4 Things We Did To Go From 0 to 120 Million Users with Prashanth Chandrasekar, Stack Overflow

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Why would you go and try to create a community from scratch when you already have a community that's highly engaged and operational, has the network effects and people are going there anyway so organically? If people just encounter Snowflake, encounter aws, it would be silly to go and try to create that from scratch. It's kind of like if you're trying to host a party, let's say that the party happened somewhere every night. It was always full, right? Are you going to try and host your own party and create a bigger buzz? Spend a lot of marketing dollars to go do that? May not make sense for you to do it. You may or may or may not succeed. I need some traction. You need some traction.

Hey, what's up, innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more.

You need some traction.

Your product or your service will never become a commodity if you build a community back.

Overflow.

They built a community of 120 million software developers. Welcome to Traction. How are you doing?

Very good.

Thanks Lloyd, for having me and for us to get an opportunity to chat about communities and stack Overflow.

Prashant, before we dive into today's topic and go into this community and product led and all of that stuff. Love to get your story. Like, you came to the US when you were 17 and today you're running one of the largest communities. Give us your backstory. How did you get into all of this?

Yeah, no thanks, Lloyd. And so we have some commonalities on this one. I grew up in India until I was about 17 in a city called Bangalore, India, which is known as the Silicon City of India. And I just was very fortunate to have parents who were very open to growth and sending their Kids to, to study abroad and so on. So I luckily got a scholarship when I was in high school to come to the US to go to university to study computer engineering. And I showed up on the east coast in Maine and was with an amazing four years of engineering education and that was immigrant to the country. And it's just been a phenomenal journey since I joined. Effectively started as an engineer, worked in a couple of different companies, then decided that my true passion was helping understand sort of the bigger picture of tech companies and really helping them scale. And so I moved various functions, always with technology one way or the other, whether it was consulting or even finance. And then ultimately took on an operating role at Rackspace, which is where I was born about seven years right before I joined Platform. But at Rackspace a lot of my work was focused on cloud services on AWS and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. And that's the business I helped lead and grow. And Sapoflow just serendipitously they were looking for a CEO and this company I couldn't obviously I was so thrilled about the opportunity because it's created such a large impact. To your point, around 100 million people. And that's when I joined in approval of 2019 and it's been a great journey since.

What was the driving factor besides like a CEO title? Big community that made you take the Stack overflow job because it's a lot of responsibility too and you're alone at the top.

Yeah, yeah, that's the title more. I think for me there were two primary reasons. The first one is just you don't get a lot of opportunities in life to positively impact 100 million monthly visitors. That's a lot of people. Right. So that comes with this sort of sense of fulfillment about working towards a goal that's like much bigger than anybody in one lifetime. We really believe this is an institution that will stay for many decade and years. So I think that was the biggest draw was just the impact that it drives globally and it goes so vast and it helps so many people. The second reason was a lot of the work that I'd done at Rad State around helping scale the cloud services business. Just a very traditional, almost effectively SaaS model scaling with everything from specialized sales to customer success to product engineering, all of that really bringing that expertise to help with the product led transformation at that overflow, which is really what we're now undergoing as we build on that foundation of community with our SaaS business. So that's really what, you know, attract. The second reason why I came on board because I thought I could contribute to that.

Definitely. I mean it's a phenomenal community. You guys are creating a massive impact. How many employees does Stack Overflow have? And I'm assuming you guys are fairly distributed, right?

Or.

Yeah, so we, you know, we're approximately, we are hiring quite a bit by the race. So anybody that's listening who's interested in great roles and working for our mission, please apply for our open jobs. Just a ton of roles we're trying to fill. We are about 300 people or so and if you think about you said this and we're growing. So we will very easily grow by.

30% this year in terms of headcount, the distribution. Yeah, pre Covid we were about 40% of our company was remote, 80% of product engineering was remote, 60% of marketing was remote. So we were very heavy remote distributed team to begin with. We have people all around the world like Russia and Brazil and both in the US and the UK where our primary offices are and now of course every 100% remote. But as far as result of COVID and the pandemic, our recruiting drive has been completely distributed.

So glad to have you here, Prashant. Without further ado, please take it away.

So I'm Prashant and you can reach me on Twitter or LinkedIn anytime you'd like. And we're fairly active on LinkedIn primarily, but look forward to engaging with this community which is a great community and also thanks again Lloyd for the opportunity to share our story. So today's topic I thought we would talk about really are thinking around how to scale B2B SaaS companies and with a special focus on community building which is obviously our specialty and what we're known for. And as Stack Overflow, it's all about communities. You have a core focus on developers and technologists and we're in the midst of transforming and scaling into a product led SaaS company and I'll explain what that is here in a second. I joined, as Lloyd mentioned, as CEO of Stack after about a seven year stint as a senior leader of Rackspace where I led their cloud services business and the company obviously also if you, if you paid attention to it, it went public for about four years under private equity ownership. So they went public again last year. So a great success story for the company.

So I started, I wanted to start.

With this sort of this chart that is actually from a book called the Messy Middle by Svon Belsky. Scott's actually a good friend of mine and section mate from business school at Harvard Business School. And he is the current Chief Product Officer of Adobe. And he talks about this journey that everybody goes through, right. And I oftentimes show this image to our teams both at Raspberries and here around the fact that if you're on any sort of entrepreneurial scale journey, it's never sort of always a straight line to the top, right? And you're going to go through this, these ups and downs of the seesaw motion and you're going to have wins and you're going to have losses and I'm sure many of you relate to, to this. But the important point here is as part of the scale journey, as long as the sort of slope of this line is on a positive upward trajectory, you're in good shape. And as CEOs and leaders of SaaS companies, it's important to always take a step back and to assess the general slope of whether you're you consistently having wins and are you moving generally in the direction of where you need to move or are you moving flat or down. So that's I think an important sort of skill to be able to internalize. I always think back to this chart as when it puts things into perspective when we go through this journey is always not straightforward. So to focus the discussion today on the scales journey, I thought we'd talk about four key pillars and the ones that I believe are the most important ones to keep in mind as leaders scale their businesses to get to that elevated revenue number. So the first, the first category is product market fit and expansion. So what this is all about is what are ways in which you can ensure that your product is fundamentally sound, that you're solving a huge problem for customers. All of this, by the way, before you scale on a go to marketplace. And how do you expand the scope of the use cases over time? Right, so those are the questions. The second category is go to market approach and expansion. And there are many ways to go to market. What are the options? How do you decide which one's best for you and how do you expand your go to market over time? The third one is around competitive differentiation. So many companies and startups, how do you really stand out from the pack and grow despite the competition? It's a big question for me, any of us. And then finally, state specific team and can you really, can you really scale to 250 million with the same founding team? Probably not. Right. So across product and go to market, you're going to need different types of people along the way. And so I Think that's another kind of big category. So a lot has been written by the way about categories one and two, so I will work with them a little bit faster and I'll spend more time on three and four, which connects back to also the community point I was mentioning. So let's kick off. The first one is product market fit and expansion. And the key points here are things like when you think about two categories, fit, which is the first part of that definition, and you think about expansion the second part of that definition. There are a few things to talk about. One is when you think about repeatable value with regards to fit, you definitely want to make sure that you're delivering this very consistently to your customers in at scale sort of way. And it's very much a machine that is being reproduced in terms of value creation and value capture for that customer. If your onboarding experience is not set up very well, that's going to be a problem because your customers don't see the value of the product very early on and then you're moving on to planning and doing other new types of customers or even the temptation of taking on things like custom enterprise customers before you hand this sort of the foundation down. That can be very difficult. And I've learned this the hard way growing the past decade of doing this. It's been very interesting to learn it as you do it because if you don't actually have the repeatable value, it can be a problem. Leading indicators the second point around making sure that you know you're looking at not just the, the outputs or the lagging indicators for giving you a sense of whether or not you're on the right track, but also looking at things like in our case post that go for things. We spend a lot of time right now focused on how customers adopting the product, how are they interacting on Intercom, how are they. Are we. How are people responding to in product nudges, all those sort of things and adoption of certain features we launched and so on. Those leading indicators give you a good sense if customers are seeing value and are likely to renew and all those sort of things. Problem journey is around making sure that you think about expansion. How do you expand the utility of your product? You can think of your maybe focus on a very specific part of the value chain today in Rackspace for example and we would think about cloud services. We folks, we started actually with managed services, which is how do you run on aws, right? But when you look earlier in that cycle you can think about things like how do you architect for the cloud, how do you think about topics like DevOps culture and so on. And so you're really in cost optimization is a different further down the line after how do you run the cloud? So those pre and post items that gives you a sense of how you can expand the scope of your product. And then finally use cases. You know, you may be focused on a very specific sort of use case. In our case for Stack Overflow as an example, we primarily serve engineers and developers and we start there. That's the primary use case in making sure they break down barriers between themselves. But then you can expand to DevOps, then SRE and architecture and product marketing and customer success and you can go to marketing and you likely have to make changes to your product as you do that, as in adding more features and so on. But that's another way in which you can expand the scope of your product and tolerate it. That's the product market fit and expansion. A few key points there. Let's talk about go to market approach and expansion with tech point. So on this one, similarly, if you think about approach, there are a couple of points. One is product led or sales led or marketing led growth. These are important points that you have to decide. Ultimately you think about the first item there. You need to be clear and align on one of those with your team as the motion. And that basically means that you're going to invest in how the company responds to customer needs. Are you going to focus on the user, which is typically a product led approach, or are you going to focus more on the customer top down at a CIO CTO level? Is it a hybrid approach? I think it's very important to take a have a point of view on this because it really aligns your leadership team and also aligns how you invest in your company and how you allocate resources. So that's very important. And there are pros and cons for each product led. Sales led, marketing, product led very much. Stack Overflow is now a product led company. Previously it was an engineering led company. Actually Rackspace was more of a sales led company. And you're pretty marketing led companies like an Apple as an example, right. So you've got their pros and cons for that freemium and free trials. So it's hard to be in B2B SaaS without the ability for users and customers try before they buy. And developers and technologies especially do a lot of this and hold the power increasingly to make recommendations. And this is very true especially when you're relying on a bottoms LED Bottoms up product LED motion that I'm happy to report I'll mention this in a bit is that yesterday we launched Stack Overflow for teams, this premium offering, ironically after we launched the enterprise and did market products. And I'll explain why that is in a second, but you can go check it out if you're interested. And then the direct with indirect sales motion, can you do it all on your own with your direct sales team or do you need to use third parties like alliances or channel partners or system integrators? And that's an important trade off, which is your primary sales motion. You might want to pick. Generally you want to pick one because I think it's very difficult to do all of them at the same time until you have a level of scale. And then finally unit economics, which should be an explicit priority if you want to create long term fundamental value with things like LTV or CAC and the payback period, we'll see. All right. And then expansion, you've got verticals. That's one way to do it where you can actually say, you know what? Beyond if you want to pick a industry verticals, for example, stack Overflow for teams. We spend a lot of time in financial service, so all the big banks, et cetera, work with us. And once we get to a certain critical mass, we would be able to have things like solutions and packages and bundles of other products relevant to that particular industry need. And you would measure things like attach rates, et cetera. That's relevant to that. That's a, that's one way to go to the market through verticals. Another way to do this is through segments. So you could start either in typically the story people start in the SMB, you move on to the then market segment, they move to the enterprise. That's how we did it at Raspate. Ironically, a stack overflow for our teams product. We started in the enterprise, then moved down market to mid market and then moved down to SMB. And we just launched freemium. So literally the opposite direction. And that's unusual. Our stack overflow path is unusual. Most products start from the bottom and move up. We just had a platform that works at scale for again 100 million users. So we had an enterprise platform that we could work off of. So we had a distinct advantage as part of that. And then geographic areas. That's another way to think about expansion is how do you think about where you start, how much you can replicate in a different country. So you start in the US Are the use cases in the customer characteristics and needs and pain points similar in a place like with the EMEA and the uk. That was the case for us at Stack. Even at Rackspace, many things are applicable across geography, but you might have to think about things like local language support, hiring, local currency billing, local go to market team, customer success team. So it takes definitely a thought and effort to make sure you do this successfully. So those are the ways in typical ways in which folks expand. And it's a good framework for us to think about all of the ways in which you can grow from a, from a go to market perspective. All right, then the third point, so I'll spend a little bit more time on this. Competitive differentiation is around, which is I think ultimately part of strategy. Right. And if you think about the ways in which you can do this, there are probably three categories. The first one is product. And you hear a lot of everybody here is aware of the ways in which you can differentiate on a product basis. So features, its quality, its reliability, its price distribution and so on. You're very much a good example of this would be like, hey, Hondas and Toyotas are known to be notoriously reliable cars. You can run them for 100,000 miles with no issues, as in. But they've created a brand because of that product reliability aspect. The second vector or pillar, rather people think about this is brand. And there are many parts to creating great brands. The values that your company stands for, the heritage and the story or the packaging or the convenience or customer support or quality and so on. And so many great examples of companies have created great brands around this. One example would be Zappos or Customer Support, the shoe company that Amazon owns. And they're notorious for all these stories about how they would stay on a call with the customer for hours until they actually got the exact order shipped. And they would wait on, they would order pizzas for the customer from a local pizza delivery store. They would just go to the extreme land speed. Even at Rackspace, we had a very similar mentality around what we call fanatical support. And that was all about doing whatever it took to make sure the customer was very, very happy and going to the sort of the ends of the earth to make it happen. So that's one example of how brands get created. But there are many dimensions to which you can do that, as you can see here. And that's again a very popular way to start things. And the lesser known, what we believe to be a very important way to differentiate is through community. This is obviously our expertise. And I'll mention The five sort of key tenets of building a great community. Example, when we think about flow, the things that really come to mind when we've done this is creating a really a shared identity in our case, for developers and technologists who absolutely love helping their fellow developers and technologists is the huge draw. And that's how the foundation of the community public platforms create and based on shared identity. The second one is around incentives and rewards and this is all about the gamification on our platform and the upvotes and the downloads and badges and recognition for the best top rep users and so on. And this gives a tremendous sense of accomplishment of helping your fellow development technologists even have a influence score as in like your one question and answer that maybe you answered a question or you asked a question and that impacted millions of people and we actually showcased that impact in your profile. And that's just amazing because it is. We were also very fortunate that we had amazing founders that created this platform that has lasted for over a decade in Akade. That's the second pillar. The third one is around building with the community and not for the community. So you can be an entity from the outside trying to do something, you have to do it in collaboration with them. And we've done this over the past four years again with very strong partnership over the years with our power users, all our meta users and we effectively partner with them to really create ultimately what is the governance framework. It's all the rules, how the platform is set up, the moderation, how does it happen and introduction of new sites. We have over 150 website 150 sites. On top of the price, stackoverflow.com, we have a whole bunch of Stack Exchange sites. And that's why we're able to get to the scale that we were at, which is over 200,000 signups and over 15 million questions and answers. And all of that is possible because we built with the community. The next item is breaking down silos to really having associated communities, whether that's in our case, all the technology centric communities like Full stack engineering, cloud, DevOps, AI and ML data science, we've been able to really have. This is a little bit of a work in progress for us where we're trying to actually create a more holistic tech sites stack over and all the technology sites on Stack Exchange. How do you make sure that you break down silos? There's more and more technology that the lines are blurring, right? And DevOps, especially somebody who's focused on the DevOps movement in a company is very much blurring lines between infrastructure on AWS or how they write code. Full Stack engineering is another example of that. It's important to do that and then virtual cycles, the last point, which is really to have this ability to have the public platform and other products be able to really have that circular motion where you create that network effect that rises all boat. So that's the fifth item that I think is compelling. And one other point I'd mentioned here is that the order in which you do this is important. So most companies start with a great product, they build a great brand and then they go build a great community, right? In our case we have actually started with a great community which is SAP Overflow. We built that as a result of that have a great brand and now after about over a decade of doing it, we are on a product led fast journey, right? So this order matters. I think most people, like I said, go left or going right to left and there's some good examples of companies that have done it even right to left and obviously we're on our path. MongoDB is a good example, one that started as an open source community and now has created a very successful product like Motion and so on. So that's the framework in terms of competitive differentiation which I hopefully is useful. And if you think about the value of community, because that's again our focus. In 2019 there was a survey done by Swiss on Capital that Talked about that 80% of founders reported that building a community was as important to their business, was very important to their business and 28% said that it was critical to that business and how I would say is very relevant. Especially when the world is becoming a lot more distributed, a lot more remote friendly, et cetera. I suspect mostly the community will become even more prevalent as a source of competitive differentiation beyond product and brand. So that's all about community building. And now let's talk about a couple of examples, right? So even those outside of the tech space. So if you think about Peloton, they have something like 3 million subscribers, they have 800,000 bikes, their whole fitness community has exploded in a huge way. Obviously the task here and they've really broken up isolated activity into a group and community activity, which is a great example. Upwork has a massive community of freelancers and permanencers and they use their site and app to ensure they feel really supported those folks in that network. In the full stack Overflow we have over 100 million users and 3 million 2020 questions. But overall, we have about 50 million questions and answers over the last 12 years. And so it's just these are good examples of how you can actually really put community at the center and really be able to drive great traction for growth. And in our case, we're obviously obsessed with community. We're blessed to work with all the developers and technologists to create communities on our public platform and also internal communities through our Stack overflow for Team SaaS product. And why does this matter? Because the developers DNA of sharing alliance for our mission statement and that is by the way helping write the script of the future by serving developers and technologists. And so we really value what we do and we find it extremely fulfilling to do the work that we do. Overall, I think when you think competitive differentiation, when you think about folks like Warren Buffett he talks a lot about competitive moats or strategy mode. And a moat being we imagine a medieval castle and the body of water around it. And we're trying to depict that here on the image. Think of community as that strategy mode. Right. We have again 100 million folks that are congregating to do what they're doing and sharing information to go and innovate a lot faster with all this shared information. And that's a huge competitive patient. It promotes stickiness, many to many interactions between the community creates virtual cycles with organic scale and this that cannot be replicated. And that is true competitive differentiation advantage. And that's the core of strategy. And that's ultimately the goal here. And so with that we have in our case at least we had that competitive moat and then we've got. We have over 100 million people on a monthly basis that visit our website and tremendous ecosystem and that surrounds our paid SaaS products like stack Ultra for teams and the same users ultimately and to make this like really real we actually even just yesterday so all of you can go check it check this out on staffoverflow.com themed yesterday we launched freemium to that community where they can leverage our team's product for free until for 50 users. And it has this a tremendous. It's basically the leading asynchronous collaboration platform and knowledge sharing platform for entities. So companies can use them, open source communities can use them. Few in a small group people developer developers are working on something you can use it for that. So it's. So that's another example of how we are expanding into this generally I just described. Okay and then the last item around state specific team if I talk through that is there are. Let's just categorize companies in three different phases, right? So there's early, mid and later stage and that's very broad. So let me just put some round numbers. It doesn't have to be too super strict. But if you define early as between 0 to 25 million as a very broad definition and you think about both product lens and I'll go to the go to market lens in a second on the product side, you're probably going to start at a fairly small, tight knit group founder land, very blurry lines, no fancy titles, typically a lot of direct customer feedback if they need to get really to the heart of the customer problem. And so that your product solves that customer problem and you have a lot of deep customer empathy. So a lot of people are in the detail doing that. And we did this at Ratspace when we launched our cloud services business engineering folks were right there with customers, not necessarily formalized product folks. Everybody were just very close to the customer to help go build a product. On the go to market side, typically when you're starting you also want somebody that's very close to the product and the customer problems. And not typically your sales leader is not your typical sales leader. He's mostly sort of an evangelist and that evangelist is leading the ability to talk about the product is likely to have a very scrappy sales and customer success team. Probably combined probably what I describe as a ragtag group and not typically from the typical functional backgrounds. They're people that are very good at what they do but they have very kind of cross that they're generalists more than they are specialists at this stage of the equation. But very valuable to start out this way. And then in the mid stage, let's call that 25 to 75 million. On the product side you start creating probably a fuller product team with specialization like product management and user research and product design and so on. On the go to market side you're beginning to put in place a true builder VP of sales who's got a lot of discipline and cadence and methodology with things like Medpick and Band and so on. We use Medpic at Stack Overflow and at Rackspace we use Band and you have this specialized sales organization which is, which is important. So you have outbound sales and inbound sales and and so on and so forth. And then finally you have this ability to actually create pipeline development through true marketing demand gen capabilities through tools like Marketo and other things or maybe an outbound sales development through people calling out into account and generating demand and pipeline that way. And Then you also have typically at this stage a separate customer success organization focused on renewals and upgrades and so on. So that's the mid stage, the late stage. To wrap this up is to talk about, let's say companies that are between 75 and about 250 million billion in revenue and the product focus. There are a lot of mid page items like voice the customer cams, which are customer advisory boards, roadmap reviews, offering management where you're really exploring business cases and commitment pitches and so on. We did a lot at Raspay in our business and then very much a deliberate focus on market differentiation versus market relevance. What does that mean? Market differentiation is how are you relative to your competition? How are we differentiating relative to them? Market relevance meaning are you at least up to snuff with regards to the competition? Are you doing almost as much as what the other folks are doing at a minimum. And then of course there's technology debt, which is a different topic. But when you have a lot of competition and you have incumbents starting to notice your presence, resource allocation becomes really important. At this stage and from a go to market perspective and this point you are moving on to more of a true forecasting machine and predictability type VP of sales. And so you're, you're running with a lot of sort of foresight into, into the following quarter and a lot of at scale things like sales enablement and sales strategy. And that starts happening even in the previous stages. But to say that this is taken to a new level I think is an understatement. Right, so territory planning and deal desk and all these other things that you need to have in place at this stage of the game. So that in a nutshell is the state specific team piece. So to summarize four key elements. One is product market fit and expansion. Second is go to market fit, the go to market approach and expansion. Third one is competitive differentiation and the fourth one is state specific team. And again competitive differentiation is through product brand and community. Community being obviously the understated one, which I believe will become more and more important as we continue in this mode that we are in. So with that, hopefully this frame was useful to all of you and as you proceed in your own SaaS healing journey and if you want to learn more about how companies build communities either internally or externally, please reach out to me and I hope these were useful ideas for you to adopt in your own SaaS business. That was well done.

I learned a ton. I'm sure everyone else learned a ton. People are super Engaged. A few questions coming up here and fundamentally I like that model, right, Is build a community, then sort of create. They offer lots and lots of value and then sometime they'll. You'll be able to monetize that. But it's like a sort of give first help you become successful by enabling the success of others philosophy. And I'm a big fan of that. There's a few questions here. When you follow that route of community first as your competitive variation, how do you fund or get investors when the money or buy in isn't the first step for your VCs?

Firstly, you need to know that it's not.

You're not the only one that is.

Going to encounter that issue because of the example that I shared. So Stack's a good example. Our first check in our series a was in 2010. So two years after we kick started.

To take a little bit of time.

For it to create this organic community and so on.

MongoDB is another great example similar.

They have a common investor in Austin, Union Square Ventures. There are venture capital firms that actually care about building great communities, period. And so they care about that first before they actually think about revenue and all the other things that are going to be organic at some point. So I think you'd be surprised how much power there is and interest there is in starting their community service model.

And we're seeing a lot of community models getting funded like this year.

Right?

Like I think even I saw a tweet by Jason Lemkin where He said predict 10 leading communities get VC funding in 20, maybe more.

Right.

Portions of the business model may be tough to scale, but communities are the new brands and I completely agree with that. We're a small company relative to a lot of other companies, but at both focus big on community. We built Traction. It's got almost 100,000 subscribers today and everything from the VCs who funded us when we were raising money to all our major partnerships. Customers have come as a result of building the Traction community. And generally people if you don't, you have to be really passionate about giving first because there are times, especially in the early days, when you're bootstrapped, you can't eat because you, yeah, you got to starve to build it. But if you're really passionate about relationships and building community, I think it all follows.

This is great.

There's another question here on product led side from Anatoly. He's building a great company called Pact P A Q T. What if you had to build a product led startup from scratch today for business owners, sales managers across North America, what would your top three actions be to grow and acquire the community if you had to start from scratch?

Interesting.

So one question like product led, which.

Is this is like foundational to say let's actually create something of value that for the users.

Don't think about revenue, don't think about.

That for the moment. Ultimately what you want to do there.

Is establish a common problem create in the community.

Like I mentioned, while having a shared identity is super important, right? So there are enough people that are all sharing this kind of problem. In our case back then there was this company called Experts Exchange that had.

Paywall behind content that was relevant for.

All of them to use. But the nature, like I said, a developer is to share and have the DNA is to actually share information. Democratizing a democrat democratized way. And that shared pain with the paywall.

With the need to actually say let's.

Actually share it more broadly was the reason that the community sort of kicked off, right? So I would look for what is the shared revenue with the space that you're that this person looking to build out and the sales managers or whoever.

Else, what is the shared problem?

Can you actually gravitate to solve that problem in a way that is community first and then over time become the B factor for solving that as a part of that community. Then you can create products on top of their product line that add more and more value and you can charge for and so on and so forth. But starting with a basic problem that everybody have that you can ban people together to do it as definitely here.

Marco from Social Nature asks when your model includes both customers which are of course paying you and users community which are just, just getting you're giving value to them for free, how do you decide which side of the model to focus on first? How do you allocate resources? Because this is very hard, right? Like you got to eat versus I'm giving.

Yeah, it's an excellent question actually. And I think to my approach and our approach that is very much what I describe as a hybrid go to market, right? What we are doing at the moment.

Is we have the user base that.

We'Re trying to engage Bottoms up. And that's everybody in the world uses Stack Overflow. Any company in the world has Stack Overflow users. That's from Bottoms up and more and more those folks are influencing decisions that are ultimately made at the senior level of the organization to say what software do you buy, right?

For what reason? So it's so Bottoms up that's that motion.

That's the product led motion, right in product organic production tops down. Then when you come and you can say you want a company, you can say you've got let's say 3,000 people in a company out of which a.

Thousand people are using the product bottoms up anyway, right. And then you're talking to the top.

Down from a customer lens you're making the case for things like security, you're making the case for why you should think about this more strategically enterprise wide. And so that's the hybrid go to market. It's not dissimilar to how slack did it, not dissimilar to other product led SaaS companies have done it. Even MongoDB is similar to that.

So that's how I would think about it. But there's a time and place you can do both. Typically at the same time.

They give a start with one and go with the next. Ironically for Stack Overflow it was a little bit of a zigzag. They started with a user journey with their public platform, went straight, the customer went top down. But then there wasn't a true product motion and that's not what doing them on. They're going to connect the dots on both but there's different phases where you focus on different elements of those.

You've been a follower of Stack Overflow, now a CEO there. Looking back, what would you do different if anything?

Yeah, this is a. It's an interesting question. I would say the maybe what I was. What I found interesting is the complexity of dealing with. There's a lot of stakeholders in this company relative to any other company. Right. So one of the things of adding community is most, most product companies you have customers and then you have users and you have yourself and you're serving them and you're building products. It's still a problem. Address it all. Coming into a role like I did as a new CEO with an existing community of 100 million people that are using the public platform and then having products that were on the other end of the building that were trying to create a business model. The I think it took a lot to appreciate. It actually makes a lot of sense to bring all of this stuff together because actually it's only one user. Right. And I think we didn't come to that realization fast enough. But I think if we had gone fast we'd say you know what, there's actually the same user. It's all about the developer. And then let's just start there and work backwards. Okay. Then it's okay. The community public platform is the first phase. Then you have this product with multiple tiers above it. And so it's almost like bringing that jigsaw puzzle together to have a coordinated, unified product strategy, I think is with a very sort of big realization along the way. And that managing that is quite complex because you're working with pretty big scale. So you can't really make a lot of big changes in the public community without going through a certain process and everybody's on board. But there's a lot of things you have to keep in mind versus a real estate startup that can pivot on a dime and do XYZ test a few different things and keep going. Here you're being with an existing massive community. Right. So that's the really the issue.

And then the other thing is when people think of communities first they started think they start thinking of tools. Oh, you know what, maybe I should use Facebook groups. Maybe I should build like my own community tool and maybe I should put them on Slack. And the reality of the situation is if people are congregating in any mode, offline or online, but like they're coming together, you can give them a platform later. But it's like facilitating those interactions in a quick way. Ryan Hoover with Product Hunt. It was just an email newsletter that turned into Product Hunt. So the question here I'm trying to ask is your community? They're developers, but Twilio has a developer community. Stripe has a developer community. Do you see yourself needing to differentiate or collaborate? And that is a key one because that could make or break companies.

Yeah. I would say for us, the way we think about it is that we serve a very specific life of the community. Right. So meaning we focus on developers and technologists. That's our specialty. Right. And with that as the foundation, we the world's developers and technology, it doesn't matter which company. So as an example, Amazon Web Services, we have over 200,000 questions and answers in our public community. Microsoft azure, same thing. 200,000. And Snowflake, they moved their entire technical Q and A to Stack overflow in late 2019.

Right.

Same with Mapbox, same thing with Sensha. So all these companies have decided that why would you go and try to create a community from scratch when you already have a community that's highly engaged and operational, has the network effects and people are going there anyway. So organically, if people just encounter Snowflake, encounter aws, it would be silly to go and try to create that from scratch. It's kind of like if you're trying to host a party, let's say that the party happened somewhere every night. It was always full. Right. Are you going to try and host your own party and create a bigger buzz, Spend a lot of marketing dollars to go do that? May not make sense for you to do it. You may or may or may not succeed. But if you already know that all the people go to that party, then you might as well show up and say you're MongoDB. Right. That's the benefit.

That's awesome. That is awesome. So the way I see it is Tack Overflow is the Marvel for developer community. They're like Marvel Universe. Prashad, looking back at your career as you look back, what do you wish you did more of going back to a 17 year old coming on a scholarship? Cornell, Harvard. The best of the best.

Right.

And what great success you've achieved. What would you do more of and what would you do less of?

From my perspective, I think I took a very interesting sort of path around being very broad and I've always believed having a well rounded skill set's important. My parents always were big fans of cricket. You might have been a fan growing up.

Yeah.

So an all rounder was important. As an. You're well rounded. So for me my approach has been that and I think that was. That sort of guided me along the way. Although I would say looking back, I wish I had taken a little more risks I think along the way because I think you don't really. I think I took a very sort of logical brick by brick type of approach and I think being more entrepreneurial much earlier in my career I think would have been even more fun relative to you learn along the way, I.

Think in my mind.

So that is, that's the, that's the thought process definitely.

Now I'm thinking about what you said. The Marvel or the super community of community. If somebody wanted to start their own community on Stack Overflow, like what would be the process? Like how do we use Stack Overflow as a channel for community and growth?

Yeah, great question. Stay tuned on this. We have some developments happening in Q2 of this quarter, sorry this year. So literally in a couple of months we'll be making an announcement about this.

But there's other people who've done that. Basically they start basically a community on like you. All right, what are they doing specifically? Some of them like start a Q and A on Stack Overflow though.

Yeah, so those are already happening. So big companies are moving. Like Snowflake made the announcement that all their technical Q and A now exists on Stack Overflow. They have moderators like Google and Amazon have full time just people at their company spending time answering questions on Stack Overflow. Right. So that implicitly we have got that. So that happens. But to make it even more higher affinity for developers and technology to engage with these communities technology communities on a portfolio. That's what I'm seeing that we have some upcoming announcements.

CEOs read a lot and what are some books you recommend and you may read a lot. I don't like reading so I buy books a lot like this one is great. Jeff Lawson Ask your developer that I'm than in reading and what I do actually to my hack for reading is I invite smart people like yourself and interview them for an hour and then I personally edit the video. So I rewatch. But what do you recommend in terms of like books you've read, blogs you've read, what are some resources for you go to?

Yeah, I think I two books that.

I found more recently that I'm reading one right now but the one that's actually on the corner but that's is one is the Mindset by Carol Dweck, which is an exceptional book, has been one of my sort of favorites because it really has this really, you know, everybody's on a personal journey like a leadership journey, growth journey and really how do you stay open to a lot of feedback? How do you grow to realize your full potential or how do you make sure be able to be open to becoming the best version of yourself.

So I think it's more of a.

Personal kind of like a growth type of book which I think is super powerful. Big fan of this book. The other one I recently read actually.

Which I might also have.

A book.

Called Tape Sucks and this is by Frank Slopin, the CEO of Snowclav. And this book is interesting because it's relevant to me or what I'm doing which is coming in from the outside as a new CEO into a company. And he's done that very successfully over the past few years. So he walks through sort of his.

Journey of how he did it at.

This company called Data Domain, which was solved for EMC back in the day at the very center. Not a very thick book but I read it in like half a few hours on a Saturday and it was very insightful.

In general, what does Tape sucks mean? Is he referring to red tape or just tape around like when you.

Yeah, tape as in magnetic tape on drive.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Powerful.

Awesome. This Tape Sucks by Frank Slootman Mindset by Carol S. Dweck Prashant thank you so much again. Great pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Lloyd. And thanks for everybody for your wonderful questions.

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