Top 5 Learnings To Getting To $20MARR - While Still Keeping NPS At 50+

Please welcome nicholas desane, co founder and CEO of Algolia. If you hire the right people and empower them, magic will happen. By magic, I mean very fast growth and great customer satisfaction. So I guess that in the last couple of days you've learned a lot about marketing, about sales. So here I'd like to take a different approach and look at the people side and share some of our learnings around people during our journey. But before to dive in, let me tell you about what is Algolia, what is 20 million and what is NPS? So first, Algolia we are a search API. We help developers of companies like Twitch or Medium to deliver great search experience in their product. You probably have gone to the Sasta blog, I hope you did. And if you search there, you are actually using us too. Behind the scene. Our main markets are E commerce, media and actually SaaS. We help hundreds of SaaS companies to power the search inside their products. Today we power more than 1 billion searches every single day and we do that for customers all around the world. But more importantly for this talk, we are now getting close to 200 people. Of course, it's not always been the case that didn't happen overnight. Actually, it took us two years to get from zero to our first million ARR. Back then we were just nine people. Two years more to get to 10 million and one year more to get to 20. That was last November. The challenges are going to be different at each of these stages. The bad news is that it doesn't get easier. The good news is that you are going to get better at it. You are going to learn. You have to. And that's in part what I'm going to share just after but before nps. NET Promoter score. So in case you are not aware of nps, what is nps? It's basically an indicator of how likely your customers are going to recommend you to their friends and colleagues. It's often used as a proxy for customer satisfaction. That was in the title of the presentation. All over the years we've always been at north of 50. Actually today we're at 65. NPS. That's great. We're very happy with that score. But NPS is not that perfect either. Actually, for us it's more a lagging indicator. The truth is that we have never set a target for nps. It's always been a consequence of something we are doing right. Something we are doing right with the product, with our behavior, with our team, with our communication. NPS can also be the tree that's hiding the forest. So you shouldn't over optimize your nps. You should optimize your customer satisfaction, your customer engagement and then the rest will follow the growth, the satisfaction. So now how do you do that? I told you about the people and that's what I'm going to focus now on. I'm going to try to share our learnings. As I said in the beginning, if you hire the right people and empower them, magic will happen. So first you need to hire them. So my first learning is about hiring the right people. The who before the what and don't lower ever the bar. You know, as you are going to grow, as you are going to get product market fit, as you are going to want more and want to double and double again, the temptation is going to be super high to settle to lower the bar because you need more people. Especially if you have a sales driven process. Sales driven market because you need more quota career. Don't, don't settle. It's so much more important to build the right team for the long term. Three years ago I was at disaster 2015 on stage during a panel and I took the opportunity to say that we were looking for VP marketing. That didn't work. We just hired our CMO three weeks ago. It took us three years to get there. So let's say that we definitely missed our target here. Was that difficult for us during that time? Yes. Was that challenging? Yes. But did the team manage? Yes, because we focused on the who before the what. The team was the right one to get there. Quality over quantity. Actually for our recruiters today there is no cash incentive to reach the hiring target. They are not going to be paid more if they hire their target because quality is so much more important. We actually have put in place a very intense hiring process. We start with recruiter interview but then we are going to have the hiring manager interview and probably one, two, three more calls. Moving to an assignment to test the skills. Inviting people to come for an on site half a day, a day, sometimes more. Here we are going to check the culture. We always have a founder call, ref calls. Well, let's say that this process is very intense and we do lose candidates because of the process. But that's okay for us because the bar we set here is also a good way for us to make sure that the people joining us are going to be the right one. Another thing around the process, we are extremely open about who we are during the process. The most important thing for us, for people joining us is that they don't have any surprise is that they know who they are joining. And so we are going to be super open. Actually we have that, you know, after a few weeks that new hired lunch, usually one of the founders and the new people. And I always ask about, okay, did you have any surprise, like good, bad about what you discovered in the company? The most frequent answer is that they were surprised that we were exactly the way we said we were. We walked the way we said we worked. And that was a surprise for candidates. A few months ago I was speaking with Maria, a new team member in New York and she shared something. She had gone through all that process and then at the end of the process she had several offers, one from us and other companies. She shared with me that she invested so much during the process that she felt she was already a part of the team and that for her the choice was obvious. She was just joining the team. She was already the part of that really mattered. Okay, the who before the what. Once you have the right people, you better let them do their job. If you hire the right people, they are going to know more about what they should do than you can yourself. You probably know about that concept of the inversed pyramid, that as the leader you're at the bottom and you're here to help the other to do their job, to empower them to do their best. That's how we see it. We are not going to know better. If I hire a team member for a specific task, they are going to know how to do it way better than I am. So my task is to make their work easier, to provide them the the resource to provide them the context, the help so that they can do the best job possible. Back when we created the company, that was more than five years ago, we really thought hard about the type of company we wanted to create. With my co founder, actually, before even speaking about the product, we were speaking about the culture, about what type of culture we wanted to build. And we came with that concept of ownership. We wanted owners, we wanted people in the company that would get out of their comfort zone, that would take initiatives, that would act like that was their company, mini CEOs. And let me tell you a small story of Maxim. Maxim was an intern who joined us in the early days to work on php. So we're an API, so all developer focused. And Maxim told us after a few weeks or a few months in the job about that new trendy framework in the PHP world called Laravel. And so he suggested that we do an integration with them because it was the new trend. Sure, go for it. I mean, you know better. Not only did he do that integration, but when he looked at the website, at the framework, he realized that they needed a search, they needed a search in their documentation. And so he went ahead and implemented a search in their documentation. He offered that to them for free with a small logo powered by. And they loved it. They loved it so much that they spoke about us all the time, that they were so happy that they would push us sign ups. We had a lot of signups from that. Better still, a few weeks later, laracast. Laracast is an educational website where they do coding screencasts about Laravel. And they started to do a series about Algolia because of that first initiative. And again, new sign ups, new bigger awareness and all of that because one intern was empowered to do his best. And the story doesn't end here because of course the team wanted more. They saw the success of that implementation and so they wanted to look at how they could go even further. And so they worked on a project that we called Doc Search. Is there any other Doc developer documentation out there where we could build the search for? And so they did that. They did a project Doc Search that's basically free documentation search that we give to open source framework or any technical documentation out there that works so well that today we have more than 450 documentation like that using us for free, but with a small logo, powered by. We got most of the Facebook open source projects like React and others. We got Stripe, we got Optimizely using us for their doc. And it has of course a big impact on awareness, on signups, but also on candidates. I told you about hiring before. Well, today we have a lot of developers, candidates that discovered us on one of these frameworks. So please give that power to your team once you've hired them, help them do their job. But all of that wouldn't matter if the team didn't care. Care is so important for us. We don't want people to join us for a paycheck. We want them to have meaning, we want them to have a fulfilling job. We want them to care about the customers, want them to care about their work, and more importantly, we want them to care about their team. And so care is actually one of our core values in the company. You know how culture is important. It's so important that you always need to reinforce it, to always speak about it, to reinforce it at any occasion. Well, I got surprised a few months ago when I realized that was not the Case with care. Care is one of these rare values that can grow organically. I told you about the interview process, candidate John. Of course, if care is displayed by the team, the candidates are going to see it. We don't simply ask them random questions. We care about them, we want to know them, to know them better. And that shows they are going to feel that. And that's of course going to help them to join us or let's say to help us to convince them to join us. And once they have joined, it doesn't stop there. They are going to work with co workers that care about them, they are going to help them during their onboarding. They have questions. Everyone is here available to make them successful. What's going to happen next? Well, they are going to interview the next candidates and again show care to them because they have learned that from the others. That's how that core value can become organic. And of course care shows for customers too. And your NPS is going to be affected by that core value when you are going to display it. So we use a tool called Delighted to monitor our NPS and we plugged it on Slack. I don't know if you have done that, but that's super handy. Each time someone answers the survey, it's going to ping you on Slack with the score and the comment and so on. And you know what, when we receive bad feedback, when we have a detractor that hurts, that hurts so much. And that's very, very good because then the team is going to care so much, they are going to try to learn from it. They're going to try to improve the product or the relationship with the customers just because they care about that feedback. That feedback channel in our Slack is one of the most followed and another one that is very followed is called celebration. That's where we celebrate our team members. That's a way for anyone to celebrate any of their team members. It's not tap down, it's more like peer to peer. And one of the most things that is celebrated there is displays of care. When team members help each other. That's what it works. Okay, so now that you have a good team, you hire more people, you have product market fit, you're really crushing it. You can tell your friends that you are crushing it. Stop. Don't become complacent. It's not about what you know, it's really about what you don't know. You have to learn. You have to always be learning. And if you are too proud, there is no way you are going to learn fast enough. So forget about your ego and listen. Listen to your prospect, your customers, and of course listen to your team. They know better. Humility is actually one of our core values too. And I think that's one of these values that helped us get where we are. Because we are always questioning what we know. We know that we have not done it yet. Even at the beginning of the company, we did that pivot and without having been humble. And it's difficult to say that on stage, you know, I'm humble speaking like that. But truth is that we wouldn't be there if we had not been able to realize that we were going in the wrong direction. We started the company with another product we were building a search SDK from for mobile applications. We had that market, at least we believe that there was a big market of developers, app developers who wanted to build search inside their app locally, to search for people or whatever not connected to a server. We saw a lot of questions on developer forums that were unanswered because that was not possible, especially five years ago. There was no product for that cool, great market. We have the experience, let's do it. We did worked, the tech worked, but the market was not there. And it took us like a few months before to really realize that and decide to pivot. Had we been too proud, we would never have pivoted and we wouldn't be here today. And actually that first product became one of the biggest reasons of our success today. Because of the limitations of mobile devices back then, we simply couldn't apply the state of the art, the traditional approach. It couldn't work on that small device. So we had to reinvent search. And these limitations pushed us to be more creative, to reinvent search in a way that was never done before. When we moved on a SaaS model, it actually took us a few months. We then realized that what we had done on mobile was such a perfect fit for 95% of the market. And that's when we accelerated. And the rest is like the story of the company. So be humble, never become complacent. Even today, we don't think we have succeeded yet. The truth is, I don't think we'll ever have made it. We'll always have something else to learn. Okay, so you've got the right people. They are empowered, they do their best, they learn. I have one last learning for you. It's about communication. Over, over, communicate. There is a simple rule. It's never enough. When you are 10 people, especially when you have an open culture, everyone is going to know everything. And that's awesome. You don't have to think about it, you just work. Everything goes the right way and then you get 20, 50, 100 people and you don't know it. But people cannot follow anymore. You cannot know everything that's happening, but you don't realize it as a leader. The wake up call for me was when we were about 50 people and I was catching up with one of our Paris based employee and I was pushing to get feedback, what can we do better? And so on. And then he shared about that whimmer, that rumor that we were going to open an office in New York. He was concerned what I mean, yes, we are going to open an office in New York. That's the plan. Just ask the question. We don't have anything to hide. And that's when I realized that when you don't communicate, when people don't know what's going in your mind, I mean you are going of course to know most of everything, but they don't. And then if you don't communicate that they are going to gossip. They are going to gossip about every small tidbit of information they receive and that's not good because then that's going to harm the trust, the trust in the leaders or they are hiding things. So one of the things we've done recently was actually to add an item in our executive agenda. Small item, 1, 2 minutes. We call that the staff forum. We basically take a step back and just think about what we should communicate. Is there anything that the team should know that we have not told them? And just that proactive step back, help us to better communicate. We're not perfect, far from it. But that really helped us, right? So if we look back at all these learnings, hire the right people, the who before the what, always don't lower the bar. And once you have them, empower them, help them do their best. They know better than you do. Of course you want them to care, to care about their job, to care about the company, to care about, to have a fulfilling day. Keep learning, be humble. By the way, when I say be humble, don't hold back. Don't hold your opinion back for yourself. Being humble doesn't mean not having opinions. Have opinions, share them openly. Be opinionated, but then be open minded. But then encourage disagreement. You want everyone to disagree with you and then be curious about why they disagree. That's the best way to learn. Get the team over, communicate. Don't forget that they don't know everything as you do. And what I like about that five learnings is the circle we have today a perfect five stars ranking on Glassdoor. I don't think it's because of the perks. I think it's because of the culture. I think it's because of these learnings. And you know what? These learnings then are going to look back on the hiring side. Candidates are going to feel way better. Because you share that openly. Many people, I mean, there is a commonly accepted, I don't know if it's accepted saying about culture that you have to make a choice. Either you sacrifice your culture to grow faster or you sacrifice the growth. If you want to retain the culture, I think you don't have to make that choice. I completely agree that if you sacrifice the culture in the short term, it's going to help you to grow, but it's also creating culture of debt. And that debt, you are going to have to pay it back, to pay it big time like Uber or Zenefits or to pay it with slower growth down the line. I believe that you can make culture and people your strengths, the strengths that are going to help you grow faster. I believe that if you hire the right people and empower them, magic will happen. Thank you.