Episode w Mariam Hakobyan (Co-founder & CEO of Softr)

Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Build in Public podcast. Today, I am super thrilled to be chatting with one of my favorite up-and-coming founders from Europe and someone who has been super community-centric, someone who's been very active in the no-code worlds that I'm part of. And, you know, a lot of other founders ask me how she's doing it all and how she's being able to keep that momentum up and, and being such a community-centric product/platform. And so I've been a fan and I have to put out the full disclosure. I'm a small investor as well. I've been such a big fan that I couldn't pass up the opportunity. And without further ado, I really want to welcome Mariam to the podcast. Welcome, Mariam.

Thank you, KP. Excited to be here. Really glad to be here and appreciate you inviting me.

Of course. Mariam is now dialing in from the new No-Code Capital. Looks like at least in Europe, Berlin, there's a lot of companies out from, you know, from Berlin. And we were going to talk about Softr, the founding Story, some lessons learned. They just closed a big round, I think two months ago, three months ago. Time just flies. Yeah. So want to touch on that a little bit. So yeah, first of all, congratulations on the round. Series A, I think it's thirteen million. Is that right?

Thirteen point five. But

yeah. Thank you so much. And want to say, like let's let's bring the audience onto the journey. So let's talk about software. Let's give give the audience who may have never heard about software a quick one line, two line intro, and then about yourself too and your background.

Yeah, thank you so much. Well, Softr is a platform for building apps using Airtable as a backend at the moment. And we, our goal is to become data agnostic platform that essentially lets you connect to any data source, whether it be Google Sheets, Notion, REST APIs, or anything, and then build your app in the frontend. So it's a very horizontal platform. So essentially it works like a Lego. So imagine you can give your Lego bricks to your kid to build any type of Lego you want. And we have taken the same approach as so we offer every, the complex functionalities like memberships, authentication, et cetera, as building blocks. So essentially drag and drop them, assemble your app really quickly. Within 30 minutes you can have something dynamic already up and running. And yeah, and that's, I guess that's it.

Awesome. And tell us a little bit about yourself, like your background, you know, what were you doing? Were you working in a startup before, software? What was it like?

Yeah. So, well, before I have been working, I have started my career as a software engineer for quite a long period of time. I worked as an engineer. Built products for more than 10 years and loved all things product, technology, design, etc. And then I transitioned a bit to leadership roles. And at one point, because, you know, my love and my excitement is all around building products and seeing customers love and use it and really get the value. At one point in leadership roles, I just realized it's not the case anymore. I'm getting too far away and being more operational, etc. So at one point I just realized, yeah, it's not for me. I'm gonna just stop and start something from scratch. And that's how I joined an incubator which is called Entrepreneur First, where essentially you start building some things, ideas, you start working with different people, etc. So I kind of started my exploration in the space like that, and then from there it evolved. I saw then together with my co-founder Artur, we both of us faced the same kind of problem in our previous, you know, career and engineering career where We were just, we kept building same things over and over. And at one point we realized it's just not meaningful and not useful to do that. And why not have a platform where essentially all of this repetition is just given out of the box? Like in engineering, you would use libraries or APIs and all of that. And then why not take that to another level, another step where you have essentially more abstraction layer and just abstract away all those repetitions and then build what's unique to your business. That's how kind of the idea started. And then of course it evolved quite a bit, but then that's That's really how we came to start Softr in the first place.

So it's fascinating. It's also interesting how you were deliberate about trying to start a new startup and you went about it in a methodical way, went to the EF program and just explored ideas. Well, I'm curious, what was the night before, like softr.io is the website, right? Before it went live, like, did you have a strong conviction that this is something that might lead to a startup, a serious business? Or was it one of the attempts, one of the experiments of like, okay, let's see what the community says, what the market says?

Yeah, not at all. Actually, at the early stages, you know, that was the biggest challenge, right? You're building something and you're not sure if that's actually going to work or people are going to use it. Because the approach we have taken was completely different from all of the other tools that we saw. We also ourselves tried to build our website and a bit of apps with other platforms and we were struggling as engineers and we were like, yeah, this doesn't have to be this hard. And then what we were building was easy on one hand but was also— we have taken the approach where there is some limitations and constraints but then on the other hand things are really easy, quick, etc. So you can really get something up and running very quickly. And that wasn't really obvious that people are gonna like it. So one of the ways we tried to validate that actually the first time we really launched it We didn't do any public launch or anything. We just did a soft launch and we had some people following us on Twitter. So it was probably 10 people or so. We kind of just did beta testing, asked them to use the platform. At that stage, we already got lots of feedback, changed some stuff, and then it was really very basic, just assembling some blocks together, getting something static up and running. But what we realized by just keeping talking to people is that they really like the approach we have taken and it just is extremely simple for them. So we kind of kept continuing that. So we kept what's working, what wasn't working or wasn't really good design-wise, we continued to iterate, talk to people, etc. And then the real version of Web App Builder, we actually launched last April. And it's not even a year that we have launched that platform, that as a software web application builder. And yeah, that's where we— it's actually, I can clearly remember when was that because it was 2 weeks after my daughter was born. And we were like, okay, we did it. Oh wow. plan it, we did plan to launch it even earlier and then she was a bit early. So that messed

around

our plans a bit.

I was a bit early.

She didn't want Softr to be earlier than her. And then, yeah, so we were kind of ready with the first version. We launched it at the time and started getting more and more interest because it was already a web app builder and that was a different approach, different type of value that it brought to customers. But yeah, in the beginning, it was completely unclear what's gonna end up with.

It's so relatable that, you know, that early stage, you know, foggy phase of exploration, you know, you're looking for some kind of signal and you don't have, you know, it's like driving through a highway and your headlights can only take you so far in a foggy day, right? On a foggy day. So you're just like hoping that this intuition is leading to some, you know, destination that you want to go to.

Exactly.

Yeah.

As you said, there's a lot of intuition in the early days. And there is also talking to customers and just really finding your tribe even smaller, maybe just several people, just really finding people that are passionate about what you're doing and continue iterating and building with them. I think that those were the, the key, key things that really helped us continue and get on the right track.

Right. Were there other ideas that were scraped before Softr? Like when you were—

Yes, there were lots of ideas. And one of the bigger ones was that we actually originally were thinking of having the database as part of Softr. So Softr itself being a full-stack application builder. And so we realized just after talking to customers in several iterations that people just don't want to create everything from scratch. They already store their data somewhere. And in this case, Airtable was the most popular one. And we said, okay, let's start with Airtable. That's easier. And it's more like an MVP for us as well. And then let's see what happens and if people really start using it.

So in the first 3 to 6 months after launch, like what was like one inflection point that you remember that you thought, as you now reflect, you think, wow, this was a pretty significant moment? It could be a first paying customer, it could be a first big client or some— it could be an investor sliding into DMs and saying, wow, this is mind-blowing, want to invest or whatever. What was like one inflection point where I think it set the stage for you for the next 6 to 8 months?

Yeah, there were actually two things, two main things that I can remember. So one was when we launched on Product Hunt, the first version. We literally just got so many customer support chat requests, etc. We're like, with two people, we are just going to be unable to support this, right? It's just not going to scale, and we can't do anything else beyond just supporting. And then the second, so which which also showed us like people started, people love the product, they use it, they want to continue, and they ask for more and more requests, which essentially was just not impossible to you know create at a short period of time. And then the second part was. We actually launched the pricing and the third, like we had 3 different plans. The third plan was much higher amount and it listed out the functionality we really wanted to test if people are ready to, you know, to go in and really test out if they click the button even, right? And then we saw several people even subscribing to that, paying for that plan while not having the features and asking us from time to time, when is this going to arrive? And of course, we had some timelines on when we want to plan, when we plan to launch this. And it was really interesting to see that people are even ready to pay, wait for those features because it was so critical for them. Right. They really did get the value and they are ready to pay without having the features.

That's a great validation right there. Right. Like a great smoke test. If people are clicking the button and paying up before it's even ready, that's fantastic. The one other thing that I thought was fascinating in your early stories, and I'm curious now, because now you're at the venture scale. Now you're interacting with, now you're in a whole different league, I think. And when you enter venture scale, you know, the game is different, as you know, right? As opposed to maybe early stage bootstrapping, that's that kind of that arena. So was it for you always, like, did you always have an intention to build a massive venture scale, potentially billion-dollar unicorn startup? Or was it for where you were like, okay, I'm just gonna make a great product and maybe build a bootstrapping community around it. And then suddenly, you know, accidentally you landed into the venture side of things.

Yeah, and it's an interesting question. I think in the beginning we actually weren't in the tribe within, you know, Twitter, this popular tribe that are the space where people now talk about building public bootstrapping, etc. That wasn't really that much discussed. And what we were doing essentially, we did want to build a product which will be used by lots of people. But at the early stages, and one of the reasons we started monetizing from day one, we really wanted to understand if people would pay and they get the value. And one of the reasons as well was because we were just 2 people and we were bootstrapping. We didn't have money. We wanted to, you know, just get the validation and the value from customers. And so early days as well, before even raising, thinking about raising, the way we were thinking is we really want to validate this for us, even just for us as founders and what we are building. We don't want to go and raise money if we don't know this is going to work or not. We want to really have a product, something that's being used, that generates revenue, value for customers. We have customers and then we can raise and then we can see depending on the need, depending on the scale and how quick we want to move, then we can decide. That's really how it happened. Well, yeah, we weren't actually at the beginning, we weren't planning to raise that early, but then we got lots of inbound interest, etc. And then at a point, the point for us to decide was essentially the customer support chats and everything that we started getting and all the requests and all the feature requests. Essentially, customers were just pulling from us what they really wanted, and we weren't, we weren't able to, to build all these features. And at that point, we realized, yes, we need more people, we need to grow the team. And then once we realized as well, at kind of in between, that this is working, this, this actually is something that people really like, and there is this pull from, from all the customers while still being early, at that point we realized, yeah, it actually, in order to win in the market and really to build something sustainable and long-term, we actually have to have— because of this, the type of and the nature of the product, it is really complex. It requires lots of engineering effort and resources. So we decided to raise because otherwise, yeah, we would keep— we would be able to keep going, but we weren't going to be able to grow at the rate we are right now, be really fast, and also build something that makes a difference in the entire ecosystem. I

mean, in the venture arena, you know, capital is really rocket fuel, right? So it will really accelerate, you know, wherever you want to go. But it's important to know the destination, otherwise you can go in the wrong way too. But what's been interesting with your story is like, so you haven't raised until you first, you made initial revenue, you made money, you got paid customers. Yeah. Again, like this is To me, mind-blowing because I would have raised much earlier. You know me, I would have raised probably much, much earlier. But how long did you wait until like you said, okay, we're ready for the first round? I'm curious, like what were your— I mean, if these metrics are not shared anywhere, you don't have to disclose, but is it 6 months? How long since the first paid customer you waited?

You mean since we waited to have the first customer or the first raise? That was several months. So we launched in August the first version also on Product Hunt, and then we raised around December time. So we did. Yeah, there was a bit of time. Time in between. But that's, that's the time where we essentially started getting a lot of customers and people started asking for requests, etc. So actually it wasn't intentional, we are going to raise in 6 months from, from now. It was— we weren't even planning to raise like even in the next year. We really wanted to build something to— we had, we had some, some goal in mind that we want to reach this goal and then go to raise. But that just didn't work out as well because, yeah, because of 2 reasons. We had a lot of inbound interest as well But then at the same time, we had this huge, like, requests of people pulling from us. And that kind of naturally just the decision was naturally made, kind of organically came.

No, I mean, I think it was the right choice for sure. So, and so we talked about the background of Softr. We talked about what it does. If you can think about like the list of, let's say, ideal customers that Softr as of today serves, you know, what would those be? What are some like top customers or segments that you serve today?

Yeah, so as you know, Softr is a pretty horizontal platform, right? Because of the nature of the platform, the building blocks, and the Lego-like experience, you essentially can build any type of application starting from marketing websites, marketplaces, communities, to more powerful internal tooling and client customer portal types of apps. And same with customers, we have a range of different types of customers ranging from entrepreneurs, creators building websites or side businesses, their startups, and then to some of the Fortune 500 companies. So I think the fair point would be to say the ideal customer, the way we define it, is the customers who get the most value out of Softr and who stay the longest and who really continue using and expanding Softr are the businesses and companies who are building portals for external and internal applications, whether it be portals or internal tools to use within their organization with different teams. So those are the customers that get the most value and also stay longest. While it doesn't— still the platform is open and we have the approach of, no, we want to have the platform open for everyone. We want to let everyone really be able, empowered to build anything they want. And one thing that is kind of a proof of that is even on the free version, we offer custom domain, especially for people who are doing side businesses, they build out their projects, right? And they can even launch, they get the value, they can even launch their full projects, have their own custom domain up and running, and they don't have to upgrade. But then there is other more important, more internally use case important features, which are then on the other plans where there is the other types of customers. So the current version that we have is really scaling and can incorporate all these customers. We want to keep it that way. It's just a different way of looking at who do you look at as the ideal customer profile and who is staying longest with Softr?

Right. No, I, as an observer, I thought that was a great, like, it was a fascinating combination of things that you've leveraged to, like, 2 levers that you've been growing. One is the revenue side, which is of course the, I think the revenue leverage is coming from businesses which have real, maybe critical applications or internal applications and they're willing to spend more. And for them, you know, price is not a big factor. But I feel like a lot of attention and hype of Softr comes from makers and people with side projects. And the fact that they, to your point, like they can still get decent value from the product, even in the free plan, is I think very smart in my view, because a lot of the times, like there's that TAM of the beginner/side project/hobbyist is huge. And because it's so huge, it is sometimes like tempting to just put a gated, like just put some pricing tag on them to like convert some percentage of it. But I think you have to realize like no-code as a movement, no-code as a market is emerging. It is very new. It is not customer success. It is not product management. Like, you know, for example, like Salesforce, you know, like doesn't need to sell itself to a movement. Right. People already know CRMs, people are sold on the concept. They don't need— there's no skepticism about why should I use CRM. However, if you see in the market, as you know and I know, we all talk about education. There's still people like, even earlier today we had a meeting, we had a Q&A with no-code ODNCF, and there's still people like questioning, why should I use no-code?

Or— Most of the people, I would say, right? Most of the people do not even know there is these tools and what you can do with the tools.

Exactly. So I think it's kind of like a Web3. it's kind of like, you know, other emerging markets. And in that scenario, you should rather have a lot of people, you know, the larger TAM of the audience, test it out, taste it, get a litmus test, get it, you know, get like a sample of water.

Taste it is a really good word. Exactly.

Right, get a taste. And then, you know, a small percentage of them will convert, right? And so that's very, very smart. I think, you know, other founders should take notes from that.

And what's really interesting, I think, is actually even within this freemium users, as you're saying. There's so many people that are just coming and starting to use, building side businesses, side projects, who are actual operators, right? Who are people from companies who just really want to learn about the space. And before they can use these tools within their organization and use it for, you know, solving actual organization-wise problems, they have to get to use these platforms. They have to understand what they can do with it. And that's really, yeah, there is even lots of customers that we see within freemium that first really try out with their own personal projects and then they understand what it can do. And then they, of course, yeah, then they convert.

And I, in the last 10 days, I heard about at least one project within On Deck and it was one of the new members who joined us, our larger team, not my team, who built a, I think he built a layoff list, you know, because, you know, as you have seen recently, like Fast is a startup, you know, they had a lot of layoffs. And so there's a Google Sheet that was floating around, I think Airtable floating around, and there was another floating layoff list. And so he built like a little Softr site that was a collection of all the people who were on the market suddenly, right? And I thought that was so clever. Again, that person was not part of ODNC, was not part of, you know, my audience or whatever. And he shared this in the company channel and I'm like, shout out to Softr. And I said, this is cool. Like, you should publish it publicly, you know? But again, to your point, that person may end up using Softr internally for another company use case tomorrow. But he got value just from that side product he had, right?

Exactly.

So it's basically—

And many other people as well, right?

Right. Yeah, other— yeah, other teammates too. So one other interesting thing that I've noticed in your pitch deck, and I think, you know, you, you embrace that really well, is this concept of PLG, product-led growth. And I'm really curious about your take on that. Like, first of all, how would you define that to people who never heard of it? Maybe in the audience, maybe there are founders who could benefit from that and they never heard of it. Second, how did you see the value of it personally, like firsthand?

Yeah, great question. And for us, PLG, you know, it's— there is lots of definitions. And what we understand by PLG is essentially it's a type of company which is growing mainly through their product. And which is, which is to some extent is a bit funny because sometimes you hear people saying, you know, build it and they will come, and that never happens. But actually, in PLG types of companies, if you really focus on product and build something that's really valuable and solves a customer problem, then that's how you grow. And that's the biggest growth channel for you as a company. And in our case, what has worked really well, of course, like 3 main things. First is really the product itself through product-led growth, meaning having a really easy and intuitive use of the product use case, and then also still being powerful. So when people start building something, they they feel like they couldn't do the same things with other platforms, and now they can do. They feel like they now got magic, they're magicians, they can do things that they couldn't do before. Second is really the community, and all of the growth that we have had is especially through community. People loving the product, building some things, and especially also sharing with their social communities, etc. And then the third is really the virality and the word of mouth about product. Again, comes back to because it was easy to build, because people really loved the experience, and they can do things now that they cannot do before is really making it easy for them to share with their friends. They want to share what they built, right? There is also a bit of this ego part, ego portion that I have built now something I'm so proud that I want to share with others. And I think that part, the third part is virality and word of mouth. Virality especially including different growth loops that you can, you have in the product. One in our case is the Made with Softr badge, for example, which every free application has that badge and a lot of people are building applications every day on Product Hunt. You will see several products launched with Softr, built with Softr that also have this badge.

I feel like there's at least 2, 3 products every day on Product Hunt from Softr.

Exactly. And while these might be simple products from creators, entrepreneurs, right? But these are things that they're really proud of. They're sharing with everyone. And also that is what brings value back to Softr. So essentially, every— all of our users are incentivizing and bringing all this growth back to Softr through all these different growth loops, one being the virality aspect.

So, you know, I've always had this sort of mental model that if you realize, if you just kind of reflect on how Shopify did for the dropshipper persona, and suddenly, like, you know, before Shopify, you know, if you use the term dropshipper, like, there's like, I don't know, how many people did you know that were dropshippers per se? Very few. You know, I didn't even know as many people. Maybe there were some mom-and-pop shops in the US or in Georgia, and there were some people who were trying to like sell stuff online. But what Shopify did was it kind of like created a movement of merchants and mom-and-pop shops and all of them. And then they called this the dropshipper economy. And suddenly after Shopify, it was like an inflection point. After Shopify, there were millions of people, you know, with candles, people selling candles, people selling, you know, I don't know, all kinds of cool matches or leather wallets.

Becoming shoppers and sellers, right?

And people who were on the ramp of like, they were all the fan— fantastic and fascinating thing about that story is I wonder how many millions of people were, you know, would have just gone on to do normal like 9-to-5 jobs if not for Shopify. Think about that. Like how many people would have been just like housewives or moms or dads or just for 9-to-5. And these, all these candle makers, like my wife loves these candle makers and supports them on Shopify. And I'm like blown away at how many things she buys every month. I'm like, wow, that's a lot of revenue for that little candle shop at some wherever, Canada, somewhere, right? And but if you think about it, like they're all empowered and championed and they came to market through Shopify.

Exactly.

So I think with the no-code, there's a parallel here, right? Even though the Product Hunt launches and some of these products that, you know, you and I, we both notice and watch, they're like, you know, they're not world-changing. They're not like startups that would ever end up at YC or ODX or whatever. I still think it's a net positive for the world because, you know, that person would never have made that $80 that day, for example, if not for Softr. For example. Right. And so that's a massive value add in the economy if you think about it, how many millions can do that. And I think that's—

yeah, absolutely agree. We are kind of at an inflection point of actually it's also a mindset change, right? I don't think it's going to be one day from 0 to 1. It's, it's an evolution and really people starting with those simple things. But then as well, over time, they— what that enables them is really them understanding that, okay, now, you know, I don't have to rely on engineers or I don't have to learn how to code. I can now build things myself. And that's especially within the current generation, but especially my belief is that in the newer generation, you know, people, children learn how to interact with technology, not necessarily coding, but how to interact with technology from their, well, from birth, right? They already have all the phones and everything.

Baby is 1 year old, he's already scrolling through my Apple Watch.

And yeah, and you're like, how did they even figure out how how to do that. Why? And that, that just shows that there is a newer generation coming in, which is who are really already going to be proficient with these tools from the get-go. And the current generation is really just learning. And those are the first steps that now it's the realization point that, okay, I can now build things myself. And then the next step, what that enables is people then start like new ideas start firing up right now. Maybe I can do this as well, or the other thing, I can automate or build this as an app. So I think that's kind of an evolution and there's lots of education, lots of mindset change that is happening at the moment. It's going to take some time, but we're, I think, at the exact right kind of timing right now, the best time for everyone in the no-code space.

Yeah, I fully agree. And as you know, like, that's one of my mission statements too, is that I think there's going to be a million or maybe more new builders like Shopify created these dropshippers. I think there will be new builders slash creators slash makers, whatever you want to call the tag. And they would, they would just come to market, you know, with tools like Softr. And I'm really excited for that phase. So let's talk a few, a little bit about some milestones you want to highlight in your journey. You know, you've had some great highs and I know of course there were some lows. I'm sure we'll get to it, but like give us, give the audience a few wins that you want to celebrate and you're proud of.

Yeah, there have been quite many. So almost every, every They, like, even the customer support, customer love, and the feedback, that's all so motivating. I think some of the key highlights probably are just earning your first dollar on internet from the very, very beginning. You have built something, now people are ready to pay for it. I think that's, that's just magic. And once you really get into that, it's difficult to go away. And then realize that you actually have built something meaningful and valuable for, for someone else. Yeah. Also launching Softr the first time after our daughter was born and winning Product Hunt community's hearts, I would say, 3 times in a row, becoming number 1 of the month and then number 1 of the year. I think this is a huge, you know, huge honor for us and recognition from the community that they, that we are on the right track, right? They love Softr, they use Softr, but also especially that we are on the right track. And then also growing from 0 to 50K users in less than a year, which is Insane to us.

Also, I don't think there was a lot of paid marketing involved, so I'm guessing—

There was zero marketing. We have spent $0 on ads. I mean, we are just starting to test out some marketing channels, but it has all been, again, through community and word of mouth. And yeah, now also growing the team from zero to now we have 33 team members, awesome talented team members. Now, I just today checked before coming here because this last 2 months we have been onboarding quite many people. And I would say the funny thing is actually we should probably have been— it should have been split across the year. But in last year we have been very, very small team and really just mainly engineering team and really growing now, growing the more business growth.

Like how this is like a hiring debt, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

Awesome. There were great highlights. I mean, I am Pleased to, you know, say that I feel like I've been part of or watched or celebrated most of them. So I kind of know, except the 33 teammates, which is awesome. Really, really happy to see that. So like in terms of 0 to 1 phase, I know you kind of touched on this about exploration and then how you landed on the software idea, but what was the hardest part, you know, in that 0 to 1 phase of software? Because there are a lot of founders who listen to this podcast who are probably in that phase. You want to share what was that hardest part and then what did you learn from that?

Yeah, I think the hardest part was especially in the beginning while you're still building the product, right? You have to have something to present to customers to even judge. Of course, you have, you can have mockups and everything to test out the idea, but unless you have something in the hands of customer and you see them paying, that's, that's the real validation to me. And the really not knowing if what you're building is going to solve that problem and people are going to be really liking it. I think that's the difficult part. And then once you have like very early, even even like 10 customers, that's already a lot of validation. And you can then start talking to these people, getting more feedback, and then finding the tribe, finding more people like this in different communities, in different places, right? That's then making it— at least you have now an entrance to somewhere, and then you can continue iterating. But I guess the hardest part for us as well was really the early stage where we were like just heads down building. Of course, talking to customers in that period, it was also a pretty short period. It wasn't like we spent 2 years just building. It was just several months working alongside our jobs, you know, also talking to customers who would potentially be interested. We managed to do some pre-sales during that time as well. Try to get customers pay you before you launch. I think that's— I have seen lots of people nowadays also trying that and being successful with that. But I— because I think that's even stronger validation before you even have a product, right? This means they, they do need. But of course, it's as long as they still are not using the platform. It's still a bit shaky. But yeah, if you can do that, that's probably the easiest tool to get on track and to keep going.

Right. So great. Again, great lessons. You know, I have a fun question. So you've been, again, I think I kind of touched on this earlier. You've managed to keep Softr top of mind for the entire no-code ecosystem so far, in my view, in my subjective view. What efforts went into that? I think you've done a great job. And I really, really like, you know, you're like one of my case studies that I always present to other founders, especially in the local world. Like, what efforts deliberately went into that? And how do you hope to keep carrying that forward?

Yeah, it has been lots of customer talking and just really iterating on the feedback. One thing that we are very, very kind of as a company and a team very driven by is being customer-centric and product-driven. And we are both of our founders are very, you know, we are product folks, right? We have built products. That's what we are good at. And that's what also we do have to some extent good intuition to rely on. That's, I think, important at the early stages. And then we really just build, listen to customers, talk to them regularly. I think just focus on the product, focus on the customer. And then even if you haven't built what's really at that point the solution to the problem, while talking to them, you will really get Like it will help you drive and navigate towards what the next phase of the product or whatever that is should be. So again, it really comes back to product, community, and the customer, listening to customers. And then once customers also, you know, if they request a feature and they see you shipping and they realize they have been heard, that's something that we get to hear a lot, that they feel like they're heard. Their voices are, yeah, they can request something and then within some period they can have what they really wanted to incorporate in the product. I think that's what has really made Softr successful.

And doing all of this, you know, almost, you know, in building public style, I think is where I get excited about. And you've done it really well. And especially, you know, one thing that was unique about watching your story was I think going— a lot of founders, once they have any amount of initial success, they launch one time maybe, but they're like insanely afraid of launching again, relaunching, going Product Hunt 2.0, 3.0, or even soft launches on Twitter or LinkedIn. And I feel like every time I open my LinkedIn, there's a new feature launch from Softr or Twitter, or every time I go to Product Hunt once in 3 months, there's always like some launch 2.0 or something. And within the short span that you had, You've done such a great job of that. And so I'm curious about what, again, just seems to be like there's not much fear of putting things out there in the market or in the hands of customers. Yeah, I mean, again, any advice there? Like anything that, you know, new founders should be looking at?

Yeah, honestly, like even if you use, like sometimes I myself am wondering, sometimes using software ourselves, you know, sometimes I'm like, okay, this doesn't work as it's supposed to be, this is so bad, etc. And sometimes I'm wondering, How do people even pay for, for the product, right? Because there is, there's so many of all these things that can be perfect. But I think the approach we have taken, which I definitely would recommend the early-stage founders, especially if you are bootstrapping, it's just really launch, as you would recommend all the time, right? Just launch what you have, like very, very minimal version. Every time we launch something, it's always gonna be the very first version, the MVP. It's never gonna be perfect, and we keep improving. But we don't want to hide behind closed doors for 2 years, build something perfect, and then launch it, and then no one is going to use it. But rather prefer to launch small, iterate, get the feedback. And if the customer— if it's not good, customers are going to tell you. If it's good, then continue building on top of that.

I think that's the thing, right? Where customers are ruthless and market. I mean, I feel like at the end of the day, the market is very impartial, like unbiased. They will tell you through their actions, through like churning or Through like customer support tickets or through whatever, they'll like make sure.

Yes, they will always complain. You know, people will always complain if something doesn't work or it's not working as supposed. So you will always know. And also probably one other thing that really helped, which I would recommend as well to do for the early products, is really just making sure this feedback is flowing to you. So some ways would be just having an open support chat always there, because then if it's there, people are going to write you. Right. So that's probably the difficult part. When it's hidden, people do not even contact or do not even send feedback anywhere or have a way for your product in your website to— way to submit feedback. So if that's the case, then people will submit for sure something if they're using the product.

Yeah. I mean, I fully agree. I mean, I think just having an open line with customers, it's a no-brainer, but it is a hard thing. And a lot of founders shy away from it again because of fear of failure or most importantly, I think probably fear— I mean, the perfection syndrome. It's huge, right? Because they're like, oh, it's not perfect yet, I'm not gonna put it out there. But more people are actually— most people are more forgiving than you give them credit for, but they're also honest. So you have to respect—

No, actually, people start liking that, that you're really launching and involving them, because I think that is what makes the feeling of community, the feeling of people giving back to each other, right? And then the community feels so open to give back to you, to tell you what to do, because Because then they are involved. They feel like they are part of what you're building.

They have a small seat at the table. Yeah,

exactly.

All right, so I have one other fun question. Like, who's been a virtual mentor or inspiring figure who helped you indirectly and they don't know it yet? Give them a shout out.

That's an interesting question. I think it's so hard to differentiate one or two persons, but I think throughout my life I have had, you know, in early days my father has been very inspirational to me and, you know, always made made me believe that I can do anything. I think that's a good lesson for me to also pass it to my children. And then also lots of many incredible women leaders, like especially building big companies and really interesting companies. And then also alongside, yeah, all of your peers, all of your team members, you always learn every day something from them. You get inspired by customers. Like one thing that we like joking is In every other company, customer support feels like the worst job to do because you always get all the complaints from customers. In our case, like daily, we keep sharing our love from customers. Like sometimes people just book calls to tell us how happy they are with Softr. Sometimes they just, like a lot of times daily, they send love messages in Softr, in the support chat or on Twitter. We're like, this is a huge motivation and this is kind of part of the inspiration that we get every day. It's like an adrenaline. So some additional motivational boosts that we, that keeps us going.

That's fantastic. So, okay. So moving on and then I have last question is, are you hiring for any roles right now? Feel free to shout them out if you do.

We do. Yes, we do. We hire across all different roles. We're hiring for community people, for product growth, more operational roles. And yeah, you can, you can also find all of our jobs listed on softer.io/jobs. And feel free to apply if you believe you can make the impact and you can help us bring Softr to the next level. Definitely happy to hear, to see everyone's contribution and CVs if there is any interested folks.

I'll say that, you know, you should definitely make your resume a Softr site or something. You know, if I were an applicant, that's what I would do because it's so easy to build using Softr. All right, so where can people find Softr? I mean, I think we talked about it, but where can people find more about Softr and more about you on the internet?

So Twitter is the main place where Softr is trending, I guess. If you search for Softr, you will definitely find, find from different other people as well. So I'm also on Twitter, not that active recently just because of some time limitations, but yeah, I'm definitely there. And you can also learn about Softr in our YouTube channel and also from all of the other, you know, creators, people in YouTube building different tutorials just You can search for Softr. But yeah, we have the YouTube channel and the Twitter channel, most importantly.

Fantastic. And of course, go to the website softr.io. Awesome. Thank you so much, Maryam. That was awesome. You know, appreciate you spending some time and kind of sharing your lessons and walking through the memory lane of early days of Softr. It was a blast and can't wait to continue rooting for Softr and using it myself too.

Thank you. Thank you, KP, for the invite. It was great to chat. And yeah, share what we have done so far.

Awesome. See you.