Stripe, like, how did I buy software online? You know, companies are willing to try things, buy things, adopt them. So I definitely think that's true. I also think that when you're dealing with startups, especially when you're on kind of the bleeding edge of what you're trying to do, product requirements are usually pretty high in terms of like, hey, it needs to be able to do these things. You know, it's got to be beautiful. It's got to have this incredible user experience. Those are all like table stakes, I think, when you're dealing with startups. Yeah. Because they're used to great software. And so you really have to finish the product and have an awesome experience when you're servicing those types of customers. But yeah, I think like someone tweeted recently about like every single, you know, every single startup I've seen now has like Brex as a customer, right? Who is probably— you could— we could debate if that's even a startup at this point. But that idea, right, that they quickly buy software and use it and implement it, I think is a great benefit. But I do think the product requirements are high. Whereas if you think about selling a product or servicing a customer, that's maybe more enterprise or commercial in nature. I think their product requirements and the wow factor is actually pretty low. Like just being able to sign in painlessly sometimes online to something, they're like, whoa, this is incredible. So I think there's pros and cons to servicing startups. I think the other thing with startups as well, depending on what stage you're selling into that type of company is, one, are they going to be around? So do you have churn risk? Right. And then 2 is just like, where do you fall in terms of the priority in that company internally. So many things that company could be pivoting priorities and changing things all the time. So I think that's, that's the other kind of con of selling into a startup customer base.

Yeah. Okay. So the product, I'd love to like dive into that a little bit. You always hear you should, as a startup, always be raising. So I did an interview with a founder recently, Shannon Goggin at Noyo, and her like secret weapon was investor updates.

Love it.

She said it was just like fundamental for their raise to the point where like they didn't have a fundraising process. They just kind of were updating investors along the way and investors were like, please take a check essentially at the right time. So they're super important and I know that just on your website, that's a part of your product. I'd love to hear more about how you think about that. And then what's interesting to me is startups need to keep their investors updated, but also VCs need to keep their investors updated. And I'm curious if there is— was that the reawakening of your VC or investor customer at that point? Yeah.

Yeah, great, great questions. So let's start with kind of the always fundraising concept, which I think nails it. When we started really thinking about Visible and where we fit in the market and just our messaging, we think like the fundraising experience for a founder is the same as what a B2B enterprise SaaS selling motion is, right? So you have Kind of your prospecting and awareness of your brand at the top of the funnel, and then all the way at the bottom of the funnel, you have kind of current investors, which I would call like customer success, right? And then in the middle, you have things like I'm currently fundraising, so I'm putting a pipeline together and having meetings, and those meetings are progressing, and hopefully I get a couple— a term sheet or more at the end of that whole process. And so when you break down that B2B funnel, and think about the best kind of experiences online, I think a lot of it comes down to marketing and like nurturing your prospects and doing it in a really smart way. And so that example of kind of not even having to pitch because she was using investor updates is exactly how we think about our, you know, why you should use Visible. So if I'm sending an investor update out every month of something about my business, to potential investors. I'm staying top of mind to them. I'm showing progress along the way and probably building a relationship with them through that mechanism. Because remember, like, a big part of this whole kind of song and dance of fundraising is building a relationship with these people. It's, you know, with investors. It's, hey, I'm signing up for the next 10 years or whatever with these people, with investors. So very rarely will someone write a check in the first meeting. There's the adage of investors invest in lines and not dots. And so I think what investor updates help you do is kind of connect the dots. And it really lets an investor see how fast you're moving, gaining traction, or even not, right? Like, I think if you're honest with the challenges of your business to potential investors, that's like a breath of fresh air. And so You want to be smart about it. Like, I, you know, if we're getting into some more tactical advice, I would say there's probably an update that you send to your current investors, and then there's an update you send to your potential ones. And it's like a Venn diagram. Some of the content you include is the same and some is not. Like, you're not— you don't want to necessarily share things like maybe cash burn or position in a potential email, but you definitely want to share things like, here are key customer wins we've had, maybe certain metrics growing. certain amount, and it's kind of a sizzle. Yeah. So, so yeah, I think like updates are a great mechanism where, uh, you can, you can really leverage them to, to, for, for financing. Harry, Harry, who you mentioned, CEO of Pipe and one of our customers, he's used Visible twice. So he, he started a company called Skirt and was a customer with, with us there and sold Skirt and then started Pipe and became a customer of Visible and just using it for updates. Through a recent raise, he took like, there's a potential investor. He just sent his past 3 investor updates to that potential investor and they committed to a check right there, just through the narrative of what Harry was saying through those updates. So definitely a huge, a huge kind of cheat code, if you will, when it comes to fundraising strategy.

So almost like a backlog, like as a fast-forward update on like how the company has been going.

Yeah.

Okay. It's like the timeline slide in a pitch deck, but yeah. Yeah,

exactly. And a lot of times in diligence, you know, depending on the stage, investors will ask for like, hey, can you please send me your last 12 investor updates, your last 12 months of investor updates? If you don't have them, that's a really bad sign. But, you know, done correctly, they help weave a narrative and will let the investor kind of see like, hey, how can I expect for you to engage with me after we write the check. So there's a lot of times in diligence, especially later, like, I'm not sure if that's obviously not so common when you're talking super early stages, but call it Series A, investors will certainly want to see your historical investor updates.

Okay, so you mentioned about around the time you switched gears to targeting customers, and we've talked about, you know, always be raising. Was the investor update functionality your earliest indication of product-market fit? Do you remember the moment where you were like, oh man, this is actually working?

Yeah, I wish I remembered the moment and maybe there wasn't even a moment, but investor updates kind of were where we felt really confident about the business and product-market fit. And I think it was around the time of we kind of said, hey, what's One thing we kept hearing, and I guess some of our learnings from, from the investor product helped us too, is like the things we kept hearing over and over again are people don't want to sign up for yet another service or app, right? Like, I'm managing so many different tools and things that I'm using in my business, and then trying to make an investor sign up or sign into something, or a founder to do so, when they're not part of your team, is really hard to do. And so we said, okay, Knowing that kind of design constraint or principle, where do we think we could take the business? And so one of the decisions we made is investor updates are going to be able to be fully rendered in email. So anything I build invisible in our update editor has to be able to be rendered in email, whether that's a data visualization like a chart, a file, a video even, right? How do we make sure that everything you build in a web browser is put in email so that no one has to sign up or sign into something because everyone has, you know, email? So how do I open my inbox and view all the of the content I produce in Vizable without actually having to sign up or sign into it. So that's— that was a big decision for us. And so we help founders look great and to, you know, to their investors and kind of have that like, oh yeah, this company knows what they're doing. And investor doesn't have to sign up or sign into anything. And now more recently on the flip side of that is the way we've architected and built the investor tooling is that founders don't have to sign up or sign into Vizable to provide data or updates back to those investors. And so we've built it and it's, you know, it's not that hard, right? It's kind of more or less a Google, a glorified Google Form, maybe a little bit better, but it's really seamless. And we actually now more recently connected both of those products together so that if I'm using the company product or the investor product, they can actually all be integrated into one another and almost automate that entire process, which is kind of how Visible got started. Just took us a little bit longer to get there because we had to build great experiences for each of those different people.

Cool. And then proving out the value of the product, I get it as a founder who's tried to raise money. How do you— how did you find out the willingness to pay for it on the customer side?

Yeah, so the— we just keep testing and we keep raising prices, to be honest. So when we first launched and kind of pivoted, so this is a couple years ago, from servicing investors as customers to companies, we started freemium. And thinking back on this, it was— so the product was free for founder use. And then if you wanted to upgrade, I think our first kind of thing we gated was like multiple dashboards. Hey, if you want multiple dashboards within Visible that can kind of put your KPIs in one place for your current or different investors, we're going to charge you for that. It's obviously iterated, so we don't offer a free plan anymore. And I think our first paying customer was on the company side was Rival IQ, which is a startup actually here in Seattle. And I met John Clark, he's the CEO there, face to face. And I think we sold him a $19 a month plan. So like clearly not scalable from like a go-to-market perspective, but we wanted to like prove like, hey, will people pay for this? And so Pricing now on the company side, we keep pushing it up, testing it and seeing what kind of adoption we can get. Right now, our average contract size for founders is around $140 a month that they're paying us. I think we're actually probably in a sweet spot on the high end for Visible. It tops out at $199 a month. And we're about to roll out a light version of Visible, Visible Lite, that's going to be probably in the $29 a month range, because I think we're actually missing quite a bit on the early side. Like, think a company that's just getting started that wants to send investor updates and manage a fundraising process, but doesn't need all the bells and whistles of data integrations and dashboards and some of the other features we offer. Someone that even may be like, hey, I'll put this on my personal credit card. So we're going to test a Lite plan. And I think the test is, can we convert customers at a higher clip than we are today? And more importantly is everyone talks about like net dollar retention and can you get more than 100%? And if you can get more than 100% in the SMB market, which I consider visible, they say you're doing great. And so for this, the test is, can we consistently land customers and expand them as our company grows from $29 to $99 to $199 a month? So we're kind of figuring out pricing. We started low, we kept raising it. There's like the rule of thumb that like 20% of your customers should say no to price. So we certainly get people saying, hey, this is too expensive to me, which is I think a healthy thing. We consider ourselves a premium product, but we are going to start testing something on the lower end as well.

Okay. Well, it's paying off because I heard from Harriet Pipe that Visible is effectively growing each year without burning any capital. How do you balance burn, funding, and growth while also trying to create more long-term enterprise value?

Yeah, a lot of sleepless nights. Yeah. With me crunching numbers in my head when I'm trying to sleep. But yeah, so that's a good question. We, a couple of years ago, you know, so Visible raised some money. and looked at the business and what the business we wanted to build. And we're like, man, we love kind of building tools for startups and investors, and made the decision that we wanted to kind of own our own destiny and not be reliant on outside capital and continue to build tools for startups and investors while helping like pivot the business again and tell this bigger story of how Vizual is not only being used by startups, but And, you know, big enterprise customers. And so we did a lot of that. So it was a very conscious decision to turn the business into profitability. And it was, I mean, it was, I mean, obviously it was hard for a while, right? When you don't have unlimited resources, but I think there's a certain truth to a lot of the things you read online around fundraising and constraint. Like the more constrained we made the business, the better we performed. I think you just make smarter decisions on where do I spend my time and my money? So I guess in terms of how we balance everything, I think all of the things that we think about at Visible are how do we make sure we're building something for scale in the sense that it'll be widely used across all customers, not just a single customer. And, and at the end of the day, now we're all accounted for, for, for revenue. So we kind of always are balancing top of funnel. So like, all right, how do we bring in more trialers and users? And there's kind of 3 ways Visible gets customers there: organic search, paid search, and referrals. Referrals kind of both on and offline, like blogs or people finding us through a podcast, for example. Organic search is, you know, pretty straightforward. We build content we think founders will love and find and read, and then that gets them into our world. And then there's paid search, which is kind of your most direct, like investor update template, hopefully Visible shows up there in AdWords, right? So we can invest there in terms of time or money. I think for us, you know, organic search is huge for us and that doesn't cost any money, right? So we really think about how do we compound organic search as a strategy for us so we don't have to spend money on paid or other channels. Then we have the middle of the funnel, which is like people starting trials. And we started to get pretty sophisticated around scoring trials. So when people do certain things on trials, we know they're more likely to become customers. How do we actually kind of— and we know certain things create customers, right? So if I connect to an integration, for example, we know you have a better likelihood of becoming a customer if I send an update. So how can we orient the onboarding experience for you to kind of become what we call a product qualified trial? And then finally, there's like the end of the funnel. which is like, all right, converting those people now to customers. And so we're always kind of managing the balance of all 3 of those things and at different times of the business. So, you know, call it for the first— I'm just trying to think, like last year, for example, we had a big emphasis on just kind of middle of the funnel. How do we make sure we're converting trialers? For this year was really a lot of top of funnel. So we've invested a lot in organic in getting smarter just about technical SEO. So we've brought on some really amazing people that kind of have cut their teeth and know everything there is to know about SEO. We've brought those people on board in a consulting capacity to help us get our things together, and that's paying off. And now we're kind of actually switching gears to the bottom of the funnel again, like I mentioned, around the Lite plan and testing some things. Yeah. So I don't think there's any one answer in terms of how we're balancing all those things. Our goal is to run Visible at kind of just break-even, right? We're not burning any money, but we're not putting any money in the bank account. You know, we always want to invest everything back into growth. And so Pipe is actually not— this is a shameless plug for Harry and Pipe. We're just— we become good friends, but Pipe has really allowed us to do that too, because we're able to turn some of our monthly customers and convert them as if they're paying us annually, so we can kind of pull forward some of that. That annual cash flow from those folks through Pipe, and we pay them a small percentage of that, which is, which has been a huge game changer for us.

Yeah, they're a total game changer. I mean, especially this doesn't really— I mean, your contract value is, uh, solid. When my background, like enterprise, when you're dealing with large contract values where the customer is less likely to just voluntarily pay upfront and you end up extending that like discount to sweeten the deal to get them to pay upfront. That's where Pipe just crushes it for me. I'm super excited about that product. Okay. So your product is like about keeping investors aligned.

Yep.

I'm curious, do you eat your dog food? Like, do you drink your own Kool-Aid? Do you use Visible to keep your like Team update, company progress, or how do you keep your remote team aligned if not?

Yeah. So we use Visible. I use Visible every week. So every week I'll send out an update, typically Monday. I'll send out an update right in the morning, kind of outlining the metrics from the prior week. And then we'll talk through things this week on our team call. So we definitely dogfood. And it's something fun was that I just wrote an email to the entire team back in like a quarter or 2 ago when we launched our new investor product. And I just said, hey, I'm giving all of you $20 million, and I want you to go invest in 10 startups of your choice, and I need you to report to me every quarter about how those— how your portfolio is performing. This is a fun exercise for us to dogfood the investor product as well. So we definitely dogfood our products. And in terms of staying aligned, I think we continue to get better at it, and it's something we put a lot of thought into. as a remote team. So we have kind of a quick breakdown. So we do 2 offsites a year where everyone gets together, the team, and we'll drive strategy for kind of that half of the year coming up. So like our last one was in Barcelona. We got together and that's where we did a lot of the strategy around our fundraising tool that you mentioned and the investor database. So a lot of that came from that offsite. So we do kind of 2— we have 2 offsites a year. What we'll do and kind of talk about high-level strategy for 6 months. And then from there, we run what's called cycles, where it's kind of— it's stolen from Basecamp and 37signals. I'm a huge fan of it, where we'll break our strategy down into kind of 8-week chunks. And so in those 8 weeks, you spend 2 weeks purely from a product perspective kind of just planning. What you want to build, why you want to build it, writing, kind of doing some fat marker sketches of product, talking about what it can and cannot do. And everything you build can either— it has to be shipped in 6 weeks. So the idea here is, how do we innovate and build without having a project run more than 6 weeks? And if that's— if it's at the end of those 6 weeks, we kill it, or maybe we decide to do another, kind of extend it. So we run those cycles. Those have been huge, by the way. We're definitely a big fan. It allows us— it's kind of scary when you think about startups and how fast you should move. Like, man, taking 2 weeks off and not doing any kind of like true coding or development is scary, but it actually allows us to really think through the entire experience, both from a user perspective, but also like the customer. So we run cycles and then on a weekly basis, you know, we try to be This is also a fine balance when you're dealing with a remote team. I'm sure a lot of people even just that are now— were forced into remote are feeling this, but how do you balance asynchronous work? Because there's a ton of benefits to doing things asynchronously with like team culture and collaboration and making sure that we're like, you know, kind of thinking through things together in real time. So we're always kind of testing and iterating there, but every Monday morning we get together as a team and do a team call, review metrics and priorities for the week. Tuesdays is when kind of the product teams get together. We'll talk through product and marketing and go-to-market. And then Thursday is usually a show and tell of some sort, whether that's something someone's built for the marketing site or products, and everyone gets to collaborate there. And then we'll do design sprints and stuff like that throughout the different cycles, but that's how we think about it kind of from a top-down Keeping everyone aligned.

That's awesome. So for your— this is something that I struggle with at my company.

Yeah,

there's back and forth on— you were talking about asynchronous communication, synchronous comms, scheduling your like all-hands team Zoom meetings.

Yep.

How do you think about that like, like tactically during the week? Do you have like a Monday kickoff? Or how does it go?

Yeah, so there's a Monday kickoff and it's at 7:00 AM my time here in Pacific. So it's certainly early. And that's because it used to be 9:00 AM when I lived in Chicago. And we have people in Europe on the team. So we try to make it convenient for everybody. So the earliest is like 7:00 AM, but we have all hands 7:00 AM and that's where everyone— so You know, I'll review things, then everyone's going to go around kind of round robin style since we're only 9, and I'm going to talk through my priorities for the week, and then everyone gives thanks to another team member for something that they helped them with the week prior.

Oh, I like that.

From that, you know, we'll definitely spur a conversation like, hey, let's pair together this week on certain things, or hey, Anna, I need to get with you on this billing thing I'm working through. So we'll kind of spare— that'll kind of spur like, oh, here's some kind of like Other quick things I need to pop up and pair with someone on. So everyone gets together on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do another kind of standup/show and tell, and then— or sorry, on Thursdays. And then on Tuesdays is when we'll get together with the respective teams. So we'll go through like your typical kind of engineering or product standups on Tuesday morning. We'll go through those and talk through, hey, here are the things I'm working on. Here's where I'm stuck or blocked. Maybe it's something with copy or a certain mockup. Or maybe it's an engine, something that's actually blocking from the technical side. So we'll talk through those Tuesday, and then Tuesday afternoon is when we do our, our go-to-market stand-up.

Right on, sounds like a good game plan. Okay, so wrapping up,

sure,

let's talk some secret weapons, the, the things that give you this like unfair advantage in your work and life. I'll bring up some questions, you tell me really quick what your secret weapon is for it and just like briefly why. So what is your secret weapon for personal learning?

Personal learning secret weapon. I love— I do love reading and consuming content, and I personally use an app called Raindrop that just like lets me bookmark or manage certain things. So if I read an interesting article, I'll put it in there or save it to read later, and I can kind of tag things and search them later. So for me, Yeah, I use Raindrop. It's kind of like an Instapaper or Pocket, what have you, but love reading. And particularly because I love being able to help founders in our community and our customers. So if we're kind of always up to date with what's going on in the ecosystem or market, we're better able to help serve those founders or customers, whether it's someone that needs help with hiring, or maybe I need help with a financial model. We can hopefully point you to the latest best practices, tools, trends, or connect you with the right people. So that's, that's a big one for, for me and the company.

Your personal learning is like your content plan for your company.

Yeah, it really is.

That's cool. Okay, so you touched on it earlier with something you guys do in your standup meetings, which is thanking another team member for something that you helped out with. So what is your secret weapon for team culture? Is that it, or is there like—

For us, it's called harmony. And, you know, when we first started the company, you always kind of hear about like work-life balance, and that's certainly become even way more blurred than it even was before, like pre-COVID, call it 2019 and before. I think people are always like, oh yeah, we have this great work-life balance. I don't really prescribe to that. I think there's just life what you do happens to be part of life. And so we, you know, have really talked about this idea of harmony invisible. And it doesn't mean that like everything's like, yeah, work 30 hours a week. It's, it's how do I have harmony in that? Like, hey, sometimes like we just did this last cycle where I asked a lot of everyone. I said, there's 3 really big things we need to do and we want to do them now. And I expect everyone to come with their best foot forward and it's gonna be hard. We succeeded and we did it. That's not sustainable though. And so I think there's always this idea of harmony and taking time off when you need it. And even during COVID you know, every couple of weeks I just told everyone to take Friday off, right? Because no one was traveling or wanting to leave. And so harmony is a big one. So that's kind of like our secret weapon is like, what I've realized is that just because you're working more hours or your butt's in a chair doesn't mean you're actually more productive. Yeah. And we have a lot of data to back that up, I think. As well.

That makes sense. Okay, last one, secret weapon. All right, so all of the things that you license, all of the software tools that you license at Visible, which one is like— if you had to pick one, what's your secret weapon?

I love Metabase. So my original answer was going to be Segment, which I think is like fairly well known from analytics. So we're fairly data-driven with a lot of what we do, but like I think everyone kind of knows about Segment We're huge fans of Metabase, which is just kind of an open source free BI tool, and Segment's plugged into that. So it's kind of a cheat, but huge fans of Metabase. It allows anyone on the team to kind of ask questions about the product or business and have everything accessible. And if you want to write SQL, you can. But I think, you know, great cultures usually have a— I think if you asked everyone that If you ask companies who has great culture and then you ask those people what makes it great, I think transparency is one of them. And so, you know, the goal with Metabase is that anyone at any time can see how a particular product is performing or the business was performing or people are using certain features. And that's great, right? Because then it helps us also identify like, hey, what products should we think about sunsetting? Because like a lot of times we'll be like, hey, we need that. I'm the one that's most guilty of that. And then we can kind of see after we build it and test, like, are people actually using it or not?

All right. Awesome, Mike. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. It's been amazing. And thank you, listeners, for listening. And please subscribe for more amazing conversations with venture-backed founders like Mike. And you can find the notes from this episode at productmarketmisfits.com.