Special: The Vitalize Podcast - Running Lean and Building in the Right Direction, with Jennifer Smith of Scribe

Welcome to Just Go Grind. Today we have a special episode from the Vitalyze Podcast, our show at Vitalyze Venture Capital. You can find all episodes of the Vitalyze Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or go to thevitalyzepodcast.com. Let's get to it. On today's episode, we have Jennifer Smith, co-founder and CEO of Scribe, a company that lets you share how-tos in seconds, automatically generating step-by-step guides for you while you work. You can learn more at scribehow.com. Let's dive in. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much. Glad to be here.

Yes. And with Scribe, I know I've, I've done research on this. I understand what it is for people who just aren't familiar yet. What is Scribe, Jennifer?

Scribe, we're a software company based in San Francisco and we make it really easy to share how to do something. You ever get asked, hey, how do I, right before this I asked you, how do I adjust my mic settings in here again? How, how do I do this thing? How do I generate this report? Scribe's a really easy way to be able to share with someone how to do something. So very simply, it's a Chrome extension or a desktop application. You click the record button and you just do that thing. And when you're done, you click stop record. And what Scribe will do is it'll auto-generate step-by-step written instructions with screenshots showing how to do that task. We call that a Scribe. And so that becomes a really helpful way for next time someone asks you, hey, how do I, rather than having to jump on a Zoom with them or send them an email or give them a phone call or whatever, you can just quickly shoot them a Scribe. And if you're working with a team or an external customer base, instead of them calling and asking you, they can go and find that Scribe themselves.

I have so many questions about this because I love that. I love the product. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, yes, I want to talk to Jennifer for sure. And with this though, tell me about the beginning. How did this get started in the first place?

Yes, we started the company over 3 years ago now. Um, and there's that famous Steve Jobs quote, right? Where your, your, um, your history only makes sense when you look backwards and you can connect the dots. And for me, I originally started in management consulting. I joke I'm a recovering consultant. I spent 7 years working mostly in financial services, org and ops. What that functionally meant is I spent 7 hours a day in ops centers looking over the shoulder of agents. And if you ever do that work as a consultant, you'll learn the name of the game is you find the best person in that ops center and you sit next to them and you say, John, what are you doing differently? And John tells you, you know, John will pull out a big— I'm dating myself a little bit. This was like 15 years ago, he'll pull out a big, thick binder, thunk it on the desk, and say, this is what I was trained to do, Jennifer. But, you know, I found these 30 shortcuts instead. And my team at McKinsey would write that up in PowerPoint. We'd sell that back for a whole bunch of money. And I always thought like, gosh, if John and people like John could just share what they knew how to do, they could have had really big impact in that ops center, right? They didn't need me and my team doing that. But I always thought like, that's a problem someone else will solve someday, right? Yeah. And then fast forward a decade later, and I'm working at a venture capital firm on Sand Hill. And I spent a lot of my time there in enterprise software talking to buyers of enterprise software. I talked to over 1,200 CIO, CTO, CDO type folks at large enterprises because I was just really curious, you know, what are you buying? What do you wish existed? Where are there gaps in the market? What are the problems that you're trying to solve today? And one of the things that really surprised me was This same problem hadn't been solved. I was hearing the same thing from executives a decade later, whether it was in the form of, gosh, my team shows up every day and they're 9 to 5, fingers on keyboard, trying to create value for my company. And I have no idea what that is, right? That knowledge all lives in their head. It walks out the door every day at 5:00 PM. And I don't know how to get at it. And I looked at it and said, well, so much time's gone by. Technology has progressed so much. This has now turned into a problem someone else should solve too. Gosh, maybe this is something I should go do.

Okay. With that though, you go from consulting for a number of years, you look at a venture capital firm, you love process and systems, but why, why start a company? Why did you like, what got, what got you over the hump? Because I think so many people have these problems they see and they're like, someone should solve that. Oh, maybe someone else will solve it. And I love hearing like, why, what got you over the hump to actually do it? I'm curious about that.

Yeah. I mean, if you had asked me even a few years earlier if I would ever start a company, I would have told you like about a 2% chance that I ever would. It was not something I'd ever planned for myself, thought of myself. I sort of always, I've worked with a lot of founders and said like, that's just a different person than I am. That'll never be me. And for me, it was just that I got really obsessed with this idea and just was really interested in it. And so I started calling up companies and saying like, Hey, are you like across the board from the large companies I've been talking to all the way to small companies and think like, is this a, is this a problem you're still seeing? Like, how are you trying to solve it? How are you thinking about it? And I got a few of them who said, well, hey, if, if you solve it for me, that's really interesting to me. Maybe, maybe you could do something there. And so I would say I almost started out with a few early customers and a few early developers that I was able to kind of like harangue and cajole to convince to help me build something. And then it kind of snowballed into something and I sort of woke up and said, Oh, this maybe this is a company.

Real quick on that, how did you find your developers early on? There's so many ways to go about that. People who are non-technical always seem to struggle with this, obviously because it's challenging. They have many options for you. How'd you do that?

Yeah, I was really fortunate. The one of the the guys that I'd worked back when I was in venture started his own venture capital firm, and they were really focused on this idea of like how do we help people like me who are just getting started, don't have a technical co-founder? How do we help them kind of bootstrap dev resources from the beginning? And so they had some developers who were. on staff who I could just literally go into the office and sit next to and say like, can you help me build this thing? How would this look? How would you think about architecting it? Um, and that was really helpful for us to get going.

How did you end up meeting your co-founder and what made you actually commit to then working with him? I, I, that's another thing that comes up again and again, but I love your perspective.

Yeah. I, I stopped keeping track, but at the moment I stopped keeping track, I had talked to over 80 Uh, engineers, either as like first engineering hire or as potential kind of co-founder, CTO, kind of across the board. And I got better over time at learning what to look for and, and what we were looking for too, and what would be a good fit for, for what is now Scribe. I got introduced to Aaron, um, 3 years ago now in what I call like one of the great fortunes of my life. Aaron is now my, my co-founder and CTO. Um, Aaron's backstory, he'd been Coding since middle school, um, got briefly— I hope he doesn't mind me sharing the story— got briefly suspended from middle school, um, for, for hacking into it.

Sorry, Aaron's mom or dad.

Exactly. Then I won't share his last name. Um, then, then did Exeter and Yale, started a— did Wall Street for a little bit, then started an automation company that he sold to Google. And so when I met him, he was 2 years into, um, to vesting at Google post-acquisition, and he was just really anxious to get back into building something. And I think we really bonded over having really complementary kind of skill sets and personalities, and also over just excitement. I describe both of us as like process nerds. We just love thinking about process and efficiency. And so we bonded over this vision of what we were building. But if you were to ask me, hey, how did you know? I'm going to tell that he was the right one. I would tell you it was a It was just a gut feeling. It was, you know, you sort of, when you meet someone where, you know, things kind of just click on all sides, you know. And I can say that having talked to well over 80, I don't know how many at this point, you can really start to pattern match of like, you know when it's right. And if you're asking yourself if it is, it's not.

Yes. Now that's a good point about how many people you've talked to. So for those who are, I've talked to 10 people and I haven't figured it out yet. I'm like, well, Maybe we keep going a little bit more on that as well.

Finding the right co-founder, I probably spend more time with Aaron than I do with my husband, right? Yeah. And so, you know, and think about the amount of time that you and effort you put into finding a potential life partner. And, you know, it's very similar in building a company, like you are building something together. And so you need to make sure that you are in lockstep at all the core foundational things around values and shared vision. And like, you've got to spend that time together upfront and make sure that Okay, this was a few years back.

And so then you mentioned how you were already talking to customers, they're looking for this solution, you may end up starting the company. And I think I read somewhere you grew largely word of mouth. Take me through that early growth around getting those customers, how that's kind of evolved over time. I'd be curious to hear more.

Yeah, so we ended up releasing a free version of the product that we had been building. We'd been building kind of this big end-to-end whiz-bang thing. And what we found was a lot of our customers were asking for the first upfront part of this whiz-bang thing, which is what is now Scribe. Hey, could you watch my people do work and tell me what the processes are? Or can you help them create documentation faster for how to do something? Or gosh, our customers are always asking us how to use our software. Can, can yet, can we just use your software to automatically create documentation? And so we said, well, hey, we keep getting asked for this thing. Why don't we just release it on Product Hunt and sort of see what the world has to say, like get a sense if people would even find this interesting. And so, we kind of packaged together what we had had and, uh, and put it out in the world and kind of ignored it for a few weeks, to be honest. And what we saw was that our downloads were spiking. We were getting tons of phone calls and emails from folks saying like, hey, this is really great. Could you build these 3 other features instead? Or I would love to use it for this. Like, have you thought about supporting this kind of use case? And so, it really, um, it just took off that way. And, um, for a year and a half, we did no marketing, No growth. The team was just me and 4 or 5 engineers. And that was very purposeful. We said, we're going to run super lean and just focus on building a product and listening to what people have to— what do our users have to say? Let's just listen to them and then build in the direction that they're pulling us. And then the rest will kind of take care of itself.

You mentioned it was a year and a half or so of that. What shifted that then from that method of growth to whatever it looks like today. I mean, what changed that? Because I know there's always, you look at product-led growth, look at people doing a real heavy sales model that's been pretty much documented and done repeatedly with predictable revenue of that book. A lot of different things that way. Like what shifted you at that point? And then what does it look like today in terms of growth?

Yeah, we said we're going to run painfully lean until we feel like the market is pulling it out of us and we are just dropping opportunity on the floor. And so Scribe had scaled to be in tens of thousands of organizations in over 100 countries. At the moment, we kind of popped our heads up and said like, This is not sustainable anymore. We need to bring in some other people here, not just on engineering, so we can build more of the product that's being asked for, but also on growth and marketing, because people are asking us, why did you build this? What's the story behind it? We need to find a way to tell our story more publicly to the world. And so, that was a shift that started really this past summer. We did our first kind of announcement of the company was when we announced coming out with $30 million in funding. And that was the first time we kind of publicly told our story. And now we've been really focused on both continuing to build product, but also like, how do we now connect with users more in the communities that they're in and creating a Scribe community as well?

With that as well, with the, I imagine different customer profiles and personas, because if you're looking at launching a product, for instance, especially when you have a free product, like how did you distinguish between like who were you actually going to target as you move forward? Was it just amount of users? Like people were using it more than other people looked at like the enterprise value of some of the companies. Like, I'm just curious on how you kind of, narrow that in? Because I've seen before with companies who, you know, they launch something for free and then that's like, oh, well, who are we targeting? Like, who are we going after? Like, who should we actually like focus on? How'd you deal with Scribe?

Yeah, it can be incredibly noisy, right? And especially with a product like Scribe, because it can be used by anyone who has to explain to someone how to do something. And my bet is everyone listening to this now has had that moment in their life, right? And so for us, the question becomes like, who are our best users? Who are the users that you really lean into? We have a paid version of the product now that we launched in response to demand, frankly, where folks said like, hey, could you build these premium features for us? And so we take a look at who are the people who are upgrading, who are the people who are using the product most consistently. We, um, we have these growth loops in the product as well. So you only ever create a Scribe to share it with someone else, right? That's the whole point of it, whether you're inviting teammates to collaborate with you or you're just sending a Scribe to someone. And those become user acquisition channels for us in their own right, right? This is kind of your classic product-led growth. And so we look a lot at, you know, who are the types of personas who are also creating, creating more scribes and sharing more scribes, because that's a sign that they're getting more value from it, right? And so we try to really lean into who are the folks we think are getting the most consistent, repeatable value from the product. We still listen to the people, kind of that early Product Hunt community was so helpful to us in so many ways because it was such a broad cross-section of humanity, right? They're folks really from all different kinds of walks of life and countries. And what's interesting was they all kind of have this shared interest around finding something cool and new and providing feedback. And so, they were really helpful to us in saying, hey, have you thought about this use case? Have you thought about that use case? This is what we would want to see. And the challenge for us has been, how do we think about prioritizing all of that different, all of that different feedback and all of those use cases that come our way? And I think where, where we've landed is in building a very horizontal kind of broad product that instead of being Scribe for people in financial services and Scribe for customer success people, those are 2 very common use cases that we see. We instead say Scribe is for a knowledge professional who has to show someone how to do something and cares that they do it a certain way. So, people who are in some kind of enabling role, right? And, and there's a lot of different ways that can manifest, whether that's someone in sales who needs to get a prospect to use their software in a particular way, or someone in customer success who has to help their customer problem solve or troubleshoot how to do something, or whether that's an operations leader who's just scaling their team really quickly and needs to make sure that everyone's on the same page around how to do their processes.

With Scribe as well, you mentioned the fundraise and, you know, $30 million you've raised, $22 million Series A, and you had this viral post on LinkedIn around being 8 months pregnant, like during the announcement or something like that. Take me through Like that whole process, decision to fundraise when you did, like, I would just love to hear more. I'm sure there's way more to a story than that few paragraphs LinkedIn post. I would love to hear more about that.

Yeah. That LinkedIn post really took me by surprise one morning. I just kind of said like, oh, maybe this is an interesting story someone would care to see. And so I just wrote up a quick blurb about our story and I think it had hit 3 million views last time I saw, which I think the lesson— and for folks who don't know, it was a post just talking about how we had raised money and I was 8 months pregnant at the time that we raised our Series A and I was really uncertain about whether I was backable as an 8-month pregnant CEO. And to my surprise, it was not an issue at all during our fundraise. And the post included a photo of me 8 months pregnant when we did the press for the announcement. And we had decided not to include that photo in the press because we didn't want the story to be about my bump. We wanted the story to be about the company, right? So, we picked something else where that really couldn't be seen. But I said, well, let me just kind of share this here. Right. And I think my takeaway from it was, you know, in some ways I think it shouldn't have been 3 million views and it shouldn't have gone viral because it should be kind of commonplace. And I think what happened was people scroll through their newsfeed and all of a sudden come across a photo that doesn't look like the others and they stop and look at it and say, hey, wait a minute. But yeah, it was an interesting kind of story for us. We had raised our seed round back in February. And then got approached to do our Series A in August. And we had spent none of the money from our seed round. And I sort of said like, hey, is this even the right time for our company to take on this capital? And then very quickly, is this the right time for me personally to be taking on capital, given that my baby's coming in a month? And we ended up partnering, our lead was Tiger, we ended up partnering with with Tiger and deciding to go ahead with it. And they've been wonderful and it was absolutely the right thing to do with the company. But talk about kind of like a tense few days where I was going back and forth with myself around, you know, is this the right thing? I'd never raised a Series A before and I'd never been 8 months pregnant before.

Why did you end up doing it? Why did you end up going with the fundraise at that point? And first off, I wanna go back for a second actually. I wanna give you credit. The hook was really good in that post, by the way. It's like 8 months pregnant, I just raised $30 million. That's also helpful when you're scrolling and you read that hook. I just, I obsess about marketing like you obsess about systems. And so I see good copy. I'm like, oh, that's perfect. That's perfect. But also, I'm curious, what got you over that then in terms of, okay, well, this is the time I'm going to make it happen to fundraise, even though we have cash in the bank we raised not that long ago, especially for venture standards? What got you to do it then?

It was a mix of the right partners, because I believe it's not just capital, right? It's about getting the right people. We were really excited about the partners that we found in Tiger. And also looking at it and saying, well, gosh, what, what more could we do? Um, you know, what, what would this capital unlock for us as a business? And it just means we're able to go a whole lot faster and be a whole lot more aggressive in both our product development, as well as, you know, how we get out and tell our story and talk about what we're doing. Um, you know, at that time, uh, I think I said we hadn't done any growth or marketing. And so we had just seen like what the organic growth had looked like from just word of mouth alone. And we said, Yeah. Gosh, this is really strong. This is incredibly powerful. Like, what, what if we put gas on this engine? What could we do with it?

With that too, I mean, I saw the list of angels as well, number of notable angels in there. Was that always part of the strategy? Take me through that side, because I know other founders, if they have options, which is a great place to be in, if you can get them, it's like you're really picking, like you said, on the people. For you and those angels, how'd that come about with those angels you have?

Yeah, we were— I'm such a huge fan of getting great angels on your cap table because for, you know, a relatively small check, when you're trying to construct a large round, you know, space becomes a real issue, right? And so for a relatively small check, you're able to bring in folks who can potentially have really big impact on your business in a few different ways. We thought about folks who could, who both had experience in the kinds of product we were trying to build or the kinds of go-to-market motions we were trying to build, or who had complementary skill sets. to what me and the executive team had as well, who could bring a different kind of DNA. And, uh, I just went around and talked to folks in my network and said, who do you think are some of the best angels for X? Can you introduce me? And that was just a really great way to kind of quickly meet a roster and set of people. And I think to my point before, you know, within a 30-minute conversation, like, is this the person I want to be on a journey with? Right. And so the ones where, where you vibe, you know, it's, it's such an easy way to kind of bring them in and I use them all kind of in different ways now, but they're all very helpful to me, whether I'm trying to like gut check a marketing strategy or get some quick feedback on, hey, I know you've built this kind of product before. Like, how did you think about this? Or, hey, we're negotiating this sales deal right now. Have, how have you thought about like these kinds of terms and conditions?

Yeah, they can be so beneficial depending on what the value add is they have. I think I was talking to It might have been Jordy Hayes at PartyRound. And I think he wanted— why he started the company, it's helping founders fundraise in a simple way. And I think he mentioned it on that same thing around like he had someone who came in for like $1,000 or something. And they ended up getting— they ended up bringing in, I think it was like $50K in revenue or something like something attributable to that angel. It's like, you can get so much value depending on who the person is, even if it's a small check. So I think founders have to always kind of think about that when you're— when you are raising, even if it's a smaller check, they can still bring a lot of value to you.

Especially if they're former operators, right?

Oh, yeah.

Sometimes they can very tactically answer questions that maybe your investors, if they haven't been been operating for a bit, you know, are going to be a bit more removed from some of the details.

Yep. Oh, exactly. I mean, you've seen the rise of that now, even with a lot of operator angels or operator with small funds. Like, we see it a lot, which I find really interesting. I think it's going to continue because of that exact thing. They have the knowledge and experience, they're in it like right now, they can just tell you like what they're seeing and like, get multiple perspectives you can ping off of, which is really helpful. And I know we have a few minutes left, I want to just dive a little bit deeper in the product because we've touched on it barely. But Take me through that experience, customer using your product. I've heard this on different podcasts, I think, but I want to hear so people have an idea of like how simple this is, how easy it is, and also like things you've thought about along the way with the product itself.

Yeah. So we are really focused on how do we take the learning curve for Scribe to zero for a new user. And so one of the things that we look at is from the moment that you land on our marketing site to the moment that you're able to create an account, download Scribe, create a Scribe, share a Scribe. Um, we look at how long does that take someone? What's that journey look like? And it's under 4 minutes for your average user.

Insane.

We have, as I mentioned, users in over 100 countries. Many don't speak English who are outside the US. We haven't translated the product. They're able to get through in under 4 minutes. Um, and so we've said really, how can anyone, regardless of kind of background or level of digital literacy, be able to get in and use the product and, and, um, and be able to get value from it really quickly? This is really important, especially if you think about what we're trying to do, right? Because I think one, one of the big reasons that you see kind of difficulty around sharing this knowledge today is because there's a lot of friction. Like if you say to me, hey Jennifer, how do I generate that quarterly report again? Or like, how do I customize my settings here? Like, you know, gosh, now I've got to think about, are we, am I emailing you? Am I sending you a Slack? Am I taking screenshots and putting them in a Google Doc? Right. And then I have to take the time to actually do that. With Scribe, we said, what if documentation could just be digital exhaust? What if it was just the byproduct of you doing your normal work? What if you just click the record button and you do what you normally would do, and Scribe automatically generates all of the steps and instructions for you? And of course, you can go in and edit and customize it as you'd like, but the point is you shouldn't have to, right? That should be nearly frictionless. We should take that effort down to nearly zero. All you have to do is click that button. And so we're really focused on how do we take Friction out of the process really at every step of the way. So you don't have to do anything more than say like, oh gosh, I want to share something, click and be done with it.

I love it. So simple. And where can people go to learn more about Scribe and connect with you as well if they'd like to, Jennifer?

Yeah, they're, they can check us out. If you go to scribehow.com, scribehow.com, there'll be a big button, check out Scribe for free. Um, I could also share a promo code for our, our paid upgrade version with this audience as well. I'll share it with you and you can link to it afterwards.

Sure.

And, uh, if folks have feedback, you know, just, just hit us up and, and let us know what you think. We always love to, to hear from people who are using the product and, and the value they're seeing out of it.

Awesome. Thank you so much for the time today. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks so much. Great to be here.

Hey, thanks for listening. You wanna learn more about us? Head on over to vitalize.vc. You can also follow us on Twitter @vitalizevc, or you can follow me on Twitter @JustinGordon212. Have a great day and I'll talk to you in the next episode.