Getting SaaS-y with Hiten Shah

The whole time? Well, not the whole time, but at like, one point when he was talking about road maps, I just kept hearing back to the future. Where we're going, we don't need roads. But I mean, what maps?

Where we're going, we don't need road map.

I see you're trying to complete the joke for me.

Yeah, yeah.

Hello and welcome to Talking Too Loud with Chris Savage. I'm your host, Chris Savage. I am joined by. By Sylvie Lubow. As always. Here we are, back again.

Hey, guys. Hello.

New setup for you today? Looks great.

Trying different things. Trying different things. Moving things around. Gotta keep everybody on their toes, including me. Including myself.

Gotta keep it fresh.

Yeah.

Am I seeing the same image? No, it looks like it's like a bizarre mirror, but it sounds like it's not.

It's not. It's part of a triptych.

Classic triptych. I love a good triptych. I've made a few triptychs in my day. Speaking of people who I don't know if they've made triptychs, Heaton Shah is here as our guest today. He's the CEO and co founder of Nira. He's been building SaaS companies for 20 years. He's got four years on me, so a lot of insights I'm sure, that I don't have. So excited to have him here. He's also the founder and creator of Crazy Egg, which I know tons of people use kissmetrics, which is when I think I first met Heaton. And I'm excited to have him with us. He's a guy who loves building product and who has strong opinions, and it's going to be a fun one.

He's a hot take king.

The hot take king. The hot take king.

He the hot take king.

Speaking of hot takes, what's got you talking too loud, Sylvie?

Okay, what's got me talking too loud? Well, I was trying to think of a hot take.

Yeah?

What's your hottest take right now?

My hottest take right now?

My hottest take right now is that Djokovic is going to win the Australian Open. It's my hottest take. It's probably not that hot.

Okay, I forgot. You're still so deeply into tennis now.

Yeah, it's so fun to watch. And every time I watch it, I'm like, that's it. I'm signing up for tennis lessons. I'm ready to double down. I'm ready to be a player on the court, not in life.

I'm ready to be player. I'm ready to Be a player. You know, I've been inspired by Djokovic. I'm ready to be a player. He's gonna win. Tennis is like your F1.

It is. It is like my F1. Good analogy.

And, you know, the people who made Drive to survive the F1 show made breakpoint on Netflix.

Have you seen that?

I know I haven't seen Breakpoint, but it's on my queue.

I was like, let me just see if I like this thing. And I watched. I got super into it. Of course I did. This is why tennis is so great. I just love this so much.

What's your hottest talking too loud take right now?

My hottest talking too loud take. I'm pretty high on New England right now. I'm pretty high on, like, just how sick it is that, you know, I live in Providence, Rhode Island. Last. I think it was last weekend, it was like, probably 40 degrees here. It's, like, abnormally warm. But we're like. We wanted some snow. We gotta hit the snow. So we drove up to Portland, Maine, and, like, went cross country skiing and sledding. And it was like, you know, just. Just under three hours or so to get there. I'm like, that's amazing.

That's so nice.

I live in this place. It's like, could be warm here and it could be snow there. And I'm tired of people in the Bay Area telling me just how great Tahoe is. Oh, and I have perfect weather in San Francisco. Slightly foggy, but nice in October. And then. Oh, and now I've got myself. I got. We all got that, too. We have that, too. Okay, so that's. That's my hottest take, New England. Everything's only three hours away.

Wow, you are like a poster boy for New England right now. That's you.

Oh, it's crazy. Yeah, I mean, huge F1 head tech. It doesn't sound like things you'd find in New England, but here we are. Speaking of people you don't find in New England, let's cut over to that interview with Heat and show.

Heaton. So good to see you, man. Thanks for being on the show.

It's great to see you. It's been a while.

It has been a while. I was just. Sylvia, right before. First of all, Heaton was early for the recording. He beat me here.

You were early. I was late.

You were late. But he's here. I show up, he's here in advance.

The early bird gets the worm. That's what I said when he came on. I was like. Before I said Anything else?

I feel like we need a new. The early bird should get something else. Like, let's retire, worm the cash, the.

Early bird gets the cash.

How about that?

I like that.

Okay, great work for me.

I like that.

That last time he and I caught up was last summer. I called him for advice. Or 20, 21, actually. So like a year and a half ago. And I. A lot of things in that conversation stuck out to me.

Heaton.

And like, we took a bunch of the stuff and used it. It was like, really helpful and I will say thank you for that. And I'm excited for this conversation because I don't know where we're going. I don't know what. What we're going to pull out of this, but I know we're going to get some exciting insights.

Not gonna talk about off sites though, right?

No.

And in person meetings for remote teams. We're not gonna talk about any of that, Right?

As long as you don't want to.

Or we can talk about whatever you want. But you tweeted about it and it didn't trigger me. But there are some things. But anyway.

Well, so let's. I do wanna get into that. The first thing I have to start with is I have to know what's got you talking too loud right now.

Ooh.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, no.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, no. I can get into that mode on almost anything. That's why I'm like, oh, oh, no.

You know the thing that is like on my mind because I'm just seeing just a bunch of stuff related to it is how bad most products are.

And this is probably.

Common theme for me anyway, as you probably have some idea of. Sometimes I rant on Twitter, but lot less lately because have a lot of work to do at my company and I'm really focused on that work. But like. And it's not product work, so that's probably why I get to go bitch and moan about it, so to speak, in other areas. But that's got me speaking loudly because I think that the products that we use today, and I'm Specifically talking about B2B products, I think consumer products have no room for this, but they're wasting our time. And with AI coming up, I don't think we're at a place where they're going to waste less of our time. I think they're going to waste more of our time because of AI. Until we settle into whatever the new normal of products and user experiences are with AI. Because a lot of people are trying AI products and they're probably not working as well as the promises that are made. But more importantly than that, like I'm today selling a B2B product. It's very mid market and heading into enterprise really fast. And one of the reasons, like we have to build what we are the way we are is because the products that are out there are failing the customers that we target. And that just makes me kind of upset.

Yeah, well, let's, let's go deeper into that. Like why, why are there so many products are bad? What makes a bad product?

I think a bad product is one where, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. But I think the biggest thing I would point out is like when the customers are frustrated when they're using the product. And I think that's very hard to tell for most companies that are large or have built these enterprise B2B products. Another factor that I really harp on. And some of this you can get away with in the early days and later on you can't. But like, we don't have a support site for my company. We've been in this business, we pivoted. So we've been in this business about 18 months. There's no support site, there's no support pages. And that is intentional because if we need support pages, there's something wrong at this stage.

And so that's where my head is. We do have support material. It is a customer success function, but it's not a support site. We don't link people to it and it's not done that way. That's probably the most. That's bold. Yeah, I know.

I see Savage is like raising his eyebrow.

Yeah, I'm ready. I have many, many questions.

And I ran support as CEO as well for the first two years of my last two companies. And so this is not coming from like ignorance. It's actually coming from the opposite of awareness of the minefield of support docs and the maintenance of them and the crutch that the team across the board would use them as if we actually had them. And then how bad the product would get as a result of having those docs this early. Because then people in the company would start saying, oh, we'll just explain it in the support docs.

Okay, so explain to the audience like, what is Nira? And then also.

How, I mean, you, you've always been someone who I think has really strong opinions and you have a lot of experience and you're quick to like, take the experience and what you're seeing and apply it together. Like when we talked, we were talking about product managers like 18 months ago and you had some very strong feelings about that. And it was very helpful because the strong feeling is easier to react to and understand like where you fit with and the fact that, I mean I didn't realize you have no support docs. I go to your website. Well, you're saying that I'm like, that's, well, this seems true and I, and I understand it, but I think give people the context on NIRA and then give people the context on how do you even decide to go do that because it's so different than what everybody else is doing.

I hope my opinions are loosely held so I'm willing to change my mind just to, just to give that anecdote. So I'm even happy to change my mind today. But what NIRA is, is it's a tool that helps you basically protect company information from unauthorized access. The unique thing about NIRA is that like it solves a problem that pretty much even employees, managers, executives have. But we're specifically selling the product to IT departments. The other unique thing about us is we're selling a security product to the IT department. And there's a bunch of reasons why, which we can get into if it makes sense. But that's kind of the tldr. The simple truth is there's no way to see every item in say Google workspace, so all the documents and manage who has access to them. On a administrative and security level that might sound absurd because you would think Google, even Microsoft and others would have built these things, but they've been so focused on the collaboration side and the kind of equivalent of the consumer end user side and the employee side that the admin tooling is inadequate. And then more importantly that admin tooling does not go across tools when you're dealing with Microsoft or Google. And the way this has all come about is that.

We'Re now dealing with more collaboration happening in those tools. Those tools are moving fast at adding even more capabilities around collaboration. And the administrative and security functions can't keep up with how fast those things are moving. And those companies will just toss these teams APIs and they'll say, hey, here's an API, go figure it out. So certain companies that are like mature, even the fast growing startups have large teams using those APIs and trying to build something close to what we have. Not a lot of teams, but enough teams where that was a key data point for us. And we started seeing that like why do they build it in house? And I've seen that over and over again in my career, at least I don't call it a career, but it's a good way to describe it. As a founder, it's hard to have a career. That's kind of my statement. But so I've seen this story before where it's like, if people are spending a lot of time and money building something internally and it really should be a SaaS service or a product that other people can buy or whatever, sometimes those people come out and try to build it. In my case, we treat everything with first principles. We never dealt with it people before, so we take a lot of notes when we do customer development. We're really staunchly on lean startup principles, customer development, things like that. And so we just want to build the right thing. What I like to say is I like to build new, different and Right. And I want to build teams that can do that. And that dovetails into the support stuff. But I'll pause there because I could go off on this stuff for a bit. But yeah, where do you want to go with it?

What I'm hearing is like, you know, Wistia example, 175 employees. We use Google Docs, we use some Apple products, we use like different things to collaborate. In every one of these cases, it's like, sometimes I'm inviting one person, sometimes I'm inviting 175, sometimes I'm inviting 10. Then you have people leaving and joining the company. You have people. Every employee is doing this. There's like, you know, literally millions of like connection points across this. What you all are doing is basically saying, like, we're going to make it easy to understand that full picture, check for unauthorized access, remove access when people leave. Grant access, maybe. Is that right?

So we're not an explicit offboarding and onboarding tool. There's a lot of those that exist. Yeah. Um, so the clarification would be we're about the items in the tool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because those items are in near real time changing in terms of permissioning. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, people can be added. And just some stats, like an average of 13 collaborators on every document in Google across the board. And this is from Google itself saying this. And it's about seven for Microsoft. So what you said is accurate. And then you have things like, is it. Does this document have a public link?

Yeah.

Does this document have a company link? How old is this document? And data retention and legal teams and compliance and auditors, all this comes into play. And so this is the mess I've been learning about for the last few years because I knew nothing about this until we got into it, which is my favorite place to be, because then you can come in with fresh eyes. In a market that, honestly, our customers underserved, they have very little bandwidth, and they're burdened with making changes for almost everyone in the org.

Well, it's also just like, as you said, it's a mess. It's a mess out there. Like, it's a complicated mess. And anyone getting in there and trying to get control over that is tough. And then also, let's go towards, like, the support stuff. So you're dealing with a really messy problem with a lot of edge cases, I would imagine. How do you make it so that you don't have any support documentation?

So the familiarity people have with the interface is actually extremely important. And making sure that the role models that we used early on, which were actually Gmail and Intercom, and so what I do. And previously when we had an enterprise search product, before we pivoted into this, we had integrated into 24 different APIs and tools and built this really cool interface for it. Our inspiration was actually Facebook's layout. And so what I'm always trying to do is figure out something. After all the customer development work and the research of what's the problem solved and some of the research of alternatives to what we're trying to do, I'll spend some time trying to find user experience, user interface, role models. And so even if you go to our homepage now, we finally have a screenshot now that I've told you the inspiration, you can look and be like, oh, right, that's where that theory came from. You can't just do this, though, and say, I'm doing that. And this is the role model. You have to do the research to say, is it going to work with the way we want? And when we look at the products that are built from a B2B standpoint, they don't account for any of that, or they're just picking a role model and just jamming features into the tool. I mean, in fact, like, certain companies that are Fortune 100 companies have Fortune 100 customers of their own that have, like, two engineers supporting them for every feature they want. And they're just adding feature after feature into the product because the enterprise customer needed it. And that's how we got in this kind of mess of wasting everyone's time with this. So part of it is, I don't want to waste anyone's time when they're using our products. So support docs waste time is the kind of ideology coming in. So then we don't have support docs because they waste time. So then what do we do? Well, today we're not a self service product. We can focus on learning a lot more about where people get stuck and all those things. And it can be a little more high touch, if not a lot more because our price points can dictate that in our sales process. So contextually this works for us. That being said, even if we had a self service product today, I'd probably feel very similarly and wouldn't have support docs if we could help it. Because it's basically like, where do you want to shift the responsibility of solving the problem for customers? Do you want to shift it to a customer support and success function? Do you want to keep it in product and engineering? And we've chosen to keep it in product and engineering instead of shift this burden to support and success. Well, what we see is a lot of companies stack the problem over on support and success. Guess what happens then? And I'll ask you, how many support people do you have today? How big is that team?

Yeah, we probably have 20 people.

Yeah. So 10% of your company, roughly, is support.

Yeah, no, totally.

Holy crap.

Yeah, no, it's.

Yeah, I'm dying. It's a perspective that we haven't heard on this show. And I haven't, I haven't really heard. I haven't heard. So that's why my eyes are popping.

Yeah. You're dealing with someone that's probably a little more aged than Chris. Not a lot on building software. It's been 20 years. Right. So I got to come up with something new every year. Right. That like, causes everybody, like, what's going on? What are you talking about?

You're an agent of chaos. Just, just like savage, both of you.

Yeah. That's why we get along. So, like, think of it this way. Like, there's so many layers to this problem and people have historically thought it's okay to stack these areas with team members. Yeah. Because they're cheaper than engineers or whatever way you want to frame it or you want to like really support customers and delight them or whatever. But that's not. That's just a solution to a problem we all have, which is our products need to constantly get better and become more usable, not less usable as we add features. That's a whole nother topic, but that's a problem. And if you pick the wrong structure or foundation for your product, this Goes back to the role models, everything. It has implications down the line. Like a domino effect. Right. Our implications are all positive and the dominoes are still standing, which is basically that we picked a good role model. So I'll say something else that's probably a little crazy, but I don't plan on adding product managers.

There we go. There it is.

I will at some point, maybe.

How many people are on the team right now?

We're only 30 right now.

And what percentage of the team is product and engineering.

Today it's like I think 20 plus on product and engineering. Well, sorry, engineering, there is no.

Yeah, there's no product. So sorry. Yes.

Yeah, my co founder and I.

Yes. So 2/3 of the company is engineering. You guys are managing product stuff kind of. But maybe you should just go on this rant, the technical product manager rant. I feel like you should just let it loose.

Yeah. So the philosophy on the product managers, not that I hate product managers, love them. I have a whole email list designed around product and stuff.

But it's basically about how do you get as close to the code as possible? If your business is about code and the way you get close to the code is by putting the onus on the engineers to figure out how to solve the problem. So the way we operate is that non engineering product is about finding problems, then we might propose a solution or something, but we're not dictating the solution. A lot of product management is about dictating the solution. Instead what we do is, hey, here are the problems, here's how we think they might need to be solved. And I'm talking about like bigger features, stuff like that, little stuff just happens relatively fast and agile, if you want to call it that. And then basically as we kind of go through that cycle, what happens is engineering gets better and better at their own specs and their own requirements. Because what I've learned is that a product spec is very different than an engineering specific. And I don't want two. So how do we have one? Well, you just make it all engineering and then it's like engineering will solve the problem as much as they want. They have the ownership of solving the problem because I'd rather have the people that are writing the code understand more about what they're building and why and not put so much of that onus on the communication from the product team about how we need to solve the problem and things like that. And so a traditional product management doesn't work that way typically. And that's why like I don't think companies.

It'S the same as a support thing. It's like where do you want this responsibility? And I'd rather have the responsibility fully on engineering for the solution. That way they take ownership of the solutions they produce. This has had tremendous impact for us. And here's why I say that already in B2B you can be much slower, especially if you're a mid market or enterprise from a product iteration cycle. If you're early like us, and this pains me to say it, probably building in a new category and with it and security, these categories do not show up. And every single category in the space except 1 or 2 out of like 15 or 20 is failed. Like the customer doesn't even use the terminology anymore. So when we heard all these kinds of things, we're just like ah, like the products suck. And how do we make a product that doesn't suck? We make sure that engineers take responsibility over the code they're writing. Not as in like did it work or not? But did it hit the mark or not? And it's not their responsibility to judge it, it's ours as non engineering product people. But it's their responsibility to get it right. That's kind of how we think about it. So that might be a more refined rant than the one we went on.

No, it's very similar to the rant that you gave me.

Okay, good.

But it's interesting because like when we talked in 21, we were working on a lot of stuff and then a lot of big things came out in 22. We launched like a video editor, we changed our pricing model and we launched a live platform. And as you're talking, I was thinking a lot about our live platform because it went incredibly well. The launch went incredibly well. The product that came out of the gate was really good, but the iteration's been really fast. And what we saw is that we had like an engineering was truly in partnership with product on the solutions from the get go. And when I was talking to you, that was not exactly how we were doing it. It was more like more just product first. And the difference is pretty remarkable. And you made a point which I think is relevant to everybody. Just like if someone's coming up with a solution and they don't code, they don't know how hard or easy that solution is, they don't know if that solution's gonna work. They may be missing something that is ten times better. And so if you don't actually have engineering involved early enough, you can miss the best products. You could ever build. Right?

That's right.

And I think that really resonated with me and I thought a lot about it as we've been like evolving the way we've been working. And I mean, you're giving the goods today, you're sharing it all. And I hope anyone who's like watching or listening is like really taking notes on this. The other thing I would point out that I think is really interesting is, you know when you talk about the role models and having the role models, I don't know that everyone always thinks like that. And I didn't either. Like, how do you get to that?

I'll tell you. Shove that in my face without knowing it. David Cancel over at Drift when he was building Drift and he's someone who I have a lot of appreciation for what he has done and how he has done it. And I studied like how he did it. One of the reasons is I had to compete with him in the past and then I became an advisor to Drift so I didn't have to compete with him. And we had a good.

Yeah, everything worked out.

It was never a bad relationship, but it was always like take a. Until then. Because he decided to get in the analytics game at some point and then sold to HubSpot. So then it was cool. And I helped them with a bunch of other stuff, not product stuff too much. I have lots of opinions on how they did product, both good and bad. But the one thing I took away is they kept talking about role models constantly, almost every time I was talking to them. And they used that as a way to hack the process of getting started. That's the way I would describe it. For example, Drift started as a rip of intercom like point blank. I can say that they would say that it is fact. But the way they use the strategy to go from an intercom rip to where they ended up was amazing to me because that role model, in their case, this wasn't the case for us, but in their case was used as a discovery method. You build that, you see how people use it and then you find your differentiating points from there. It is very rare for anyone to think like that and do it like that from the get go. But David Cancel is someone who's done it over and over again and he has a specific style, not saying it's for everyone and he doesn't care about the rip in the beginning and the noise he gets from it because he got a lot of noise from it early on and they did as a team, but it was Almost like he took pride in that noise, if that makes sense. But as I watch the company iterate and them like slide around, they found opportunities Intercom completely missed. Even though Intercom is great at product, no one would say they're not. Right. I'm very critical. I can point shots at jobs to be done and their frameworks and some of the crap, but I can't say anything but great things about their team and how they build product to the point where they were one of our role models. Right. Gmail More so though, for a number of reasons. But they were close because we had some things we had to do that were more like them. And so the role model concept is, I think, extremely powerful. And I'm always the one to do everything different. I don't want to copy. And once I realized the role model wasn't about copying, it was more about what's good for the customer and what are they familiar with.

Yeah, get different faster.

How can they? Yeah, like you come into our tool, you've never seen it before. And we have something called an employee security portal. So even the employees are using our tool in a very specific fashion. And I've never seen this done before, but we did it. The tool that admins use and the tool that employees use are almost exactly the same, except the employee side has appropriate limitations. Admins can see everything across the company. Employees can only see their items. But it's basically the same interface. We just have like three or four areas not accessible for employees. Right. And the employees are coming back to these IT people and saying something unheard of, which is, hey, we love that tool. Thank you. And the tool just spreads inside of. Org when someone uses it to say, oh, crap, all these personal accounts are on my documents. I didn't know that. I removed them. And this happened yesterday. That employee goes and tells their whole team, hey, you need to log into this tool. Just clean this up. Because there's customer data we're leaking and we shouldn't. And the IT person had nothing to do with it, which is what IT and security wants. We wouldn't have been able to do that without having really strong role models that were good at user experience already. Gmail is obviously great at user experience. You could argue about some of their changes in the button colors on this crap or whatever, the blues or whatever. But from an information architecture standpoint, it's very clear.

Agree.

So Drift used the role model to discover a business. This is how I'd say we use the role model to have a construct and we really focused on the information architecture. There's a couple things in Intercom that we didn't like either that we thought we could do better and we did those better.

And then also to what you're talking about before, most products are bad. Like if you have the right role model and it's actually has a great, you know, interface and experience, people understand it quickly. To your point, like, I haven't heard of many IT tools that, you know, teams are suggesting to each other that they should go use. But that's what ends up happening, right. If you end up differentiating in a place where there's lots of bad products or it's not well understood.

Right.

You know, you said something else which is also like, you have a few more years on me. What you do and is great.

And not a lot.

No, but, but a few, you know, 16 for me. And I have to ask the question, you know, you're. I'm learning a bunch of stuff right now. I haven't really thought about the role model thing that much. We talked about the technical product manager thing before. What are the other things now that you're doing that are like the hacks that those, like that extra time, that extra effort, like that extra learning that you're using that are really, you know, accelerating or changing things for the business.

I feel very lucky, I feel very, very lucky to have met my co founder. Our skills are complementary and the values on how we think about product and stuff are aligned. Even though she came from cpg. So her last official job was about six or seven years ago when she left was at Diageo and she had like five executive roles there. Innovation. She did M and A before that, but very much on product on that side of the house. And the one thing that is probably the hardest thing for any organization to do is what I would say. And I've talked to folks at Buffer about this and they've repeated it back.

Is scale customer development.

As the company grows and make sure that that's still an ingrained thing. And I don't think it's just customer development. It's the concept of when you talk to a customer, a prospect, anyone that's gonna potentially use or buy your product, you know, everything they said and you can then map to so many things. So we have literally 5,000 pages in Google Docs across many different docs of notes. And Marie, my co founder, is like the stickler on that and she leveled me up there and I was already like into it, but now I'm just like, oh, and the whole team's designed that way. The sdr, the sales team, everybody.

It's your mind readers. Like, you know exactly what they're going to say are their pain points. You know exactly what.

Because we've taken so many notes, we could go back three years and be like, oh, that CIO said that three years ago, which maps to what this CIO said today. Oh, crap. And if you don't have that, you can't build a roadmap. You can't ship what they need. I can tell you honestly, today, based on all of that stuff we've done, we have an unlimited roadmap. Like, there's no shortage of what to build, why to build it, how to build it. It's just more of the sequencing of how do we build it. So we earn the right to keep building the next thing, which is sequencing is the trick, not prioritization. Probably a separate rant. But, like, those notes are like the dirty, dirty secret that no one wants to hear, nobody wants to do, but they change the whole game for a whole business. And because, yeah, you don't lose the data, you don't lose the information.

You're saying. Because what a lot of people do is, you know, you have a sales rep who's having a bunch of conversations. They don't write it down or they don't write it down in a centralized place. You go and ask the sales rep what customers want and they tell you, but they remember everything. You know, their own biases are impacting what they're telling you about and blah, blah, and then multiply that across everybody. You don't actually have an accurate view. Now let's throw away the fact that, like, the team's changing. You know, some people who are sales reps are no longer sales reps. Some people have joined the company, some people have left the company. You don't have the holistic brain.

Yeah. And the brain. People think like people at Stripe and other companies think it's documentation and a writing culture.

Yeah.

My opinion, it's a note taking culture.

Okay.

Right. Because where do those documents and all those things come from? They come from either someone's brain, which usually is someone's notes. Yeah. So I go back to the core and the root. The root isn't, you need all these frameworks and documents and you should have a document or writing culture, which I think is great. And we don't have that like Stripe does. But what we do have is the note taking culture. And that allows us to just come back to that stuff. That allows us to, like, today, if there's a feature, go, hey, Marie, we got this feature. Like, it should be one of, like, the next features we do or whatever. Yeah. She's like, okay. And then she's like, I'm going to go find all the notes on that. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna write up a doc and find it in, like, literally 20 minutes, 10 minutes. And she's got this doc, like five pages, three pages of everything we heard, who said it, when they said it. And it's like, oh, cool. Well, shit. Like, we don't even need to go talk to more people. We already have all those notes for some obscure thing that we're now gonna add that we heard over and over again over, like, three years. Right?

Yeah.

And that's also why no product managers today.

Yeah.

Because when you get them, they need to. And they also need to be trained in this way, not in what traditional crap they're trained in at Google or whatever company they come from or whatever the hell it is, because they're trained completely differently. And in fact, they don't even know how to learn about problems from customers most of the time because their job is so entrenched in writing specs.

That's interesting. What do you think of the tools that, like, automatically record transcribe your meetings? Is that a replacement or what do you think?

Thank you. That's a layup. I think that anything that makes it so that your brain is not synthesizing what you're hearing is problematic. So if we were to do those recordings or anything like that, we would want to jointly summarize, if there were multiple people on the call, what we heard as soon as possible after the call so we could interpret what was really being said and our interpretation of it. I'm not saying those tools are bad, but they make people lazy. Yeah. And so even like Gong and things like that, those are great for accountability, but people end up using them for notes, and that's why we don't do that. Also, our customer. I feel really weird when I get on a call and the record button's already hit. And our customers, IT and security teams, they feel even weirder. And if they say to record, we will absolutely record. But we do not like asking for the recording. And a lot of companies have done it where the Gong thing shows up right away. They don't even ask you if it's okay to record. Yeah. Pathetic.

That is unethical.

Like, come on. Yeah. Well, it depends on your opinion. I think it's just pathetic. I think it's just, I think it's just wrong. Like what is wrong with you? Like, don't record me without asking. And this stupid pop up comes up and you're like, wtf? And like my co founder has gotten like pissed and on some calls she never gets pissed, but she's like, hey, don't record me.

It's interesting.

She didn't ask for it.

Yeah, no, totally. We use this tool and in interviews called Pillar. Have you seen that one?

Yeah.

Which has been helpful for us. And you know, we ask everybody like, is this okay? Basically. But one of the things that's been interesting is like fighting bias and stuff because people will have their perception of how the interview went and they're trying to suss out all this information. Then we can go back and be like, we'll ask them to go back and say like, hey, can you take another look at the interview? And what I found is kind of to your point. Like if you were to rely only on the notes that are automatic, you miss sometimes. Like, oh, I did ask this question and they gave me a great answer and I was, but I was getting ready for my next question. I wasn't ready. So it's, it's an interesting thing trying to find the balance. Cause there's like an unlimited number of these tools now and like, should you use all of them or is it too much? When is it too much information? Or your point on like the synthesis of this and who's doing that is really, that's a big question. Especially this world of AI, that's a big question. Like who is doing it? Is it you or the machine?

Yeah, I think, I think we're headed into worse products because of that. Yeah, I really do. Because the interpretation is everything. And if you can't interpret this stuff correctly, you're not going to build the right product. And not building the right product is death.

And you're not, you're not trusting the machines to be able to interpret it correctly.

I haven't seen AI being able to interpret most things very accurately. I've seen them help you sort and filter and like get down to things. But then, you know, with chat, GPT3 or whatever, like the amount of like false information in there is pretty high. So you can't even trust what you get from it. And I'm not knocking it. I love this stuff. Big, big on any new technology, I don't care what it is. Like, let's go dive in, figure it out. But we got to, we got to be honest about the problems. Right. So I think the over reliance on it is going to happen. It hasn't happened yet. And then we're going to see a cycle of that biting people somehow. Like I don't know if it happens on product or other areas. I actually feel like it's going to happen on marketing first.

Yeah, I mean, well that's like the whole. I mean, you know what, let's not go too far down this because I have other questions that are now running low on time. Okay. I have to go back to the remote thing and let me set the context and then I want your opinion. So we just did what we call a tri annual business review because we didn't like quarterly things. It was too much. And basically it's like we have our okrs that are set. We get together with like the directors and up in the business and people present on like they send everything in advance so you can like read and watch stuff in advance. And we're trying to just have discussion. Um, we've done this remotely this time. We're doing it in person. And the goal is like we pre Covid were very in person. Now we're extremely remote. But we still try to have these like events to help create more trust. Like help make it easier for people to push back and argue and disagree when they're not in person. Um, so we did that. It went well. It was super energizing. And it was interesting though because like I have a sense of we're gonna go. But I'll just say this point, like when we closed up, one of the things I said was like, look, we had a great, like there was a lot of learning that happened in this room. There was a lot of like ad hoc stuff that happened. But to get this to happen when we're remote is different. Like it takes much more conscious effort to like document, write up, send. You can't have the run in and all this kind of thing. And it's. And I find it hard is the truth like to have this balance because on the one hand so does the presentation. Three people walk up to them and you have this like sync. But that inherently means that no one else knows what was said. It isn't in a public slack room or whatever. So that's what we did. But I love your perspective because you had a strong reaction. So I'm wondering what it is to remote.

So I've been an advisor to buffer. I've been an advisor to automatic. Those are two different spectrums of full on remote So I have an advantage to most people on it. And then on top of that, I've done remote myself for 20 years. So here's the thing I notice about off sites and remote people save. This is like the biggest one. I would say people save important work for the off site. I don't want that in my company. Just not. Okay. Important work should happen all the time.

Yeah.

I don't care if it's strategy work, tactical work, whatever. I don't think we need a chunk where we're doing something like that. And yes, as you scale, you need chunks of like, you know, planning and stuff like that. Totally get it. But I don't want the requirement that we're in person to do those chunks.

Yeah. Because then you slow down.

I saw that over and over again at both those companies. My conclusion about remote and it's still the same is most remote Companies are about 70% as efficient at best, compared to.

Office. And some of these things are related to that. It's a little bit of a side note. So how I feel about off sites is if I can help it, and I'm not the only one that's in charge of this. So that's the caveat. But if I can help it and I have the wherewithal to fight this, I will make sure we never have an off site ever. I will make sure nobody ever meets up in person as a company. Like we're all going to meet up. Because that's one problem. Another problem, I actually believe those off sites are disruptive to work. I've been to off sites with Buffer. I've been to the enormous automatic off sites. I'm not at all saying anyone else should take any of my advice on this. Right.

Yeah.

Because I understand how humans operate. I am not an introvert in the classic sense at all. And I love people, you know that, Chris. Like socializing and all that. But you know what, honestly, do people really want to do that with their company and their team? Let's really put it out there for real. Right. I didn't choose these people, so to speak. The team members did not choose these people as friends. And yes, you could be friends with people, you could do that. But so my whole attitude about this is like freedom of time and people should have that. And if you create all these constructs where you need to be in person to get certain things done, even if it's really great work, strategy work or whatever, I feel like you kind of like going backward from where. Where we've been trying to get to even a society. Wow.

Look, this is, you know, you. You're a man of extreme opinions, and I love it. And, you know, I don't think we definitely don't agree on everything, but I love the way when you frame these problems and push, that causes me to think differently. And I'm sure it is going to cause our audience to think differently. It was actually also, you know, Patrick Lancione. I mean, I don't know him personally, but.

I don't know him personally, but I know he's.

He just. Like, I listened to a podcast he did recently who's talking about exactly what you're talking about, which is like, the question of in the world where now so many people want remote work, does that actually mean that we need to be more clear about, like, do you want just true, like, transactional work in that, like, you do your job, you do it. It's this time you walk away, you don't have to do anything else. Or the people who want, like, relationship building at work, which is like a separate, different thing. And, like, what's confusing is everything in the middle. And, like, just be more clear, like, which. Which extreme are you on?

We have a team member in Barcelona. I love him to death. He's, like, one of my only reports. He's our growth manager. He does a lot of stuff for us on the marketing. Whatever side. I've never met him in person. We have a content writer that's on our team. She's traveling.

Yeah.

She goes and has dinner with him. I'm jealous. I love this guy, but I have no intention of ever seeing him in person in my life. If it happens, great, but there's no intention. It's just really fascinating. I've never met him in person.

Yeah, no. That's wild. Look, we are basically out of time here, Heaton, and so there's so many other things I want to talk to you about. So if you're up for it, I think you should come back.

More than up to another episode. More than up for it? Yeah, of course.

Okay, great. Well, you heard it here first. Heaton will be back. We'll do a part two with Heaton. Where can people connect with you if they want to learn more, follow you? Where should they go?

Find me on Twitter. Hnshaw. Fun story there. My dad's first car had that license plate. It was Heaton Nipton. That's my dad's name. Shah. So that's been my Twitter handle and my Gmail. So you can always. You can always try to email Me too. It's all good.

Perfect.

Yeah. It's H N S h a h @ on.

Twitter. HeatOn, thanks so much for being here. This is a delight, and thanks for having me. I look forward to the next episode when you come.

On.

Likewise.

We set up that Heaton is the king of hot takes, but I hope that delivered. I hope that delivered, don't you think? I think it.

Did. I feel like the way that Heaton at least builds companies today is just so different. Like, everything that he was saying, like, no support team, no product managers. Like, my mind was just like, blah, blah, blah. Like, I cannot compute. You were kind of laughing. You were kind of like, you know, your eyebrow was going up. Like, you don't agree with everything that he's saying. So, like, where did you land during his hot.

Takes? I think where I land is.

Heaton knows the power of being different. Being different is a superpower, and doing things differently, doing the right things differently is a.

Superpower.

Right. And it's pretty hard to learn things when everything feels nuanced, which a lot. I think a lot of the answers for me are like, well, like, the Triennial Business Review is perfect example. Most of our stuff is remote. Like, the majority of the work that we're doing, which I think is like, the most important stuff, is the actual work itself is remote. This thing is in person right now, and there were some people calling in remote, and, like, I don't have the extreme opinion that he does, that I never want to see these people in person. So someone who's gonna work at Wistia is gonna want, like, huge flexibility, but they're gonna want to feel connected. They're gonna want that as part of the thing that they get. But it's. When you hear that extreme thing, I just think to myself, like, which of these things can I steal? Which of these things, when it's set in its purest form, are the things that we can replicate and do over and over again or can cause us to do something different? And it's almost, like, easier to learn from someone like Eaton than it is from someone who's giving you the full nuanced thing? Because the truth is, every situation is different. And always this comes down to, what can you take away from a conversation? What can you take away from a learning, and how do you apply it? So there's a lot of stuff in what Heaton said that I think we can apply. And there's things from the last time we talked about where he said, you know, no product managers for Me, we do have all that other infrastructure and customers and, you know, people on success and support and sales, which is complicated. Having the product manager is incredibly important. But also having that, like, unified front between product manager and in our case, like tech lead and designer is critical to solving those problems. And his thing, what he.

Says.

Right. Like, if a product manager makes this huge list of things to build and no one and the engineers are involved, it won't work. But a lot of people do it like that. So, yeah, I'm trying to pull the nuance out. I'm trying to listen really hard. I'm trying to.

Question.

Yeah. Myself. And usually I learn more when I do that. So, I mean, it's like, why it's so fun to chat with.

Him. Yeah, I mean, I think something I appreciate about Heaton is his boldness. Like, he's bold, but he's also like, I'm not telling you to take my advice. So, like he, he's able to be bold and share what he's sharing, but also not like, prescriptive. So, yeah, it's kind of up to you, listeners, watchers, like, what do you want to take out of Heaton's.

Talk? And that's how you do have to do.

Everything.

Yeah. And I think it is, it's almost like your biggest job in your job is to decide, you.

Know.

Yeah. Which of this advice that I'm taking, which of this input should I'm taking? Should I actually.

Do? Totally. It kind of touches on something we, we talked about in the interview, which was like the automated, like, AI thing versus, like the human interpretation. And like, part of your job as a human, this feels like it's getting like sci fi. But part of your job is.

Like, this is how we talk.

Now. This.

Is. There's what AIs around us that are doing things and there's humans and we just, we have to work with.

Them.

All right. We've derailed now, but to punctuate it, I was just gonna say. Yeah, like what you distill, that's. That's top. Now I lost it, now it's.

Gone. No, no, you're saying it's important to figure out, like, you need to.

Like, take away what's.

Right. Distill things for.

Yourself.

Yes. And you need to figure out what works. You need to feel comfortable with the risks that you're taking, the things that you're.

Doing.

Yes. That you believe in them. And I think that. Well, a lot of what we're talking about is like, you're taking all this advice and trying to figure out which advice did you take? What should you not? When should you take a risk? When should you do something differently? It's about training the instinct so that you're ultimately making better decisions when things are really complex. And you know, someone like Heaton is an amazing person to train your instinct with because he's so bold and he has so many different opinions and he really does think from first principles. It can accelerate that, I.

Think.

Damn. So take what you want from the hot take.

King. There you.

Go. That's my.

Slogan. That's the slogan. Take what you want from the hot take king. And we want to take from you reviews and feedback. So please email us@ttlpodc.com if you have ideas for guests topics. If you have questions for Heaton for the next time he's on, please send them in ttlpodisia.com or you can find us on Twitter. I'm csavage on Twitter.

Sylvie. Give me the loop, give me the.

Loot. Also on LinkedIn. You can always email us. And the last thing I would say is, if you like the show, please rate and review it wherever you listen to it. That helps spread the word. It helps more people find. The show, helps us out and we appreciate it. Sweet, sweet. And we have to start giving away these.

Hats. Oh, yeah, we gotta give away the.

Hats. We'll come up with that for next.

Time. Start with me, then I'll put.

The hat on, give a hat away.

To you, then I'll have the idea. But I need the hat.

First. You know, we can do.

That.

Okay. All.

Right. Bye.

Sylvie. Bye, Savage.

Talking Too Loud is brought to you by Wistia, hosted by Chris Savage, produced by me, Sylvie Lubow, along with Adam Day, executive produced by Wistia Studios. This episode was mixed by Maria Passingham of Edit Audio. Listen to Talking Too Loud wherever you listen to podcasts and hey, rate and review us wherever you listen. And check out more content from Wistia Studios at wistia. Com.