How GTM Engineers Use Puzzle | Advanced Mind Mapping for RevOps & COOs

Sure, sure.

All right, you guys. So I am back with another podcast with an amazing founder. He is the founder of Puzzle. It is the greatest mind map tool out there, especially if you're a GTM engineer. So my full time job, as you guys know, I'm a GTM engineer and there's so many moving pieces to what I want to actually construct when it comes to N8N clay. Even when it comes to like what's the workflow supposed to look like after a lead comes comes in from an advertising. My friend Dave from Cloud Task, he was like, hey, why don't you try, try this thing called Puzzle app. And you know, I tried it and I also thought I was like, hey, maybe this is like another Miro, like I have like lucid and Miro and all that. But when you actually use Puzzle, like the things you can do inside of it, it's actually game changing. You know, I really feel like you're such a forward thinker and it's just, it's funny because everyone thinks when they have to build a product, it has to be revolutionary. You actually simplified things. So I want to jump in. I'm going to give Brian the opportunity to speak. He is the founder of Puzzle. We're going to be going into GTM strategies, his backstory, how this all came about and how more GTM engineers can be using Puzzle to simplify their workflows on a day to day. So Brian, please give us the backstory. How'd you get here? How did Puzzle be get created? Please, the floor is yours.

Awesome. Thank you, Carrie. It's great to be here. Starting with the origin story of Puzzle started when I was running the operations for this 15 person organization. And I always say that this organization was all chaos, no order, right? So every time we wanted to structure a process or change a system, I would call the team wide meeting because I was responsible for the operations and making sure that systems and processes were in place. I was responsible for calling that team meeting and getting everyone's perspective on how they're using that specific system or how they're, you know, their team's contributing to a process. In those 60 minute meetings would go on for three or four hours because every single time we had to build the context back in our heads about how systems work and how processes work and who hands off what information at one point and where does the data live? All of those questions that are oftentimes a black box in an organization. And this organization that I was working with, that was certainly true. And this is really where I got, I called the problem Space Puzzle, which was. It was an organization's operations being totally, totally fragmented in the minds of the people who are doing the job. And so I set out to find a way that we could get a central repository that's visual so that everyone on the team can understand how the big picture operation worked. Because I didn't want to be in those meetings every time that we had to call them and no one else did. Instead, we wanted a place where everyone can have a common understanding about how systems and processes work. And so that's the origin of kind of where I experienced that problem. And, you know, that was in 2017. So it's literally been eight years since I experienced that problem. And slowly I've been working on developing Puzzle. You know, we're a bootstrapped one FTE company, so we're small but mighty. And I have two, like, elite contractors that I work with for development and some product operation stuff. So we've come a long way in those eight years. But that, that's the original pain point. Wow.

It's so funny to see how founders usually like really good founders. They usually. The pain point usually comes from their job and then the boss or whoever owns the company not wanting to actually fix the problem. And then a lot of the times we're just like, hey, I think I can't be the only one dealing with this. This actually may be a good idea for a business.

And Carrie, what you just said was so important because although I named that problem Space Puzzle, at the beginning, I don't think I was ready to like, build a product and build a company around it. After that company, I went to Uber and I worked in Uber's big BET division. So Uber has a big BET division where they make investments into like, what are like internal startups at Uber. And I was working in Chicago and I was the second operations hire for this project called Uber Works. And we went from like $10,000 a month to 10 million RR in like 18 months. It was like crazy rapid growth. And when you think about Uber, which is a worldwide logistics company, you think, wow, they must be pretty good at operations. Well, it wasn't the case. It was just as much of a kind of chaotic environment as it was back at that startup where I initially felt that pain point. And that's when I was like, oh, it wasn't just that original organization. It's even fully built out mature companies where their operations is, you know, a bit chaotic. And that at that point I was like, maybe I can go help the world in this way by giving people a framework for how they can organize their operations. Meaning that they can understand how their processes work, understand how their people relate to those processes, and how the technology across those processes has worked as well.

That makes sense. It is. I'm glad you had the opportunity to experience the fact that all founders, because now you're a founder, so I'm sure you understand we all go through the same problems, right? Sometimes it's even at the granular scale, like the Ubers, the doordashes, the apples, there's still so much chaos internally. And I think that when you have that level of first hand experience such as you had, and you witness rapid growth, you're really able to identify how many opportunities there are in the marketplace for you to also win. So it's actually, that's a cool story you told. I, I mean I could believe that Uber was a little bit chaotic after watching the movie, you know, I could see, I could see how that's possible, you know, but it's definitely, it's. So I guess after Uber, how did, when did Puzzle become involved? How much longer after?

So I actually got laid off from Uber in 2020 because the big bets division got a massive layoff and our entire Uber Works project was shut down and kind of sold off. And at that point in time I bought the Puzzle app domain. So it was like, it was like June of 2020 in like the early days of COVID And I was setting out to start this company, I think, and I started to pitch a bunch of investors. I pitched, I think, 75 investors on the idea of having a visual repository for how your people process and tools work together. And every investor's eyes glazed over when they asked me, well, so is it like Zapier? Can you like automate tasks? And I'm like, no, no, no, no. It sits on top of systems like Zapier so that you can visualize how Zapier and you know, HubSpot and Monday.com all together and that's where their eyes glazed over. No one was willing to invest into documentation. And that's when I decided, well, I'm going to find a way to create this product. And so I started consulting. So for the first, I don't know, even today I have some consulting, I have some consulting clients. But for the first three years, Puzzles product didn't even exist, right? It was just a consulting company to get a first row seat into what operators are thinking. And so I consulted for three years with a bunch of operators about how they're thinking about their organization. And I was helping them streamline things. So I was configuring systems. I became a no code expert, a zapier expert, a HubSpot, you know, partner, a Monday.com partner, a PandaDoc partner, Fivetran partner. I partnered with all these companies and I was deploying this tech stack into different organizations. And so it kind of. It was awesome. It was like an awesome strategic positioning because I got to talk to the customer for hours every week because they were paying me and I was delivering value for them. It got me a front row seat into the pain point of how organizations go about setting up their operations. And I had a third point and it'll come back to me, but it was just a great way to understand the problem and the customer deeply and slowly build a solution that I felt like solved it it. And you know, most people are using systems like Miro and lucidchart and Whimsical to. To do these jobs. And actually in my consulting time, I was using lucidchart and that's when I realized, oh my God, there's an opportunity here to build a system that was structured like notion. You could create it like a database of operations, but had the flexibility and visibility of something like Lucid chart and Mira and that that's how the product came to be. Ultimately.

It's actually a really good story and a really good way to actually do it. I like that strategy that you're taking. You just got in front of who your ideal clients would be in the future. Yes, that is a genius play right there. And I, I admire that one. I really do. I feel like sometimes with the podcast, that's what I'm doing as well, but I don't. I. I'm more. So I'm showcasing tools for GTM engineers, you know, so my client isn't the founder. My client's like, hey, do you want to become a GTM engineer, etc. So that's why I like to do these podcasts. All right, cool. So, yeah, so we're going to segue from that, right? Pretty much. I really like to humanize brands because in my previous video, somebody said, what. What's the difference between Puzzle and Miro and. Or Miro, I'm sure we'll all. None of us know how to say, say it correctly. It's like zapier. Zapier. We don't know which one it really is. Yeah, but what is the difference between you Myro. Lucid. Like lucid Charts break that down.

Yeah, totally, totally. I could speak on this for, for days. I think I, I categorize Miro Lucid Chart and Whimsical as everything whiteboards. And what I mean by everything whiteboards is that you can go in there and you can create a matrix for a brain share of marketing ideas. You can also create a process diagram, you can also just like store your personal notes and like personal pictures. You can make a collage. You can literally do anything in Miro, lucidchart and Whimsical. And there's value in that. There is definitely value in that. A lot of our users in Puzzle still use their Miro and lucidchart boards for those ancillary reasons. But what Miro, Lucent Chart and Whimsical don't do specifically in the use case of understanding your operations, in understanding how processes work, is they don't help you make business decisions, they don't help you answer vital questions that people have. When you see a process which is like, well, how much time does that process step take? Who's responsible for that process step? How many other steps does that role contribute to? What data fields are included are required at this form in order for three steps down in the process for that automation to run. And when we're talking about building a hyper automated and modern business operations, all of those questions around system architecture, where fields are filled out, how data flows through the process, who's responsible for what, how much steps cost, what, those are business decisions, those are process innovation questions and answers that need to be had in order to make those decisions about what's our tech stack, where are our opportunities where we can implement AI and implement automation and how can we just get really efficient? And if you're using Miro, lucidchart and Whimsical, you're going to have to flip to another tool, you're going to have to export your maps and bring it into an Excel sheet to do any of that analysis. And within Puzzle you can do all of it. It is full life cycle process innovation from current state mapping to quantifying how much your processes are costing you, to identifying technology that can automate those things to implementing it. And if you can rinse and repeat that innovation loop, then you're unbeatable over time because evolution shows us that the one trait that wins out is adaptability. And so your organization needs to be able to adapt over time. And so if you're committed to one system or one tool, that's cool. But what's more important Is that when that tool, that 10x's the output of that previous tool, you better be ready to transition to that new tool in weeks, not months or years. You know what I'm saying? So adaptability, I think is the number one trait that organizations should be investing into. That way they can adapt to the market, whether it's competitor moves or technology changes that happen.

I think that that answers the question and you're absolutely right. You know, and I think that after being like playing around in Puzzle, it really, I have the, the standard version, right. The free version that we, that you get like 50 blocks or I think whatever, I don't know the terminology. Yeah, I've been using that and I've been playing more and more with the features and I was just sitting like I don't feel like I need to leave Puzzle to do what I need to do and build what I need to build. Like everything is there. I would love to see more AI integrations for sure. Because I think once that component's there, I think it's just going to be a marketing thing like you just marketing to the right people. But once again, as a GTM engineer, mind mapping is everything for me. Workflows are everything. And having a clear visual because I have to be able to elaborate to the clients what they want. They think they know what they want. So I have to take what's in their head, simplify it. And Puzzle has really been able to do that for me. I use lucid. Lucid is really good. But the thing I feel about lucid right now is that they are no longer innovating. When I went into Puzzle, I feel like you really are innovating and you're, and you just understand the process due to your background. You're the perfect. Like this founder led product is awesome because you're solving problems that you wish were solved when you were in corporate working at another company. So I definitely have to give my flowers, you know, because I don't. When I talk with a lot of founders and every founder I talk to, I like all their products. Yours has been my favorite and has been so simple. But it has also just helped me in my day to day. So I wanted to say thank you for that.

Carrie. Man, that gives me chills. Gives me chills. My pleasure.

Absolutely, absolutely. Now when it comes to Puzzle, who do you recommend actually uses it? Like who's the. Who do you recommend and what are the top three features of Puzzle that some of us may not even know about?

Totally. These are great questions. I, I Want to answer it in, in kind of the perspective of are go to market, puzzles go to market. So I see agencies and freelancers being the top ICP for a product like this. The reason why is because of what you described, how you use puzzle. You said you need to create diagrams so that when your clients say, what'd you build us? Or how does it work? You can pull up a diagram that very clearly shows what technology is used, how it's used, with notes in the sidebar for each step. So it is a visual playbook for you to create diagrams so that you can communicate to your clients. And that's the earliest use case of puzzle. The second use case that is starting to ramp up is the internal knowledge base use case. So your use case is, I'm going to create diagrams so I can communicate my value that I'm bringing to my clients as an, as an agency and freelancer. The internal use case is more so can I create a repository of information that, that everyone can go visit so that they can understand a few things? If you were just a kind of like a frontline worker and you're not a system builder yourself, you're going to figure out which steps you're responsible for and how they work. It's really a visual training book playbook. But then there's the system builders internally. And this one's a really important use case because it's going to become increasingly important for system builder system builders to document how they're building their systems. Because before maybe there was one or two system builders in an organization. Well, in a modern organization, we are going to have dozens and dozens of people configuring systems, right? And ultimately the frontline workers will just be the systems and the actual people will just be configuring those systems and making sure that everything's kind of running correctly. But in order for your left hand to know what the right hand is doing, you need to be able to have a repository of information that makes it clear how all of these systems work together, where data is coming from, when it's populated. All those questions that I said puzzle answers, it answers those questions for the system builders. And when organizations are all system builders, because it's coming, that future is going to be a reality. You need a way to communicate how everyone is building at the same time. And that's when puzzle, I think, reaches its full maturity, is when that reality comes to, comes to bear. Because when a bunch of system builders are documenting things and everyone knows what systems are going live and what systems are Changing and there's dependency warnings that are showing people oh if you change this these three things will happen. That makes it so much easier than ripping the cords out and kind of have to having to clean things up afterwards. Because that's the risk that you run if no one knows any. No one knows zero about the about the organization's operations and systems.

Absolutely. And yeah I'm glad you're so forward thinking so that you know where the market is going that it's just gonna be like one big orchestra. You know and what's the person.

Yes.

Who does the. The waving. He. The I forgot what they do with me or he's all he has the sticks in his hand. But that's how I feel. That's where I feel like marketplaces are going, you know, even down to GTM engineering as a whole. I feel like everyone's going to be a GTM engineer eventually or that's what's going to be like what people are mainly hiring for. And it's on top of okay well AI and then people are just managing like teams of AI with very minimal human oversight.

Yes.

This is really going to come in and just dominate because it's just like I'm excited to use more of it. You know I really image is like dive deeper because I'm one of those people like once I start using a tool I'm like all right, well okay, we got the foundation. Let's see if this can go hit the next level and then the next level. You know what I would love to see you you guys do this is I'll say this is the part where I give feedback if you're open to it.

Please, please.

When it my specialty is not just in building out systems, it's in building out sales systems. I would love to see something like a puzzle Games marketed it as a webinar. Then it's here's how you use it. Maybe you target GTM engineers, system builders, whatever it is. Whoever controls the sops and operations of the day to day. And I would love to be it'd be like puzzle games and now you're actually taking us and building workflows with 100, 200, 500 people inside the webinar. Even current users. And then there's a prize for just like clay whoever builds the best. I don't know what would call it puzzle mind Map. Well I don't know what the word would be.

Map. I think it's a map.

Whoever builds the best map they get some sort of re prize or free Year of Puzzle, things like that. Because when I see founders who have such a great product, and I promise you guys, Brian didn't pay me for this, so don't. I'm. I just really like the product. But when I see founders with such a great product and the marketing isn't where I feel like it could be, I'm like, hey, I got. At least we got to put four minutes aside on this podcast where I could say, hey, this is what I would do. Because I think that's the missing piece. I wholeheartedly believe that if there was like, a puzzle games and then there were more YouTubers when they're doing walkthroughs, because that's like the new thing on YouTube. It's just showing a lucid chart and you're doing a walkthrough, I think you would dominate and just continue educating all of us. And me as a user myself, because I want to be educated as well. And, you know, I think especially with a lot of, like, the AI stuff and there's so many software companies coming out, there's two things founders are forgetting. Make your brand human and teach us how to actually use it. By the time you do those two things, us joining is not a problem. And if you can master those two things, which I highly believe you can, if you did all this other stuff, you know, I think that you will. I think investors will stop looking at the Myros and the Lucids and be like, what is this puzzle app I keep hearing about? And now it makes sense.

So totally.

That's just my marketing feedback.

Thank you, Carrie. It's welcomed. It's welcomed. And I will. I will think on that. I will. I also think that this might be a good opportunity to announce that Puzzle is going to be launching a community on Circle. So it was originally going to go down the Slack route. Slack communities, you know, they're. We don't know what their survival rate is, actually. But Circle communities I've seen thrive. And I think once I unleash all of the system builders that are in the Puzzle user base today into a community where everyone sharing their knowledge about systems and processes and tools and all the really cool stuff that's happening on LinkedIn right now can be shared within Puzzle in an intimate way with workshops and webinars. These are the things that I'm working on right now. And we're launching that next week on Wednesday. So that'll go live, and then I'll start to invite people to do webinars.

Perfect. I think it'll Be awesome. Like, webinars are back right now, and there's two things people aren't doing in B2B webinars, and they're not doing podcasts like this. You know, they may look at podcasts like, oh, it's only 100 views or 300 views or 500 views. I'm like, no, you now get to humanize your brand and actually explain what it is your product or service does. You know, you're really good at speaking, and that's what I like about you. Because I usually talk to people like 15 minutes beforehand. It's one call first, then I have to make sure the energy and vibe is there. But Dave is like, trust me, one call with Brian, you'll be fine. And I was like, all right, I trust it. But just, like, the way you articulate things, it really goes to show that puzzle can really be the next big thing. Because if this is how you speak, how you articulate your story and what you've built at this stage, being such a new startup, what are you, two years old?

Yeah, we've launched the product 18 months ago.

In 18 months, you're already your way of. You're. You're at the same level these other companies. I can only imagine what's going to happen when you have the community and the marketing behind you, how fast you're going to take off. You don't have a product problem. It's not. You don't even have an awareness problem now. You just need more awareness of the product. So please keep on keeping on with it. But I want to. I want to go into my next questions.

Sure.

Yeah. And then we. We could jump around a little bit. So with puzzle.

Okay.

What'S the future for it now? When I say the future, like, how big do you want to grow? How many users do you have now? What's the. How many users do you want to have in the future? Like, what's the plans there?

So today we have about 2,000 users, and. And our growth has been very, very incremental over the last 18 months. We are bootstrapped, so we don't. We haven't spent anything on marketing. Like, we. I think we have a 500 budget going on Google Ads, and that's only been going for like a month and a half. So we're just starting to get into paid marketing and starting to kind of wrap my head around driving, signups, webinars, podcasts, that sort of thing. But in terms of the. The. When you asked about what is the future, do you mean the future of the product. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the future of Puzzle, right now we have kind of the base components of what an organization has in terms of their operations. It's people processing tools. Like if you boil down what, how an organization operates, it's people using tools to get jobs done. And that's it in a sequence, right? You can literally say x person uses Y tool to do Z job. And if you just continue that pattern, you'll have an idea how work gets done. And so now that that's baked into the product, it's really going to be about solving. There are really two major problems that I see for Puzzle to solve for. One is one of the biggest hurdles for documentation is creating it. Not like, not everyone is like us, Carrie. Not, not everyone is willing to invest the time into building elaborate diagrams that clearly articulate how systems work. And so I want to lean into investing on ways that we can get people to get their information into the system, but accurately. Because, you know, as you've worked in a bunch of AI tools, I imagine, and maybe you've even tried lucidchart or Whimsical or Miro's AI features, but when you put in a prompt, you're going to get an output that is super, super cookie cutter. And it might help as inspiration or brainstorming that you can get. Get on with your own things right next to it. But chances are that AI feature is not going to give you the output that you're looking for. And so my goal for Puzzle is how can I get Puzzle to get someone's thoughts into Puzzle as fast as possible? And how do you do that? Well, the first is you have a bunch of information in existing systems that you can get into Puzzle so you can build integrations. We have integrations with HubSpot, make and Zapier to pull in workflows, forms and that sort of thing. And it lines it up for you. So you just have to like click a button and it adds those as sync steps. I think that's phase one. Phase two is how can we get that information from systems, put it through AI and allow AI to kind of configure the map for you in the order that makes sense. That's off into the distance. I don't actually know how we're going to solve that problem, but that is what everyone's asking for. And frankly, in order to get an organization to transition from something like miro whimsical in LucidChart, it doesn't take a system that's 5x better. It's going to take a system that's 10x better or more for someone to leave something that they are used to. And so the question that I get all the time about leaving those companies and coming and you know, building with Puzzle is do I have to map everything? Because I have everything mapped in lucidchart. I don't want to have to remap it in puzzle. And so I have to find a nifty way to get information from other systems into Puzzle, either using AI, either building out integrations. And those are really the direction that I see for getting documentation into the system.

That last one really, it was really like a. Well, I could see how that could be a problem when you've already built out. It's like someone's trying to get me to go from zapier to make.com exactly. And I'm like, make is a better tool now that I know more about automations. But I'm like, I have companies running on zapier right now. Yeah, it triggers correctly all the actions. It. I don't know if I'm willing to make that investment.

Totally.

That's a huge pain point to solve.

Huge.

Yeah, it's huge.

But I think it can be done. The good news is that I'm not lucidchart trying to get people to leave Puzzle. And the reason why I'm happy about that is because there's no where puzzle information fits into lucidchart, you know what I'm saying? Like if you pull puzzle information which has connections, process has connections to tools and roles and people in data and your data model that has nowhere to go in lucidchart, all of lucidchart's information, if you're a company that uses lucidchart, it is titles of steps in shapes and that's it. So like, if there's one direction to get information from, it's LucidChart over to puzzle and then from there people can go deep into documentation. Because if I were to finish that loop about LucidChart MIRO and whimsical, those systems are everything, whiteboards where you can do shallow documentation. Puzzle is the place where you get visual relational documentation that is deep. You can build a visual playbook that tells you the full story and answers all those questions that I had mentioned earlier.

I would love to see you build out a drag and drop feature with AI where you could screenshot from lucidchart, take the screenshot, drop it into puzzle. Puzzle will rebuild it or at least assess and Diagnose what's in the photo and at least give you the steps so that eventually get an AI builder, et cetera. For puzzle. I think that, I think that might be like the simplest route, a screenshot drag and drop. Because it has to be possible if right now with chat GPT, you can take a picture and it can extract what's in a PDF and screenshots. Yeah, yeah, that's a route. I'm, I'm sure you've been thinking of every which way, but that does make a lot of sense. Yeah, that. I hope you solve that pain point. I really do. I really do. Because I just didn't think about other companies who have, who are already building out. And you know, they're deep. They are. And the thing is, it's like they're not even scratching the surface of how deep they can actually go. They can have all these, they could have a hundred mind maps build out, built out, but at the end of the day they don't even realize like, hey, you can actually like cut these 100 mind maps down to 25 and just have 20 detailed mind maps inside of puzzle right now with actual steps. And it's not just squares where you, you add the text and then you're just typing a few things. My favorite feature in puzzle is the notes feature because sometimes I'm like, I don't even know why this is. Here, let me write Jock this down as to why.

Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. So spot on.

It is. And that's where it's gonna come down to, I guess as we spoke about earlier, teams, people orchestrating systems, you know, and I think we gotta get you, we gotta get some more funding. That's what we got. Because the things that you're bringing up is making me very hyper aware of the problems that I've had with these other software players.

Yes, right.

So yeah, let me ask this question then. Why do people come to puzzle that you've seen, you have 2000 users, why have they come to you?

They've come over from the, the pains of using those other whiteboarding tools. But what, what I, in very similar to what you just mentioned, they, they didn't really realize that they were kind of just coping with these pain points that they had and they like didn't. I guess they, they weren't thinking about switching to a tool that might be better or searching for a tool that might be better because like a process map has been a process map since like I think 19, I think 18, something like. I'm talking about over, like, a long time ago. A long time ago, people have been using process maps. And I think it was like 1920s when the process map was invented to essentially get a visual of how organization, structure, structure worked. And no one's changed it since that time. And so when I built puzzle, like, when people discover puzzle, they also discover the pain points that they were feeling. Like you had mentioned, they're like, o, I can't believe I was even doing it that way. You know, I was like, struggling to like, take a tools icon from the Internet, drag it into your lucid chart and like, put it in the square. It's like, why would you need to do that? We're in 2025. We have a relational. We can build relational databases. And so it's a lot of transition. It's folks who are transitioning from lucidchart, Miro and Whimsical who are looking for salvation to put both their written and their visual documentation in one place. That way they don't have to do their visual and then write paragraphs in Google Docs.

You know, that makes sense. Yeah. Because I would build in any other tool. I have to build it and then like make a loom video and then attach the loom that it's. I just have to keep moving. I don't want to move because I'm assuming your ideal, your, Your icp. I'm assuming there are builders like I am. And it's like, yes, we just like, we need to stay in the, in our box of, of creativity because, you know, one wrong color on a browser tab may throw off our entire, like, workflow. So that's why I like puzzle. Like, having the ability to not have to leave simplifies. So I'm like what you just said. I'm also just happy to say that I've transitioned over as well. No complaints so far now. So what would you say to people who are. How would you actually handle that rebuttal? Hey, I have all of these workflows in my role and lucid and whimsical. I want to use puzzle. It looks interesting, but I don't want to lose my workflows. What's the answer to that?

So I think that the answer is that I forget what the kind of mental fallacy it is. But it's like loss. It's like loss where I'm blanking on it. But it's when you are so. Oh, it's like the sunk cost fallacy. That's what it is. It's the sunk cost fallacy. Where you've dug yourself into this, this pit of Lucid Chart and Miro and you are unwilling to do the smart thing because you are so deep within this tool. And so I always say that there's no better time than to start right now. And if you want to keep one license with lucidchart so that any of your team members can log in and go reference historical information, have it like, like keep it. I think it's 33 bucks per month to have that license. But start with puzzle because the puzzle platform is, is being built to handle modern operations. And so like, if you want to be part of the future, then you want to start diagramming inside of puzzle. And the more power ups that we ship on top of puzzles, diagrams will make that effort that you put into puzzle diagrams more and more and more valuable to you over time. And so if people are just wondering, like, I don't want to cut bait. Well, it's kind of like a survival question, you know, and now will people survive with Lucid Chart? Of course they will. You know, like they're going to keep being in business and it'll be fine. But there is a competitive edge to having a better view on your organization and understanding your technology and how it's used across your operations. And over time, when you're making incrementally better decisions because you have more information and insight from a visual map of how your operations works, then over time you're going to beat out the people who are still in lucidchart. And so although it's survival, it's not survival, you know, from today to tomorrow, it's survival from, you know, today to maybe 10, 15 or 25 or 50 years from now. And for me and I think everyone else, if you're building your company, you want it to survive forever, you want it to thrive forever. And so you need to make sure that you're investing time into the right platforms. And so that's the argument that I make for anyone who's saying, I'm still with lucidchart. You know, it's like someone driving like a horse in buggy and be like, I, I don't know, I like my horse so much. I don't want to transition over to a car. Well, you're gonna get done and dusted on the highway. If you're still in a horse and buggy and someone and everyone else is.

Driving a car, that makes sense. So for $37 a month, they can amplify their business and possibly, you know, three, four, five, Exit. Because at the end of the day, if they have these processes in place and they're and workflows, it's only going to enhance employee performance.

Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

I mean for, for 37 or $33 a month, whatever it was, I mean a dollar a day, you can't really, you know, it's not the end of the world.

It's not, it's not, it's very inexpensive for the major decisions that it helps you make in terms of tech stack decisions, team design and where you're, you know, automating and implementing AI agents.

So what are the top three job titles we'll go with that should be using Puzzle?

I think gtmes from the jump, anyone who's doing GTM engineering should be using Puzzle because there's so many tools on the market and it's, it's just a really hard thing to wrap your head around how all of these tools work together. Maybe as a gtme you get it and in your brain you kind of like have the whole puzzle figured out. But what's really important is that you can articulate, like we've talked about earlier, how these systems work to other people. And so GTMEs I think are like top of the line should be using Puzzle to map out their GTM stack, how it works and conveying it to leadership. Especially because GTM is like GTMEs are so new and so justifying the work that they're doing. Improving its value, which you can all do inside a puzzle with the process costing feature is really important right now in the early stages, while this kind of role proves itself out in a way which it already is. So that's the first title. The other title in my mind is the Chief Operating Officer. Right now. They're not the person who's going to be, you know, going into the steps and building out the steps. But when I talk about using Puzzle from like a top down mandate, if I was a chief operating officer, I would tell every one of my teams to go into puzzle, create a dedicated tab for your department and build out your process flows. Because department by department you can identify inefficiencies and understand how you're going to make operational changes. Especially when your investors, if you're a COO that has investors say, how are we using AI? How are we automating our processes? And if you could pull up a map and say, I have 232 steps that use AI across our 10,000 step operation, your investors, their jaw is going to drop. The fact that you have those data Points and you're able to point to a map about the financial and quantifiable impact that AI is having on your organization. So that's the second title that I would say after is like a, like a very modern system builder, like a gtme. And then the chief, the Chief Operation Officer.

Well then who would be the last, what's the last title? If you had to say, give us one more.

Sure. The last title. Oh, I would say Revenue Operations. And this is kind of similar to gtme, but Revenue Operations. What I think is unique with Revenue operations versus GTME is they're oftentimes working across the entire life cycle. Now, I know GTM engineers, some of them might work across the entire life cycle, but for the most part GTM is focused on new business. And that's it. Right? Like how can we grow new business, grow new awareness? Whereas Revops is across that entire cycle of marketing, sales and customer success or customer support. And so they're worried about retention, the whole tale of retention. And so they're needing to work across these teams. Whereas GTMEs are much more experimental, kind of figuring out what's driving demand. And Revenue operations is much more grounded, working in, you know, what works today, documenting with what works today, configuring the systems. So when you're working across teams, teams will often have questions about, well, where do handoffs happen and where do systems stop and certain things about the process. And I think revenue operates to make sense of the whole flow from marketing. Sales in CS is really, really important and, and getting buy in from teams about how specific processes work. So that would be the third title.

All right, so we got GTM engineers. Yes, Chief Operating. The Chief Operating Officer COOs, you said.

That's right. Yes.

And then last but not least was.

Revops Revenue Operations Manager. Yeah.

Awesome. Okay, perfect. Now this is the personal side of things that we're going to wrap up with. So my first question is how does it feel to go from 0 to 2000 users?

It feels expected. It feels expected. Now I know that seems a little cold, but I really believe in this product and I think that the users who are on the platform love it. And there is also a collection of people who have come and have went and I just would, you know, I kind of expect that there is a good amount of demand for this platform. It's taken a bit longer, you know, for us to get to market. And so I'm really trying to get creative, get creative about how I can bolster up the user base quite a bit. It feels Good. Like this is a long time coming. I had this idea back in 2017, so I do like to pat myself and our team on the back about where we're at now because it has been a long time coming and we're bootstrapped. So like the cap table is clean as a whistle. And that's not, that's just very rare to get, you know, what feels like early, early product market fit sort of. And, and be at the place where we're at in terms of team size and cap table and, and, but also traction at the same time.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I think in 18 months you have done an incredible job. You know, it's. You say you feel like it's expected for you to be here. You're not even running ads. There's no clear GTM strategy and you have acquired more users than most companies ever will in their entire lifetime.

There.

It says so much as you say about like the MVP and you know, the use case like you have proven that it works and that it's wanted. My not advice, my prayer for you at this point is that you really structure a GTM process fast because you never know who the other Brian is sitting at Clay saying, what if I turn clay into a mind map? Or all of a sudden now the bigger players, they start coming together and they're like, oh, we just saw this puzzle thing and we have 200 million in funding. Let's just either copy or buy buy puzzle out. And it's just I don't like to see people be taken over by the bigger companies. And the bigger companies only win due to finances, not due to solving real life pain points. Not saying Clay doesn't. Clay is awesome. But once again, after you, after being a customer of both lucid and puzzle, you're dominating them. But you're not winning at marketing. And as we know in business, all that matters at the end of the day is marketing. It's people are only going Clay is not that great. But when you see the marketing, the job titles, how it is a requirements to understand Clay, we need the job market to be. It is a requirement. You understand puzzle and all of the functionalities within puzzle. That's where you're going to win. Because your level of success that you're already having, I've never seen it before. Right. You know, and a lot of my friends are founders. They scale very quickly, but they scale because our background comes from paid advertising, outbound strategies. You have idea and you built and you believed and look how far you've gotten in 18 months. Companies don't grow this quickly. So all I ask of you is if you have been given such an amazing opportunity that very few companies will ever get that you 10x in the next 12 to 24 months. Because the Runway is very clear for you right now.

But prayer accepted. Prayer accepted.

No, Brian, is there anything else you want to leave the audience with? Any insights, tips, anything at all?

Well, if you're interested in becoming a person who builds modern processes, I invite you. Carrie will be in there next week to join the puzzle community. It's completely free. You sign up with Puzzle, so just go get your puzzle account, you can join the community. And if you keep tabs of that community, you're. You're gonna, you know, drink the Kool Aid. You're eventually going to be building diagrams, and you're going to be eventually building systems. So I invite everyone who is listening to come to the puzzle community. You're welcome. And we will get better together every day.

Love that. Get better together. I like it. All right, you guys, I'm going to be leaving Brian's LinkedIn in the description below. I'm also going to be leaving a link to the puzzle app. I would love for you guys to go check it out, go do a free trial and just, just go play around with it. Have fun. When I first signed up for it, I was just having fun. I didn't have like this big, oh, let me convert. No, I was just like, hey, what can this do? And can it help me? And after building out a couple of workflows and after building up my mind map, I was a believer. So if you're a GTM engineer and you understand the pain points we go through of how we need to articulate to our clients, to our, to our employer, whoever it may be, Puzzle will simplify the day to day for you and it will simplify how you articulate. Because a lot of the times us, we come in as GTM engineers, our common knowledge isn't common knowledge to the rest of the world. But puzzle makes it so for everyone where everyone can speak the same language regardless of experience level. And with that being said, you guys, thank you, Brian, for coming on and we'll see you on the next one.

See it.