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Interviews with world-class startup founders about their unique paths to uncover tactical insights they've learned about how to fundraise, grow, validate, hire, scale, and lead teams while building your startup.
Get full access to detailed takeaways on each episode, additional case studies, and more at join.foundingjourney.com
According to Stripe, we're in the top 1 or 2 percent of fastest growing companies. That's Adam Nathan.
Michael Houck:After raising at a $150,000,000 valuation from investors like Kyger Global, he realized he needed to pivot.
Adam Nathan:I spent years of my life losing sleep, wondering how the I was gonna find a market and build a business that could clear a $150,000,000 But he figured it out,
Michael Houck:and now his new startup, Blaze AI, is a rocketship.
Adam Nathan:But we're on track to go from 0 to $10,000,000 in revenue in like 15 months.
Michael Houck:Adam told me his formula for how to accelerate growth and how to prioritize the right things during hypergrowth, as well as how to avoid overbuilding. This is Adam Nathan's founding journey. Adam, welcome to the podcast, man. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you.
Adam Nathan:Yeah. Good to see you too. Thanks for having me.
Michael Houck:So I actually wanna start by talking about something sad or at least kind of sad. Almanac, the original company, you guys have now obviously rebranded to Almanac Labs, and Blaze is the 2nd product within Almanac Labs. But the original product, Almanac, you're in the process of kinda closing it down. I think you said by end of year, so, you know, December 19th right now, coming up on that. How does
Adam Nathan:it feel? You said it's sad, but, you know, to me, it's, it's kind of a happy ending in that we, have built a second product called Blaze, which is, growing incredibly quickly. You know, we're we're on track to go from 0 to $10,000,000 in revenue in, like, 15 months, which is, you know, top 1% growth out there. And the reason we're shutting down Almanac is because we just don't have enough team capacity to both maintain the quality of Almanac at the level that we'd like for our customers there as well as support the growth for the 100 of thousands of users who are on Blaze every day trying to grow their business, with our with our tools. So we have an a team of 19 people.
Adam Nathan:We, you know, have, I think, 9 engineers now, 3 marketers, 1 designer. I'm the PM, and so there's not a lot of folks had to go around to build an incredible amount of stuff. Almanac and Blaze are both obviously productivity creative tools. There's a ton of functionality and surface area in them. And at the end of the day, we just decided that we didn't really wanna have sent our names onto something that we couldn't absolutely guarantee would be an amazing experience for every single person.
Adam Nathan:And so the reason we're shutting down Almanac is because Blaze is going so well. I know that's not true for many companies out there when they shoot on a product, but, you know, it's it's certainly sad to, say goodbye for now to an idea that I am so passionate about, that I still believe in, that I I think our thesis was correct on. And, you know, I've talked to other founders recently that are showing them their companies without an alternative, and I can see the ferocity at which they protect their vision and just try and do anything possible to to keep it alive in some form or another. And I and I certainly feel that about Almanac. But like a lot of things in life, it's easy to get over something if you have something even more exciting to move on to, and so I'm grateful that we are having a transition like that here.
Adam Nathan:But, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's still it's still tough to not pay attention to something that I spent 4 years of my life on.
Michael Houck:Building an audience is a full time job, or at least it can feel like that when you're busy running your startup. But with AI making software easier to build, getting distribution is more important than ever. I can help. After growing my LinkedIn to over 40,000 followers and having a 100,000 across all platforms as well as a 60,000 subscriber newsletter, I know how impactful having an audience can be when you're building a startup these days. So I started Megaphone Studios, a ghostwriting agency specifically built for founders and their startups.
Michael Houck:Think of us like your startup's chief content officer. We turn your LinkedIn x or newsletter into a machine for lead generation, follower growth, and building your influence as a thought leader in your space. Our process is super lightweight for you while still delivering content that only you uniquely could write. And our plans are flexible with no long term lock in because we know how fast things can change at startups. Oh, and I brought my buddy Blake Emal along to help me run the business.
Michael Houck:He has even more followers than I do. So email me at hauk@megaphone.network and mention the pod for a 1st month discount. Yeah. I feel you on that. But definitely sounds like a happy ending, at least bittersweet at the very worst.
Michael Houck:What was the inspiration to go out and start building Blaze 15 months ago when you guys, you know, you had Almanac? It was a successful product. It was growing. Maybe not as fast as Blaze is now, but, yeah, why why start Blaze in the first place?
Adam Nathan:Yeah. Well, I I was gonna write a a blog about this soon because a lot of folks talk about, you know, the how they launched their company and got product markets it. You know, my friend, Tyler, who I know is on your podcast, writes about his company in, like, in chapters as years of the company. So I was I was thinking about Blaze recently and, like, oh, well, what's what's our chapter 1? And and, really, our chapter 1 was a pivot from Almanac.
Adam Nathan:And so Almanac is pretty critical in the story around how Blaze got started. We started Almanac 5 years ago at this point, in 2019. Started really as this idea of building a Stack Overflow for nonengineers. We thought there's a bunch of new professions like product management, product marketing, growth, came about in the Internet age, and a lot of those professions, were based on tribal knowledge. You had to go work at a company like Uber or Airbnb, in order to learn how to be a PM or a PMM.
Adam Nathan:It was the the information about techniques and best practices were passed from person to person. They weren't codified, like, how you would learn any, kind of old economy career at an IVD school or something like that. And so we wanted to build, you know, basically a repository of best practices that were validated by experts in the field, similar to how Stack Overflow exists to basically help engineers, implement, at this point, commonplace components for code. We wanted to do the same thing by building gibs and hacks or folks who are learning the jobs of the new economy. We built that in 2019, launched later that year, 2020.
Adam Nathan:COVID came around, and with the remote work, everybody all of a sudden had to learn new skills around how to work on the Internet. And so the first version of Almanac, which is the stack Stack Overflow replica took off. We, you know, went from basically 0 to a 100000 users in a couple months. We're able to quickly raise money for that. We raised our seed round in late 2019.
Adam Nathan:I think we had a $9,000,000 seed round, which at the time was one of the largest, at least, one of the largest rounds of the year, certainly for, like, a non biomedical product. The the first version I wanna took off, and we we started thinking, well, do we really wanna build basically a double sided marketplace where we have some folks publishing knowledge, other folks consuming it? We thought the market cap on that, like, Stack Overflow would be a $100,000,000, and we compared the alternative to that was something like GitHub where which has a market market cap, at least, when it's bought by Microsoft, of $10,000,000,000. And so we thought, you know, basically, getting a first draft or some information is worth, you know, 10% of the full value chain. But if you're the place, if you're the source of truth where people are creating and collaborating and storing their knowledge and their their work products, that's a 10 100 x opportunity.
Adam Nathan:So, with with the first run of Olenec, we had built, in a faithful decision, a document editor and to publish knowledge to this marketplace. And building a document editor is one of the toughest things you can do in technology, I think, sort of like building a rocket ship. It sounds silly, but it's just really hard to build a real time rich text collaborative editor. Very few companies have done it, and those that have, like Notion, you know, often take 5 or 10 years, of just building to to even get to market, and even longer than that to get to an inflection point of growth. So, we had already started on this path of building a document editor.
Adam Nathan:We had a very talented team, and so we start we start to think, well, what if we were in Stack Overflow, but we're instead GitHub? So we started building an enterprise product, around building a a collaboration tool. But collaboration tools and productivity tools is is a super credit market. It's dominated by, you know, incumbents like Microsoft Office and, Google Docs that have been in market for 20 years are backed by $1,000,000,000 balance sheets. They're, you know, incredibly well used products, with a ton of features.
Adam Nathan:And it was you know, it's it's hard not just to build a product like that, but to figure out, well, where where's my entrance into the market where I can serve an, an underserved need, that has a huge total addressable market. So, like, it's a some crack that the big guys haven't figured out that you can build a huge business around. And, of course, there are no big cracks unless there's a change in either technology or consumer behavior or, or regulations. And so we we had the villainous products, and we we saw with remote work and the the hunger that people have to try and figure out how to do remote well with our first version of Almanac that, oh, wow. All of a sudden, the whole world is thrown into this whole new way of working, that nobody knows how to do, thanks to COVID.
Adam Nathan:And, you know, all of a sudden, overnight, every company in the world was remote, and nobody had to nobody really knew except for a couple, pioneering companies knew how to do meetings in a distributed way, how to do communication or collaboration, over time zones and geographies. So we saw that as our opportunity with Almanac to kinda break into the productivity market in a big way. So we anchored what we build with Almanac, which is basically GitHub for docs around this remote trend. And so Almanac has, really good version control where you can easily see who made what changes on the document in a kind of a Facebook like timeline. You can ask for reviews and approvals, asynchronously so that you don't have to have a meeting to get feedback on a document or see what somebody thinks.
Adam Nathan:It's super transparent, super structured, and allows companies to, work together without as many meetings. And so we had anchored both the product vision as well as our positioning, around remote work. And I think that was smart at the time because, 2020, 2021, it seemed like, okay, remote's the future. And I still think remote is the future, but it feels, less like an earthquake than more like a climate change where, the the the tide is rising, but it's gonna take 30 years for a whole generation of managers to retire, a whole new generation of managers to come in who prefer to work from home, like I do today, probably like a lot of people that you know do as well. It's not a you know, that that transition does not meet the 5 to 10 year, return horizon of our of our venture investors.
Adam Nathan:And so while I believe it will eventually happen, we, as a company, couldn't be that patient to wait for the results. Certainly, our investors wouldn't be. And, you know, at the end of the day, my job, having taken venture dollars is to provide venture scale returns to our investors. And, you know, venture venture capital is, not for everybody. It's not for every business.
Adam Nathan:I compare it to jet fuel where, yeah, there's lots of great cars in the road that take regular fuel, but there's only a certain kind of, machine that can take, jet fuel. And those machines can only fly between certain markets that are big enough for them and have unique other attributes. And the same thing is true for building a venture scale business. You know, you need to find a market that is so large, and can grow so quickly that it can return it can produce go from 0 to a $100,000,000 in revenue in in 5 years or so, and help, you know, our investors return their funds even if every other investment was not to work. And so, you know, after working on Almanac for many years, we saw that even though the business was growing and we had probably the very best remote companies in the world all on Almanac, we had, like, incredible market share with huge pioneers in the space.
Adam Nathan:We just weren't growing fast enough to provide, I think, the returns that I that I wanted to give back to our investors and also to our team and our shareholders. But we had built, at this point, a document editor. We had built, comments and real time collaboration. We built a file management system. We built a ton of security features, that were all market tested.
Adam Nathan:And, you know, around 2022, I guess, from 23, AI started to break out into the scene. And for a whole year, I was basically like, I don't really wanna I'm not even gonna pay attention to AI. We're really focused on remote work. This is just a fad. It's another trend.
Adam Nathan:And, like, I'm not gonna be that founder that's just bouncing around between, you know, the, like, the next shiny object that comes across Twitter. But it was clear, you know, probably 6 months, 7 months in that, AI was not just, a fad. It was it looked like it truly could could be a disruptive innovation that creates a ton of new markets and opportunities. And so at the same time, I was realizing, okay. Maybe Almanac is not gonna return the fund for our investors.
Adam Nathan:We We also realized that the thing we had built very luckily with Almanac, which is this document editor, matched perfectly with the first use case for AI, which was generative copy, generative words. And we also had built a ton of functionality around images and graphics. And so the next couple use cases around, creating creating videos, creating, graphics and images also is supported by the thing we built. Like, we could not have been better positioned to meet this trend. And the hard part about generative AI is not the generation part.
Adam Nathan:Anyone can plug into ChatGPT's API. The hard part is, being able to modify the copy or the image, sharing it with people, distributing it, storing it, accessing it. That that's that doesn't take AI AI. That's just a regular old code that takes years years to build in a really sturdy way, and we had already done that. We had spent 4 years building that foundation.
Adam Nathan:So we we saw that we, you know, we we've had built something that, you know, quick quickly meet the moment. And so then the question was, like, well, what what will the value proposition be? How do we market it? How do we go to market? And with Almanac, as I've kinda mentioned, we were serving really big companies.
Adam Nathan:We had an enterprise sales model, which I hated. It's not I didn't didn't hate our customers, but I think the tough thing about enterprise as a go to market strategy for a pre product market fit company is that you don't know, if, the slow growth is due to just the nature inherent nature of the sales cycle. It just takes a long time to sell the big orgs. Or Or if it's because no one actually needs your product. And so you can spend a lot you can waste a lot of time, trying to figure that out and then, you know, eventually run out of money.
Adam Nathan:And so that uncertainty always nagged me with with Almanac. And so with Blaze, I knew with the with the new company, essentially, I knew that I wanted to flip the go to market model on its head, serve consumers, or we could do self serve. I get really fast feedback cycles, basically, as we do to still to this day of, seeing by the hour, are customers converting from their trials? Are they retaining, by day, by week? And so that sensitivity allows us to really understand how consumers, at a statistically significant scale, are reacting to our product quality and reacting to our value proposition.
Adam Nathan:So I knew I wanted to go consumer and kind of rectify for the things I didn't like about the Almanac, go to market motion. And so we started we kinda built this prototype for what became Blaze. We called it Megan at the time, like, the scary movie girl. Nobody liked the name internally, but I I thought it was funny. And we started showing what we had built to a bunch of people, and we knew that the first couple industries were that were gonna be affected by AI were ones that use words a lot.
Adam Nathan:So marketing, sales, customer service. So we started talking to marketers up front. Sales and customer service seemed like not as big opportunities. We showed Meaghan to professional marketing teams at big inter big companies, and they're, like, oh, this is cool. You know, we'll, like, we'll we'll try we'll take it for a trial, and we'll have to show it to legal and, like, bring it to our, you know, like, budget counsel and all of this stuff.
Adam Nathan:It felt like a nice to have for them. But when we showed it to small teams, agencies, freelancers, creatives, consultants, entrepreneurs, all business owners, their reaction was, like, full of hunger. They were, like, how do I get this thing as fast as possible? Like, I need this right now. And, like, can I use it today?
Adam Nathan:And so that that is the kind of, I think, product market fit and traction that you always hear people talk about. I love the idea that if you don't know if you have product market fit, you don't have it. And that felt like these customers were pulling us into the market. And at the time, there really there really was no one focusing on these customers. Even the the comp the kind of the first entrance into generative AI, which were Jasper and Copy AI, they They started at this consumer side, but they started moving upmarket as soon as we entered the market.
Adam Nathan:And so they were moving away from our customers, but we were really focused on them. And the reason I think they moved away, I hope they're not listening to this podcast, is because I think their their core product just wasn't very good. Like, we we when we tried it, we it just didn't do a good job of generating copy that anyone would wanna use. But because we had really invested in a document editor and because we took a long time to focus on personalization features like Brand Voice, we were able to generate really, really good AI driven social media posts and newsletters and website copy and blog posts for our customers. And so, essentially, from I I I think that faithful decision of basically focusing on this focus really narrowing in on who we were serving and picking a part of the market that I think is has historically been underserved, and certainly in the case of AI, is continuing to be underserved because everybody thinks these customers are bad, is the key to our success.
Adam Nathan:Because, basically, you know, the 200,000,000, small business owners in the United States are not bad customers. You just have to figure out how to serve them well. And we had a product, an emotion, and a brand that I think had really connected with our target customers from the from day 1. So, yeah, from from from basically launch onwards, it's just been a the kind of, up into the right graph that UAC and see people posting about on Twitter are big companies you dream about. You know, according to Stripe, we're in the top 1 or 2% of fastest growing companies of companies that that use Stripe to process their payments.
Adam Nathan:So and that's been the case basically from the from the first day. So I think those 4 years of of building Almanac are really just training and practice, and building building our internal muscles as a team to figure out, okay, what do we think are the home? How do you find product market fit? How do you find distribution? How do you create, you know, inflection point growth?
Adam Nathan:And that kinda prepared us to become an overnight success with Blaze.
Michael Houck:Okay. So you have that overnight success quote, unquote. Right? What does it feel like then when you have that hockey stick growth, when you're in the top 1 or 2 percent of com of companies on Stripe? I feel like you're in a scenario where, obviously, things are going great, you feel amazing, but how do you prioritize what to do?
Michael Houck:Because there's so many different things you do when you know you're on
Adam Nathan:that trajectory. The mistaken belief, by, I think, a lot of founders or entrepreneurs on an early stage is that, yeah, as soon as you find product market fit and you find distribution, and you start going, like, everything's gonna be great, and, like, it'll all be easy from there, that is the opposite of true. The bigger you get, the harder it gets. It's just that the problems change. And so you're not and and, certainly, personally, I prefer the kinda mechanical nature of the growth stage to the, the art and craft that takes to find product market fit and distribution at an early stage.
Adam Nathan:It takes, it's much harder, I think, to to, be facing extinction and just kind of, as I describe it, wandering in the woods through the fog, trying to figure out, okay, what set of turns do I need to make to find to find the promised land. You know, as you start growing, I think my cofounder and I both both were like, oh, yeah. As soon as we you know, we yeah. We can't wait to get out of product market fit land. We can't wait to get to the growth stage.
Adam Nathan:But once you start growing, a, there's a lot more to lose. You have customers and, like, lots of version as a psychological factor kicks in. And you're like, oh my god. Like, this this all could go away. When you're small, yeah, you're fighting against ignominy and extinction.
Adam Nathan:And you're like, oh my god. No one will even know all this work I've put in and because I've never me anything on myself. But when you're big, it's, like, wow. We could really fall pretty far from here. There's a lot of people who are depending on us now.
Adam Nathan:Like, this is gonna suck. Like, we you'll crash and burn. And it still feels like a house of cards where it could all fall apart at any moment. Because when you're growing really fast, I compare it to, like, a a rocket launch where, like, if you're looking at a rocket, you know, like, a SpaceX rocket looks beautiful and elegant going up. But, like, if you've seen the movies of the astronauts inside, it's like the whole thing is moving and rattling, and it's like sounds like the thing's gonna fall apart.
Adam Nathan:And that's what our company feels like every day now where because we're going so fast, there's there's pressure in the system. And so there's always something there's there's something that's causing a bottleneck. And so sometimes it's top of funnel, like, oh my god. We're not growing fast enough. Sometimes it's conversion.
Adam Nathan:Like, oh my god. We're not activating enough customers. Trial conversion's down. Sometimes it's retention. And the mistake is thinking that there won't be a problem.
Adam Nathan:And judging ourselves for there being a problem, there's always a problem. It just rotates where it exists in the system. Sometimes it's recruiting. Sometimes it's cash flow or finance. Sometimes it's culture.
Adam Nathan:And, you know, our ability to grow really fast is is really our ability to detect the problem quickly, figure out the root cause, come up with solutions, implement, test, iterate, scale, and go through that cycle as fast as possible as you spot where the problem moves to as as you solve once. So I don't think that it feels, you know, easy at all. It's harder than ever, and, you know, we we're trying to keep our team really small even as we grow. And so we're just we have to do a lot more now than we ever have before, in as and in the relative especially to the number of people that we have. So we're basically still the same team size that we were when we had 0 customers, and now we have, 100 of thousands of users on the platform growing 30% every month.
Adam Nathan:And so and we wanna you know, that that's partly intentional. We don't wanna overscale the team. It is amazing sometimes, like, when I end the day, like, to think about all the like, I went through that day. And especially as a CEO, I think the problems I see are the worst problems. Like, I don't I don't pay attention to the stuff that's working well.
Adam Nathan:I only see stuff that's totally broken or on fire, or stuff that no one else can deal with. You know, even yesterday, I spent the day trying to get a money order to pay the San Francisco government for this registration fee so that we can, like, advert we can accept payments as Blaze instead of as Almanac. And so I spent, like, an hour of my time running around San Francisco trying to get a money order. I had to go to, like, 3 stores, finally a Safeway, and then, like, get stamps. And I'm like, and I'm even though, you know, I'm running the company, I'm the only person that can do that.
Adam Nathan:And because my name is on the bank account. And so, you know, even even despite the craziness, there's always, like, a bunch of you have to still do, both important and mundane, just to get just to keep things going. And of and, of course, that's true for our customers who are running small businesses across the country. They also have to do that stuff. So I felt, you know, I was walking a mile in their shoes for a day.
Adam Nathan:But, yeah, it it it has only gotten harder and more stressful as we've gone. I forgot even what question you asked me at this point, but, it is not it's not easy.
Michael Houck:The, the glamorous life of the CEO going to a money order at Safeway. Right?
Adam Nathan:I mean, people you know, you look at, like, you know, this, ink profiles with, like, Elon Musk and great lighting, and you're like, oh my god. I think there's this valorization of CEOs and entrepreneurs as visionaries who spend their days, like, thinking big ideas. And and I think a lot of folks, mistakenly try and start companies thinking that that's what life is gonna be like when the reality is that, you know, for a couple years, you eat glass trying to find somebody who needs your product. And there's so much that has to go exactly right to get product market fit. It's just all these small parts of the equation that need to perfectly align, again, in this especially if you take venture capital in a model that's not just gonna build a business but a very, very big business.
Adam Nathan:That's really, really hard to get right. It takes a lot of luck and, again, kind of craftsmanship that you hone through iteration. And then once you figure that out, it's then it's like, okay. Well, now now now you have to go build a company for another 5 to 10 years. And and, like, your job is to, like, do all the worst things and deal with all the biggest problems.
Adam Nathan:And the problems are only gonna get harder as as you get bigger. It's like they say about the president. Like, the only problems the president sees are the problems no one else in the government can solve. And I think the same thing is true to a much smaller scale, of a sea of a gross age company where, yeah, it just gets harder, and it is deeply unsexy and requires a lot of persistence and, like, stress management tactics to to to to come to work day after day for, you know, this point. Again, I'm now now I'm logged into this thing for, like, another 5 to 10 years probably.
Adam Nathan:And so, you know and then that's after, again, 4 to 5 years of just just kinda getting to this point. So it's both a sprint and a marathon, to use a cliche. And, you know, I I think if more if more people knew what it would actually be like, I I I think it's good that people don't fully understand what it's gonna be like because fewer people would do it, and I I think we need more entrepreneurs in this world. But, you know, I think the best entrepreneurs are people who aren't doing it because it's like a rung on a ladder or because of, like, the material rewards. I think it's gonna get them, like, fame or money, but do it because it's the only thing they can do.
Adam Nathan:Like, they were born to be entrepreneurs. It's a calling. It's a career. And because they have some idea that, does keep them up at night and helps them get out of bed in the morning that they are interested in and and will continue to be passionate about for, like, a 10 year period of their life if everything goes well.
Michael Houck:Right. We we we want the the missionaries, not the not the mercenaries. We don't want the people who are going from, you know, premier college, and then instead of consulting or banking, they're trying to get into YC. Right? That's not the that's not the type of founder that's set.
Adam Nathan:Worked out long term for them. Like, I I think I like idea like that, you know, no startup dies mid keystroke. Like, at an early stage, the real resource you're dealing with isn't money. It's momentum. And, you know, come I think if you really feel passionate about something and you run out of money, the really determined founders will find a way to raise cash from family or friends or wherever they have to.
Adam Nathan:But most start ups die because the founders' interest, they're tired. They're demoralized. They'd rather do something new and exciting and and less risky. And so I I think it does yeah. It's it's it's easy like anything to start.
Adam Nathan:A project is easy to go on a first date with somebody and imagine a perfect future, but, you know, it's, like, 2 years into a marriage where, like, things aren't working out. Like, are you gonna stick that out, or are you gonna give up and get divorced? And I think really great founders, you know, are are defined by their persistence.
Michael Houck:So when you're in that kind of environment where you're taking on the hardest problems the team is handling, maybe the ones that they can't handle, you're handling everything else, How do you know what to delegate? Like, is it just a function of some things I can't delegate, so I do those everything else I delegate? You know, sometimes I think people try to delegate maybe a little too early. How how do you think about that?
Adam Nathan:I'll I'll speak to the way that we run, which I think is pretty unique compared to other companies, but I think very effective, at least for us. As I mentioned, we have a really small team, and we're doing a really big thing. The product is really complicated. We've we're serving a lot of customers. We're trying to grow as fast as possible.
Adam Nathan:I I have at least, our equation for getting that done successfully is to hire incredibly competent people and build a culture of high ownership that depends on trust and respect where people can get their jobs done basically without a lot of, meetings or a lot of communication. And so we're we're, essentially, we have, like, a bunch of nuclear engines on the team, that are producing way more value than, you know, your average professional that are all pointed in the same direction. And so we've worked really hard to recruit people that can thrive in that culture and build a culture where those people thrive and wanna stay here a very long time. And because I think we and that's been hard to do. It takes it means we interview, you know, thousands of people literally for a job before we hire them.
Adam Nathan:We, we're very intentional about we bring on the team. Good is not good enough here. But, you know, because we can, I think, filter for the right kind of person, and we create an environment, you know, where we have maximized people's ownership in the company? We give a lot of trust to people. You know, I've there's many examples of this, but every Friday, we share the executive dashboard that we share with investors, with our teammates.
Adam Nathan:Everybody on the in the team has access to Stripe to see our revenue. Our engineers pair directly with customers. And so there's there's strong feedback loops throughout the company between people's work and and the impact it's making on our customers on the business. That creates, you know, motivation, ownership, and a sense of alignment where people would make, you know, my goals, that people make the same decision I would make if I were in their shoes. And because we have, like, a high ownership culture of people who are pursuing and achieving excellence, it means I don't have to do as much because because I because I trust people.
Adam Nathan:At the same time, you know, I'm a I don't know if I'd say I'm a believe believer in micromanagement, but I certainly am involved in every detail of the company. And so I don't believe in the idea that, like, you know, you should just hire the best people and let them run. Like, that you should hire great people, but then you should help coach them to be their very best selves because even star athletes need feedback. Things to be pushed, things we, complimented sometime and cheered up. But I think a plus players wanna become even better versions of themselves.
Adam Nathan:At least that's true with every person on our team. And so someone on our team joked that that we were doing founder mode here at Blaze and Almanac way before Brian Chesky even popularized the term, but I'm the PM. I set the road map. Everybody on the team QA's features, but IQA, everything that we build before it goes to customers, we have for years. I look at every piece of marketing copy.
Adam Nathan:I interview every person that gets to a final round. We we I I'm on every stand up every day. And, basically, my I see my job in the company as make sure we're all moving in the same direction, make sure everybody's work is up to our standard, what's what our customers deserve, you know, make sure that we're following through on the promises we've made to our our investors, our shareholders, our customers. And, you know, and so so that so that's, I think, what my job is. Like, we're all swimming in the same direction, and we're actually moving towards our goal.
Adam Nathan:When when something new comes up in the company because we're growing, like, what often happens is, yeah, I will kinda prototype a job. So, like, hey. We now we now, for example, need to do a lot of product marketing. We don't have a product marketer yet. So I've been doing product marketing.
Adam Nathan:And often when I find myself sometimes this happens intentionally. Like, oh, yeah. I realize we need to do something. I do it. Sometimes it's just kind of more intuitive where, like, I find myself, like, spending a lot of time on something, and I'm like, oh, yeah.
Adam Nathan:I guess that this is a job we need to hire for. Like, my cofounder was running customer service, like, literally managing thousands of tickets every day before we hired our 1st CS person. And we were like, oh, yeah. I guess we should hire a CS person now because, like, there's enough people writing in that. Like, we can't do this ourselves.
Adam Nathan:And that's happened with job after job. I've done probably every job in the company at some point. And that's I think it's helpful to prototype new roles because it helps me understand what the job is, what is needed in in someone. So our hiring spec can be really tight and narrow around what we're looking for with experiences and strengths. And, yeah, my job is eventually to take myself out of those jobs because the problem with being the CEO doing an IC position is that I actually can't do anything on my own.
Adam Nathan:Like, I don't often have the skills you need. Like, I joke all the time I for a while with this product marketing stuff, a lot of the work is, like, writing life cycle emails or writing newsletters. I can actually, like I don't actually know how to use our email sending service like Iterable. I'm not the graphic designer, so, like, I can't put any images in. I just I'm still kinda being the CEO, but just doing someone else's job.
Adam Nathan:And it's really annoying and expensive for everybody for me to do that for a long time. So the way I kind of, to answer your question, delegate is, by kind of figuring out, like, what the new jobs are in the company, filling in at first, but then trying to hire myself out of that job, and then rinsing and repeating. So that in a grocery's company, there's always more stuff to do. And so whether it's product you know, recently, I've done this for product marketing, for brand marketing. Right now, I'm doing it for finances.
Adam Nathan:I as I shared, we probably need to hire a controller soon, but, like, me and my cofounder are managing the budget, and it's getting very overwhelming. But these kind of jobs pop up. And because I'm the only person, I fill in 1st. And my goal is to, you know, quickly take myself out of that position so that I'm not annoying other people and slowing down the company and and hopefully get back to that that that place again where I'm mainly getting feedback and making sure we're all swimming in the same direction.
Michael Houck:What I'm hearing is that you're not the, quote, unquote, idea guy. Right? You're that you're in there executing, making sure everything is operating and and all that.
Adam Nathan:It's funny you mentioned that, like yeah. And ideas are cheap, obviously, but I so much of what I'm sharing, like, I've learned through fire and failure of just, like stuff up so many times with Almanac and other things I've tried to do before that that, like, I've through different failure modes and getting punched in the face a 100 times, I've learned what the success modes are, and I've got punched in the face enough times that I, like, don't wanna get punched the 100th and first time. I I figure out, like, okay. We've I've done that, you know, a 100 times. Like, let's let's do the thing that works.
Adam Nathan:You know, when when it comes to strategy strategy, you can see me rolling my eyes because, like, the best strategy comes from listening to your customers and just, like, literally doing what they tell you to do. And often, the, like, the the the companies that are growing the fastest are not ones with the biggest ideas. That's kind of ex post facto. You can talk to a journalist and be like, oh, yes. This is my vision all along.
Adam Nathan:Like, it was this whole mission statement. But but, really, growth comes from just, like, understanding the 1,000 small things in your product that are creating friction for your customers and just tackling them 1 by 1. And those things are often, like, pretty dumb. Like, they're often so small that an, you know, Ivy League grad or, like, a PM from some fancy company, like, they won't even see it because they're, like, oh, this is beneath my intelligence. Like, I don't wanna fix this small thing.
Adam Nathan:I want this intellectually challenging problem. So I'm gonna go create a bunch of complexity for myself and for everybody else, and we're gonna spend a bunch of months solving something in a way that, like, nobody needs and and not even folk you know, at the at the expense of focusing on the product that exists in market right now and how do we make it better. And and most most products get product market fit for, like, a pretty simple job to be done. Like, if you think about Uber, you know, like, it's like, how do you get from a to b? And Uber was, you know, really, really good.
Adam Nathan:I worked at Lyft, so I had a front row seat to help Uber grow faster than us. And, like, Uber was just really good at, like, making every single part of the experience better, faster, cheaper, and, like, not overcomplicating the core business. Yes. They build other businesses too, but, like, they're maniacally focused as DoorDash or Airbnb has been on, like, just removing friction. And so, yeah.
Adam Nathan:Like, my job, I see it as, like our customers give us so much feedback all the time that, like, my job is just to listen to them as closely as I can, try and understand exactly what they want, and then get it built as fast as possible. And if I do that, you know, a 100 times a week, a 1000 times a month, like, we will end up growing faster than our competitors because the product itself will just be, you know, a little bit better in a 1,000 ways, which compounds into a significant advantage. So I talk to investors who are like, oh, like, what do you think the future of AI is? Or, like, what about a world where, like, there's content everywhere? And, like, I can, you know, I I can, pontificate just like anybody else, but that's just like, really, what I'm concerned about is, like, are we building something that is useful to our customers?
Adam Nathan:That's so hard to do. So few companies do that that if we can do that pretty well, like, we will be a we'll be fine. We'll be a very big company, and and we will figure out the rest. And so I it to me, it's always, like, a sign of, like, someone who doesn't know what they're doing or hasn't actually built anything when they, like, talk about high level ideas or strategies because, as I said, I think smart people love complicated things. And and the reality, like, often the success mode is a bunch of really dumb, stupid little things, that create a lot of change rapidly for customers and for the business.
Michael Houck:It's interesting that you draw a parallel to Uber conversation, you mentioned Copy AI, you mentioned Jasper. Right? You guys are sort of the have the 2nd mover advantage similar to Uber did with UberX, which Lyft had in a similar product first.
Adam Nathan:Do you think that second mover advantage is,
Michael Houck:like, an 2nd mover advantage is, like, an inherent risk to being first to market that other companies will come along and take, the first mover on? Or do you think that it's just you guys in particular found something unique here that has propelled you to to grow faster?
Adam Nathan:Yeah. I love 2nd mover advantage. Like, I I I feel lucky about when we entered the market. You know, I think Copy and Jasper were first movers in part because they had access to a limited set of licenses to, chat GBT before everybody else did. And so it sounds like luck to me, or, you know, an an an an advantage that they didn't necessarily earn through intelligence or execution, but, you know, they they were kinda first to market nonetheless.
Adam Nathan:And, I think that's a trap because once you find product market fit, you it it's like a set of a gears and an engine that start to perfectly fit together. And once you find it, it's really hard to change once once the the elements of a business work together with a market, it's really hard to change them. And that's why, there's the innovator's dilemma with and and things like disruption because you once once there's good rationale for how the pieces of business work, it's really hard to, like, go and kill your business to pick a bigger opportunity. So, I think that's the problem with first mover advantage is you get trapped essentially in, like, an early version of what a market could be. You know, I think about this a lot with there's this concept of weak technologies and strong technologies.
Adam Nathan:And often, in a big disruptive wave, you have some weak technologies first that have kind of the right idea, but not the whole idea. So downloading music on your computer before streaming or, is a good example or, like, mini discs or, you know, 8 tracks. Like, there's a whole there's often, like, a thing that, like, is kinda right, but, it takes another wave of them in innovation to be like, oh, yes. It this got us on the right track, but there's a strong technology that is built from the We technology. In AI, I actually think that's and I think no one's really branded this yet.
Adam Nathan:But no one talks about this well because it's a whole bunch of VCs and technologists, but there's this idea of agentic AI, terrible branding again. I I don't think it makes any sense. But we see this in our business, and I think we stumbled upon it where the first the weak technology with AI is is basically the set of copilots you see companies building where Notion or Microsoft Office or Canva, like, build AI into existing features they have to automate them or make them better, remove backgrounds or, like, search better than algorithmic search. Yeah. So, you know, in a 5 or 10 x improvement, I don't know.
Adam Nathan:It's cooler, but, like, would you switch for it? No. And that's why, you know, when it's the there's often initially with AI, I think people thought the the gains from AI would go to the incumbents, like the companies I just mentioned, in the same way, mobile, advantages went to Google and Facebook and and Microsoft. But what we've seen so, you know, we we have some of those features in our product. Advantages went to Google and Facebook and and Microsoft.
Adam Nathan:But what we've seen so, you know, we we have some of those features in our product where AI can finish sentences for you or improve your syntax. But where our product has really taken off is with these complex, multistep processes where you can ask Blaze, I want a, quarter's worth of Instagram content about this new product I'm launching. And Blaze will find information in your in your documents about that product. It will write a 100 posts for you. It will find photos or visuals for those 100 posts.
Adam Nathan:It will schedule them. It will post them. It will analyze them. And and Blaze, you can actually check and make sure it's right at all the stages, but it also can do that just in a single click. You can give, for example, this podcast recording to Blaze or a a YouTube video you've made or a white paper and say, I want a multichannel campaign.
Adam Nathan:I want 4 newsletters, 20, social posts, a 100 tweets. I want a web page about it. Emblaze will go and create all that content for you. Again, schedule it and post it all in your brand voice. And so the the the comparison to those workflows I'm talking about is not Microsoft Office or Canva or even ChatGPT.
Adam Nathan:It's a person. It's hiring someone on your team to do that work, hiring an agency to do it, or doing it yourself. And so what we see people, and and this is not again, this sounds like something I I am so smart to say. But our customers, when I talked to them, stopped comparing us recently to ChatGPT or to Canva or to Google Docs and started comparing us to not hiring someone on their team or the amount of time they say by not learning it themselves. So the alternative to, like, copilots the alternate to AI that, like, helps speed up your workflow is AI that just does the work for you.
Adam Nathan:And we have basically, I think, in the process of building Blaze, gone from, like, hey. How do we speed up parts of your workflow when it comes to creating content for your small business to, hey. We built a virtual marketer that does marketing for you. Instead of hiring someone on your team, we're doing it yourself. And so the output is content, but, really, the outcome is growth.
Adam Nathan:And what we used to have seen from our customers who have been with us for 3 months, 6 months, a year, is that it doesn't just produce great content. That's an output, but that it actually is helping them grow their business faster on the Internet. And when you compare what Blaze does for $35, and in the growth it produces, you know, we've had customers go from, like, 0 to 10,000 Instagram followers or 20,000 TikTok followers in a couple months. You've had customers go from having no blog posts to being number 1 on SEO on Google in a couple months. And that's really cool just just quality wise, results wise.
Adam Nathan:But when you calculate, like, the per lead cost or the per customer cost, the CAC for our customers of what it what it cost them through Blaze to find those customers, it's, like, less than a cent. And so we're not talking about a 5 or 10 x improvement. We're talking about, like, a 100 x, a 1000 x improvement. And that's what I think where AI is going is is not like, let's automate parts of existing tools, but let's replace those tools altogether. Let's just have, like, your computer do the work for you.
Adam Nathan:And I think the right answer will be a set of, controls that custom like, humans, real people have over the AI. So not just for safety reasons, but just to check along the way. Like, hey. Is this thing pretty good? Like, you wouldn't you know, it's the same reason when you get into, a Waymo, they show you the directions on the screen because I think we humans want it we want some kind of quality assurance of, like, hey.
Adam Nathan:Is this machine some feedback loop of, like, doesn't know what it's doing and just the ability to intervene in case it's not? We may get to the point where you don't need to check it, but I don't think that'll be for years. So I think the place we've stumbled onto, I think, the the strong technology that that is coming behind the We technology. And and I I actually worry there that we are a first mover on that. And I worry that someone might come and look look at us and be like, hey.
Adam Nathan:These guys figured it out first, but what about, you know, x, y, and z? And because we're locked into our product market that, you know, we can't see it or we can't respond to it fast enough. So that that scares me a bit, but it's it's great to be able to learn from other companies. Last thing I'll say on this is, like because I thought a lot about this. You know, we serve this part of the market that no one pays attention to, which are, I think, the backbone of of Main Street, the backbone of the American economy, the global economy.
Adam Nathan:You know, we serve real estate agents, financial advisors, fitness trainers, mom and pop shops, d to c brands, Shopify store owners. Like, basically, everyone you might buy products and services from on a daily basis. And a lot of those folks aren't technologists. In fact, like, we define our customers as being primarily nontechnical. We built a marketing tool for non marketers, a technical tool for nontechnical people.
Adam Nathan:And so our people, our customers are never gonna be, like, on, you know, Twitter or on products on, like, looking for the, like, the they're not they're not classic or the adopters, but they're looking for the least and greatest things. So I think our job in the ecosystem is to is to, on our team, be looking out for where is their validated, product market fit with cool features or use cases out there for video or for images or in different channels, and then basically to take those ideas and simplify them for our customers. In the same way that Apple often does this in in in their areas, you know, I don't wanna actually be first to market. I want to see what other people are experimenting with, where they're finding traction, and not not even take their customers, but take their idea and translate it in a way that is easy and simple and fun for our customers to use. And I think in that way, we can, you know, grow, basically, a moat around, around our customer base and grow into a big business without a lot of disruption.
Michael Houck:Wanna get more insights like that? Each week, I actually interview multiple founders. For the ones who don't join the podcast, I write up a case study and share it with all founding journey members. I also write weekly tactical deep dives, share start up opportunities, and analyze trends that I've noticed. We've also got a community of founders and investor and pitch deck database and more fun stuff, like over $60,000 in perks and discounts to help you build, grow, and raise capital for your startup.
Michael Houck:Go to join.foundingjourney.com to get access. Yeah. I think Moats in the AI product space, it's a very, very tense discussion right now because I think a lot of people worry that if AI makes building the products themselves so much easier than building a great product, it's hard to build a product. It's hard to build a motor on that. You really need customer trust, brand, distribution, integrations and partnerships, data, all those types of things.
Michael Houck:You guys have invested really heavily on the branding side in particular. Like, if anyone goes to Blaze dotai right now, she'll see exactly what I mean. It's an incredibly striking brand. Was that a conscious decision early on? Do you think other founders should invest super early in branding?
Michael Houck:And, like, what's the trade off between kinda standing out and alienating customers?
Adam Nathan:It was an intentional decision early on. I mentioned that, you know, we we knew that we wanted to focus on, consumer motion with self serve. And if you look at the most profitable consumer companies in the world, they all have great brands, whether it's Nike or Apple or Starbucks. I think there's a strong correlation between, brand's prominence and resonance and, market capitalization and enterprise value. And I think that's because if you can build your company into something that stands for more than just the functional value and services that you provide.
Adam Nathan:If you can create an emotional connection with your customers beyond, you know, just just the value they get from using the product, they retain more. They will pay you more. They're less price sensitive. They will share the product for you and and and, basically, contribute to your growth. They will become, yeah, become your prosthetizers.
Adam Nathan:It's almost a surprise to me that more companies don't invest in brand in a in a meaningful way because it's such a force multiplier around your growth and the retention of your of your business. I I would say, I think people don't because a lot of people aren't creative. Or, you know, maybe don't see things that way, but it's it's still striking now that whenever we talk whenever we talk to customers, and I get on the phone with 2 to 3 customers every day, Building the brand was an intentional decision from the start. If you look at the most profitable companies in the world, they all have great brands, whether it's, Nike or Apple or Starbucks. And the reason for that is because, brands create a connection with your customers beyond just the functional value that your products provide.
Adam Nathan:If the brand stands for some bigger idea that people resonate with or feel a kinship to, they will give your product more of a try. They will stay around longer. They will be less price sensitive and pay more for it as anyone who buys an iPhone knows or buys a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks, and they will talk about it to their friends. And so brand, I think, is a force multiplier on every aspect of a business. And it's it's crazy to me that more consumer companies don't invest in brand because it really helps you also just stand out in the market when you're trying to find a foothold.
Adam Nathan:And to this day, when I talk to customers, I'd say 90% plus of them say that the reason they tried Blaze is because they liked our brand. They laughed at one of our ads on Instagram. They loved our website. When you sign up for the product, the first email is, like, a comic book strip. You pick a character when you sign up for the product.
Adam Nathan:We we play with a lot of, like, like, gaming concepts to make the product fun and enjoyable to use. And so we we try hard to build an emotional connection with our with our customers. And it's not just tactical stuff like, oh, we think this is cool. But, really, we all all of those things I mentioned build to this broader idea that, Blaze gives you superpowers and takes turns you from an ordinary person into an extraordinary entrepreneur or business person and that, you know, a lot of I think the reason we valorize sports stars, reality TV celebs, pop stars, superheroes is because they all seem like they've been able to take control of their future. And our brand promise at Blaze is that you can be the hero of your own story.
Adam Nathan:It it takes hard work and creativity and, of course, some help with from tools like Blaze. You know, a lot of folks there's this there's this notion out there that small businesses are bad businesses, that, you know, if you're if you own a cafe or you're a personal trainer, you couldn't do anything else. And when I talk to our customers, they don't wanna be like Amazon or Nike or Apple. They wanna be the very best version of of themselves they can be. And so what we're promising that plays what we want our brand to stand for is that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be great.
Adam Nathan:We think anybody can build something great, and we wanna help everybody do that. And what separates, you know, the successful from everybody else is that they bet on themselves. They don't give up. They invest in their creativity and their persistence. And, you know, we wanna say, of course, use great tools like like Blaze to help them along the way.
Adam Nathan:But I think people connect intuitively with that idea. And so what we're trying to do is build this movement around this idea in the same way Nike purports that anyone can be an athlete. You know, you don't have to be Michael Jordan to be an athlete. But if you use Nike if you wear Nike shoes, you know, you you can you too can realize your potential the same way he did. And, of course, when you talk to anyone about Nike or Apple, no one talks about, like, the quality of the leather, or, like, you know, the resolution on your screen.
Adam Nathan:It says something about you, to be a consumer, an owner of that product. And, you know, we the fact that we already see this happening at such an early stage for us is, like, so cool. It makes me really bullish about all the investments we're making in our brand moving forward because, of course, the product itself is really good, but the combination of of a resonant brand and a great product means really happy customers who love who love being subscribers, love being consumers. And so we have a huge program in our inside our marketing team right now called customer growth where, essentially, we are leveraging our customers to grow our product for us. Our customers are hosting events for us.
Adam Nathan:They are bringing people together locally in their communities. They're, of course, referring people into the products. We're building a huge community that we're launching next year that is run by our customers. We're gonna do conferences with our customers because it's it's not just about Blaze and how to use Blaze really well, but having people help other people like them figure out how to grow faster. Growing at all is the name of the game for any small business owner entrepreneur out there, and it's really hard.
Adam Nathan:It's never been harder to grow a business on the Internet, and we wanna help level the playing field. And, of course, Blaze can can do part of that, but what our brand stands for is is bigger than that. And, you know, I think that's a real opportunity to for for us to build something that stands out from everybody else in the same way. I think, like, yeah, there's lots of payment processing tools out there. But when you think about Stripe, you think about, Stripe being developer friendly.
Adam Nathan:Like, they have kind of cornered the market when it comes to start ups because they have said, we are for developers. We understand developers. We love developers. We're gonna build for them, and we're gonna do a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with our core product because we wanna help these people do this thing. And I think we have a similar opportunity in our space to be the home on the Internet for teams of 1, small business owners who wanna build something great.
Michael Houck:I think that happens, that sort of, like, resonance with a certain demographic, ICP, that happens when you really understand them and what their aspirations are. I think what you said really demonstrates that you guys understand the small business world, which is it's about doing more, it's about growth, it's about expanding the business, building a better life for yourself. And I think that's what AI is enabling these types of businesses to do. Right? AI for smaller companies enables them to do more with less.
Michael Houck:AI for bigger companies enables them to basically cut their costs and improve their margins. Right? You guys chose after after looking at the big company market, you guys chose to after the the small company market, and I think it's, I think the approach is it makes a lot of sense. I think another thing that you've talked about which I wanted to wanted to highlight was building too many features into a product. I think this is something that a lot of founders fall into the trap of, you know, I think you mentioned that you had done this with past product.
Michael Houck:How do you know how does a founder know that they're overbuilding, and is there a time or a place where that actually it does make sense to kind of build everywhere? Like, to talk to me about this.
Adam Nathan:Oh, yeah. It's a great question and topic. And and I think as I mentioned, it's it's a problem often for the most talented and most intelligent people out there because I think really smart people wanna be stimulated. And so they naturally glom towards complexity. So they they pick complicated ideas.
Adam Nathan:They and products and markets because they think it's gonna be interesting. Well, I don't know if they think this intentionally. I certainly wasn't a conscious decision, but I was I think Almanac is a really complicated product from a really complicated market as you probably heard. And I think part of me was like, oh, well, I'm really smart. Like, I can solve this complicated problem.
Adam Nathan:Like, I'll show them, or at least it'll be really interesting along the way. And so I think mistake 1 is not not noticing that bias if you're someone who's very talented that, you're probably making it harder on yourself by overcomplicating the problem that you take on. And I I often think, you know, if you look at the biggest, most successful companies out there, they often do a very simple thing at their core. At least they started doing a very simple thing. Mhmm.
Adam Nathan:They may be complicated, diversified companies now, but most people most jobs that people buy products for aren't complicated. They are very simple, and I think that gets lost a near term blind spot for really smart people. On the execution side, though, I think my number one mistake with Almanac is that we didn't launch. We had we brought on customers. We did sales, but we never, like, launched in a big way the enterprise version of our product.
Adam Nathan:And, yes, it's important, you know, of course, not to launch before you think that you have something that's minimally great. It's important to bring some customers on to validate the product and the value proposition before you launch to make sure that it's not a piece of shit. So I'm not saying, like, launch before you feel ready, but it's really easy to, never launch or and just and just keep building because you think, oh my god. There's another thing we have to do. This isn't right.
Adam Nathan:And, of course, this is magnified. If you pick a really complex problem that needs a complex solution. But the the benefit of launching, even before you feel fully ready, is that, launching gives you a very clear and immediate response from a statistically significant market relevant in the first place to somebody's problem. And you can't do that if you're only bringing if only talking to 5 or 10 customers a week, even a 100 customers a week is not enough signal. Because you could be like, oh, I'm just not talking to enough people.
Adam Nathan:I need to talk to more people. The only way to really get clear market signal is to launch in a big way to, like, 10,000 to a 100,000 people. That was my mistake, I think, with with Almanac is that we never launched. And and so when you launch, I think a couple things can happen. Either, you know, you it could totally bomb.
Adam Nathan:Like, you just you put on product and you try really hard, you get press, and, you know, either no one comes to the website, that means your value proposition wrong is wrong. Or people do, and they sign up and then they don't stay around, which means your execution is wrong. And then you're, like, okay. Well, at least then you have the benefit of knowing we should we need to pivot right now, And you don't spend more time investing in something that's not gonna work. Or, you know, you could you could launch and kind of get a middling response where you have a distribution of outcomes.
Adam Nathan:You have a couple customers that are really into it, a lot of people who aren't. But those couple customers are interesting because if you go talk to them, you can figure out, well, what do you what why are they saying that everyone else isn't? And that gives you some green shoots of product market fit to invest into. Or you can or you can have a response where, you know, a bunch of people they say, hey, we really like this thing about the product, but you're missing this feature. Or really like this, but this part sucks.
Adam Nathan:And, again, that's some green shoot. That's some traction that you can build on towards product market fit. I think launching the goal is never I mean, if if you could strike it out of the box, fantastic, Mazel Tov. But I think that more than often happens is you get a mixed bag of feedback. But that feedback is essential to then, the cycle of iteration that you need to go through to take a good product and make it into a great product.
Adam Nathan:That has happened with every launch we've done at Blaze where, you know, we had a good a lot of assumptions internally. But when we launched, yeah, I think we had, like, you know, it's like a c plus or like a a base hit. But at least we were on base then, and we had enough people using the product to get us feedback to to go from, you know, use a baseball metaphor, you know, 2nd base all the way home or to take a c plus product and turn it into a plus product. And so I think the way to prevent from overbuilding is to get something out there to a lot of people, get feedback, listen, and then figure out what of what you built is useful, what's and and and use that feedback to direct to direct you forward. If you don't do that, it is really easy to, go with your own good ideas, which almost all the time are not what your customers need.
Adam Nathan:No one is their customer. Even if you think you are, you're not your customer. And I've I've just always I'm humbled by the number of times I've been wrong. I think I'm pretty smart. I think I have good product taste and intuition, but I'm always wrong.
Adam Nathan:Like, I'm, like, wrong, like, 90% of the time about what I think is right. And so talking to customers is the only way to figure out what the truth is for your customer and and to prevent overbuilding. And I I meet with a lot of young founders all the time, and I see them falling into this trap where they're like, oh my god. My vision is this. And I'm like and I again, I think this is a mistaken assumption in the market that to be a good founder, you need vision or you need strategy and, like, that you should be obstinate in the face of data or feedback.
Adam Nathan:No. Like, yes, it's important to stay persistent towards the idea of building something great, towards the thing that you think is real, but you need to be flexible along the way. I compare it to the different, it's like I ask people, do you wanna build an art project, or do you wanna build a business? The difference is if you wanna build an art project, you're building it for yourself. And maybe if someone, 50 years from now, thinks it's worth money, cool.
Adam Nathan:But, like, you can't expect that. Most artists are starving, and it's a passion project. And that's fine. That's art. But if you wanna build a business, the distinction is you're building it for somebody else.
Adam Nathan:You need to listen to that person. You need to respond to them and serve them and be subservient to their needs, their desires, their motivations instead of your own. And if you do that, which is, again, a really humbling experience, especially for a really smart person, you will eventually succeed. And I think a lot of founders who fail and overbuild believe in their own vision and their own intuition instead of instead of listening. And I think the best way to listen is to launch.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I totally agree. I see a lot of people fall into that trap and have trouble getting out of it. I also wanna talk about, fundraising because you guys obviously, you raised a ton of money. You mentioned the seed round was, one of, if not the biggest at the time for for for a seed with 9,000,000.
Michael Houck:How does that change expectations within a company? How does that change relationship with the investors you do bring on? How does it change product strategy? How does it change your thinking as a founder?
Adam Nathan:Great question. And, yeah, we we raised, also a $35,000,000 series a, which was also one of the largest, I think, of the of the time. And that was the peak of the market in 2021. So we raised, you know, over $50,000,000 in 4 years. A lot of money.
Adam Nathan:My general advice is don't do it. I mean, I I think, this topic's talked about a lot, and, yeah, people still make mistakes on this all the time, which is, like, yeah, it's really easy to evaluate yourself and start up by the wrong metrics. And dollars raised is a vanity metric. Number of people on your team is a vanity metric. How many how much PR you get, how many conferences you're featured at is a vanity metric.
Adam Nathan:And a lot of people learn this the hard way and often don't figure it out before it's too late, before their whole business comes crashing down around them. And I and I I think that's to my point on feedback, I think the most the hardest part in most jobs is where the rubber hits the road, and most people avoid that point of traction because it's it it sucks to be wrong. It hurts. It doesn't feel good to be told no or that you're or that you're wrong. And so, like, I think salespeople often like to especially average salespeople would will do anything but, you know, you know, ask customers for money.
Adam Nathan:Marketers will do anything but, put content onto the world. Product managers will do anything but, like, show their ideas to customers. Engineers will do anything but QA their own features. And, you know, everybody hates because because that's that that that point that moment where your idea meets the truth sucks. But if you can build tolerance to that and you learn how to do that, you build muscles for that, you will not only get good at figuring out the truth better than anyone else, but you'll be the only group of people doing that in a in a profession full of people not doing it.
Adam Nathan:And so the same thing is true for founders where it's really easy, relatively speaking, to raise money, to hire people, to spend money. The hard thing it's easy to build product as we were just talking about. The hard thing is, like, showing off that product to customers and getting told no, like, a 100000 times before you figure out what yes looks like. Like, that is painful, and you have to do it for a long time often, to figure out what the what the truth looks like to your particular problem that you wanna solve. And I think fundraising is a major distraction to to that essential skill.
Adam Nathan:And it it actually makes it so much harder to spend time on that because the more money you raise, as I'm sure you know, the easier it is to spend it. And so the more time you're gonna the more time you as a founder are spending hiring people, then managing those people, dealing with, poor performance in your team, trying to communicate and keep everyone aligned. The more money you raise, the bigger your team, the more the more, cost you have, the more your the more your time is spent on overhead things, not on the core thing. And the core thing, especially pre product market fit, is finding product market fit. That's the only thing that matters.
Adam Nathan:And setting money of course, raising money is a distraction, but it then it creates more distractions. There is more of your time away from the only thing that matters. And I I think that's just inevitable. You know, we I say all this as if I'm, like, you know, from from on high, but I've just learned everything that I'm talking about the hard way. I mean, I I've done everything I've said wrong.
Adam Nathan:That's how I know that it's wrong. You know, we raise all this money, and, of course, what what do we do when we raise a lot of money? Well, we, like, wanna hire people. And then, of course, when you're hiring really fast, you can't hire really great people because you're just trying to bring people on board. So you hire a bunch of average people.
Adam Nathan:It's inevitable that as your team grows, even if you really try to hire good people, the average will go down just statistically. So, you know, I was in a CEO support group recently with companies at our stage or of of our revenue size, but we were the smallest company, at least, I think we we have 19 people. Everyone else in the room was met we're managing teams, I think, of, like, 50, a 100 people with the same amount of revenue that we have right now. And everybody in the room was talking about people problems. Like, oh my god.
Adam Nathan:I have to fire my head of marketing. I wanna layer my head of sales or, you know, our customer service team, like, you know, isn't isn't dealing with people the right way. And, like, we have none of those problems now because we we did overhire, and I did experience how much of my time was going towards what I call playing company, like, playing start up as if, like, we're playing house. And we didn't deserve the money in the 1st place, I think. We certainly didn't deserve to the team size, but but having that pick of a team distracted us and slowed us down from from from building something real for people that that would get us there.
Adam Nathan:And so I I know it's really hard, especially if you're good at fundraising or you're on you're in a hot space to to say no to money, to be ascetic in some ways or, like, a monk. But I I think that really smart founders and it's often second time founders that know not to take too much money, but it's you know, it it it does make sense to not take more than you need. And, of course, the other benefit of this is the less money there's just there's math involved here for anyone who's going through this where it benefits to yourself to have a lower valuation early on. It's easier to clear it for your next round. It it, is less dilutive for your ownership in the company.
Adam Nathan:And those are things you don't really think about as your first time founder raising your first one or two rounds. But, you're playing a long game with your cap table. And the more money you raise early on, the more money the more you give away, the harder it is to eventually, kinda clear evaluation and give, you know, if you if you raise your seed round at $10,000,000 versus $30,000,000, it's gonna be like you will need to build a business that's, like, over time, probably 10 to 20 x larger because you're because you're, you're gonna have to clear your valuations and your success around. It's gonna get bigger and bigger and harder and harder to even find a market that can support that big of a business. Much better to raise raise a little raise what you need up front, not more.
Adam Nathan:Don't overly dilute yourself. Don't make it harder later on. I'm probably talking to people who still don't follow my advice here. But, as you probably know, like, it's I learned this the hard way that, you know, I we we will clear our evaluation now, but our series a was you raised at a $150,000,000 valuation. And I I spent years of my life losing sleep wondering how the I was gonna find a market and build a business that could clear a 150,000,000 dollars.
Adam Nathan:I would have much rather raise a series a, you know, maybe a $10,000,000 series a at a $50,000,000 valuation or a 20,000,000 even at a 100. Like, that's a much easier thing to do to figure out to build a business that can clear those valuation hurdles. And I I have I have friends who raised at even bigger numbers than we did, and I could have actually taken more money than I did at a higher valuation. And I'm so glad I didn't, but because I have friends now that have to clear $300,000,000 valuations or $500,000,000 valuations, and they're sitting with a ton of cash in their bank account with no product market fit and no way out. And, if that doesn't scare you, listener, then I don't know what what does.
Adam Nathan:But, you know, the only thing worse than running out of money is wasting your time on something that's not gonna work that you're not passionate about anymore. And I think that's the, that's the that's the dark side of of raising too much money too early.
Michael Houck:The ironic thing, of course, is that now you do have a product that can let you grow into that that valuation, which is your investors are probably very happy about that, and you're probably, sleeping a little bit a little bit better at least.
Adam Nathan:I mean, I'm not I feel lucky. Like, I don't, you know, I don't I don't attribute any of this to, like, intelligence. It's like, I think we just we just like, the cards fell well, you know, for us, and they could have easily not at at any point along the way. And so I don't attribute it, yeah, to my to my skill. And that, yeah, I I think often about I'm I'm lucky that, like, I'm basically able to, yeah, to your point, kind of get a second chance to do things the right way after doing so many things wrongly for so many years.
Adam Nathan:But I think that's why, you know, 2nd time founders are often so dangerous. Because if you have failed the first time or whatever, got a base hit and you wanna do it again, I think, you know, 2nd time founders are able to learn from all their mistakes and, and come back with a vengeance.
Michael Houck:I feel you a 100%. We, we made a lot of those same mistakes, my first company as well. Okay. I want to do some rapid fire outro questions here before we wrap. 1st, who's an investor that other founders should take capital from and why?
Adam Nathan:Catherine Boyle, who is a known Andreessen Horowitz, runs the American Dynamism Practice. You may follow her on Twitter or know of her for her thought leadership, and she is very, very smart. But Katherine believed in us at a when when nobody else did at a very early stage, believed in me personally and has just been so incredibly supportive and encouraging along the way, reminding me to believe in myself even when I didn't. And, it's easy for an investor, especially in an early stage company, with that product market fit to be mean to their founders and be like, oh, you're so stupid, or why aren't you what your competitors are doing? But Catherine has been so consistently positive and helpful, and I would not be where I
Michael Houck:am without her. What's one thing you would change about the startup world?
Adam Nathan:Remove the sheen and the shine around venture capital. I I think it's it's a the marketing is fraudulent. I think it's it's branded in a way that isn't what it is, and I wish people could understand it as a product and and know the risks of what they were taking before they took it.
Michael Houck:What's your number one piece of advice for first time founder?
Adam Nathan:Do your homework. I I think it's generally good advice in life, but I think a lot of people do stuff without preparing. And I think success comes when you aren't prepared and, that preparation meets an opportunity. And, I think a lot of people are, like, lazy and and just, like, don't even try even when an opportunity is before them. And I think, if you're a founder, before any important meeting, try a little bit even when it's even when you're tired or it's hard.
Michael Houck:And lastly, what's something you believe that most people would disagree
Adam Nathan:with you about? Mountains are better than beaches.
Michael Houck:Fair. Fair. We gotta get you out of California and into Colorado or or something like that, Ben.
Adam Nathan:Someday once I clear that next evaluation hurdle, maybe, you'll you'll see me calling in from a cabin somewhere.
Michael Houck:Cool. Adam, thanks so much for coming on. This was this was great. Super tactical.
Adam Nathan:I think a
Michael Houck:lot of people are really gonna gonna love it. Where can folks find you and obviously Blaze as well?
Adam Nathan:I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn with more great thoughts like this, hopefully. And, yeah. And for any entrepreneurs out there, we have a really strong founder and entrepreneur community, for free at Blaze dotai where, there's just a lot of organic discussions happening among founders. And so even if you're not a customer, I mean, because you did go to Blaze dotai and check out our free resources, especially both if you're in tech, I'm on a startup venture cap venture backed startup. But, also, if you're just a normal person trying to make something of yourself, you know, our mission is to help you.
Adam Nathan:And, hopefully, you find our product useful along the way, but there's tons of resources and more at blaze.ai. Love it. Adam, thanks so much for coming on, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Michael Houck:Thanks for listening. I write up my main takeaways from every conversation and make them available to all of our members at foundingjourney.com, along with a bunch of other perks and more content. If you found this conversation valuable, subscribe to Founding Journey on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts,
Adam Nathan:or whenever your favorite podcast
Michael Houck:app is. I post a Apple Podcasts, or whatever your favorite podcast app is. I post a new episode every Thursday. Also, consider leaving us a rating or a review. As a brand new podcast, this is the best way for us to get out there and founders to find us.
Michael Houck:See you next time.