Top Tips For A Successful Product Hunt Launch (feat. Anna Buldakova)

Hello everybody, welcome to the Build in Public podcast, and I'm your host KP, and I'm super, super excited to have Anna Buldakova with me. Anna is joining us from London. Anna is the founder of meander.so, a mentorship platform, and I'm super thrilled to kind of dive into the backstory, how it came about, her remarkable Product Hunt launch. They were number one product of the day, number one product of the week. We had so much fun working together on that launch and also her insights from being at Meta, being at Intercom and some of these companies and what's exciting about the future for her. So, this is kind of the realm of what we want to cover today. But without further ado, welcome to the show, Anna.

Hey everybody, thanks for having me.

So, tell us the quick story behind Meander. Like, how did it come about? I'm very curious to hear the origin story.

Yeah, that's actually a very personal story because as you mentioned, before Meander, I was a product lead at Meta, Intercom, and many other companies and also have been working quite a lot with AI products. But before that, I actually was a journalist for almost 8 years.

Really?

Yeah. And it was a very difficult transition for me because I didn't have many connections in the field, didn't know how to navigate the space, didn't know what kind of skills I need to learn. And that's where I found a mentor. So essentially, a mentor was pivotal in this career change for me and essentially helped me navigate this change and prepare for the transition. And since then, I actually encountered mentorship quite a lot of times in my career because then I moved to Germany, I moved to then to the UK, so I had to adapt to a new culture. I also joined a startup and then I joined Meta. So essentially, I had to find someone to support me in those new environments and also transitioned from an IC to a people manager, which also required quite a new skill set to be learned. So essentially, in all those different stages of my career, I actually used mentorship as a main resource. And since then, I also, I also was a mentor myself, so I felt the urge to give back to people because my mentors helped me so much. And that's what inspired me to initially explore the space. And initially, when we started this exploration, we launched the chatbot without any, you know, any ambitions. Just wanted to help people find other, other mentors who could help. And in the first couple of months, we got more than 20,000 users without any, you know, any investment in marketing. So that's where we knew that there is something there, there is a need. And we also heard so many amazing stories from people using the chatbot that it compelled me and my co-founder to leave Meta and just focus on this full-time.

Yeah, there must be That must have been a big decision for you, right? Leaving a safe career and then taking a leap into entrepreneurship. Has it always been your dream to be a founder? Has there always been some sense of a calling or urge to build something brand new?

I think I have always been experimenting with different ideas, like playing around with, you know, different technologies when they were coming out or some ideas that would just appear in my head. And my co-founder and I, yeah, have been doing them together because he's a software engineer and I have been doing everything else. But to be honest, I always feared to get into entrepreneurship because it was so unpredictable. And you always have this survivor bias, right? Like you hear about those successful stories where people raise billions and just become really successful entrepreneurs. But I always realized that there are so many of them who are not successful and who were not as lucky as the other ones. So, I think the pivotal moment for me when I realized that I actually had to try entrepreneurship was when I realized that I should focus on the experience and on the journey rather than on the result.

Yeah.

That was a crucial moment when I thought, okay, if I just have fun with those amazing people, we do something innovative, and we do something meaningful, that already would be enough for me to be fulfilled by this experience.

I couldn't agree more. As a sort of a principle, as a sort of core metric, I think people often over-index on the outcomes, you know, and results. And I think that's just the default tendency in society, right? We always look at the outstanding outcomes and measure, um, you know, against them. But often I think in entrepreneurship and founder journey, like you said, the fun is in the journey, the fun is in the process, the joy is in the journey. And you really cannot attach your identity to the outcomes because they may or may not come because of so many factors, including macroeconomic factors, funding environments, markets, whatever. But if you just focus on the moment each chance, each day you get to, um, you know, really help a customer, really solve a problem for them, or connect them with the mentor that they were looking for. And so things like that, I think that's just the way to be. It's such— also, I think entrepreneurship is, I feel like, is a fast track for personal growth. Mm-hmm. You know, I was like you in corporate America, um, where for 8 to 9 years I was at Fortune 500 companies. And my personal growth was this much, I think. And I thought that was great. And the last seven months being a full-time entrepreneur, I feel like I grew so much. Yeah. I mean, again, I don't have any results to show, which are like very remarkable. But I think internal inner transformation is is happening every day.

Yeah, hundred percent. And that's a change that we are observing in careers as well. And that was one of the reasons why we renamed. So we were called Vector before and we are now Meander because we highlight this concept of meandering careers. And because 10 years ago, people's careers were quite linear. People were focused on getting from a middle-level person to a senior, then to head of something, to a director and VP. That was kind of the final point in your career. But now we observe more and more people being focused on the moment, like exploring what actually interests them, what brings them joy and not being shy, like not hesitating to transfer from one career to another, even if it means that they wouldn't get this promotion in technical terms, they won't make them enjoy the experience.

Yeah. We connected about this particular topic when we first met about these nonlinear careers. as a concept, right off the bat. I think the first call was about sort of exploring Product Hunt, you know, launch strategy and things like that. And within like, I think, 5 seconds of you explaining this nonlinear career, I jumped and I said, I'm in, I want help. Because it's personal to me, just like how you went from sort of journalistic background to tech, broke into tech and startups. I went from Fortune 500, you know, enterprise, very slow moving, career to startups, and I had no map of the territory. I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know how to do negotiation on the jobs. I had no clue, you know. And yeah, there were some people who luckily manifested themselves as mentors. Luckily, it just happened, and I'm so grateful for them because they handheld me, you know, in that transition period. And now I feel like I know the game, right? But If they were not there, it would have been very difficult. And I think, uh, I wonder how many millions of professionals are out there across all industries who are stuck in their careers. Maybe they should be doing something else that will energize them, but they're stuck because they're not— because they're not sure who will help them, how to get there, what's the map, you know. So that was— that's why I was pulled into the vision of what you're doing.

No, I think, uh, before Meandro, I worked at Workplace, which is a B2B product by Meta for companies, and we actually did quite a lot of research on engagement in different companies. And to be honest, the numbers are shocking. From my memory, based on the research by, I think, Gartner, 75% of people, of working population, feel that they are stuck in their careers.

Wow.

I think around just 20% of people feel they are engaged at work. Those numbers are shocking because I think right now, with so many opportunities, with AI and technologies playing such a crucial role in our lives, There are so many things you can do that can leverage your interests and your skillset, but a lot of people are just stuck in where they are because they don't see the options. And I think as, as a company, we actually dream about helping people to find a map and a guide in this, in this unknown territory to help them understand what kind of options they have and how they can get the best out of it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's just fascinating, and I think it's a very powerful mission. I really wish you all the best on that, and I think it's neat. It's one of those things where it's needed to be built, it's needed to be done. So tell us a little bit about the product itself. Like, where is— if somebody went to meander.so today, what are they going to see? Is it a marketplace? I know it is, but what supply side, demand side? You know, what is the description like? How does it feel right now?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of principles that differentiate us from like traditional mentorship solutions. So the first thing is that we are very focused on cases rather than on just a relationship without any purpose. So essentially we are trying to make mentorship a very focused and outcome-oriented experience where you are not just spending 6 months with a person, but you're trying to achieve certain results. And that has been quite an effective strategy for us. So essentially helping people—

I don't think, I don't know of anyone, I don't know of any other platform that does that. I don't know, maybe there are, but that itself is brilliant. Like you're basically tying it to a destination so that both the parties are accountable to that result.

Yeah.

As opposed to just a one-off session Like pick your brain and it just goes nowhere after that, right?

Yeah, exactly. So essentially, when you are discussing something very specific, like how to create a strategy, or how to conduct user research, or how to, how to decide on an MVP for your product, then you're not just achieving the results, you also manage to understand where this mentor is a good fit for you, because not every connection is perfect. Like, not all the time the connection is working out. So essentially, when you can judge your relationship with a mentor based on particular results, that gives you much more basis and feedback to see if you want to continue the relationship with them.

That's very interesting. So it is a 2-sided marketplace, right? But when you go in and as a person as a seeker, I go create a profile and then I describe my outcome that I want, or like, what is it? How does it work?

Yeah. So essentially there are 2 ways to go about it. So the first one is when you know what you want. So for example, I'm a product manager in a startup. I understand that I need to create a strategy. So who is the best mentor to help me with this topic? And we actually did quite a lot of work to find a really diverse set of mentors who can help with those problems, because we believe that you should talk to a person who is just One step ahead of you, so essentially you can just fill out this goal and we'll try to match you with the best person available. But then there is also a second route. A lot of people who come to the platform, as we discussed, they actually feel stuck and don't understand whom to contact because they don't understand what kind of goals they want to focus on and what would make sense for their career development. For this particular segment, we also have a solution. So we have a dedicated career navigation specialist. who helps those people to essentially boil down what kind of goals they could pursue and also set out their career goals that they could then discuss with a mentor. And afterwards, if they are happy with the mentors, they can obviously leave feedback and book further sessions with those mentors.

Gotcha, gotcha. Awesome. So you got me onboarded as a mentor. I'm really excited. I just got a ping from someone in Australia.

Oh, wow.

Like I said earlier, right? And I'm really excited to have my first session on Meander. So we— let's sort of switch gears and talk about product hunt strategy. And I want to save sort of some time on this podcast to mutually brainstorm, not brainstorm, but reflect on some of the things we did that worked really well. So other people who are listening to this who want to launch on Product Hunt can benefit from it, right? We collaborated for the launch. I had the most fun helping you guys out. You were so proactive.

Likewise.

Yes, you're so proactive and so grateful. And like, I felt for like those whatever, 1 week, 2 weeks, I felt like I was part of your team. There's a lot of camaraderie and appreciation. I enjoyed it. And you were number 1 product of the day, number 1 product of the week.

And we actually got number 1 education product of the month as well.

Really?

Nice.

Yeah. Kudos. So let's walk through some of those non-obvious lessons for you, and then I'm going to chime in with my observations that I learned through your project, right? So any number of 5 or 3 tips that you have that were non-obvious?

I would say that the first lesson for us was to clearly define the goals for the launch, because obviously you could pursue different objectives, and also you should clearly understand what kind of audience you're talking to on Product Hunt. Because some people go for Product Hunt launch because they want to increase the number of users, right? So they want to increase the awareness about their product. But also, there are some non-obvious outcomes of becoming a Product of the Day, like investor reachouts or journalist reachouts. There are also some trust factors in getting a Product Hunt badge on your website. So essentially, I think number one thing for anyone going to launch on Product Hunt is to clearly define what is it you're trying to accomplish here. Yeah, so that's, that's like one, one thing. The second thing, just in terms of technical preparation, I think it's really important to have different sources of support that you could reach out to during the day. I think it was really beneficial that we had this collaboration going on with you. To make sure that we get into the main page quite early on and we had the support from your community during the day. But also in addition to that, we made sure to reach out to our own community. So we divided all those reach-outs in batches and we also use different channels to make sure that this kind of support is distributed equally during the day. That's one of the important learnings because, for example, at 6 AM, just before the poll closing, we actually saw one of our competitors starting to get a lot of traction. And if we didn't have anything in our pocket, they could have won. And that's really important that you have quite a lot of different sources distributed across the day.

Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Um, I was waiting for your third one, but I, I'll, I'll prompt the third one. I think this is something I noticed that you did really well, um, Anna and your team, is that, um, this is— I'm so shocked at how many founders I work with, or how many founders I help and I observe miss the boat on this one. The first 4 hours is the golden period. Hmm. Since you launch, right? So 12:01 PST is when you go live, right? Generally the earliest you can go live on Product Hunt. The first 4 to 6 hours, absolutely you have to be present online and react and respond to every comment possible on the top page. So many people that I work with or see, they miss the boat there, and then it's very, very hard to catch up the rest of the day. Right? So what I've noticed you guys did really well is that you were active. I guess it helped that you were in London, you know, time zone-wise. But still, like being present and replying to every possible comment, you know, often I notice that for one comment from a particular customer, it would be you responding and then Victor responding and then even your community person, I forgot his name.

Adam.

Adam, yeah. So it adds a lot of engagement on the page and, you know, if I spent 35 seconds on your platform as a product and user on your launch day and then replied and left a thoughtful comment or feedback, it's imperative that I get reciprocated.

Yeah.

Like table stakes, but people don't do that, right?

That's a great comment. Yeah, that's a great point. To be honest, it turned out like a team-building exercise for us because our team, which is still quite small at the moment, was so present and was so involved in talking to users and just replying to comments and reviews. And we were so humbled by those reviews, to be honest. We did not expect such a wave of support, which was really amazing for the team to read. So, I think like even if not for the purposes of engagement, but for just the pure joy and satisfaction of interacting with your users, you definitely should do it.

The other thing that extends And that naturally lends itself for great strategy, but also is a great team-building activity. I noticed through the day you've done several screenshots or tweets about some of the comments that was made on the day on, you know, on your page, or some, like, celebrating, like, small milestones, like, hey, we're in the homepage, or top 10, or top 5. I feel like those things really show that you're building momentum. You know, like, you know, if you think about it like a startup, if I'm an investor, Series A investor, and if I'm looking at your, um, you know, just generally your traction, if you suddenly come out of nowhere and then show one day that, hey, here's the metrics, that's not as exciting as if you celebrate every little milestone that got from pre-seed to seed to Series A, right?

Yeah, that's true.

Same logic applies to The larger product and community as well. I think a lot of people want to support, but they don't know who to upvote. They don't know who to elevate and support and reply. So what they look for is who seems to be having more fun. Who seems to be building momentum, right? They think like investors. Oh, this company. Oh, this is they're crushing it. They're having so much fun. Like there's replies, comments, and so they will. pile on, you know? Yeah, I say this to all my founders, like, guys, bring some of the best comments on Product Hunt as they happen on the page, screenshot them, and bring them onto Twitter or LinkedIn, and then keep the conversation going.

Nice. I think that we are very, uh, we are very community-driven product, so it's important that we bring our community along, along on the journey with us. So essentially Sharing all those important moments and just being grateful to the community for making it happen. I think it's it's really important, and there is no such thing as oversharing in those things because celebrating.

I think especially when you're elevating other people, right? Like when you're not, it's not a me me me me me thing. It's more like hey, this is happening. It's fun. So I think one last tip I want to add is you were very intentional about leveraging your. your network and Victor's network, you know, when I think 2 weeks before when we first started talking about this, I was very impressed by the level of detail you went into. Here's my first-degree connection, second-degree connection, here's who I'm going to reach out to and all that. Can you share a little bit around your mindset of like, how should some founder, how should a founder ask and leverage their network, you know, for Product Hunt? Like, what are some tips about that?

I think the first, the first rule of thumb is to make sure that you explain clearly what it is you want them to do. So essentially explaining what kind of support you would like to get and most importantly why. So if some people from my network did not know what I'm building and why a Product Hunt launch is important to the product, it's important to explain because not everyone is familiar with Product Hunt. Some people would just say like, oh, of course I will do, like I will leave a comment, but maybe tomorrow So they were not really familiar with the, you know, with the dynamics and with the mechanics of the tool. So I think essentially making sure that you provide this context and those steps that they could easily follow is quite important. But I think also it depends on the degree of your connections, of course, but you should make your message quite personalized and targeted. So when we looked at our networks with my co-founder Victor and also with our team members, We were trying to think who from our networks would be most relatable to the mission. So who could resonate with what we are trying to build and would want to spread the word? Because in this case, it would be very organic to them to share with their network that, hey, there is this amazing new platform for finding mentors and developing in your careers. But like, if for people in my network, it won't be such an organic thing. It won't be such an organic message to share. I probably won't ask them because it probably won't make sense for them. So essentially being quite intentional on who can be an ambassador for you versus just a random reach out. Yeah. And I think you shouldn't spend a lot of time on those random people, like 80/20 rule.

Yeah, 80/20 rule. Yeah, I think a lot of people, again, like they do the spray and pray and they assume you have to outbound DM everybody on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I highly, highly discourage that because I'm like, that's just the fastest way to, one, lose the spirit of, you know, reaching out to somebody, right? It's just like nobody likes these irrelevant, non-targeted pitches.

Yeah.

And two, you're just gonna drain yourself out and you're gonna be bummed out and you're gonna feel like nobody cares about the mission, right? Yeah. Like, when we talked, like, I think the best example is if you were trying to pitch Meander to a dentist, you know, that reaction would have been different compared to me. I literally went through the pains that you were talking about. And so within 5 seconds, I was like, I'm in. And not only that I was in, I was like, we genuinely wanted to be an evangelist and promote it as much as I could. So I think you're right. Like, the 80/20 rule applies. Like, overall though, I said this in my emails to you. I loved how it didn't feel like you were working hard, but it felt like you were working smart, you know, the team, you and the team. So kudos to you. Thank you. That's generally my style when I work with clients, etc. There's so many people come to me and they're so nervous and they're like, they're trying to work so hard. And I say, you should have fun. You should not work so hard, you know, it should not feel that hard. Anyway, the other thing also, I have to say this out in public, There was somebody who asked me, and that was like really one of my highlights of my Product Hunt journey. Somebody asked me, KP, I want to be Product Hunt, I want the Product Hunt badge for Product Hunt of the Year.

Oh.

I was like—

Ambitious.

I was like, and I want $1 billion and a private jet tomorrow. I was so shocked. I was like, what? Who even thinks like that, right? And I think the intention was, I understand, you know, being ambitious to an extent. I feel like I'm an ambitious person. I think you're an ambitious person. But being so outcome obsessed is such a negative trait in my view. You know, I won't name the names who said this, but I was like, this is definitely not the right approach of building a venture-backed company or whatever, you know. In fact, so I couldn't work with them. I said that, sorry, this is not how I work. I focus on the process. The journey, you know, here's what I can offer, here's what we could help with, all that. But nobody on the planet, including Ryan Hoover, you know, who's no longer Product Hunt, but like the founder of Product Hunt, could ever promise Product Hunt Batch of the Year. That's one of the weird asks. But eventually, as irony would have it, they ended up number 3. I didn't help them.

That's good. It worked out for them.

Right, but like if you think about it, I didn't get to help them because I said, I'm sorry, I can't help you. But I think if they didn't obsess over that, I feel like they would have been like number 1 like you. Because they obsess so much, I feel like the karma, the universe got them and they got number 3. I was thinking that to your point, like, you know, one thing that I noticed among my top performers is that the ones who tend to really hit it out of the park actually don't care about the badge as much. Isn't that ironic? Yeah, you never mentioned to me, KPM, we want Product Hunt of the Week.

That's true, that was a big surprise. Good

surprise. We're always like, oh yeah, that's a great bonus, right? It's a bonus. And this is— this applies to so many things. Like, the people who are obsessed about getting to the 100K on Twitter are the ones who don't get there. People are obsessed about getting a 25 million CTA are the ones who don't get there, right? The folk— the people who are obsessed and focused on either the customers, the mission, or the journey seem to me are the ones who are the top 1%.

Yeah, that is so true. No, I feel like being focused on outcomes and just being very focused on just results makes you afraid of failures. So essentially, you're so obsessed, uh, with the end results that you forget about what kind of problem you're solving. And you were just afraid of any experiments. But I think in our industry, that's what actually gets you to success at the end, right?

It's the number of iterations that gets you to success. It's nobody has the first big, like the way you guys had to pivot a couple times, even the name and the branding. Nobody wakes up and has the best idea ever, right? You have a hunch, and you have to take it to market, and you have to listen to what people are saying, and then slowly adapt it. You know, so, um, thank you for sharing some tactical and reflective tips about product and journey. I want to switch now to the journey of building a product, like the technical journey, and especially, you know, as early-stage startups, you have to balance how much you can build versus how much is like technically possible, realistically possible to build versus how much— Yeah. is wishful thinking that you would love to have one day. How do you draw the balance? How do you draw the line between them?

How do I draw the line between what to build and what not to build?

Yeah.

I think it's a true art in terms of prioritizing and identifying what is a must-have versus nice to have, especially when you have limited resources, limited number of people, limited time, and just in general, not not a huge runway. It's not like 10 years ahead of you. You have to stay focused in order not to spread yourself thin. And I think it's not even about the build phase, but rather about the maintain phase. Because essentially, as soon as you build something, you have to think how it will be maintained, how it will live further. Because every single thing that you release to life, then you need to make sure that it evolves and you will be receiving feedback, you will be receiving some complaints, and it increases your scope for prioritization in the future. So essentially, by prioritizing early on, you kind of make yourself a favor in the future. I think one of the frameworks I brought to Meander from Facebook is Understand, Identify, Execute. So essentially, it's a framework used to to understand what part of the funnel you're focusing on. So is it a problem validation? Is it a solution validation? Or is it just an execution problem? And essentially it helps you to better frame what it is you're trying to accomplish and also to focus on the most important thing. Because essentially until you have validated that the problem is important, it doesn't make sense to focus on solutions. It doesn't make sense to build like a, you know, 100 different versions of one feature until you actually realize that it's a problem worth solving. So, I think that really helps when you adopt this kind of framework and prioritize based on whether it's a problem that you're trying to confirm or it's a solution or it's specific execution details. Another thing that, that turned out quite to be quite helpful was just thinking what would you do if you had twice as less time. So essentially imagine that right now you have twice as less people, twice as less time. What would you actually do? And that brings this level of clarity that, okay, instead of those 10 features that I could potentially do, instead of those 5 user researchers I could run, What is the one that is the most important? What is the one that will move the needle? And essentially, it also allows you to get this level of clarity to make sure that you make the right decision.

How much of your time and your energy is spent talking to users as an early-stage founder?

A lot of time. I think that's a number one priority for any startup founder. Because you don't have any other sources of information, right? So, you should be constantly in touch with your users to make sure that you understand not just the problems that they experience, but also the context they are in. When you're thinking about—

How do you do that? Do you jump on quick Zoom calls with them, phone calls? Do you schedule them?

Yeah. So, first of all, I'm a mentor on the platform. So, I'm constantly mentoring people and that's a great source. of information, like dogfooding my own product. Right. And I'm also finding mentors through Meander, which is helping me to, you know, to see some gaps in what we built. I also have office hours. So essentially anyone on the platform can book a call with me. And actually quite a lot of people are using this option. So I'm having calls every week with them. And what's turned out to be quite an amazing benefit, we have a mentor community which is quite engaged and mentors are sharing their feedback and their insights in how we could make the platform better. So it's like all those different channels are super helpful. We also have onboarding calls for mentors and mentees, which I used to join especially at the beginning, but now I, I was lucky to hand it over to our amazing community lead Who is sharing the insights with me.

That's awesome. I love, I love you, how you jumped at it and said a lot of the time that I spend is with users. You know, I saw this split somewhere. I can't retrace it, but I think it was one of the YC Startup School videos that was talking about how in the early stages, 80% of your time should be talking to users and 20% should be built, like building products and features. I thought that was, that was brilliant. Yeah. Um, and often we, we know from experience the reasons why we build things that nobody wants to use is because we flip the ratio. We spend 80% of the time trying to build it and then 20% talking to them, and it ends up being unwanted. Tell us about these mentors, um, on the platform. What are some great qualities and traits that you look for in individuals You know, when you choose, when you want them to be a mentor?

So there are a couple of things that I think are crucially important for any mentor. So the first one is open-mindedness. So essentially being able to share your knowledge, but without it being imposed on another person, because obviously from just a half an hour, 1-hour conversation, you cannot gather all the details, all the context from another person's life. And that's why you need to be quite open in how they might interpret your experience and how they might apply it. So essentially, your job as a mentor is to ask questions, like understand the situation, and then make sure that you share information in the right way so that a mentee could actually use that. Another important trait is just essentially being able to build rapport and trust with another person. It's not an easy thing to do, to be honest, because you again just have 30 minutes or 60 minutes with another person. And in a lot of cases, it happens over Zoom. So it's an online connection, which is, which is even harder in terms of trust. And that's why it's so important that mentors have the right communication skills. Which allow another person to talk about some issues that might be sensitive for them or might be even difficult for them to talk about. So if you want to, to make sure that you are sharing the right information and people are answering you honestly, then trust is quite important. And then the third important trait is making sure that you can communicate in a very concise And structured manner, because again, mentorship is a very personalized experience. Mentees come to you with questions, and they might not repeat from one session to another. And that's why this conversation might feel just very unstructured in some way if we if a mentor doesn't have the skill. And if that happens, then a mentee might just leave that they had just a nice talk. But without any action items or any specific outcomes that they wanted to achieve. So I think for a mentor, it's quite critical to be able to communicate in a very concise and efficient manner.

Yeah, that's a great point. You know, one of the things that I try to do when I'm having sessions, you know, either office hours or— I'm in the Berlin Public Fellowship, right? I run the fellowship and I have a lot of founders office hours there. is I've noticed this little subtle slight adjustment to the framing of a question can really change the experience of what's being discussed dramatically. Mm-hmm. One example is, you know, this very popular question called, how can I help you? Yeah. How can I help? People ask that all the time and I hate it. What happens is, unless you know me really well, unless we are in a mastermind group or something, like it's very hard to do the work to tell you how you can help me, right? Like, there's millions of ways you can help me. Like, what do you mean by how you can help, right? But VCs love to use it, and I think it's become a catchphrase everybody loves to say. How can I help? How can I help? Mm-hmm. I think the intent is great. And so what I've learned is I've learned to use that phrase, and it always sucks. It always makes it like awkward, you know, like, uh, maybe you can amplify our stuff when we go live or something, but nothing really concrete comes out. Instead, I've been flipping that to saying, what's the top-of-mind challenge or bottleneck you have this week? What's like top of mind for you? That's so easy because that's not saying what is the number one challenge among the ranked list. I'm not asking that. I'm just saying what's top of mind, what comes to mind.

Yeah.

And then there's usually the founders rattle like a list of 3 or 4 unique challenges. And then I try to sort through them to figure out where I can add value, because that's on me, not on them, right? Because I know what I can add value in. So suddenly they'll say things like fundraising, which I can't help with, for example. They'll say like, oh, you know, CPA, accounting, whatever. Then they'll say, yeah, product at launch. I'm like, yo, yes, I can help with that. Here's these 4 articles I wrote. Here's this, you know, video you should watch. So I've realized that that little framing, I think, I wonder for Meander if there's an opportunity to create some, a database of prompts that would be great framing questions for both mentees and mentors. Just an open idea I just got right now. Yeah, I think would be interesting because, you know, this is something I learned the hard way, but I feel like companies could benefit from it without it. So.

No, for sure. I think that's a great tip. And, uh, our learning lead actually has been working on a library of templates. Yeah. Like structures for the conversation depending on the situation. Because to be honest, people never ask the right question. Like they come to you because they lack competence in a certain area. And that's why they cannot ask the right questions. They do not know what to ask you.

Yes.

And that's why your goal as a mentor is to help them frame the question. In majority of the cases, like from my mentorship experience, people come to me with one question, but we end up answering a completely different question because their first question was either unimportant or it was not something that they actually needed to make progress. So I think your advice is really, really valuable, like making sure that you help them frame the right question to be answered. And that actually might be the most valuable thing you can get out of the session, because if they have the right questions, they can also find a lot of resources.

Yeah. Yes. Also, I think one of the most non-obvious things is about sort of this mentorship process beyond Meander. I found that there are thousands of mentors, well-qualified, successful, proven, like people who are practitioners, who are generous and want to help. You know, it's such a limiting belief that I think when somebody feels that they're stuck, they think that, man, it must be I'm at fault or maybe, you know, something wrong with me. I'm stuck at this step of this journey, whatever. And it feels isolating. It feels like you're doing something wrong. And because, you know, in school we don't feel stuck because we have teachers, right? We have peers, buddies, friends. In often many journeys like entrepreneurship or career switching, we feel stuck because we're doing something unusual, offbeat. You know, you left Meta and you're doing something called Mehnder.

Yeah.

Nobody's done this before, right? That exact sequence, nobody's done it. But the biggest shock to me happened when I realized that there are so many people. When I worked at On Deck, I was surprised at how many people were willing to come forward and help me if— for 2 things. I had to do 2 things. One, be bold enough to have an ask. Mm-hmm. Because closed mouths don't get fed.

Yeah.

Right? If you don't ask, nobody knows what's going on in your head. Number one. So one, the bold ask. So that's one. Number 2 is the right question. And that may take some work because knowing what to ask is, I think, is a great skill.

Yeah, for sure.

Because even problem solving, as you know this, right? Like, it's not about the problem that's hard. It's about asking the right question that can unlock the answer.

Yeah.

Because the answers are all around us walking. Right? And so every time I get stuck, I think about this. I'm like, man, I'm stuck at this thing, but there are millions of people out there who know the answer to the thing I'm stuck with.

Yeah.

That's wild. So I'll give you a fun, silly example, but for, for a while, for maybe like 2, 3 months, um, I've been pondering the question of how do you build and grow and exit a Bootstrap startup, because I'm on the bootstrap path right now, and I'm like, I want to build a SaaS product or a marketplace or something, and then build an exit. And then, you know, so I thought, what would be— how, how would I do this? And I have no experience on this. I have experience in starting companies, a lot of them failed, but I have no experience in exits. So I thought, okay, how would I do this? How would I go? And then I know some people on acquire.com have been talking about exits all the time on Twitter, Acquire.com, and so on. So like there are people out there who are walking in this world who have had an exit. So it's about 2 things now. Same thing, I have to reach out to them and then I have to say, hey, what's your path? How have you done it? So I started a podcast called Billion Dollar Exits. Million Dollar Exits. And I put it out on Twitter saying, hey, I know nothing about this topic. I'm a newbie, but I'm very passionate, enthusiastic. And the topic is called, I mean, and the key theme is we're trying to unlock how to get million-dollar exits. The million dollars is a hook. I mean, I don't care for a million dollars, but you need some hook, right? It's blowing up. Nice. And there's, I think, 9 people on the first tweet replied and said, KP, I just had a million-dollar exit. I'm happy to jump on a call. I didn't know that there were 9 people in my orbit who had million-dollar exits, right? So it's like something—

That's amazing.

You don't know the latent potential of your network. I think that's another thing about career mentorship is that you just don't know who had an internship at Meta or who had a job at Apple. You don't know until you ask.

That is so true. And I feel the title of your podcast really resonates with me, like in terms of building in public and also thinking in public and doing anything in public. Because when you share something into the world, then you get responses. Response. And even if your thinking or building has been imperfect, you still get those other opinions. And I think that is so beneficial for any decision-making, decision-making process, because essentially when you consider more than one option, even if your first option was the right one, it strengthens your proposition because you start thinking about the pros and cons and you just get, you know, the option of a second opinion. That's, that's really incredible.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's sort of the lifestyle I've been living, right? Building in public for the last 5 years. Okay. So let's touch on AI for a minute. I have 2 questions for you left. One's the AI, and then I'll share what the next one is. But how are you processing the AI revolution? You know, what are your thoughts on it? Do you ever see meander playing into the AI, you know, evolution a little bit? Or how are you processing the whole thing?

I feel like obviously right now it feels like the moment for AI because it became a commodity. Like even people in a coffee shop, I don't know, accountants, hairdressers. I actually went to my hairdresser the other day and she was talking about ChatGPT. Which I found really amazing. Like, when the technology actually gets to people who are not usually talking about technology.

Right.

So obviously, this feels like a huge moment. But at the same time, it's really interesting what comes next, because still, it feels like the Wild West in terms of transparency, in terms of control, in terms of measurement. And even when I worked on AI at Meta, We used to discuss those questions, but now, as more and more people are using those technologies, these questions become more and more prominent. Like, how do we use data? How do we protect people's privacy? How do we ensure that we are optimizing for the right thing? How do we ensure that there is no space for human error? And obviously, how do we make sure that it's not used for some bad purposes, like fake pictures or some impersonification of people. So, I think it's a really exciting time. There are a lot of things to be figured out and essentially to build out the rules of the game, like how this game should be played in the long run to benefit all of us. In terms of Meander using AI, I definitely see a lot of potential because obviously at the core, we have the matching technology, making sure that mentees, learners can find the right person to talk to at the right moment. So obviously, we need to ensure that we are connecting the dots and are using different types of data to match people and to ensure that this match actually leads them to results. So I think in the future, this actually becomes a very important point, especially as we scale. To ensure that we are not just looking at people's professional achievements, but also at some of the personal characteristics. Like, as you said, people have really different paths. Like, they transition from one profession to another. And if I transition to product management from journalism, my path is different than, for example, for a lawyer who transitioned into product management. So, I think this kind of personalization would be critically important.

Yeah. What is coming up for you in the next 6 to 12 months period? Like, what is exciting in the roadmap or in the company's trajectory?

I think we touched on this idea of career navigation. I really like this analogy when you travel to a new city that you don't know. You really can go in any direction and you don't know where to go, so you can just wander around the city. But if you just have one day, it's much more efficient if you have a map or if you have a guide who can help you at least understand what's interesting about the city, like where you can go, how it might align with your interests. Like if you're a foodie, what kind of markets you can go to, or like if you want to To to to learn about history, what kind of museums you can visit, and the same applies to careers because essentially when you achieve a certain point in your career, like five years, six years mark, you really don't know where to go. Kind of going back to my early point that people don't want to go into VP or like head of positions anymore. They actually want to do what's fun and what's meaningful. But at the same time, they kind of find themselves in this stuck situation because they don't know what and how they can leverage their current skill set. So at Meander, we are exploring this problem. Our initial pilot for career navigation was really successful, and we feel that it will be the future. So essentially, we'll be doubling down on the career navigation part and making sure that we are not just helping people who know where they want to go, but also helping people who feel stuck and who don't know what's next for them.

That's awesome. That sounds super exciting. I'm rooting for you guys. Keep me posted. And, you know, thank you for being on the show.

Thank you for having me.

I didn't realize the time flew so, so fast that we were over the hour. But thanks for being here, and let's keep in touch.

Thank you so much.